Cholera Day 7: 10 babies and 11 days In Port Au Prince

Day 7: Saturday, January 26, 2013

Malachi

I got up in the morning, ate breakfast with the kids, and saw that they were doing very, very well. The staff was giving them excellent care, and they were happy. I asked if they knew a moto driver they trusted who could take me back to the hospital, because their schedule that day didn’t allow for their driver to take me to the hospital. Frentz (Mallery’s husband) called a guy named Watson who came to get me, and I got to the hospital about 10:30. As I paid the moto driver, I also asked him if he could possibly come to get me again if I needed a ride, and he said he could. I got his name and number and went into the hospital compound.

When I got there, I met up with Annita and Manette. They had worked all day Friday, all night Friday night, and were expecting to work all day Saturday. We had agreed to pay $10 for the day shift and $15 for the night shift for each person. We had paid them the $10 each for the day shift on Friday, but we owed them $25 each for Friday night and Saturday. In addition to their work with the babies, they had also washed all the clothes. This in itself was worth a great deal, because Joanne’s laundry lady refused to wash them out of fear of touching the cholera-infected items, and we had had to pay another lady $15 to do it on Thursday. The amount of laundry we produced was unbelievable, yet understandable considering the quantity of diarrhea and vomit we were dealing with, so it was a splendid bonus to have all the clothes clean.

Annita told me that Doug had come in the morning to restock our supplies of diapers, wipes, etc., but that he had not paid them. I was indignant all over again. It was simply not right. I couldn’t go on seeing our workers not taken care of. I had no money, but this time I did have my debit card and driver’s license, so I could at least go to a bank and withdraw money at an ATM. I told Annita I would take care of it, and I called Watson, the moto driver who had brought me to the hospital, and asked him if he could come back to get me. He said he could, so I went out to wait for him.

On the phone with Watson, I had said that I needed to go to the bank and withdraw money at an ATM, but he evidently hadn’t understood me, because when he picked me up, we started going back exactly the way we had come when he brought me from Joanne’s. At first I thought, “Well… maybe this is a shortcut to a place where we can go to a bank.” But as we got further into remote residential areas, I at least had to ask. “Are we going to the bank?” I asked. “I don’t need to go back to Mallery’s. I want to find an ATM machine.” He turned the moto around and we started going back towards the more commercial parts of town.

We tried three banks before I finally got a chance to withdraw some money. After I got the cash, I asked the moto driver how to buy minutes to recharge my phone, which he helped me to do. Then we went back to the hospital. It all took an inordinate amount of time, and I got quite sunburned.

I was thirsty and hot. I paid the moto driver and then asked one of the nearby street vendors for a water bottle. It cost me 25 gourdes, and I asked if they had another one. They didn’t, but they went to get one from another vendor.

While they were gone, I opened the one I had. I tore off the plastic shrink wrap and opened the cap. The cap opened without ripping away from the little ring that is supposed to stay below the plastic lip at the bottom part of the lip of the bottle, and I thought, “Oh great. This is one of those bottles that they warned me about.” Joanne’s interpreter, Dony, had warned me that sometimes they took these bottles and refilled with them with different water which wasn’t safe to drink. When the vendor came back with another water bottle, I noticed that it was filled to a different level than the one I had. Without removing the shrink wrap, I twisted the cap slightly. I could see that it, too, was going to be able to unscrew without punching off the little safety ring. “Yep,” I thought. “These are bogus…not from the factory that the label says.” I had already paid for the second bottle, too, and I asked for my money back for both of them. I explained quite nicely and calmly that this bottle looked like it had been opened before, and I couldn’t drink that water, because it would make me sick. It made me sad to do it, because I was extremely thirsty, and I really, really wanted water, but I couldn’t drink water that was going to make me sick.

