Jacqueline Koch is working with Merlin in Haiti. In this second field diary, Jacqueline writes about a remarkable patient she met at our Wimbledon field hospital.
It's easy to fall for the youngest patients, the toddlers who run around, learning new words and call out my name in a Creole-tinged accent: "Jac-QUE-line!" They want to play and they want to see my camera. They want me to be their distraction from the tedium of tent ward. These little ones are easy to entertain, largely because they are too young to understand what has happened here in Haiti. They don't ask many questions.
As for the older kids, it's very different. They are very aware that their destiny has taken a sudden detour: having lost their parents or homes, they are haunted by a very uncertain future. They will have little choice but to grow up quickly, as I learned from 15-year-old Geralda Alexandre, who is recovering from a severe crush injury to her left leg. A couple of days ago, I asked her what she most wanted to do when she left the hospital, thinking she'd want to see her school friends. She ignored my question. "I want a tent. I don't have a house, I'm going to need a tent."
Courageous, pragmatic, and older than her years, Geralda survived three days trapped in her collapsed home. "I wasn't alone," she said. "I had my grandmother," she added to reassure me, seeing the shock register on my face. She doesn’t seem too concerned about a successful recovery. It's as if she considers it a done deal. "When I got here, I could hardly walk, now I'm walking around," she boasts confidently.
Today, I realized I had yet to see Geralda walking at all. I always saw her lounging on the hospital bed. I chided her gently. "I thought you said you were already walking again?" She smiled her shy smile and went back to staring out the ward tent door at nothing in particular.
Later that day, I sat with Merlin's orthopedic surgeon Andrew Murray, looking at patient X-rays on the image intensifier. Marie Gerdie Neptune, a senior nurse popped her head in the tent. "Someone is here to see you," she said to me. I looked out and saw Geralda. She was on crutches, making her way slowly, steadily, and with determination across the tennis court and toward us.
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