Touching Haiti

From Nancy Young

I was just going through the pictures that Dr. Lisbet Hanson of Virginia Beach gave me of the days following the earthquake in Haiti.

These two were not the ones I was looking for.

But one made me sad, the other made me smile – and with both I reached out to my laptop to touch their foreheads.

That seems to be my reflex with pictures of Haitians these days. Ineffectual, yeah – but it still makes me feel like I’m touching Haiti.

These pictures were taken in a hospital in Cange, about 45 miles and two hours of rough roads from Port-au-Prince. At first light the day after the earthquake, the injured made their way there to be treated. That included the families of these little boys.

The little boy with the heavily bandaged leg is probably an amputee now. He came to Cange with the skin scraped off of much of that leg and someone in Port-au-Prince had carefully wrapped it for his trip to the Zanmi Lasante (www.pih.org) hospital in Cange.

But underneath the bandage an infection had taken hold and he was on his way to the Dominican Republic where there were more facilities to take care of him. Dr. Hanson, an OB-GYN who was at Cange for a training seminar when the earthquake struck, said that it was unlikely they would be able to save the little boy’s leg – but likely that they could save his life.

So that picture makes me sad, but also gives me hope that the boy is alive and well and in considerably less pain than he is in this photo.

Now, the other little boy, you can tell, not a thing wrong with him. He was waiting for a family member who was being treated. Chomping on a cracker, too much energy to stay in his seat, telling a story I wish I could hear.

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