Third Day Thursday, Jan 14, 2010
God gave us Psalm 18 to encourage us on this day: 1 I love you, O LORD, my strength.
2 The LORD is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer; my God is my rock, in whom I take refuge. He is my shield and the horn [a] of my salvation, my stronghold.
3 I call to the LORD, who is worthy of praise, and I am saved from my enemies.
4 The cords of death entangled me; he torrents of destruction overwhelmed me.
5 The cords of the grave coiled around me; the snares of death confronted me.
6 In my distress I called to the LORD; I cried to my God for help. From his temple he heard my voice;
my cry came before him, into his ears.
7 The earth trembled and quaked, and the foundations of the mountains shook; they trembled because he was angry.
Our mission today was to find a penicillin shot for Johnny.
To our great surprise and delight, our friend and YABT Haiti board member, Jimmy, showed up at our house early the next morning. He said his house was in bad shape, but that his family was fine. He ended up spending the day with us in our travels.
The first place we stopped was a hospital right around the corner called L'hopital Espoir (Hope Hospital). It looked deserted so I wondered what was going on. I walked up to a young woman with a clip board in her hand and introduced myself and told her about my need. She told me she had nothing to treat tetanus but said to try L'hopital la Paix. It turned out she was one of the director's of the hospital and after three days of non-stop emergency care she said they had to give their staff a rest and clean the hospital. Her name was Natalie and she was a graduate of Quisqueya Christian School! She told me the hospital had suffered some minor damage and cracks and that she would like to re-open the hospital, but there was no one to tell her if the building was safe. She also said she needed Clorox to clean with.
Our next stop was Quisqueya Christian School (QCS) where Carol teaches. They were expecting a medical team and I thought they might have what we needed, but unfortunately they did not. However, the school nurse, Miquette said she would give the shot if I could find it. While there I saw the school's new plant and facility manager and asked him if he felt qualified to look at Hope hospital to see if it was safe to open. I also mentioned their need for Clorox. He said he would go and get some and head over to the hospital.
In the meantime we went to L'hopital la Paix to see if they had what we needed. As we pulled up to park outside the hospital we saw a box with a towel over it. Inside it was the corpse of a young child. To our surprise, several pharmacies outside the hospital were open, so we purchased some antibiotic pills in case we couldn't find the shot and some syringes.
We then went inside the hospital gate. The sights, smells and sounds were overwhelming. Bloody trash strewn around the courtyard rotting in the sun. The moans of patients being treated outside. The police, UN and other international security were there. I looked around for someone who looked like a medical person and saw a lady in scrubs. I approached her and explained our situation and that the patient had already had 2 tetanus seizures. She took me by the hand, got us past the guards and knocked on the door of the pharmacy. Within one minute of arriving, I was inside talking to a pharmacist about what we needed! She looked around briefly and said she didn't see it. I pleaded with her to look again, and she took me into a back room with meds all over the floor. She pulled out 2 boxes of some small blue vials. One of them said “Penicillin” on it, so I checked my “Where there is no Doctor” book again and verified that it was the right stuff!!! I said, how much do I owe you, and she said “nothing – take what you need!! So I took 3 vials because the book said to repeat the shot every 12 hours.
We went back to QCS and the nurse gave him the shot. While there we found out that the plant engineer from QCS had OK'd Hope Hospital to open the next day with a team of German Doctors. God used me as a messenger to bring the right people together for a badly needed hospital to open in Haiti!!
Throughout the third day I kept getting incoming phone calls, mostly from our AIS Haiti leaders in different parts of Haiti wondering how we were. This was very encouraging. But I was still anxious to hear from my key leaders in Port-au-Prince like Daniel, Sylvain, Ronald, Jean Paul and Debreus. One by one I heard from them or through other people that they were alive and well. I also learned that Elysee Vaillant and his family were OK, but their house was damaged because a house next to it fell against it.
One of the calls I got was from a young man I had led to Christ a few months before in Verrettes named Miguelson. After I told him we were fine, I asked how he was doing and he said he was going to church and growing the faith. This, of course, made me very happy.
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