Friday, February 12th, 2010
A hero in Haiti
Thinking about Haiti over the last weeks, I’ve gotten used to 2 words together –orphan and crisis.
Obviously, there are more words that crisis could be attached to. Here’s a biggie. Tuberculosis. Like the orphan situation, this was an epidemic even before the earthquake. TB is the second killer of Haitians, just behind AIDS.
In one TB hospital, Pierre-Louis Monfort was one of 50 staff nurses before the earthquake. Now he is the only person caring for all the patients who are left:
He scavenges the rubble daily for medicines and needles. He sterilizes needles using bleach and then reuses the bleach to clean the floors.
In his cramped clinic, eight of the sickest and most contagious patients lay on brown- and red-stained beds. He said he had lost count of how many more were sleeping in other pockets alongside the hospital. (read it all)
Here is one hero in the midst of calamity. “These people here are dying, but they keep me alive,” he said. “I know they are hurting more than me and not complaining.
