Front Lines of PEPFAR: From Haiti
June 18th, 2008 at 11:08 am | posted by Virginia SimmonsONE member Graham Sowa writes in from Haiti.
Cazale, Haiti, where I am currently writing from is better off than almost all rural Haitian towns. There is a clinic that provides health care and medicine at little to no cost, with paid referalls to hospitals. There are several well-built churches, and there is a small but secure footbridge across the river. There is a pipe which brings fairly clean water down from a mountain source. Not bad.
However I only have to walk an hour, which I do almost daily (often several hours) furthur back into the mountains to find the rawest of miserable poverty that still allows human life to persist. Barely. The clinic I work (volunteer) with does its best to help out back here. Clinic vists are free for these people, and they are often assisted with food, school for the kids, and seed when the planting season starts….
At the TB clinic where we are to pick up the medicines I talk to the Haitian doctor and lab tech for about an hour as we run TB/HIV tests togeather. They are so happy to finally have electricity, via solar panels, a laptop, a country wide network of TB clinics to connect to, and the resources to diagnose and treat their patients, of which they see over 100 each day. This clinic specializes in TB only, and did not exist before PEPFAR. There is no alternative to this clinic. Elsewhere in this area TB medicines, even first line drugs, are prohibitively expensive even for “middle class” Haitians. In the TB clinic all consultation, educaton, tests, and treatment is free. Just as it is in allmost 300 clinics like it across the country.
After we run the tests from the sputum and blood we brought in that day we picked up the medicine and headed back to our rural mountain town. Tomorrow over 70 people will show up between 7am and 12pm to pick up their medicines, as they do every 15 days. Some will be just starting their regimes: 9 months of TB treatment. Some will be taking their final TB test after finishing the treatment. No one would be doing either without PEPFAR.
…It is easy for you and I to discuss the blockage of this legislation, we are used to political obstructionism. The patients however, who have watched each other die from these diseases for generations, this issue is much more tender. There is no proper way to break the news to them. The optimism they have developed, the optimism that is so impossible to cultivate in this country, is so very fragile. I cannot bring myself to do it. Therefore for me there is but one option: I will not let them block PEPFAR. Please sign the petition.
As you can see from my experiences all of the stated arguments against PEPFAR are null and void when on the ground. We need this money to be versitile. We need administrators, as we have developed a country wide distribution system. We need solar panels. We need laptops. We need IT people….
Read Graham’s full piece here.
-Graham Sowa, ONE member, Cazale, Haiti
November 18th, 2008 at 5:43 am
Hello. I work for a Disaster Response Team that is working in Haiti following all the hurricanes that hit this year. We have a medical team in the Gonaives area for a week and yesterday a patient came that was diagnosed with TB. We have been unable to find where to refer him and the Haitian nurse that is working with us also did not know. Do you have any information on where we could refer him? If so, please contact me at christina.davies@Mtw.org