The guy gave me my money back for the second bottle, but not for the first. The reason for this, which I didn’t understand at the time, was that I had removed the plastic shrink wrap from the first bottle, and everyone had seen me do it. I could barely understand the creole spoken around me, but I could gather bits and pieces of phrases here and there. I asked again, calmly and a bit beseechingly, for him to give me my money back. A crowd of people gathered around, and they all started speaking loudly with each other in Creole. One man came, as it were, to my defense, and I thought for a minute that I was going to get my money back. 25 gourdes is about 60 cents, so it wasn’t a huge deal, but I thought it was perfectly reasonable to expect to return something that showed obvious signs of being opened before and refilled and get my money back. The man seemed to be demanding that the vendor return my money back to me. However, several people stepped in and said something I didn’t understand, which I afterward surmised must have been them reporting that they saw me take the plastic shrink wrap off, which, in their minds, meant that it certainly had not been opened before I touched it. The man shrugged his shoulders and disappeared into the crowd.

Another man shouldered his way forward, picked up the water bottle, and set it down with a decisive thump on the top of the cooler. “Take this bottle, and go away,” he said.

In that instant, something in the back of my mind told me that I ought to take his advice, go away, and just drop it. However, I didn’t obey my instincts.

“No, I want my money back,” I said, still calm, unruffled, and unafraid. “I can’t drink that water. It will make me sick.”

“Then take it and throw it away,” he said in exasperation. “You’ve lost it.”

That didn’t make any sense to me. Why had I lost it? Only afterward did I realize that in their minds, the presence or absence of the plastic shrink wrap (which I had taken off myself) formed the definition of “opened before,” while to me, it was the plastic cap itself, and the water level, and the whole aspect of this bottle being a “re-bottled” water. We were talking about two different things, and I didn’t know it, and they didn’t bother to understand my point of view. “No, I want my money back,” I repeated. I stood there, almost like a Haitian approaches an American, with my hand out, standing there without speaking.

More conversation ensued, more heated discussion in Creole by all the bystanders. Another person commanded me to take the bottle and go away. The voice in my head told me I’d better listen. I sighed. “Okay,” I agreed. I picked up the bottle and walked away.

Later, inside the hospital, motivated by my extreme thirst, I drank the water. It didn’t ever make me sick.

But after that, whenever I walked by those vendors, someone would make a comment about a water bottle and 25 gourdes, and the whole crowd would burst out laughing. The first time it happened, I apologized humbly in my broken Creole for my role in that whole drama, but that caused another burst of laughter. It was somewhat intimidating to walk in and out of the hospital after that, because I felt that I had unwittingly made enemies, simply because I didn’t understand.

Aside: It’s interesting how one comes to understand things here. Having gone through this experience, I understand that it’s not quite as simple a matter as it is in America to make a return of a simple item. There is no such rule as “the customer is always right.” There is no allowance made for the defectiveness of an item being grounds for a return. Now I understand—but if some seasoned missionary had tried to tell me as much (which no one ever did, because there are so many of these things, no one could possibly keep track of them all to tell the newcomers), I would have believed it, but I wouldn’t have understood.

When I got back to the hospital, I learned that Malachi and Jackson were getting released. Mallery only had room for one more, so she was going to take Malachi, and Joanne would take Jackson.

In the afternoon, Joanne came with Dony, her interpreter, and they brought Jackson and me back to her house. This left only two children at the hospital, Pranel and Sephora, curiously enough, the same two who had been admitted first. I started making plans for sending Kerlande and Clauciane back to Montrouis, since we wouldn’t need so much staff at the hospital anymore. I thought they could go back Sunday or Monday.

On the way, we stopped at a restaurant, where Dony ordered me a take-out meal of goat over rice, which was delicious and spicy and a very-needed boost to my energy level. Dony also gave me money from Joanne to replace what I had paid the nannies.

Back at the Kimballs, it felt good to take a shower and pour cold water all over my sunburn. I spent the night there.

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Read the next post: Cholera Day 8.
Read the story from the beginning: Cholera Day 0