9 June 2010 Mental Health Training Begins

9 June 2010
Petit Trou de Nippes
St. Paul's Church and School
Entry by Beverly
The journey from Port au Prince to Petit Trou began at 8:15 am on Tuesday, just as planned. We traveled in 2 rented cars with 2 very FAST Haitian drivers. Both kept the vehicles upright. And we arrived in at St. Paul's around 1:30 in the afternoon, tired, but grateful that the river was not too high. (The river was much higher than when I arrived here in February, but we were able to drive through it.) For those of you who know this area, let me give you our travel times. 8:15 depart PaP. 9:20 Mariani; 9:33 Marge; 9:42 Leogone (we got Gas and snacks at the Total station on the left of the highway – highly recommended for “pit stop”); 10:50 Guave; 11 Petit Guave; 11:20 Miragoane; 12:30 Petit Riviere; 12:45 River crossing; 1:30 Petit Trou!! Mr. Kessner greeted us, but Guilot was not here – he was in Miragoane, only to arrive much later after he was called to come in.

Today we began the Mental Health training – to give the participants tools for dealing with the trauma dealt by the Jan. 12 earthquake. The team planned to have a morning session for the Women Volunteers. This group of 34 women were identified as community leaders about 4 years ago and have done a variety of basic community health activities with CHP. They really are the pulse of the community and we anticipate that training them about trauma symptoms and practical ways of coping will spread out to the communities. The afternoon training is for the 28 St. Paul's teachers, the seminarian and the school nurse.

Upon our arrival, we found that the Women Volunteers hadn't been notified about the training, so our leader, Pat Laudisio drove out into the countryside with a couple of Haitian colleagues to find and bring as many of the WV's to this morning's training as possible! We had a packed classroom as the students of the vocational training program joined us. We are providing the Wvs with a lunch stipend, to make it a little more reasonable for them to be able to spend their whole morning in class. $5 per person. A bargain, as these women have the pulse of the communities in which they live and will carry this learning to many people in remote villages.

The team has been joined by 2 Mercy Corps staff, based in Port au Prince, who are doing trainings based on Comfort for Kids curriculum. This will be a pilot project for them, as all of their prior trainings have been in Port au Prince. It is brilliantly simple and straightforward and has been used after the World Trade Center, Katrina, China earthquake and more places. 　 We are really enjoying sharing professionallly with them and hope this pilot is only the beginning of services to come to Petit Trou de Nippes.

As far as more personal information, we are all awestruck by the beauty of this place. St. Paul's is in tremendous shape. Even the bathrooms are cleaner than when I was here in February (OK, that's from the neurotic nurse!) The ocean views invited us for a dip as we drove in, but it was a 5 ½ hour journey as it was. So no dallying! Here, we have verdant, tree-covered mountains to the south. St. Paul's grounds are clean, spacious and open. Part of the team is sleeping in tents; part in the dormitory. Thunder and lightening rolled in as we were preparing to go to bed, but we did not receive rain. The roads were muddy as we drove in, so we know they have been getting plenty of rains. It's partly cloudy today and hot!

It has been really humbling for me to be back here after 4 months and for so many people remember me and welcome me warmly. I am a bit “curious” about developing a plan with the WVs to identify women patients for the Women's Health team. (They arrive in a week). The idea/hope is to develop a strategy with the WVs to identify patients, give them appointment cards for either a morning or afternoon appointment on a specific day AND to hold clinics in buildings in the outying communities...so that it is less of a hardship for the patients to reach the clinic. And we are hoping that the wait time for the patients is less as well as the pressure on the clinicians. Wish me good luck! It is a whole new concept to go out to the communities AND especially to try to set appointments.

Last night, I thought I was going to bed early, starting around 8:30...but no. We found that 2 of our 4 rooms did not have functioning ceiling light fixtures and one room didn't have a light bulb. Mr. Kessner, Guilot and one other guy found parts and and repaired and replaced them all to great success. It meant that we could all have fans cooling us during the night.

Today the team has begun their trainings. We had about 40 for the morning and 25 for the afternoon. We have a great variety of professions attending – 22 of the community Women Volunteers, teachers of the primary school, the principal and the administrator, the women's collective coordinator and the school nurse, to name a few.