GUEST BLOGGER - COLE BOYLE

We're doing a series of guest bloggers who joined Columbus Medical Mission Team this year.  The first is Cole Boyle, a student working on his Masters in Public Health at UNMC.  He has an undergraduate degree from UNL and will graduate in August with his MPH.

Haiti---from a public health perspective

My first trip to Haiti was a humbling and eye-opening experience. This was my first trip to any third world country, so I had no idea what to expect. Before leaving, I knew that was a very poor country with a tumultuous history, but I didn’t fully comprehend just how poor Haiti was until I actually witnessed it myself. The abject poverty that I witnessed for the first time on the ride from the Port au Prince airport to Pierre Payen was overwhelming. During the long, uncomfortable ride to the place I would be calling home for the next week, I couldn’t help but ask myself what I had gotten myself into. I was tired, hot, sad, and didn’t know how the vehicle I was on was going to make it on the narrow, crowded highway in one piece. I was definitely out of my comfort zone.

View out the front of our truck.

Our Paddywagon ride to Pierre Payen.

The baggage truck with the rest of our team. 

Streets in Port au Prince.

Market along the road. 

 These feelings changed over the next few days of working in the clinic and experiencing the people and the culture of Haiti. I utilized my prior experience as a pharmacy technician and spent most of my time working with Sandy, a wonderful pharmacist from New Hampshire. We unpacked the drugs the teams had brought and reorganized things so that, by the end of the week, our little pharmacy went from a state of disarray to one that was organized and functional. 

Pharmacy & equipment.

Cole & Sandy, the Pharmacist. 

I also had a chance to witness how each patient at the community clinic was tested for HIV and syphilis, and I served as Chris’s “test dummy” for his EKG machine demonstration to the Haitian nursing students.

One of the seminars. 

While working in the clinic, it was interesting to see how well our team worked together and with the Haitian staff and translators to deliver the best care we could with the resources we had. In the U.S., different health care teams don’t really have a chance to interact in our fragmented, complex systems. Working in a much more simplified health care system than the one I am used to in the U.S. made me ponder about how all of our regulations, insurance bureaucracies, and technologies influence health care (for better and for worse).

Kelsey and Dr. Mark Carlson.

As a public health student, I was shocked with the country’s complete lack of a public health infrastructure. During my short time in a small section of Haiti, I witnessed issues with sanitation, access to clean drinking water, food insecurity, and an absence of public safety rules and regulations. The public health problems in Haiti are immense and complex; however, I did see some impressive public health success stories. One of these was at OSAPO. The OSAPO clinic is located in a remote area up in the hillside, where the people are even poorer and even further removed from basic services and access to health care. Not only does OSAPO offer a clinic with some state-of-the-art medical facilities, it offers a holistic approach to health care with health and nutrition education, latrines, and wells for access to clean drinking water. The public health prevention efforts at OSAPO have demonstrated a remarkable and significant decrease in cholera and malnutrition prevalence in the people it serves. In addition, the clinics we worked at in Pierre Payen had well implemented HIV testing programs, which offered access to HIV meds and counseling for those testing positive.

OSAPO.  A shining example of a global health initiative.
Not only health care, but nutrition, farming and education are all part of the project. 

The new maternity ward at OSAPO.

The delivery room at OSAPO.

  My short time in Haiti was an unforgettable learning experience. I am thankful for all the things that I have in the U.S., but there is something that can be learned from a simpler way of life. How is it that, in a country with nothing, people still manage to get by and be happy? In the U.S., the CDC estimated that 1 in 10 adults are depressed; however, conversations with the primary care practitioners on our team indicated that only 1 or 2 out of the hundreds of Haitians we saw during the week reported feeling down or depressed. I’m still overwhelmed by the poverty and the complex, never ending problems in Haiti, but I left the country with a greater appreciation for the resilience of the Haitian people.

I would like to thank the Columbus Medical Mission for the opportunity to have this experience and for being able to get to know some of the most altruistic, sincere people I’ve ever met. I look forward to returning to Haiti someday soon!

Cole Boyle