Monday, November 19, 2012

Life is good...

Yesterday I cared for a young women cut down in the prime of her life by a disease that I have developed a respectful hate for... It was a tough day and I really felt like crying when I returned home after my 12 hours with her and her ever supportive husband...

The past week I have watched the events that are happening all over the world (more specifically in The Gaza Strip) and I have been experiencing so many emotions ranging from anger to sadness. Watching as needless deaths occur on both sides of the conflict.

I have read articles about the destruction left by super-storm Sandy in both the US and Haiti and I worry about those affected.

This morning I awoke in my own bed, I took a shower with hot water, I ate bread baked using ingredients that are in abundance in my world, I am safe from violence, super-storms and cancer.

Life on this end is good.


Be grateful, be kind, educate yourself, lend your hand to those in need....

Saturday, September 29, 2012

Little C

Life is hard when your 5.

Life is even harder when your 5 and live in Haiti but what makes life even harder then that is being 5, living in Haiti, weighing 18 pounds and having TB.


I know a few posts ago I talked about the delicacy that is required to tell another persons story. I want to tell her story from my perspective. Yes, this is about one little girl, but as with most of these types of stories it's a story about many little girls all over the world.

I met "little C" when I arrived to work with Ti Kay this past summer. Ti Kay is run by Dr. Megan Coffee and for those of you who do not know, Ti Kay treats TB and HIV patients in Port Au Prince Haiti.

When I first met little C, she weighed 18 pounds and this was her second hospitalization for TB.
5 year old children are:
a. not supposed to weigh 18 pounds.
b. not supposed to be confined to living in a hospital for months on end, separated from family (aside from a 13 year old sister who's sole job is to care for her)
c. not supposed crumble under their own body weight because their disease and lack of intake (as a result of treatment/disease induced nausea and vomiting) has made them too weak.
d. are not supposed to know such sadness that a smile is an exception not the rule.

5 year old children are supposed to run and play and laugh with the squeal only 5 year olds can do...

Over the 6 weeks I was at Ti Kay little C didn't appear to get much better. She would just stare at the caregivers with an empty look. She smiled, sometimes, usually at Jeremy cause he just seemed to have a way with her.
She threw up her medication almost every morning, her weight seemed to either stay the same or decrease in spite of all the extra chicken or hot dogs we bought her..

to hold her little fragile, emaciated body everyday, trying to coax smiles and words out of her (her vocabulary was severely lacking) caused me to try to find that place within me, (within all of us I am sure) that lets you love and care for people but that doesn't destroy you at your core...

After I left Haiti, little C did a big turn around.
She began to gain weight, she began to talk, she began to smile, to play... she became a 5 year old girl.

And soon she was well enough to go home....

The fact that this was her 2nd hospitalization was not lost on Megan and a few weeks ago she sent me an email asking me to look for funding to send little C and her sister (her caregiver while in hospital) to school.


Maybe in doing so they will have access to things like a meal a day or other services sometimes provided that will help keep her out of hospital for a third time... hopefully a positive outcome to a story that had the potential to be so different...




I have told Megan that I will fund school for the girls for this coming year. If you would like to help out let me know!

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

home..number 5!

I have noticed that as my trips to Haiti have increased in number my blog posts while there have decreased in number.. There are many reasons for that I think..

Aside from what I spoke about in my last post, not having the right to tell another story, I have come to see that my time there is MY own lived experience. It's not one easily recounted or shared.. I guess it's why I find myself seeking seclusion when I come home.
There are few that can understand what it means to be where I was, to see what I saw and to experience the return to "normal" life once home.
I am grateful for those of you who have opened yourself up to the trying... those who have been there for me as sounding boards and willful ears.. and I am sorry that yet again I find myself in that "place" where most of this doesn't make sense..

I'm not sure how life can keep going on in such a manner when the balance continues to be so off and although the little bits count, they never seem to add up to a whole for so many...

As it always does, life goes on, all be it a little skewed for me.. for the time being.

A smart man said..

Given the scale of life in the cosmos, one human life is no more than a tiny blip. Each one of us is a just visitor to this planet, a guest, who will only stay for a limited time. What greater folly could there be than to spend this short time alone, unhappy or in conflict with our companions? Far better, surely, to use our short time here in living a meaningful life, enriched by our sense of connection with others and being of service to them. I won't be gone for long... Peace out Lise

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Imagine

Being here has taught me many things. The other day I had a conversation with my friend Jen who has been coming back and forth to Haiti for over the past 10 years. We talked about a lot of things but the one thing that she said that rings in my head every time I sit down to write this blog is how we, the "we" being people like me who recount and tell you all stories about our trips down here...and how "we" may not be representing the people and events properly... and that everyone, myself included need to really think before we write about the lives of others...

