Friday Afternoon

I spent part of the day trying to secure supplies for a children’s clinic in Peterville neighborhood of Port-Au-Prince. There are many children with diarrhea from drinking contaminated water. And babies with diarrhea from being breastfed by mothers who are drinking contaminated water. The babies are the scariest, because they have so little body fat and extra fluid to give up.

I spent hours trying to find find pediatric catheters to no avail.

People are drinking contaminated water now because there is nothing else. The ones who don’t want to get sick are starting to show signs of moderate dehydration.

The healthy can make it on a glass a day (for a little while) but the young, the elderly, and the ill will advance to severe dehydration in another two or three days.

Then they will start to die.

It’s almost like everyone has prepared themselves, relief workers and Haitians alike. It is like a movie where everything that can go wrong did . . and you are waiting for the hero to come save the day, only to realize in those last minutes of the movie that there is no hero. You know that really awful feeling when you realize it and you can’t stop watching and you can’t take back that you watched it.

You can forget it if it's a movie.. but tragically, this time we wrote the script. And now we have to live with the ending.

And it will never go away.