Tuesday, 2 September 2014

I was sitting in the kitchen after lunch with my friends Claudy and Taino when frantic shouts started blaring from the two-way radio that the chauffeurs use.  I didn't realize what was being said, but Claudy froze and then leaped up with a horrified look on his face and started running to his van, yelling that there had been an accident.  A driver had lost control of his car and hit one of the vans used to transport the volunteers around the different NPH properties.  At the time of the accident, another friend was in the van riding back to the hospital with a little boy that she had been taking to get some tests for treatment of his HIV.  When I saw the van, the three dents in the windshield where their heads had broken the glass were clearly visible.  We later learned that the driver of the other vehicle was distraught because one of his children is critically ill and he was desperately searching the city for the right medication.  I feel like only in Haiti would these two vehicles collide.  

 

When I got to the hospital a short while later, I found my friend soaked in blood with her head swathed in bandages--the laceration on her forehead was severe enough that she needed plastic surgery.  The little boy also had cuts all over his face, but they were mostly superficial.  I didn't hesitate when I was asked to go with them up to the clinic in Petionville and climbed in the back of the ambulance after they pushed my friend's stretcher in.  There was no room for another stretcher, so they simply handed the little boy into the back of the rig and he laid on the bench with his head in my lap.  I didn't even have time to ask him his name until we got to the clinic.  Riding in an ambulance is never fun, but riding in one on rocky, rutted, unpaved roads through heavy traffic that follows no discernible traffic laws was pretty much the worst transport I could imagine for two people who probably already had horrendous headaches.  I did my best to hold the little boy still with one arm and to try to keep the stretcher from moving and smashing into my shins with the other.  

At the clinic, everything went fine.  My friend was mostly upset that she hadn't had the little boy wearing his seat belt (which, unfortunately, is not at all unusual in Haiti).  She had been working for three months to get him accepted into the home in Kenscoff because his mother is not able to give him the care he needs and the paperwork had finally come through earlier in the day.  But now this.  It seems like in Haiti, so often it's two steps forward, one step back.  I felt terribly for him because I kept thinking how scared he must have been--he was so small, and my friend was stretched out on the bed next to him, injured and bloody; the sole person he had was me, who he had met an hour earlier.  But he never cried or complained.  The only thing he did was take my hand, slowly pull me down onto the bed with him, and wrap my arm around his little shoulders like a blanket.  I held him until we had to leave, four hours later.