A bottle of Coke

Thursday. Today's a surgery day so it's time to put those rollerskates on. Up at 5:45, shower (I don't know why I bother because you get sticky again in about 3.2 seconds after you get out), and down to the lab to retrieve our young patien'ts blood sample to take down to General Hospital to get a crossmatch so they can find the correct type of blood for him. Fortunately Randy, who's an electrician back home in Yakima, WA but the de facto local jack of all trades guy here at Adventist, has volunteered to bring it down to the General for us and pick up the blood so we can keep operating. As the day goes on, we're wondering how his quest is going ... until we find out it's for a patient at the MSF hospital. We suspect the staffers at the General assumed he was from MSF, and gave him the MSF guy's blood. And we're not about to give our guy the wrong unit of blood. Well, I feel a little unsafe about operating on our poor guy without blood ready to transfuse him with - he broke his femur 8 months ago and you know it's going to be a bloody mess taking it apart and putting it back together. So unfortunately for our guy, it means another chat with him explaining that I'm sorry but the General sent us the wrong blood and it'd be safer for him to wait till tomorrow. It's a conversation, unfortunately, that you have to have with folks a lot here. Fortunately he's really understanding, shrugs, and start to tuck into the sandwich sitting previously untouched at his bedside - happy that he can now finally eat.

Tonight it's raining farily hard. This is the rainy season so it rains most nights here. Pat Ebeling has a hankering for a Diet Coke so we put on our shells and venture out down the street with Jimmy in search of a convenience store. There's a pretty big one just off the main road that runs parallel to the coast and connects Carrefour (where we are) with Port-au-Prince. As we walk down the side road that connects Adventist with the main road, rivulets of water are running down the gutters, washing away piles of trash. You try not to think about what your feet getting wet with. But it's hard not too. You don't flush poopy TP down the toilet here, but rather throw it in the trashbin. The hospital burns its trash, but a lot of people simply dump it on the sidewalks. Yup, that's what you're walking through. As we approach the main road, these little rivuelts converge into a huge flowing brown river running alongside the busy thoroughfare. There's no overpass, no underpass, no raised blocks of stone to cross the road with like they had in ancient Rome. As we walk up and down the sidewalk looking for a way to cross, we see more streams of brown sludge feeding into the brown river. A ripe, putrid stench wafts up to us and suddenly I really don't want to eat or drink anything. So get across the Port-au-Prince road tonight, you'd have to wade through the brown river, dodging cars, in the dark, with pouring rain. Folks are doing it left and right - wearing flip-flops. It's tantalizing to see the convenience store across the street - so close, yet so far. We turn back. There's a small mom and pop stand on the way back to Adventist with bottles of Star, the local brand of cola, and we pay 8 Haitian dollars for 2 bottles, or 1 US dollar. Sounds like a small price to pay for avoiding the big brown river. Even now, warm and dry inside the hospital, we're bathed in a fetid miasma of sewer gas. Well, at least it goes well with the Star cola.