I remember one of the last days I was in Haiti, I had just gotten back to my unit after visiting the Adventist college down the street from the hospital. I had been gone for almost two hours, so many of my patients needed pain medication, repositioning, or assistance eating. I didn't even bother to go back to the roof of the hospital where my belongings were to change into my scrubs, I just rounded on everyone wearing my sunglasses and "Disaster Relief" t-shirt. Professionalism be damned.
[caption id="attachment_1104" align="alignright" width="252" caption="The Adventist University, which is no longer being used as a teaching facility. Instead, people who have lost their homes pitch tents and live on the campus grounds."]
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As I'm finishing up and sanitizing the nurses station, another one of the nurse volunteers from my group arrived to my unit. She brought with her one of our translators, and a Haitian man who volunteered to help us out. She explained to me that her mother was a high school French teacher, and when she found out that her daughter was going to be traveling to Haiti, she assigned as homework for her students to write poems to the Haitian victims of the earthquake. In their best François, of course. It was neat- the Haitian man would kindly go into my patient's rooms with us, one by one, and read to them one of the poems written by an American student. He would read a line, pause, and our translator would explain to us what was being said. Much of it was hard to translate, but we could always figure out what the author was trying to convey. At the end, the patient got to keep the paper that the poem was written on as a gift.
[caption id="attachment_1102" align="alignleft" width="186" caption="Me and the "Haitian Man." Sadly, his name eludes me."]
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I think it was perhaps the fourth patient we were visiting, that something very special and very beautiful happened. The Haitian man who was kind enough to be reading these poems started off as usual. The poem was called "Pour Haiti" ("For Haiti"), written by "Liz." He was patiently reading it, and the translator seemed to be having a much easier time translating it for us, which I figured meant that the French was much better with this student. When the man got about halfway through, I noticed that his voice was beginning to waver. He got to one sentence in particular, and his voice cracked with emotion, and he could not go on. Something had touched him, and he began to weep into his hands. The line was "Je prie pour les maris qui ont perdu leurs femmes", which translated means, "I pray for the husbands who lost their wives." As it so happened, the earthquake had turned this man into a widower, and he was reminded of the love he had lost.
[caption id="attachment_1103" align="alignright" width="204" caption="My hand-written journal entry of the poem, "Pour Haiti" by Liz."]
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He took a moment, gathered himself, and finished the poem. He then went to fold it and put it in his pocket, and then seemed to remember that it was supposed to be given to the patient to keep, because his hand jerked, he laughed, and handed the paper to my patient. This was when I saw a neat opportunity. I asked him, "S'il vous plait?" and held my hand out for the poem. He gave it to me, and I went to the nurses station and hand-copied it in my journal, word for word, twice. The first copy I ripped out, the second copy I left in my journal and put in my bag. I gave the patient the original, and the Haitian man my hand written one. He skimmed it, his eyes still teary, and thanked me several times before folding it up and putting it in his wallet. I like to think he reads it every so often and has fond memories of the woman he loved.