I got engaged on the Saturday, the 30th of May, and left for the DR on the 1st of June! Needless to say, I was a bit antsy and overwhelmed when I got here, but things have settled a bit, and I am really enjoying my time here (and this photo is of my backyard, which is lovely). Missing Ben is no fun, but we have been talking every day, and I can't wait to get back to the US and start planning out wedding! I did pretty much everything I could to ensure that people were expecting me and they still didn’t seem quite sure what to do with me initially. However, things have been clarified and I have been doing a lot. My first study is going to be a qualitative analysis of why people are/aren’t coming in for HIV treatment once they have been tested positive. I am working with the batey (sugarcane field) project here, so I go to the bateyes three times a week, and the other days, I have been working on IRB application stuff and going on home visits with the palliative care team here. I am also going to maybe be doing a needs assessment for a local hospital and then also doing quantitative research on the migration patterns of batey residents and their levels of HIV knowledge, attitudes and behavior. I have learned a lot of Spanish, but it’s not going as fast as I would like since I work mostly in Kreyol (and English). The place I am staying is outside of the city a bit, and there are lots of Americans around, so it’s hard to get practice in. The other students from Columbia got here on Monday of this week, and as much as I love having them around, I am going to have to be really careful not to get sucked in to gringo land! Being here has been relatively shocking, and I don’t think I am shocked by much…I knew there was tension between Haitians and Dominicans, I just didn’t realize how high the tensions actually were. I talked to a woman one of the first days I was here up in Puerta Plata who told me that they had found a Dominican man strangled in his house, so in turn, Haitians were being slaughtered with machetes. I have no idea who “they” is, but she told me that they were planning on killing 300 Haitians for the one Dominican man, because that’s what his life was worth. They had killed two by the time I talked to her. Who knows what pieces of that are reliable, but still. I also have been doing a lot of hospital visits and such, and the way they treat Haitians/people with AIDS (and if you are both, you are totally screwed) is just horrifying.
Then last Friday I went to the hospital with one of the Haitian home visitors from the clinic to see a Haitian patient we had gone to see the Tuesday before. That Tuesday, he had been at a different hospital, but the Doctor sent him home because he said everything was fine. The guy could barely sit up on his own, and his body had been totally destroyed by AIDS. Apparently, this doctor has a reputation for sending patients home before running the appropriate tests (especially patients who are Haitian, or with HIV).The social worker, hearing that he had been sent home, went up to the batey (sugarcane fields outside the city which are staffed by Haitian migrants -- that's where I'm working) to bring him back to the city and took him to a different hospital to get a TB test. So Friday we went to visit him and they hadn't yet done the test at the hospital, so Elizabeth took the sample herself and took it to the lab on her own (mind you, she doesn't work for the hospital). At this point Elifer can barely open his eyes and can't move on his own. So while we are waiting to make sure the nurses come in and change his IV, he has a seizure. It was probably the most horrifying thing I have ever seen. I honestly thought I was watching him die. His mother fainted, then woke up and started screaming, and meanwhile, the nurses did nothing. I left with the mother so they could take care of him (her falling on the floor, me trying to get her somewhere to lie down) and when we came back they hadn't even touched him. Not even to wipe the foam from his mouth. He was ok at that point, and fell asleep after that, but Elizabeth and I left to go call a family member to come stay with his mother and by the time Elizabeth got to the hospital, they had left. They didn't trust that he was going to be taken care of so they went home (how they got there, I have no idea). He passed away at home last week and we went to the mass for his funeral to support his family. He left behind 7 living kids (two have already passed away), one girlfriend (his wife passed away last November), his mother (who has no other children in the country) and two grandchildren. I have never worked in HIV before, so just seeing the web of people affected by this disease is very difficult. I don't yet know what is normal here, I am just going off of what people say, so it’s still hard to judge what aspects of the care are due to discrimination or just normal care in the DR, etc...
The children are also raised to not like Haitians, so the kids who were born here (even if they have Haitian parents) don’t identify with the culture at all, and most of them don’t want to speak kreyol. I was driving the other day with a Haitian woman and one of the kids who was washing windows/begging in the street yelled at her that she was a dirty Haitian even though the kid was very obviously Haitian himself and was begging in the street. I am trying to figure out how I am going to develop a program that works within this system.
I am working on expanding my experience here to extend to Dominicans so that I can get the other side of the story of what is going on here. I really love being out in the bateyes, and the Dominicans that I have met so far are really nice. I am adjusting pretty well and I am going back to NY in July for a few days to celebrate my engagement and see my family, and I will also meet with the office in New York about all of my IRB proposals that are being put together.
That's about it from here, I love and miss you all, give Ben hugs and kisses for me, and I will see everyone soon!
