I've come to accept that time is just different here in Haiti. Things move at a MUCH slower pace. Time is valuable here, and you have to be flexible because things almost never go as planned. Take last Saturday for example:
This past Saturday, I had planned to help Mr. Nickson do grocery shopping and get some things done around my house and at the school. But, at 7 AM I received a phone call from one of the Haitian nannies, Jesula, at Faith Hope Love Infant Rescue. Dorothy is currently in the U.S. for a month. So, I am an "emergency contact" if they need anything at her house while she is gone. One of the babies, Angel, has been sick for several days with a fever. The pediatrician, Dr. Pierre Louis, came to the house to check on the kids. He thought that Angel might have malaria so he went ahead and prescribed chloroquine for him and gave orders for him to get blood work done as soon as possible. Dorothy's driver only works on week days. So, Jesula needed me to drive her and Angel to Medlab. Sick baby definitely trumps grocery shopping so I immediately headed over to get the truck, Jesula, and Angel.
I drove Jesula and Angel to Medlab and we did not have to wait long to get the blood taken. However, they also needed a urine sample which we did not have. So, Jesula and I spent the next hour sitting in the waiting room feeding Angel milk while holding a plastic bag over his privates. It is moments like that where I just have to laugh out loud at my life: In Haiti, sitting in a waiting room full of people who don't speak English, chatting in Creole with Jesula while holding a sick baby, and waiting for him to pee into a bag.
Thankfully, he eventually peed and we were able to leave. The next part of the journey was to get Angel's prescription filled. "Simple," you may say. Well, not here in Haiti. In Haiti we don't have nice big pharmacies full of hundreds of types of medicine. We have tiny pharmacies not much larger than a walk in closet with no guarantee as to what medication they carry. Most of the people that run the pharmacies know nothing about the medications they sell. You don't even need a prescription.
So, on the way home we stopped in every pharmacy that we passed. I think I checked five different pharmacies without finding chloroquine. We were tired and frustrated. So, as a last resort I called Keziah, my good friend and nurse. She told me that she was pretty sure she had liquid cholorquine at her pharmacy in Delmas 31 (the direction we had just come from). I dropped off Jesula and the baby at the house and turned around to go back to Delmas 31. Kez does not live there and the person that does live there was not home. So, I spent the next half hour helping some complete strangers try to find the key to the pharmacy so that I could search for the medicine for Angel. FINALLY, I located the chloroquine! HORRAY!
Five hours after leaving for the hospital, I was finally finished. if you have even been frustrated by waiting in a line at the pharmacy or doctor's office...please...don't be. Something that would probably take two hours max in the US took us five, ha!
Want to hear the kicker? The next day I got Angel's test results back and he was negative for malaria so he didn't actually even need the cholorquine that I spent all afternoon searching for. Oh, Haiti.
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