Tracking Ed Monroe as he travels to Haiti and other exotic(?) places

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Come Saturday morning-

-I’m going away with my friends.

So I thought I would start out today with a song since I chose to skip yesterday. Actually with Deacon Bruce here we start out the day with prayer, and that is a good thing.
There are three laptops here on the dining table of the second floor where I am sitting. Dr Nelson brought me his so I could try to load a program for the palm pilot that Holly from the March team, sent to me for him. However, I do not have the Palm program CD for the T/X model and I could not find the program on line to download. I did transfer some files from my laptop to his via my jump drive and promptly picked up the Trojan horse that was on his unit. He has no anti virus program, no firewall turned on, no clean up utility so I am fixing him up with some. It is a cute little Acer one which is ½ the size of my 17” screen that I need for my tired old eyes. I do find myself squinting at his small screen. I’ll give it back to him today when he stops by for it. The second laptop is one that Jacky, one of our Haitian workers and main stays would like to purchase. It is an old HP ze4800. They want $ 300.00 American for it and it is bare bones. I do not think that is a good price for that unit. There is no wireless card and I have yet to see if there is a way I can check out diagnostics on it to see what it may contain in the way of hardware specs.
Yesterday’s clinic results 28 patients were scheduled and 21 of them showed up. We had one show up who had a Return To Clinic (RTC) but the dossier was not marked by the provider in May so it was not on the list. I will not mention the provider’s name but it did make me smile, when we went to pull the dossier. Roger has been a great help in organizing the patients and anything that is asked of him. He must have turned away over 20 patients who heard we were in town and wanted to be seen. I made the mistake of allowing a reactive airway patient who was having severe breathing problems to be seen by Dr Nelson and the word got out. Out of the 66 people we saw two will be returning to see our doctors during clinic for follow up. I have some thoughts for medical advisory that are best shared there and not on this blog. I just got a note from pharmacist Jess that was encouraging bout the pre clinic. Thanks Jess.
BTW, I do see that I make this blog to personal but, since it is my thoughts and observations I’ll leave it up to better editors and writers to extract items for the FOTCOH blog. Someone from the July team other than me will be the author for the FOTCOH official blog so you might want to subscribe to it.
I have had several questions about the shocking announcement that I will publish this coming Monday. Maybe I chose the wrong word. Perhaps a better word would be revealing to describe what is going on. Yes, I am teasing you but, for those who have known me for any length of time, know that I love to tease.
Today we will continue to prepare the clinic for the team’s arrival on Monday. We hope they have better luck with travels than we did last week. Peoria airport was a breeze. American Airlines was a pain. Miami hotels were a bargain by Hotwire and the shuttles were easy to use when we found out where to find them. We did have to recheck the 50 lb bags-thanks to AA. Miami airport was easy to navigate but all of our gates were at the far end of the airport. Port-au-Prince airport remains the same. With the smaller early morning plane, a 737, we breezed through immigration. Yes, the Haitian herd was active as we boarded the plane and especially as we exited. It got worse when the luggage was finally off loaded. One lady was almost knocked across the room by a man swinging a bag off the carousel. Since I had to go back to retrieve the three missing bags I got to participate in the melee twice-thanks again to AA.
Boyer, our main man, has had his arm attended to by Dr Nelson. We have been trying to help him for 3 days but he would not listen until yesterday. I brought out the largest syringe and needle I could find for Nelson to us on him. I also found a skin stapler. It scared Boyer even more than he already was. Anyhow, the area has been drained and cleaned, antibiotic prescribed, and it should be better today. He plans t go to town to purchase Prestige, soda, water, and ice for the team’s arrival. I will try and have it chilled for Monday. We will also travel to Ti Moulage to put down the down payment on the Sunday beach adventure and travel to Cyvadier Platz to negotiate the Saturday evening event. I wonder if the team will tip the clinic hosts for all this extra hard work. LOL. As a reminder to any who have Google Earth, there are pictures of both Ti Moulage and Cyvadier Platz on that sight if you were ever curious. I find it fun to use that program and look at Jacmel, to try and find the clinic when it is visible, and other places in the world.
It is almost time for breakfast so I’ll need to clear this table and publish this to the site. Thanks again for the comments. Please keep them coming. And, yes, I am trying to catch the spelling and grammar errors and love it when you find more. That means you are reading this after all.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am so proud of YOU!!!

Anonymous said...

good luck finishing your stuff for tomorrow. i am off at 2:30 today. Had a blast last night at your pool. called mom again at 11:20 with the same group fo friends. they all think your pool is awesome and you are wonderful hosts. big surprise. golf yesterday with the boys was great. Simon is really coming along. We'll keep praying for you guys. send one up for me as i go out on this trip.

we love you, dad.

Chris and Heather