Reporting from Les Cayes, Haiti

December 6

My last three nights at the maternity were good, but really, really busy. I caught 13 babies (in 3 nights)—which even for our relatively high volume maternity is a good number of babies (since I wasn’t the only provider catching babies).  Most of the deliveries were beautiful normal births, which was really nice.

The worst part of having busy nights is that inevitably women have to sleep on the floors. It’s always so sad for me to catch a baby, and get the mom and baby all cleaned off and dressed, and then have to tell them to try and find a spot on the floor to sleep. But, that’s how it goes when you have 20 beds in the maternity ward and more than 20 patients (and no overflow beds). Luckily, the post-partum women don’t have to stay in the maternity for that long (I try to make them stay for at least 6 hours so I can monitor their bleeding, but that doesn’t often happen), so at least they don’t have spend days on the floor.

The one unexpected addition to my night shifts was two adorable, abandoned babies. One is a term girl, the other a pre-term, but healthy boy. Both had been delivered at the maternity and for whatever reason their mom’s had decided not to keep them. When I asked the nurses what was going to happen to the babies no one seemed to have a very clear idea (we evidently don’t have an orphanage in town). So the babies just hung out in our non-functioning baby warmer in the delivery room. Someone had gone and bought formula—and eventually diapers—for the babies, so in between seeing patients/catching babies I’d feed/burp/hold/change the babies as needed. Evidently HIC is the hospital in town where people come to abandon their babies, and Haitians looking to adopt know to come to HIC to try and get a baby (though I’m told adoption by Haitians is very rare, so I don’t think that happens very often).  I hope that when I go back to work tomorrow the babies aren’t still there, though I won’t be surprise if they are.