She was/is so right..

I started to look at myself and this blog like it has the potential to become like the old school game of telephone, where one person starts a story and it travels around a circle changing with each person it goes through...

Imagine you meet someone and have a brief encounter with that person, say they care for your child during a brief hospital stay. Now imagine unbeknownst to you that person has taken pictures of themselves with your child. That person has also read the hospital file that reports the vague details of your's and your child's case. Now that person has left their position in the caring for you and your child.. Imagine a year later you stumble upon a website with your child picture on it and a very inaccurate description of your hospital stay..a very inaccurate accounting of your child and your lives and how the person's brief encounter with the both of you had affected them so much they just had to write about it...

How would that make you feel?

I know in the past I have written a number of blog posts about people... for the most part I would say I was pretty accurate about the stories.. "pretty accurate" isn't good enough.. I know that now... I will do better!

I will however continue to write about me and how the situations here make me feel...how the people here make me feel...

Tonight a very sick man sang a song to me... had to hold back the tears...because people have the potential to move you if your open to them..in Canada or Haiti or really anyplace....

night from Haiti...
Lise

Friday, June 15, 2012

Emaciate

Emaciate..it's a verb..

"to make or become extremely thin, especially as a result of starvation...

TB/HIV...

she's younger then me..she has children, the youngest is 14..he comes every Saturday and Sunday to sit by her bed and beg her to "please take your medication mom....please, so you won't die..." It's still a fight...

Her mother comes to wash her each morning...her mother's not well so this week i make it my job...
"lave, Miss?"... "wash, Nurse?"

oxygen off..she'll be ok for a short while without it...I go to lift her from the bed...skin and bones...

I might break her....

short, slow walk to the showers...past all the patients, sitting, waiting to see the Dokte...
 "will that be me one day?" must go through their minds...
"surely not..."

Spigot that is the "shower" leaks continuously...
undress..disrobing of urine soaked clothes..no one to help her get up and pee into the bucket that sits beside her bed...
sit on 3 half concrete blocks in the corner...lowering her gently..no cushioning to speak of

standing in the water in my running shoes I glance down at this women...this mother...
take the bucket, fill it and run it over the skin and bones...

just cruel...

no energy to wash...gently over the bones...rinse....

"encore"

"again"

the water must feel good...

lift her to standing...lifting a bag of flour takes more effort....

sad...

walk past the waiting area...getting more full of people waiting to see the doctor..
"regade a li"... "look at her"...does she hear them..
probably not, she's too focused on getting back to her bed where she will lay all day

...making herself extremely thin....

Emaciate...
wrong....

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Don't have it in me...

Hi everyone, Sorry I have not been keeping up with this blog... Days here are long, hot and to be honest I am generally not in the mood to sit down and write... Usually my evenings entail in no particular order, shower, cold drink, food and maybe a little reading. I can honestly say I that I have no idea how Megan is able to keep this up and has kept it up for the past 2.5 years!! She truly is amazing and I don't know how to even describe a day in her life. I am happy to report my bug bites have all healed, I'm sleeping good, have not lost much weight and am getting to work with amazing people doing such awesome things in crazy conditions.. I'm off to bed... Stay well... Lise

Saturday, June 2, 2012

the tap-tap touch..

Today was fully day 5 here in Haiti on my fifth trip to this island nation. Aside from a bad bout of bed bugs, which were eradicated today with much adieu,  I have settled in fairly well.

Each morning and evening I ride a "tap-tap", which is the Haitian equivalent to public transport. Tap-taps can take pretty much any form from mini-buses down to the back of a pick-up in varying states of disrepair. I take these rides with my new found friend, Jeremy, a 19 year old kid from North Carolina who is also helping out Megan at the hospital. These rides have proven to be interesting in many ways and I just have to chuckle to myself that most north american's would consider this form of transport too and from work each day as a form of torture. Imagine if you will, a morning that is already hot (30+) and still, a mini-bus filled beyond capacity by about 5+ individuals,  all trying to maintain an air of disconnectedness while practically sitting on each others laps..all the while listening to multiple cell phone conversations and if your lucky, a sales pitch from the, quite literally,a travelling salesman...

