Lizzy Berryman is Merlin’s Country Health Director in Haiti. Here she writes about the vital importance of our mobile clinics, as they enter their fourth week of operation.
With a real sense of accomplishment, our mobile clinics are underway, forming the next phase of Merlin’s response in Haiti. The medical needs are still great and the situation is challenging: the port remains closed, drug shipments must come over the Domican border and local health workers are in short supply. But the team is happy to have the project off the ground.
Coordinating with Medicos Del Mundo and Medecins Sans Frontiers, Spain, we decided that mobile clinics do the most good for villages in and around Petit Goave, a town 1.5 hours outside Port-au-Prince. In our assessment we found that they suffered damage, while absorbing displaced people from the earthquake. Access to health is limited, and when heavy rains and floods come, possibly bringing disease and illness with them, these villages might be further cut off from essential services. Rural and remote, these villages are living on thin margins. But the impact of the earthquake has reduced those margins to nearly nothing.
When I recruited our team of local doctors and nurses, I rotated them through Merlin’s surgical field hospital in Port-au-Prince, at Delmas 33. The outpatient clinic served as an ideal training run to prepare them for our mobile clinic circuit. The first week, we set up an office in a Petit Goave hotel room. I camped out with the team on the hotel grounds.
Value is the first village we visited and more remote than I expected. Treating 80 patients that day, we also did exit interviews to ensure that patients were happy with their treatment. If the mobile clinic doesn’t come to Value, then they must walk one hour to get to it. Though many people expect to walk upwards of four hours, it’s my personal benchmark for defining what constitutes limited access to basic health care.
Another village on our circuit is Ticoma, off the highway and a long stretch along a riverbed. A welcome and unexpected surprise awaited us: a group of young students wanting to help. They had returned from Port-au-Prince, where they had been studying. The disaster destroyed their universities and their accommodations, leaving them broke and with nowhere to go but home to their families.
I was touched by this group of twenty-somethings, stepping up to help us. It was so clear that the momentum of their future and professional ambitions was suddenly gone. They were grappling with enormous uncertainty and loss. Yet they were also resolved and here they were, channeling the crisis into an opportunity to benefit their community.
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