The Hospital

It’s safe to say the hospital is usually a sad, depressing, not where you’d like to go for fun on a nice Sunday afternoon kind of place. Would you agree?  Most of us go when we are forced to succum to our own problems or illness, or even worse we know and love someone who is there because they need to be. It is no different here in Haiti. Except that here, you don’t get the luxury of privacy, a clean environment, the ‘hospital’ food, clean water, a/c, and many other things. Some new friends of ours that live across the street from us teach at a school, and they have been visiting the hospital in their spare time. We have gone with them a few times, simply to talk to, share with, and touch the sick patients. Then we all got to thinking, and wondered what would happen if we showed up with some food. Since we happen to have huge pots that can cook a lot of food, we simply asked our wonderful cooks to add in another two buckets of food so we could take them to the hospital. We have no idea if this is something the hospital could participate in (by being able to donate) or would want to. But we thought we’d just show up and see how it went.

I’m not sure I could say if it was a success or a failure really. The first room we went into was a post op room with about 20 patients. We walked in and said we had some rice and beans if anyone was hungry.  Oh man, the looks we got! There were five well-to-do Haitians there and they immediately sprang on us. Not knowing we spoke Creole they sassed us by asking for chicken and fish too, and how about a drink, and this and that. We tried to ignore them as we went to the other patients and asked if they wanted food. Three did. One man ate his portion so fast we gave him another one. Off to next room-only to find one of the vocal ‘fantastic five’ followed us.  The patients in this room were a little more excited for food (as were their families staying with them) and we passed out about ten plates. Then we went off to the maternity section. A few of those ladies wanted food, but the real appreciative ones were all the dads waiting in the hallway. Soon, we had a line forming, since we had so much food to give out we were giving it to both patients and friends or family visiting. That could have been a mistake considering it was them who then followed us to the next three sections asking for more and more food and even our buckets. They wouldn’t give up! The last room we visited was the children. There were parents of the kids camped out there, meaning their kids have pry been there for a decent amount of time. They were grateful for the food and went back to sleeping on the floor.  We gave away about 3 buckets of food, which is about 240 servings. It was an interesting day. Since we had an extra bucket of food left, we took it to the neighborhood of our driver. All they had to do was shout to a few neighbors there was hot food and within minutes little kids came running with bowls in their hands, shirts on and no pants, no shoes, with huge smiles on their faces. As I smiled I looked to our driver and his wife, smiling as they happily scooped up rice for their neighbors.