Today's rides were extra special in that not only did we get to hear the sales pitch about how Amoxiacillin was the cure for whatever ails you and if that didn't work well Zantac would surely be the winner. But next we moved onto the gentleman who hitched a ride for a few blocks quite clearly focusing in on the "blancs" at the back of the bus, welcoming us to his country now could we please give him some money so he could get something to eat for breakfast..which of course we did and all went well... So much entertainment for the bargain price of 0.45 American each way. Tonight's ride home proved to be slightly uneventful unless you count the fact that I was sitting next to the wide open door as the tap-tap careened through mud puddles and down roads at what felts like breakneck speed in a machine quite clearly not meant to travel at such speeds (sorry Danielle..your voice was ringing clearly inside my head but there was no where to go...)

And that is only what is inside the tap-tap... the sights, sounds and smells are indescribable and need to be experienced to be valued.. Children off to school in pristine uniforms, men pushing wheelbarrows full of construction supplies down the middle of the road, smells of sewage on one block only to be replaced by the smell of fresh baked bread or frying banana's on the next...

I must admit I was a little apprehensive about riding the public transport system here in Haiti but I think it's opened my eyes to a little more of what life is like on a daily basis for many Haitians. And it has shown me how in many ways I am disconnected from my fellow Canadians when I am at home. I see now that I come from a world where we barely even look at each other, we ride in cars alone too and from work, many wouldn't dream of touching a stranger let alone be squished in a car for 45 mins in +30 heat unable to escape, we value our space from one another but after the past few days of travel I can't help but wonder if in some small way I am missing out....that although during our rides in these tap-taps we are not engaging with people on any really deep levels maybe in some small ways I am becoming more connected to the city, to it's people and to the reality of a life I have only stood on the fringe of and will never fully appreciate... but maybe in my own way I can once again become more engaged with my life back home in Canada and more further from the fringe and more into the core...

Just where I'm at tonight....

Night all...

Love Lise

Friday, June 1, 2012

Day 4

Day 4 spent washing,bleaching and boiling clothes and sheets... Not the way I would have chosen to spend the day! Off to the clinic in the am... Life is always strange here... Currently, sitting on a dark room writing this and playing with a very skinny kitty cat... About to go to bed before we lose power! Night everyone!

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Haiti day 2

Just a quick post to let those of you not on Facebook that I have arrived safe and sound in port au prince! Looks like it is going to be a steep learning curve for me and creole! Megan and her right hand brooke are awesome and this Is going to be a wonderful month!! Hot, sticky and awesome... Cold pop tastes so great!! Will write more when I get settled in!! Love lise

Saturday, May 12, 2012

Amazing people and tragedy..

Tonight I am sitting on my patio, arranging my life and my up-coming trip to Haiti. This past week I have had the privileged of spending time with other people who have spent time in and loved Haiti also. One even spent sometime in the "clink" down there, as his southern self calls it! Not only did I so enjoy listening to all the stories and hearing all the great things that they had experienced while there, I started to get more excited about my up-coming trip. It was nice to see that even though both of these people are now back in the States they have both stayed very connected to Haiti and their work there. Even trying to get back to work full-time...Something I admire! For both of them Haiti was not a fleeting experience they have a love for Haiti that warms my heart.. they are both passionate and caring people and I am so very happy I got to spend time with both Holli Griffiths and Paul Waggoner! Hope to spend time with them again soon!!

Although hanging with them was great I also learned some very sad and troubling news about Ti Kay and Megan's supplies..Seems like it is so hard to catch a break at times...

Below is a picture of a fire that ripped through the compound that held her container full of supplies (not to mention the workshop for a group from Cite Soleil and many other projects currently underway at Haiti Communitere).
Thousands of dollars in precious and needed medical supplies, supplies that are not easily replaced, supplies that save lives and keep people well. It is to say the least devastating...

Currently, I am trying to get a hold of some suppliers to get supplies to take with me to help until they can build up their's. If anybody has connections with medical supply personnel,  please pass them on my information and I can talk to them about how they can help (lbudreo@hotmail.com or 780-278-7186). Also, if you would like to donate money that would also be useful as I will pick up what supplies I can here with it. Every little bit counts.

Megan and her crew are down in Haiti working day in and day out to try and provide healthcare to the people of Haiti. In the conditions, providing the type of care they do is no small feat ..this current tragedy thrown into the mix just makes providing that caliber of care all the more difficult. As a nurse working in a resource abundant facility I could not imagine trying to provide the type of care Megan and crew provide without the appropriate resources.  

Thanks for all your support in this matter. Keep your eyes and ears open as I might try to have a last minute fundraiser next weekend and will keep you all posted!

 Lise

Monday, April 23, 2012

Thank you!

