Port au Prince, Haiti - Why are some guys such self-serving wimps nowadays? Worse, why is it a global affectation?
I usually try to avoid such generalizations, but as a kid I spent many long nights watching John Wayne westerns with my brother and sisters, and, right or wrong, that’s where I’m coming from.
Yesterday I had to check the blood sugar of a 30-something-year-old Haitian man. The technology is so advanced nowadays that the tiny device we use in the field encompasses a needle so miniscule that you practically need a microscope to see it. Yet the man on whom I performed the needle stick winced, grimaced and moaned as if he was having a colonoscopy without sedation. I mean, come on.
On the other hand, I saw a 20-something-year-old woman who had had five children, three of whom were with her, the youngest being only two months old. She was having the children examined because the three of them had some configuration of diarrhea, earache, “la grippe,” and stomach pain.
She herself didn’t look well and you know she had probably had almost zero sleep in who knows how long. We all know that mothers put themselves last, and I have seen that illustrated here over and over and over.
By the same token, my micro-experience seeing patients at two Tent Cities in Port-au-Prince over the past four days, seems to reinforce the notion that men are all about “me.”
Three adolescent boys have waited in line to complain about their acne, while the adolescent girls I have seen have stood in line, not for themselves, but to get their younger siblings examined. I saw this same phenomenon after the tsunami, in both Batticaloa, Sri Lanka, and Banda Aceh, Indonesia. I was treating men who had been drinking alcohol in Sri Lanka and Banda Aceh and who were falling down drunk, whereas the women were taking care of the kids.
At Hurricane Katrina, men were asking me for “smokes” while women were asking me for milk and food for their children.
I know the old saying is – that’s why women are charged with the business of labor and giving birth, because men couldn’t handle it.
HOW TO GET INVOLVED WITH DISASTER WORK
Well, speaking of “me”, let’s talk about you. I get a lot of inquiries from people who are interested in being involved with disaster work.
First of all, you don’t have to be a medical professional. You don’t even have to have a skill set. We need a lot of hands in disaster response. You DO have to have a good attitude, be a team player and be willing to do anything. For example, after Hurricane Katrina, I was at New Orleans Airport offloading evacuees from helicopters for three days. To my knowledge, there are no medical school courses on how to safely operate around military, cargo and commercial choppers which are landing every 10 seconds without getting your head lopped off.
Physical endurance is a requirement. I would go so far as to say one should be physically fit. For example, we waited all night for the choppers to come in on our makeshift landing pad in the parking lot of Walter Hermann Memorial Hospital in Texas after Hurricane Rita. We were tired and there were no choppers in sight. So we slept on the tarmac. No blankets, no pillows, no sheets and no soft pajamas. No kidding. It didn’t kill me, and quite honestly, after a week of sleeping on a hard cement floor of a schoolhouse here in Port-au-Prince, the tarmac doesn’t seem so bad now. I developed a crick in my neck the first night I was here because of improper neck cradling, and I haven’t been able to shake it. I can’t fully rotate my head to the right. Do you think I’m complaining? Not when I’m seeing people everyday now who don’t even have a cement floor to sleep on!
Can you be deployed if you have physical medical conditions? Yes, if you can manage them. One of our team members at Hurricane Katrina, an obese, unhealthy man with type II diabetes, developed a severe leg cellulitis and weeping wound exacerbated by uncontrolled blood sugars.
He became a liability instead of an asset.
The mantra of a disaster worker is the same all over the world: “Take care of yourself first, then your team members.” The worst anecdote of a violation of this unwritten rule was after the Oklahoma bombing where a well-meaning first responder who was a nurse, rushed into the unstable federal building to look for survivors. A beam toppled over, hit her in the head and she died several hours later.
Adaptability is a must. I have long stopped fretting about whether the toilets at my destination are going to be upright, squat, clean or dirty. I take toilet paper and baby wipes and figure I can handle whatever I am faced with. At the time of this writing, I have had two bucket baths in six days. You can’t waste precious water here, and deodorant and baby powder come in handy. (I wish more humanitarian workers around here would use them!) Especially in confined spaces and hot, humid conditions where sweating to keep cool is a necessity.
Unfortunately, most Haitians don’t have that option,
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