A few days ago Dr. John Carroll posted a column in the Peoria Journal Star about his experiences in Pestel. Then he withdrew the column and I deleted my excerpt and link to it. Evidently the problem has been sorted out and he's re-posted Cholera and Blame in Rural Haiti. Excerpt:
During the last several weeks I have lived with very poor Haitians in the mountains of Pestel and I felt filthy. I didn’t take a real shower in 10 days. But I had fairly clean water to drink…which is a luxury that tens of thousands of Haitians surrounding me in the mountains do not have.
And if all of this doesn’t sound bad enough, some of the Haitian nurses staffing cholera treatment units in Pestel had not received a salary from the Haitian government since September, 2011. I would not think that would encourage their spirits. But these nurses came to work anyway. Taking good care of a sick cholera patient is difficult nursing work.
And these Haitian nurses make a grand total of 300 dollars US per month. Why were they not paid? The Haitian doctor in charge of the whole Pestel Commune was pleading that his nurses get paid. And so we went to bat for the Haitian nurses at a “high level” and the salaries they were owed for the last three months was paid to them almost immediately. I wonder what the problem was?
And how about the Haitian hospital in the village of Pestel? It is a Haitian government hospital. And it is absolutely horrible. It is an embarrassment. There are five broken down beds serving about 80,000 people in the Pestel area. There are a couple of Haitian doctors and one Cuban doctor that staff the outpatient clinic at the hospital. The head doctor shook his head and showed me the ancient rusty green oxygen tanks that don’t function in the corner of the room where our newly admitted 58-year-old lady in florid heart failure died in front of us.
And the cholera tent is despicable at the Pestel hospital. I don’t have adequate words to describe its filth and the misery inside of it.
And even if I had “adequate words” to describe the misery on the ground in Pestel, I started to have uninvited visitors at night asking me where my documented permission was that stated I could work in Pestel. And I was told my posts on the internet needed to be read by the powers that be BEFORE I posted them. And I was told NOT to take more photographs.
So along with the poor Haitians who don’t wash their hands in clean water, the messenger in the mountains became a problem too.
With cholera in Haiti, someone always needs to be blamed.
