Trash Talk is touring NOW!

Riding home from the airport in Port-au-Prince, Haiti felt familiar. I recognized the stench of underdevelopment from my trips to Guatemala. The picture on the right depicts the negligence with which so many people treat their environments. It also represents the government that fails to promote its care.

Party buses are a more expensive form of public transportation than the tap-tap on the right. Nobody in Haiti seems to have been warned to keep their hands and feet inside while the vehicle is in motion.

I lived in the guesthouse at the Partners in Development site in Blanchard, a suburban district of Port-au-Prince. Another American intern Sandra slept in the bunk across from mine. The American field director Lizzy sleeps in a single room. Haitian employees do laundry and cleaning daily. The floor is concrete, so Rosemary throws buckets of soapy water around to wash it. There should be gutters to collect rain water for such tasks. There are always many things to be done.

Behind the corn field is the old cholera tent, now used for diabetes and hypertension clinics. I created record booklets for all participants.

Pouchon, PIDs driver in every sense, lives in this house right on PID grounds.

Medical Center Partners in Development

The above right shows the area to the right of the clinic where PID plans to eventually finish building an office extension for the Child Sponsorship Program.

ddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd

I spent many hours reading, stretching, and stargazing on the clinic roof.

Blanchard, Haiti

Sandra is from Virginia. She teaches English to prepare PIDs most motivated employees to attend university in the US. Shes also become the group leader for visiting American teams.

Lizzy is the field director. She speaks perfect Kreyol and has a year-long contract with PID. In the picture on the left she is serving Tom Tom, a favorite Haitian dish made from lam, or breadfruit. It has the consistency of raw dough and is served with a salty crab sauce.

This is Nickenson, my best Haitian friend. He helps keep the yard neat. Before PID, he was an outcast because of a slight physical handicap. This is also why he never went to school. He is very intelligent.

On the left is my recycling partner, Rilbert. When I first arrived the furnace was full so we burned trash next to it as well as inside. On the right is Rilberts son, Mikayel, playing in my shoes.

Three medical teams of varying fields of expertise visited while I was at PID. We always did at least one mobile clinic in nearby tent cities. I helped with translating and crowd control.

This particular tent city, Damien, was a pig farm before the earthquake of 2010. The Haitian government recently built a wall around the small city to hinder its expansion. PID is building homes for seventy-six of these families in the nearby village Canaan.

Marceline, one of two triage nurses, was another one of my best Haitian friends. She took lessons with Sandra and loved to practice her English with me.

The other triage nurse is Suez. I gave Suez English lessons on lighter clinic days.
This video is of Suez saying, Tomorrow, I will bring my notebook.

Sandra is piloting a child sponsorship subprogram for children in particularly difficult situations. Charisemene (in the tub) comes around three times a week for baths and love.

Frandeline (right) is the child that my mother now sponsors. A basic sponsorship is $30 a month and helps cover the cost of education. Many Haitians start school at age three. I imitated Sandras program with Frandeline. This picture was taken at our second meeting. She was terrified of me until I covered her in stickers.

M Genoi is the director of the Child Sponsorship Program. He knows everyone in town and decides who can most benefit from PIDs programs. Mme Genois business is making reusable grocery bags (shown on the right) out of old sugar sacs from the Dominican Republic. I purchased two dozen to bring home with me. I sold them all one Sunday at church. The proceeds go to the Emergency Medical Fund I created to help patients reach beyond the limits of PID resources.

Partners are of all ages and areas of expertise

Smokey the Bear has no presence here.

In Haiti, trash is burned. Alternatives are few.

PID buries all noncombustible, nonrecyclable cans, needles, etc. However, this is not a common practice.

One beings trash is another beings treasure. To Haitians, dogs bite and dont deserve to eat our trash.

Most of what we burn in the founo (furnace) is plastic. The city air is nauseating.

We bag recyclable bottles and bring them to a weigh station in downtown Port-auPrince. We sell them for 4 Goudes a pound, or the equivalent of $0.10US. I painted recycling barrels to remind staff and patients of what to put in them.

There are several schools within walking distance of PID.

The facilities are basic.

PID holds monthly mobile clinics in this tent city, Canaan. They are now building their third house in the area. The goal is to eventually provide homes for the entire village.

Vehicles in Haiti are in a constant state of repair or anpann, literally in pain. Is there an easier way to induce a state of despair in a group leader than a tap-tap that doesnt start?

I visited the Saint Rock Haiti Foundation for a week with my godfather and his fellow directors.

Houses grow sparse as you ascended the mountain.

At the Foundation clinic, I helped take blood pressures and note complaints to distinguish critical conditions from the average complaint (aka triage). The most common complaints are headaches and dizziness, heartburn, and stomachaches. The people here in the countryside speak slower. Great practice for my Kreyol.

We brought goody bags with beading kits to the girls in an orphanage up the street.

The directors allowed me to sit in on meetings, the primary purpose of their trip. Haitians on the left are reporting the success of the Foundations microfinance program to the new directors. Ralph (left) is the founder and former director of the Foundation. He has recently passed on these responsibilities to a number of friends, including my godfather, Tom. Of the 68 micro-borrowers, six are men, and only two have defaulted.

Trash and wreckage all the way home. The pollution makes you sick when you hit the city of Karfour at the bottom of the mountain.

Big city streets are lined with open sewers.

Real rivers are in a similar state.

Despite (or because of, depending on how you look at it) the daily struggles of the Haitian people, their faith in God is interminable.

My Trash Talk is the most significant product so far of my two months in Haiti. The idea came one night while Sandra and I were discussing on the roof after dark. We were often frustrated by our never-ending privileges as Americans. Almost every night on the clinic roof in Haiti, I trash talked America. An amazing country in many ways, America could do so much more if greed wasnt such a prevalent mindset. Haiti looks up to America, a celebrity who is pretty to look at but often thoughtless and addicted to decadence.

The purpose of my Trash Talk is to inspire everyday Americans to make a difference. People living in extreme poverty have so little that every dollar can make an enormous difference. With PIDs support, I established the Emergency Medical Fund for our clinic in Haiti. The EMF covers transporting desperate patients to betterequipped facilities and paying for their treatments. PID receives about 20-30 emergency cases each week. Most are referred to a hospital, which charges fifty percent of the costs of treatment. Without the financial support of others, death is imminent.
If you would like to make a donation to the EMF, please mail checks made out to PID or Partners in Development to: 55 Market Street, Suite 201 Ipswich, MA 01938

Thank you.