Dr. Joel Hurt and his wife Ashley, champions of the Austin Medical Relief for Haiti efforts, are leaving PAP today to return to Austin. Here’s an update from Ashley:
We are so sad that we are leaving today. It has been a full three days and flown by so fast. Life here is different and wonderful. Church was amazing! The singing is beautiful and the Haitian people really get into the music. Yesterday we oriented the team to the clinic and did a major overhaul on supplies. Trying to get organized and situated. There are A TON of supplies. A blessing and a curse. There is a cirus tent full of supplies that are spilling out of. The school house still has tons of supplies in it, a huge hoop barn that was set up for supplies is now half way full and we have central supply room in the clinic stocked with supplies. It is a daunting task and we will now staff people on our weekly teams just to be a head of it and master it. Supplies are expiring and now unable to use simply because we don’t know what we have. What a waste.
AC and water pressure are two things I miss. Our shower drips and is often filled with cockroaches at night…ugh, gross. I kill them and then do an icky dance before I’m able to pick them up and flush them. Last night I was greeted by a mouse when I entered the room. EEK was truly my response. I couldn’t see a hole in the wall so I’m pretty sure he slept in our mattress with us.
The sun rises at 5 am daily. By 530 it is bright! Sets around 630. This is pretty much unchanged year round. We went into a local city near MOH for lunch yesterday. It was good Haitian food and they people were lovely.
Yesterday we changed Job’s dressing and found his skin graft on his orbit to be necrotic so we removed it. Poor guy has two skin graft sites on his thighs with nothing to so for it. This is the second failed graft. We decided to sedate him to do the procedure which was much easier on everyone. He left this morning for Dell in Austin. Smider the baby with hydrocephalus was on the same flight. We put a lock, IV, in Job yesterday so we could give him a sedative for the flight. I went down at 645 to check it. It’s patent and working. His “mommy” was bathing him and getting him dressed in his church clothes. He looked so handsome and was so proud. He’s never worn anything like this before. He had slacks and a long sleeve yellow shirt with shiney black shoes that were probably 2 sizes too big. He jumped down and did a little dance for us in his new shoes. All the kids from the orphanage came by to see him off. We took a picture. Please pray for his flight home. Two amazing men, middle aged, no medical training, will be flying with Job and Smider to Austin. They tried to get Joel and I on their flight but it was full. The mommies are so sad to see their babies go and asked to bring them new babies to care for. They loved Job and Smider but understand this is the best for them.
