This past week started off on a good note. There is a boy, Jeff, who lives about an hour away from Port-Au-Prince who Dr. Bonnet (The doctor who started SantéBus, the program I am here with) met while he was here last year. Jeff is trying to obtain a visa to be allowed to study in New Jersey and stay with the Bonnet family. On Sunday, Jeff and his mother arrived in Port-Au-Prince to spend the night since they had a meeting at the embassy at 7:30am. We all went to the embassy Monday morning but Jeff was not allowed to have anyone accompany him since he was over 18 and under 79 so we waited in the car for 3 and a half hours until his interview was over. He would have been granted the visa but the school he is going to be attending put his name as Jeffery on the form and on his passport is says Jeff, so the school has to send a new letter down and then he go to the embassy and get his visa.
Monday afternoon I went to meet with one of the owners of the Hotel Montana, Nadine, Aleda, one of the co-founders of We Advance (http://weadvance.org/index.php), which is opening a clinic in Cite Soleil (one of the poorest and most dangerous cities in the western hemisphere), and Adam, the founder and president of Global DIRT (disaster immediate response team, http://www.globaldirt.org/) which specializes in emergency patient transfers by working with clinics and the General Hospital.
A brief history about Nadine and the Hotel Montana: The Hotel was built in 1946 and was a well-known 4-star tourist hotel with 146 rooms and a panoramic view of the city from the restaurant. On January 12th 2010, an estimated 200 of 300 guests were missing. One of the people who was buried under the rubble was Nadine whose family owns the hotel. She was buried for 100 hours before she was found by a rescue team from Spain. Many of the rescue teams gave up looking for survivors after 72 hours, but Nadine’s son would not let them stop looking for her. When the Spanish team found her, they were overjoyed and amazed by her resilience. They became very close and in her honor they decided to donate ambulances to programs and NGOs (non-government organizations) that will be able to use them. They have already been able to bring in Nadine Uno into the country and are working hard to get Nadine Dos out of the port and are hoping to bring in at least four more.
Dr. Bonnet has stayed at the Hotel Montana in the past and had met Nadine a few times. As we were going through immigration he recognized her while she was in the line next to us. They talked briefly and it was during this that she mentioned the ambulances. Dr. Bonnet knew Aleda and she had expressed her need for medical transportation. We Advance has been working with Global DIRT for a while now to help them facilitate the transportation of their patients.
Back to the meeting…Nadine was very interested in bringing an ambulance over for Global DIRT and We Advance to use. They are going to find a way to easily get them out of the port and without paying a lot of money for customs. After that is completed hopefully they will be able to get them through without any problems. It sounds a lot easier than it is. Even if you have the correct paper work, the officials can always find something wrong.
On Tuesday, Yvon was off to find parts with Peter the mechanic for the SantéBus suburban that J/P HRO (Sean Penn’s NGO) had but was not working. I was on my way to the health cluster meeting alone. These meetings are held once a week in order to inform other health NGOs what is happening around the city. As the meeting started, everyone was introducing themselves and which organization they were with. At least this is what I am assuming since they were all speaking French and I only understand about 7 words of French. One of them is santé which means health in French and was the only word I could pick out. I stayed for a half hour before I asked the women next to me if the whole meeting was in French and she said that they used to have an interpreter but they haven’t for many weeks now. Next week Yvon said he would go with me so he could translate for me. The only notes I took down for the meeting were “Learn French”.
On Wednesday I went with Yvon and Peter to look for the missing parts. We went to two junk yards and the industrial part of town looking for all the parts and were still not able to find them all. The cars are American made and those are the parts that are most difficult to find here. There is a surplus of Japanese parts everywhere you look but no American. This is one of the reasons building a garage to service not just our vehicles, but the public as well, is one of our short term goals. We are looking into the cost of land not too far outside of the city and hopefully have something soon for when we bring more buses into the country. Thursday we tried to finish the car but each time we thought we had all the parts we needed, we realized there was a missing bolt or something small and we had to go back out and find one. On Friday all we needed were the keys to test the brakes that had been put on the day before. We were told a man had them but when we finally found him he didn’t know where he had put them and the people working in the office could not find them anywhere since they had moved a few times in the past few months. Needless to say, we were not able to get the car moving but the mechanic was able to hotwire it and it works. We are having 2 sets of keys made so things like this won’t happen again.
I see the ocean every day and it taunts me on these hot endless days so it was so relaxing to go swimming even if it was only for 2 hours yesterday. We had some freshly caught red snapper for dinner. I unfortunately swallowed two bones. They are just so small that I couldn’t get them all. Every Sunday there is a group that gets together to play football and sometimes soccer. Last week was football but this week because there were so many people, there was soccer and football. It is really nice to be able to get together with all different people doing all different things, Haitians and foreigners.
On Wednesday until Sunday of this week, there are 5 men coming from Radiologists Without Borders who are going to be working at the General Hospital fixing their x-ray machines that are not working. Hopefully they will be able to help us get our x-ray bus up and going in the next few months. There is also a dental unit and eye unit being put on a bus as well. The radiologists are also going to be bringing the corrected letter for Jeff so he will be able to get his visa and head to the frigid, winter wonderland of NJ.
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