Nap Goumen

Nap goumen – we are fighting. This was our team’s mantra for the last week – probably the most challenging work week we’ve had to date.

For me personally, the fight began as soon as Monday morning broke. As I got ready for work, I knocked a bottle of nail polish off my shelf which then shattered and splattered blue streaks across my bedroom floor. Then I checked my email and discovered that yet another something went wrong in my place back in New York. Since I’ve been in Haiti I’ve had to replace a roof, a major piece of the furnace, a washing machine and now a thermostat. It has seriously cost me as much to NOT live in my Ithaca place as it did to live there. Thankfully I don’t pay rent in Haiti so I can manage it just fine. As we drove to the clinic I thought about Alexander and his Terrible Horrible no Good Very Bad Day. Some days are just like that… no matter where you are. Unfortunately, events quickly escalated beyond personal mishaps fit for children’s books.

Late Monday morning we received word that a baby who had missed his two January study visits had actually died in late December. This is the third death so far in our study - this time likely due to dehydration related to diarrhea. Baby V died in his grandmother’s arms on the way to the hospital.

Tuesday brought more sad news. Last Sunday Miss M had seen one of our mothers sweeping one of the major streets near downtown. As she worked her little baby, our only confirmed HIV-positive child so far, was lying alone on the sidewalk. Right then, Miss M predicted that he would come in that week sick. She was right. On Tuesday morning the baby arrived with fever, diarrhea and signs of a respiratory infection. Our team fought to have him see a clinic doctor right away, be given a first dose of meds, and then referred to one of the better hospitals across town. We provided the mother with transport fees and found another mother to travel with her. We called ahead to the hospital and made sure they knew to expect him…but the mom and baby never showed up. The next morning we sent another person to check at the hospital and a field worker to the home address the mother had provided when she enrolled. Miss M has been driving by the street where she saw the mom and baby every morning and afternoon. Now, it’s almost a week later, and still no word. We do still have hope that the baby is okay. The mother can read and she was given bottles of meds at the clinic before being sent to the hospital. Hopefully the baby has received them. It’s common for mothers to not follow through on hospital referrals. There are a 1,000 reasons why this happens, often because mother has to go to care for other children or is worried about fees at the hospital.

The week continued with more sick kids than usual coming in on Thursday and Friday. We had to fight again to get referral to a cardiologist for a child who had been hospitalized a month or so earlier. Another baby in our program was sent to the hospital due to severe diarrhea and vomiting. This time a field worker accompanied the mom and we know she was actually admitted. In the midst of literally fighting for some of our kids lives, there were smaller battles to keep our supply chain moving – delays in production and delivery of the manba, an unexpected pause in new enrollments to the household food ration program that left me calling around to friends working for other NGOs to see if we could get some donated food , a delay in getting our petty cash request processed.

I’d like to say that I handled each one of these events with an appropriate balance of assertiveness and respectfulness. Unfortunately, by 3pm on Friday, when I received word that our urgent petty cash request had been delayed for 48 hours due to a small error in the way the receipts had been pasted to the paper, I lost it. I yelled at someone in the accounting office. I was shocked at how angry I was – at how the week’s worth of stresses and setbacks managed to explode in one moment.

Nap goumen – we are fighting. Nou pral goumen - we will continue to fight. Hopefully, there won’t we another week as intense as the last five days but there are certainly more battles to be fought - against sickness, against poverty, against bureaucracy, against apathy, against the endless series of obstacles that stand between our kids and a healthy hopeful future. I am also fighting within myself – to become wiser, slower to speak, less selfish, more patient, more compassionate, and more focused. Pafwa map goumen pou espwa - sometimes I am fighting for hope.