Clinique Confiance En Dieu, de Oriani, Haiti
A BIG hello to all our dear friends, family and supporters. It has been a very busy month and so much has happened! Remember the lady I told you about that had her foot ground up in the spokes of a motorcycle? Well, she is improving and will regain the full use of her foot! A couple weeks ago another lady came to us with internal bleeding (she had had a bad C section 4 months ago). We took her down the mountain to a hospital ASAP. She died yesterday. Pray for her 21yr old husband. He is very poor and now has a 4 month old baby to look after and next to no money to survive on. A real success story is a little girl named Ketli. She is 5 yrs old and was burned on her leg and stomach so badly that she probably would have died, but with some TLC from Kim, that little girl is walking and is almost completely restored now in the last month. Praise God.
Today we had a tiny preemie baby brought in. The mother had (and has) high blood pressure, and maybe that is what caused the baby to come early. The babe is tiny, maybe 3 lbs, and is all blue lipped from insufficient oxygen and wrinkled like a prune from dehydration. The amazing thing is that this little girl has survived 23 days already! We warned the mom of what the likely outcome of this could be, and that the babe could very easily die. (she almost died in our clinic today when Kim tried to change her dirty wet clothing). These situations are tough, because this mom has no resources to draw from, she has 7 other children (one barely weaned), and there is virtually no place to send a mom and baby here for 2-3 months of intensive care in incubators with oxygen to carry her through. You can pray for her too. She has had 3 other children die of different problems and this could very easily turn out to be #4.
As Candace and I were walking one of the back trails last week we met a lady, named Fifi, who says she is too poor to look after all 6 of her children. She wants to give 4 of them up to a Christian family or orphanage someplace. She wondered if we can take them? Wow. Our hearts go out to Fifi. She obviously loves them dearly but just cant bear to watch them grow up hungry and running wild. We are looking into the children`s father and birth certificate status to see what we can do to help them all. Life is so hard on some people! Makes me cry sometimes.
I must tell you a little about the finances. We are unable to get enough in from the patients to maintain the level of care that is needed here. Its just not nearly possible. We are thrilled with the support we have felt and seen from you all who live in the land of low or no cost health insurance. J
Please consider these expenses….
1. We have almost 900 patients a month and since we don’t charge for followup visits, only about 2/3rds are paying patients. We are grateful to Christian Aid Ministries as they help with some meds, but our medicine costs are still very high.2. Vehicle fuel and repairs are costly. (We have a 2000 Ford Excursion which doubles as ambulance and family transportation)
3. We have and will continue to have to spend money on clinic building upgrades and repairs. I can see that a new storage building for the clinic is needed soon. The storage building we have is dirt floor, has a leaky roof and board walls that you can reach an arm in through the holes.
4. We have 5 Haitian paid employees now.
· Dauphney at the gate screening people for signs of Cholera, (the funniest girl you ever have met)
· Docter Ozias, (18 yrs experience in the area)
· SeWilly, as nurses aid (and learning fast from Kim)
· Jakot, receptionist
· SeDieuFo, cleaner (she is the best and hardest worker ever!)
5. And last but not least, even though we try to be frugal, it is a fact that keeping us foreign workers and family going here is not cheap. Fortunately our house building and etc that we have done has been paid mostly from a sole private source, so very little donated money has been needed there.
We can’t project the exact future of this clinic or what will all happen, but check this out…. At aprox 900 patients a month x 12 months, that is almost 11,000 patients a yr. Now if all the above mentioned expenses together would cost $14 dollars a person… then 11 thousand patients could cost $154,000 US dollars for operating costs per yr. That’s only $14 dollars a patient!
But… we are expecting the number of patients to increase, because we hear that the local Catholic clinic is closing soon. These remote mountain people here need help. Every day I heard local people telling me they are thankful for the clinic and that they pray for it daily. So, please, help us actively pray that the funds will be available to continue this work. We have had great support in the past, but right now our bank accounts are down to less than one month reserve. Is God trying to teach us dependency on Him?
Nurse Kim has had her nurse friend “Sunshine” (real name, and it fits her personality J ) come in from Bonners Ferry Idaho for a couple weeks. Sunshine has truly been a huge help. She is a RN and has been working with us organizing, doing IVs and just giving lots of good advice. We have a nurse named Ashley Dirks from Kansas coming here for 3 months starting May 10. We extend a special invitation to any Creole speaking RNs to give us a call if you are interesting in working here. We have also had 3 young men come in from Canada to help us with some building projects. First they worked on the house, then the clinic, and now they are helping build a new church building to replace the one which we have outgrown. The old Oriani Mennonite church building was 20x 25 ft and often holds between 130-160 people inside. Now the new church will be 30x70 and at that same density…. It could hold… 600?
The house is quiet and all the family is sleeping. We have breakfast at 6:30 usually and school for the kiddos starts at 7:30. Lacey Toews from Pincher Creek Alberta is doing a great job in teaching our children! We asked her to come back next year and she has agreed to do that, so we feel secure knowing that is now in good hands. Tomorrow morn at 6am Candace, Lacey, Kim and Sunshine will ride our 4 horses to the top of a cliff to overlook a 1200 ft deep ravine. It’s a favorite spot to watch the sun come up. A year ago this idea of going to Haiti and doing this was only a far off secret idea. What kind of changes will this next year bring for us? What will it bring for you? Where will you be in a yr from now? Where will we all be a million years from now?
Wishing you all the blessings of God,
Keith, Candace, Trev, Zack, Cam, Chase and Christina
Oriani, Haiti
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