Day Four!
Day four is fini! And what a day! We started out by doing a mobile medical clinic at the old SOPUDEP school site. With a large donation from Red Cross that Ya'el Weiner (Stanford freshman) brought down, and about $400 from our own club's fundraising efforts we bought enough medical supplies to service about 250 Haitians in the Petionville, Port au Prince area. These mobile medical clinics are run by Madame Flourentine, a nurse from Haiti and good friend of Rea. She and a few of her coworkers periodically volunteer their time to set up mobile medical clinics whenever they have the funds or donations. The clinics run all day and families will line up hours before to recieve treatment, most of which have never recieved medical treatment before. In the past we've done clinics in Canara and Petionville. Most of the patients come in suffering from common illnesses of impoverished areas, including malnutrition, chronic pain, iron defficiency, digestion problems etc. The nurses work to prescribe whatever medications we have that may be of assistence (bismuth, iron pills, benadryl, ibuprofen, acetaminophin etc.) while we count pills and fill the bags! It was an incredibly rewarding yet humbling experience to see all these people come through. Afterwards we went to FOPAD, a school for Pre-K to 6th grade similar to SOPUDEP that is run by a good friend of Rea's named Paulette. FOPAD services 760+ children at no cost to the kids (since most cannot afford schooling) via donations from various groups and churches. Unfourtunately the kids have this week off because of Ra-Ra (Easter) so we didn't get to see the children, but we spent a lot of time learning about the school and the situation of many of these Haitian children from Paulette. Ya'el brought Paulette some emergency supplies for the children and nurses of FOPAD donated by Stanford. We then came home to another delicious dinner of veggies, what we think may be goat?, and some shrimp (which was a nice surprise since we don't often get seafood!). We are all exhausted but feeling extremely grateful to have this experience and take this journey together. As always we look forward to tomorrow and try to get some sleep!
