June 4, 2010. Petit-Goave, Haiti.

Dad and I looking at a rare X-ray

At long last, my dad and I got to practice medicine together! Dr. George La Brot, was just with us for ten days working in the clinic alongside me. This was a big deal for me; ever since I was a child and I knew that I wanted to be a doctor, I dreamed of working with my dad. Over 25 years have passed and here, a continent and an ocean away from where we started, we saw patients side by side in the clinic and in our mobile clinics. It was a wonderful experience to consult with my dad, and to be consulted by him when we had troublesome cases to figure out. I really wanted to show him what all his and my mom’s support and encouragement on the path to medicine and then to Floating Doctors had wrought.

I talked to my dad on Hughes’ phone as they were driving from the airport; my dad said that PAP looked like a lot of places he had been, but with more rubble—the wholesale destruction is much more striking in PAP because that’s where the biggest buildings were. He is right—anywhere I have been in the developing world, many things are exactly the same. As different and unique as each place is, there is always a strange sense of déjà vu that accompanies walking down a dirt road through an impoverished neighborhood watching children bathe in the gutter or a woman cooking something over a small wood fire. When he arrived at the clinic, we worked that first day, and in the afternoon all of us headed into town to run errands. We had to go to the bank, get bread from the bakery, get some produce from the market, get laundry detergent, get gas for the skiff, get some phone credit for our Haitian cell phone (indispensable for anyone planning to work in Haiti), exchange some glass soda bottles and collect our deposit, etc. For the afternoon, the clinic had arranged for us to have a driver with a beat-up old pickup truck. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: comunity, Creol, doctor, floating doctors, floatingdoctors, haiti, medical, medicine, mission