I got the following message this past weekend. Anthea and Lyndon are children of a guy I have known for a very long time (Jay and my brother were great friends growing up)! Makes me grateful for parents like Jodi and Jay who are showing their children that one can make a difference at any age. Compassion is often so abundant in children and much can be learned by these little people!! Thanks again you guys! Lise, This is Anthea. Lyndon (my brother) and I raised some money in the last couple of months. We sold home-made napkin holders, little people, and bugs and sold them to our family and friends. We raised $37.20. We want to give it to you to use for medicine when you travel next to Haiti. My dad will make sure he gets it to you. Anthea (and Lyndon)

Thursday, April 12, 2012

A few more items...

Hi Everyone,
Here are a few more things that I/we need for my next trip:

Protein bars/powder (please not the powder in the plastic jugs as they are too hard to pack and are very heavy)

Vitamin B6 (50-100 mg tabs): this vitamin specifically helps fight a toxicity from a common TB drug. A 4 pack can be bought from Costco for $24

Weekly Dosettes: containers to provide medications for people to take at home. TB medication regeimes can be complicated at the best of times, providing patients with prepackaged meds helps improve compliance and reduce possibility of developing drug resistance.

Let me know if you are able to help with any of these items! Thanks!

Sometime in your life, hope that you might see one starved man, the look on his face when the bread finally arrives. Hope that you might have baked it or bought or even kneaded it yourself. For that look on his face, for your meeting his eyes across a piece of bread, you might be willing to lose a lot, or suffer a lot, or die a little, even.> ~Daniel Berrigan

Saturday, March 31, 2012

way too serious?! :)



In the past 6 months I have had 2 people very close to me,women whom I respect immensely, tell me that I was an "intense and serious person". Now I feel this is a fairly accurate summary of me.. the kicker for me was that they felt I am that way the majority of time....<>

Today was a beautiful day outside and as I walked in the sun today I started thinking about what my friends had said. This year I have been teaching clinical nursing and have expressed to my students the importance of being self-reflective in their life and practice as nurses. What I realized today as I thought about my friends comments, is that to be truly self-reflective you need to consider what others think about you, especially those close to you that know the true you. So that is what I did..

And what I have come up with is this..I AM a serious and intense person. Can I work on chilling out a bit more...maybe.. ok... yes

But to be serious doesn't mean that I don't enjoy life, the experiences I have, that I can't see the good in this crazy world in which we live and that I can't cut loose and have a purely fun time (at times)!

But what it does mean to me is this.. If you are involved in my life we will have deep meaningful conversations about a broad range of things and sometimes what we talk about may make the both of us uneasy.My facebook posts will probably err on the serious side. You will have a champion for your cause whatever it may be and I will be as supportive of you as I can! I will count on you as I know you will always be able to count on me...

I am not going to apologize for being the way I am...I will work on relaxing a bit more and truly enjoying the moments that I am given!

As most of you know, I work in a field that IS serious, I volunteer in positions that push myself and others to places that are uncomfortable. The conditions in which most people in this world live in IS something that more people should take seriously. So often I get wrapped up in that part of it and lose sight of the amazingness of the life I have in front of me...

And sometimes my friends, who love me very much pull me back to that amazingness (is that even a word?! nope..at least it wasn't in spell check..) and for that I am grateful...

Tonight= sit in the sun and enjoy then chill out with friends and enjoy my awesome life!


Sunday, March 25, 2012

Bringing Sexy Back....

Here goes....with the serious stuff again!!

As most of you know I will be heading back to Haiti this coming spring/summer. This time I will again be working with a different doctor and I am very excited about it! There are many reasons why I am excited of course, one is that it has been almost a year since I was there, there are many people I am missing (Rose, Beth, John, Winnie,Olez and many others) I am excited to see the changes that have been made there and most of all I am looking forward to meeting Dr. Coffee and helping her and her staff in anyway!

Dr. Megan Coffee is an infectious disease doctor from the U.S. and she runs the organization I will be volunteering with which is called "Ti Kay". The translation of TI Kay is "little house". Tuberculosis is a disease that is spread through secretions expelled through cough and sneezes and in close quarters i.e. little houses, tents etc it is spread that much easier. TB is thought of as the "sickness of the little house" because of its highly infectious nature and transmission to people living in close quarters. TB has all but been eradicated from places like Canada and the US (except for isolated cases/areas) while Haiti (1.5 hour flight from Miami) has the highest mortality rate related to TB in the America's.

TB is very treatable but you need money for medications (most TB is treated with a cocktail of medications), money for food and money/equipment for treatment of side-effects (of the disease and treatment). The very scary thing about TB is that there are different strains and (in not wanting to get too technical here) if not treated properly,the strains mutate and become that much more difficult to treat.

