Pathfinder
Editor, Senior Moderator
<ABBR class=published title=2010-02-20T03:57:01-0700>Doc Gurley
Posts from an Insane Healthcare System
</ABBR>
<ABBR class=published title=2010-02-20T03:57:01-0700></ABBR>
<ABBR class=published title=2010-02-20T03:57:01-0700>Haiti: Things Shifts</ABBR>
<ABBR class=published title=2010-02-20T03:57:01-0700></ABBR>
<ABBR class=published title=2010-02-20T03:57:01-0700>February 20, 2010 ? 3:57 am</ABBR>
Even the predawn day began a little differently. The shrill distant stadium cheers of hundreds of Haitian roosters sounded oddly synchronized, as though perhaps they were doing the wave. There were more dogs keeping the beat with incessant, rhythmic barking.
Dogs in Haiti are everywhere underfoot, seemingly ownerless. It is something of a shock, after all the warnings about rabies everywhere, and the need for immediate evacuation if any of your skin is broken, to find one nosing against your leg as you try to walk to the pharmacy area is the day?s tightly-controlled clinic-space. All the dogs ? all of them ? are the lean, feral-looking, arrow-nosed, mottey-colored variety that are never at rest. They nose through trash and scratch at rubble and weave needle-like through the fabric of masses of people. Dogs of the relatively wealthy are just the same, wandering collarless, ribs almost visible through their short mat of fur. They all have the shrill, piercing yapyap that I remember of feral dogs from when I grew up in rural Georgia. There are no woofs, no baying, nothing that we would, if pressed, truly call a bark, which makes me wonder whether they would find our own pampered, exotic, baroque variety of dogs equally odd and a bit disturbing. And these dogs are loved by their owners, who apologize for them, and shoo them out of the way like chickens.
Chickens, too, wander freely in this dense urban city of over 4 million (keep in mind, San Francisco is less than a million). There are no goats, no livestock of any kind, and, frankly, the chickens are bedraggled and pitiful.
Actually looking stunted and anorexic instead of just small. Like the dogs, they nose and scratch through rubble, but theirs is a furtive, always at a near panic type of movement, feathers askew as though they haven?t had a decent night?s sleep in far too long.
We were supposed to be working today in one of the largest constantly collapsing sheet cities (I refused to flatter them with the false-advertising, put-the-best-spin-on-it-possible name of ?tent city?). An open area that looks, underneath it all, like it may have originally attempted to be some sort of park ? but who knows? It?s like trying to imagine the shape and function of a hand from fortune teller bones tipped out of a rattled cup. There are over 2,000 people there, without one single toilet, not even an end-of-a-free-Lady Gaga concert overflowing Portapotty. Crowds of faces glance through a fences railing bars as a woman casually heats a large sizzling shallow hubcap-like metal disc full of boiling oil, preparing to cook, the whole device precariously perched over a propane cannister on top of a waist-high concrete wall as dogs, chickens and children weave and roam behind her. There was a Lombard-street-esque hill rising straight up into the sheet cities, some rare trees on either side of the road shelter prime spots on either side. 2,000 people in there.
Imagine what such a thing would be like in San Franscico ? Golden Gate park a sea of blue tarp, women who are being raped screaming in the night, and, after a month, disease, dehydration, and diarrhea spreading almost as fast as despair.
But although we sat and stared at it, people boiling past like ants, we never made it into the sheet city. In what seems typical now to me of this type of ever-shifting (even hour-by?hour) relief work, Our organizers were told by the administrators of the area that a new direction was being taken. Efforts needed to be made for Haiti to normalize, for people to return to their lives, and no one wanted this type of sheet city more enshrined. People needed to start using existing hospitals and clinics.
After looking at a situation like that, and hearing that official response, you cannot help but have an urge to guffaw in disbelief. Go back to what lives? Where? On which pile of still-falling dangerous rubble?
Much more at:
http://www.docgurley.com/
Posts from an Insane Healthcare System
</ABBR>
<ABBR class=published title=2010-02-20T03:57:01-0700></ABBR>
<ABBR class=published title=2010-02-20T03:57:01-0700>Haiti: Things Shifts</ABBR>
<ABBR class=published title=2010-02-20T03:57:01-0700></ABBR>
<ABBR class=published title=2010-02-20T03:57:01-0700>February 20, 2010 ? 3:57 am</ABBR>
Even the predawn day began a little differently. The shrill distant stadium cheers of hundreds of Haitian roosters sounded oddly synchronized, as though perhaps they were doing the wave. There were more dogs keeping the beat with incessant, rhythmic barking.
Dogs in Haiti are everywhere underfoot, seemingly ownerless. It is something of a shock, after all the warnings about rabies everywhere, and the need for immediate evacuation if any of your skin is broken, to find one nosing against your leg as you try to walk to the pharmacy area is the day?s tightly-controlled clinic-space. All the dogs ? all of them ? are the lean, feral-looking, arrow-nosed, mottey-colored variety that are never at rest. They nose through trash and scratch at rubble and weave needle-like through the fabric of masses of people. Dogs of the relatively wealthy are just the same, wandering collarless, ribs almost visible through their short mat of fur. They all have the shrill, piercing yapyap that I remember of feral dogs from when I grew up in rural Georgia. There are no woofs, no baying, nothing that we would, if pressed, truly call a bark, which makes me wonder whether they would find our own pampered, exotic, baroque variety of dogs equally odd and a bit disturbing. And these dogs are loved by their owners, who apologize for them, and shoo them out of the way like chickens.
Chickens, too, wander freely in this dense urban city of over 4 million (keep in mind, San Francisco is less than a million). There are no goats, no livestock of any kind, and, frankly, the chickens are bedraggled and pitiful.
Actually looking stunted and anorexic instead of just small. Like the dogs, they nose and scratch through rubble, but theirs is a furtive, always at a near panic type of movement, feathers askew as though they haven?t had a decent night?s sleep in far too long.
We were supposed to be working today in one of the largest constantly collapsing sheet cities (I refused to flatter them with the false-advertising, put-the-best-spin-on-it-possible name of ?tent city?). An open area that looks, underneath it all, like it may have originally attempted to be some sort of park ? but who knows? It?s like trying to imagine the shape and function of a hand from fortune teller bones tipped out of a rattled cup. There are over 2,000 people there, without one single toilet, not even an end-of-a-free-Lady Gaga concert overflowing Portapotty. Crowds of faces glance through a fences railing bars as a woman casually heats a large sizzling shallow hubcap-like metal disc full of boiling oil, preparing to cook, the whole device precariously perched over a propane cannister on top of a waist-high concrete wall as dogs, chickens and children weave and roam behind her. There was a Lombard-street-esque hill rising straight up into the sheet cities, some rare trees on either side of the road shelter prime spots on either side. 2,000 people in there.
Imagine what such a thing would be like in San Franscico ? Golden Gate park a sea of blue tarp, women who are being raped screaming in the night, and, after a month, disease, dehydration, and diarrhea spreading almost as fast as despair.
But although we sat and stared at it, people boiling past like ants, we never made it into the sheet city. In what seems typical now to me of this type of ever-shifting (even hour-by?hour) relief work, Our organizers were told by the administrators of the area that a new direction was being taken. Efforts needed to be made for Haiti to normalize, for people to return to their lives, and no one wanted this type of sheet city more enshrined. People needed to start using existing hospitals and clinics.
After looking at a situation like that, and hearing that official response, you cannot help but have an urge to guffaw in disbelief. Go back to what lives? Where? On which pile of still-falling dangerous rubble?
Much more at:
http://www.docgurley.com/
