Well it is all go for my trip to Haiti at the end of the month. What started as a casual conversation at my Oamaru clinic has escalated to my agreeing to be part of the Hands and Hearts for Haiti Project, started by Robyn Couper. Robyn has been a missionary in Haiti for 33 years but came back to her hometown of Oamaru last year - that was until the big Haitian earthquake in January this year. With so many contacts in Haiti and a compassionate heart for the people she lived with for so long, she began to look for ways she could help. While the town she worked in, Cap Hatien, was affected very little by the earthquake that struck Port-au-Prince, the effects have reached there. With the help of the church she worked with, a need at the public hospital for medical staff to cope with the influx of work from the region was identified and she obtained permission from local authorities to bring in a medical team to help. Money has been raised to fund this venture and a team of an anaesthetist (Steve Benford), general surgeon (me), orthopaedic surgeon (Jean-Claude Theis, and 2 physiotherapists (Kim Laurie, Dale Radford) are making the first expeditionary team at the end of May for about 4-6 weeks. Tickets are booked and Robyn has arrived already to prepare for our arrival. When I first met Robyn to discuss the possibilties, I made it clear that I do not want this to be just a surgical endeavour but I want to be able to contribute to the spiritual encouragement of the Christians in the church at Haiti. The anaesthetist is not only a practicing doctor but also a trained Anglican priest. My wife Catherine is not coming with me as our eldest daughter is having her first baby about the time I get back. I am really looking forward to being of help in the St Justinien hospital which is a poorly funded public institution in Cap Hatien about 100 miles north of Port-au-Prince. I will have to brush up on my French, but my orthopaedic colleague is a native French speaker. I will be using this blog to post events to keep you updated on what I am doing. I leave NZ on 30th May.
As many of you will know, the picture above is not what I look like now. Eighteen months ago, over a period of 3 weeks, all my hair fell out - alopecia totalis is the medical terminology making it sound worse than it is. Even my eyebrows and eyelashes are gone! So I will be needing a good sunhat to sheild my "boiling" head as one of the kids at church said to me recently.
To see more of the Hands and Hearts for Haiti Project see the following website
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