Jeudi and day 4 at the clinic is over

It’s Thursday at Haiti Arise and the day is even hotter – probably pushing 30 today. Saw 147 patients today and nearly completed wiring the Paulin house (the third house constructed by volunteers from Haiti Arise). For a change, the guys get to write the blog and talk about themselves - kinda like the Toby Keith song “I want to talk about me”. The crunch was on for finding containers in which to distribute meds to patients and in that search we ended up cleaning out about a quarter of the storage area.
The last few days we’ve been busy repairing and burying an electrical feed as well as wiring the Paulin house. Interestingly enough, the kilometre walk to the house gives us the opportunity to interact with kids along the shortcut path. As we push our wheelbarrow of tools down the rutted pathway past goats, cows, chickens and donkeys, we get accosted by kids from 2 to 10 who run along with us smiling, touching our skin, holding our hands and trying out their English (usually “you – you” or “give me a ‘dollah’” but smiling up at us when they say it). Those we are working for are very appreciative of our efforts and try their best to speak English (or to politely respond to Al’s pidgin French or Martin’s English). There is just so much to be done and with an improvement in infrastructure we would see an improvement in health as well (for example, Madame Paulin spent all of Wednesday ironing with a charcoal fired iron and she spent the whole day sitting on the floor breathing that smoke while ironing piles of clothing. One of these days we’ll get a decent sleep and not be woken at 0330 by a mooing cow or at 0400 by an insomniac rooster. Al and Martin