Day 10: Mobile Medical Clinic Day!

You can learn a lot about a culture by examining the people of that culture medically. That's what I did today.  I was in the triage station, so I organized about 40 patients by taking vitals (pulse, temperature, and blood pressure) and asking some basic health history questions through an interpreter.

Haitians have a very high emphasis on cleanliness, but they don't understand that to clean some one, you need clean water. This is evidenced in that all of the women that came in today had one common complaint: vaginal itching and discharge. Not only do they douche a lot, but they use dirty river water to do this which is the source of their discomfort. With some basic knowledge of about proper cleanliness this problem could be corrected.

What surprised me most was when a 16 year old girl walked in. Her right eye was swollen with bleeding in her eye with the surrounding area being heavily bruised. When I asked her how she got it, she said her father beat her. The translator didn't even flinch. when I asked him about it later, he said it was normal for a man to beat his children or wife in Haiti. Not an organized spanking or some form of discipline, but just a man losing his temper and beating his family. While some things may be right or merely different, this aspect of Haitian culture is wrong.