Leaving Soleil

 

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Leaving Soleil

The International Herald recently reporteded that Doctors Without Borders (MSF) are leaving Cite Soleil at the end of December.

Because "violence" is down and the need for trauma surgery has decreased, MSF is leaving the one and only functional hospital in Soleil. The hospital is tiny, pathetic Saint Catherine Laboure.

However, "structural violence" is at an all-time high in Soleil. Children are starving to death and the children who linger have weak immune systems. Diseases such as pneumonia and meningitis fill the overcrowded pediatric hospital wards.

Newborn premature babies lie in over-sized metal cribs upstairs at Saint Catherine's. A few of these babies have tiny IVs placed by the excellent Haitian nurses and antibiotics slowly drip in. No ventilators are present to help the newborns' immature lungs search for oxygen. The babies' grandmothers gently coax the infants to take a few drops of powdered milk, and when their tiny grandchildren tire out and decide to sleep, the grandmothers lie on the floor under their cribs and sleep too.

Numerous children are abandoned in the hospital. They are too much of a financial burden for their families in the slum. 

The beautiful baby girl pictured above with my father-in-law Ed is one of the abandoned. The nurses plead for help for her. All the mothers in the ward care about this little one, but they have their own problems. All eyes are on the foreigners to do SOMETHING. But the eyes are pointed in the wrong direction. 

Saint Catherine's patients need Doctors Without Borders. Saint Catherine's needs very active participation from the State of Haiti. 

As 2007 comes to a close, the "violence" in Haiti continues. 

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Comments in 2021--

The years moved by quickly and St. Catherine's fell into more disrepair. 

The earthquake in 2010 did not cause a huge amount of structural damage to the hospital but patients and employees were still afraid of being inside due to the aftershocks and fear for what might come.  

With the cholera epidemic in 2011, multiple huge tents were erected on the hospital grounds and were filled with patients with cholera.

And as I look back at the last decade, the thing that is most haunting to me about St. Catherine's Pediatric Ward is the lack of patients. Sometimes there was only a small handful of hospitalized kids. I often wondered where are all the sick kids in Soleil? Are they at home? Hospital charges were too high for mothers to pay. Admission to the hospital costs a couple of dollars and oxygen and chest X-rays cost 10 dollars each. Mothers from the slum do not have this money.