Rubble Guts

On my second night in the hospital while on suspension, I woke up at about 3am with dodgy gut pains again. I hadn’t been eating base food (which while basic is reasonably clean and tasty) and instead was sampling Haitian gourmet off the street. You might get super deep fried chicken or deep fried eggs with msg on a roll if you’re lucky, but more likely some deep fried green banana scallops or other stuff that needs a good dose of chilli sauce to bring out the full flavour.

Anyway I woke up with grumbly guts and got out of my fold-out stretcher bed to search through the hospital for a toilet. The hospital is four semi-cylinders, joined with small tunnels at various points. It is a sterilish environment with a space frame covered in thick plastic tarpaulin sealing the atmosphere. There are tubes running along the roof on the inside with holes punched in them, where cold air-conditioned air pours out. There is a full suite of surgical apparatus but generally a shortage of supplies and a lot of improvisation occurs there, especially with surgery.

It looks like the International Space Station crash landed gently on Haitian soil, all white and glistening in the sun. I like it because it’s cold and there aren’t any flies inside. For a temporary structure it is very impressive. I have a feeling that like many things around here temporary will turn into semi-permanent.

The problem is it doesn’t seem to have a toilet, so when I woke up I was given a bowl to go outside and turd in. I summoned the first guy I saw who happened to be a Haitian orderly. I grimaced in exaggerated discomfort and made a downwards flushing motion next to me backside with my hands. “I need to do a shit.”
The orderly frowned at me for a minute then motioned to follow him. I sighed in relief and shuffled after him.
“Take this,” he said handing me a bowl with some paper in it. I peered at him in confusion. This wasn’t the toilet I was looking for.
“What do I do with this?”
He motioned me to follow him again and we walked through a maternity ward where a Haitian lady was lying propped up on her elbows with her legs spread wide. For some reason the way to the toilet was through the maternity ward. She was sweating and grimacing in pain. There were a couple of nurses buzzing around her. Jesus Christ, I thought and hurried on to the end of the cylinder. The orderly opened the door and motioned me outside, and we walked to a small pile of rubble that shone white in the moonlight. I had to pick my way over mud bogs as it had been raining.
“So do I shit here, and wash my hands in the bowl?”
Of course this was a stupid thing to say since there were taps in the hospital but I couldn’t contemplate turding in a Tupperware container. What would my mother say? He made a pooing motion with his hands, intimating that I should do my business in the bowl, and turned around and walked away. Ok no worries I thought, and dropped my pants, shuffled over the bowl, and squatted.

Squatting is not a comfortable way to drop your guts. I am used to sitting down and relaxing, letting the body take it’s time to do its thing. It’s a time to contemplate life, your day, and whatever the hell you’ve been eating to make yourself feel so damned horrible.

I had a knee reconstruction a few years ago and squatting is not a comfortable position for me at all so I applied gentle pressure to speed things up a but. Bloody hell I thought two minutes ago I was fast asleep in an air-conditioned room and now I’m squatting over a blue Tupperware bowl ankle deep in filth and my knee hurts. And a mosquito was drinking blood from my ass cheek.

Anyway I finished up, at a loss with what to do with my blue Tupperware bowl so I just left it there and walked back to the door in the maternity ward feeling a little unsatisfied with the whole experience. I walked past the woman who had been in labour moments before and she looked exhausted, wrung out and bedraggled. I felt I could relate to her. Her hair was slicked down the side of her face with sweat and she sagged limply in the bed, but she seemed to radiate a deep happiness and joy, as she nursed her newborn baby.

I thought about our respective achievements over the last 15 minutes and realised how profound things can happen in such a short space of time. I can only vaguely imagine the pain and discomfort she went through for that child, while I was perched on my rubble pile. The beatific smile on her face as she held her child is something I suppose I will never understand but it was wonderful to see.

Jokes aside, having never seen a newborn baby in that fashion before, I was struck with what an amazing place Haiti is. The human condition is exposed raw to the burning sun, and things are brought back to basic needs and emotions. There’s none of the cosmetic and make up of civilised society to cushion the impact of what occurs here. The food tastes better, the alcohol is stronger, you sleep deeper, small achievements mean more.

A related event happened a few weeks ago. A mother had a two month premature baby and left it outside the hospital. She didn’t want it.

Someone found it and sent it to the Miami University Hospital in Port au Prince because there is an incubator unit there. The child survived, and one of the nurses has decided to adopt it. At two months old the baby, called Emily-Anne, weighs 4.4 pounds, and instead of dying on the side of the road abandoned, in Haiti, she will now grow up an American citizen with all the privileges that society has to offer.

Enough about that sort of thing. I haven’t explained what really makes this place so interesting, which is the people, the Haitians and the volunteers, some of whom I believe I'll be friends with for a long long time despite knowing them for a month or less. So maybe I’ll do something about that in the next blog.