Barbie Makes her Mark on Sous Savanne

Barbie Love is a Clinical Research professional from Costa Mesa, California. Her recent deployment to Haiti allowed her to put into practice her many years of experience as a Registered Nurse and a Public Health Nurse. This was not her first involvement with disaster relief. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita brought her from California to the Gulf Coast as part of response efforts and this weekend, she leaves for Alabama as a Hope Force Reservist, responding to last month?s deadly outbreak of tornadoes. Following is Barbie?s perspective on working in Sous Savanne, Haiti, following last year?s earthquake, which took the loves of 230,000 people.

So often, what we conceive to be the truth of a situation is not what the true meaning turns out to be. This came out so clearly in our recent efforts to set up a mobile clinic in the small hamlet of Sous Savanne. My husband Bob is a veteran of several Haiti projects and he had warned me to be very careful, to watch out for anything unusual, as Haiti can be unpredictable; kidnappings occur, robberies, etc. As part of setting up the clinic, we began to realize that every time we turned around, it seemed there was the same guy following us as we made our way through the village. He looked pretty intense, even evil in his stare. You can imagine this alarmed us after a few days of the same behavior.

We eventually inquired, expressing our concern over his presence to the village leaders. We were pleasantly surprised to learn that he had been assigned to keep a protective eye over us! Since our community health efforts were often carried out with just a team of women, and the men on the team were in other parts of the village, he was assigned to make sure we stayed safe. What we thought was evil was actually for our benefit.

I was so pleased to have the opportunity to work with the team. "We will be friends forever" was our conclusion at the end of the week. It was very interesting to set up the clinic, considering the circumstances and the setting in which we were working. We had to be flexible, capable... while remaining relaxed about the logistics. Originally, we had planned to have it in a church but the rains proved to result in muddy parking lots and muddy floors in the church so we had to change and uproot. Within a few hours of arrival, we had set up shop in another location.

My heart went out to the myriad of people who expressed such similarities in their symptoms -- stomach aches, fever and headache. Between worms, malaria and parasites, a number of the children had patches of hair missing. To have to live each day with a stomach ache because you don't have clean water is incomprehensible to me. It was a privilege to treat them, but it's sad because they will now go home to unclean water. Improved hygiene and purified water -- that is party of our long term vision for Sous Savanne.