THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, October 14, 1995 TAG: 9510130630
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A6 EDITION: FINAL
SERIES: HAITI: A YEAR OF STARTING OVER
SOURCE: BY FRANCIE LATOUR, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI LENGTH: Medium: 72 lines
The corridor leading to the surgery wards of Port-au-Prince's state University hospital is a narrow, gravelled ramp that opens into a set of rooms with no light and no doors. Water from the rain outside leaks through holes in the ceiling.
It's almost as if the smells of disease have seeped into the walls, turning their lime-green color a stale brown. Inside one room, two patients lie huddled on their sides, facing tin bedpans on the floor beside them.
The only sound here is the voice of Jocelyn Joseph, a 7th Day Adventist who comes daily to this ward to read from the Bible. Today, he prays for 12-year-old Jean Reny. Reny came to the hospital with a concussion, but he looks as if were sick long before his injury. The golf-ball-sized head wound, soft and red, has no bandage.
``Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me,'' Joseph reads.
Rose-Anne Auguste, a practicing nurse who runs a clinic for women in the Port-au-Prince slum of Carrefour Feuilles, said the state of Haiti's main hospital shows the enormity of the country's economic problems.
The infant mortality rate in Haiti is 133 per 1,000 babies, and 25 percent of children suffer moderate or severe malnutrition. The United States infant mortality rate is 7.9 per 1,000.
Like many basic services, Auguste said, decent health care remains a function of a person's ability to pay.
In the vast countryside, where about 70 percent of Haiti's 7 million population lives, physical barriers to treatment are as great as the economic ones. With no adequate roads linking them to urban areas, peasants are sometimes forced to unhinge the doors from their houses and use them as stretchers to carry their sick to the nearest center.
Auguste's clinic offers family planning, pre- and post-natal care and AIDS education, as well as care for the elderly and young children. Every morning, beginning at 4:30 a.m., women line up with their babies and fill the blue and red waiting benches outside to see a doctor. This day is no exception.
By 7:30 a.m., mothers with sick children have spilled over into the stairway and up onto the balcony. With babies held across their chests, over their shoulders and in their laps, they will wait for hours before they get to see a doctor.
``Yesterday I came at six, but I was too late,'' said Marie-Lisa St. Fort, 26. ``So I came at five today.''
Birth control has become a primary focus of the clinic. Hurdles arise from a lack of awareness and a staunch Catholic faith that forbids birth control.
But many young mothers are changing their attitudes.
St. Fort comes to the clinic every three months for a shot of Depo Provera, one of the most popular forms of birth control at the clinic. ``So what are you going to do? You can't feed them, you can't protect them, you can't give them a life. So the less children now for me, the less misery for other children who have already been born.'' - Francie Latour MEMO: [For a related story, see page A6 for this date.]
ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo by BETH BERGMAN
The Virginia-Pilot]
Bayonne Bernaird was visiting a friend at the State University
Hospital in Port-au-Prince. After the visit, he stopped near the bed
of Jean reny, whom he had never met before. "I thought, since we're
all here in this together, we shoulf at least pray for him."
KEYWORDS: HAITI by CNB