For more information about TB in Haiti I suggest you check out the Ti Kay website, which I will give you the link too at the end of this post.

Dr. Megan Coffee has been treating TB and HIV/AIDS patients in Port Au Prince since just after the earthquake. She and her staff supplement the current program run by the state. Medications for both HIV and TB are supplied through programs like PEPFAR and PNLT (the national TB drug program)but Ti Kay must supply most other things to the patients including food, oxygen, vitamins (integral to the health of these patients),supplies like syringes and facility costs.

Megan is a twitter aficionado and often tweets stories about life in Haiti, patients stories and often her thoughts in just 143 characters. If you want to follow her you can find her at @doktecoffee. Recently, she tweeted about trying to find a way to make "funding food sexy". One of the side effects of disease and treatment in both TB and HIV is anorexia. In a country where citizens already struggle with the reality of malnutrition the addition of either of these diseases (and often people suffer from both at the same time) can be devastating. When Megan tweeted about making food sexy I tweeted back and asked her to give me numbers about how much it costs Ti Kay to feed and provide much needed vitamins for the inpatient unit of the program. She wrote me back and outlined costs... basically it boils down to $1600 a month for food, chef, vitamins and transport of food to the hospital from the warehouse.Lets break that down a bit further....

$1600/month = $53.00 a day to feed and provide vitamins for 30 people.
$53.00 = 10 lattes.. and not even the "special ones"!
$53.00 = 1/2 of the pair of jeans I bought 2 weeks ago
$53.00 = 4 movie tickets (with $5 to spare to buy a...??? drink)
$53.00 = less then 1/2 of most people cable bill each month

I know that many of you have asked me to let you know what you can contribute to my trip. This is how you can help me.. you can help me bring sexy back to food for the inpatients at Ti Kay. But more importantly you can help people in a way that is so important to their healing. Lets show Megan that helping people get better (and they truly do get better) through food and medication and vitamins IS sexy.. and awesome all at the same time!

My hope is this...

100 people @ $15.00/month = food security and healing for 30 people a month

That equals $180/person for the year...

If you wish to help bring sexy back...contact me at lbudreo@hotmail.com or 780-278-7186

Thanks in advance for all the support you have all shown me over the past 2 years!

Lise
http://www.tikayhaiti.org/

Saturday, March 3, 2012

Friday, January 13, 2012

frustrations...


Over the past year and especially the past few months I have talked with a lot of you about adoption and primarily about my wants/abilities to adopt Rose and her brother Jean Lee. As most of you know the both of them are now being adopted by another Canadian couple, something that makes me happy for them and their future!

Many of you have said to me that I needed to just go for it.. that the money (an area of concern for me) would just appear and that I would be able to find a way to cope with all that comes with an instant family as a single person well... please know this...Haiti is continuing to uphold its archaic rules for adoptions. These rules, although case by case considerations are made (hmmm ok) include:
1.Married couple (read not single women), married for at least 10 years (may consider those married for 8 years... yes cause all couples married for 10 years are "stable" and "are able to provide a stable growth environment").
2.No biological children of their own (hmmm yes cause most couples who can't have children within the first oh I don't know 2 years of marriage are so willing to wait 10 years to adopt).

I know that there are many rules/laws that need to be in place to ensure that children are not sold or given away even if they do have families. I am an advocate of keeping families together but there are some harsh realities of living in a country like Haiti and often the ideal outweighs those realities.

I read the following blog post this morning and I thank Kristen for outlining this issue so well for me. Please, please go read it! It is informative and was for me profound..Made me cry (not that most things don't :)) and it weighs heavily on my heart...

http://www.rageagainsttheminivan.com/2012/01/haitian-orphans-two-years-later-still.html

Life is as it is and I understand that. Quite often we are faced with things that we cause us frustrations and disbelief and we are left standing feeling like there is nothing to do...Maybe that is the case with this one.. I don't know...

Thursday, January 12, 2012

2 years


Two years ago today the lives of everyone in a small Caribbean country changed..
In ways that most of us will never comprehend..

Today is a day of remembrance,sadness, hope and love...

I stole these words from Tara..

"We are not alone; beyond the differences that separate us, we share one common humanity and thus belong to each other. The mystery of life is that we discover this human togetherness not when we are peaceful and strong, but when we are vulnerable and weak." -Henri Nouwen
Hug those you love today near and far..

Renmen Ayiti, mwen p'ap janm bliye ou..