Day ? Friday

Woke up with nothing to do.  So I had a nice leisurely breakfast of fruit and dry shredded wheat and started reading my book.  IM’d with Mary and Anthony for awhile and then headed out to check out the Healing Hands complex.  It’s fairly large and walled in.  They hope to rebuild the lab  down the hill , so I thought I’ld take a stroll down there to look around. 

The view from above

The top is stairs, the things that look like rocks on the bottom, I think is ice!

I didn’t fall, but I surely would have won something on America’s Funniest Video if only someone was taping me.  It starts off with some stairs, that then turn into rocks and then into ice or something!  At 53 I still have amazing balance.  And this was with a bottle of water in one hand and a camera in the other (and I didn’t loose either). 

Healing Hands has a donation from the International Red Cross to build an out patient O & P facility that if they get the governments approval can possibly start in November.   Al Ingersoll is the Prosthetist here running the organization and we had an interesting conversation.  He has many people that would like to come down here to help, but he is turning them away (and for good reason).  I feel my time here was more valuable for the technical help I provided (doing the grunt work).  The teaching is nice, but  I only had 4 days.  The staff did a great job in mimicking my casting technique, but we only had time to modify 2 casts.  My fear is that the first time they fit someone that has a problem with this technique, they will scrap it and go back to their previous technique.  Without someone there to work with them on this for at least 6 months, I would be willing to bet they will not continue to use it.  They are partnering with Handicapped International that has brought in the practitioners from El Salvador to help teach them.  This is a long term project and the end result will be a self sustaining O & P facility run by the Haitians.  This is exactly what Eric and David have done with ROMP.  Without David having stayed in Guatemala for at least a year, their facility in Zacapa would not be what it is today (which is a self sustaining facility run by Guatemalans).  Now they have practitioners go down a couple times per year to help them with some of the more challenging cases.  I think this is truly what is needed here as well.  Interested in doing it again David?  Practitioners that want to help here in Haiti have to come to assist in the technical work.  Once it’s self sustaining, then they can come down to help work with more difficult cases.

I’m off my soap box now and ready to discuss lunch.  Haitian Pasta and fresh biscuits!  Had I known this is what they have for lunch everyday, I would have never gone to the lab.  
Dinner was conch.  It was some kind of a stew which was pretty good, along with more fried something.

It looked better in the stew

Tomorrow we go shopping in the am and then the rest of the gang should be back by the afternoon.  They've really been out roughing it.  I was able to come back to a place with a pool and a beer every night.  So there's sure to be dissension among the group.  Let's hope they're adult about it.  Ha Ha, we got a pool and beer, and you didn't.