Nothing they taught me in journalism school could have prepared me for this trip.

I had an idea about what I was getting into when I volunteered to accompany a medical mission to Haiti organized by St. Mary Roman Catholic Church in Milford.

I had read all the reports coming out of Haiti in the aftermath of the Jan. 12 earthquake that devastated the country’s urban centers.

And I talked to the team members about what they hoped to accomplish through their health clinic and surgery center in the village of Marbial and the city of Jacmel.

And I did my homework before the trip so I could be prepared as possible to file stories and write blog posts with photos from a quake-ravaged country with a crippled infrastructure and rural areas with little electricity and no cell phone service.

Before I could even begin to think about technology, I had to think about biology — my own. I arranged to meet with a travel doctor about a month before the trip and was given a schedule of vaccines to get before departing for Haiti.

I got a total of four vaccinations — typhoid, tetanus, hepatitis A and hepatitis B. Typhoid was by far the most painful, but hepatitis B was fun because it comes in three parts. I got two of my “hep B” shots but I have to get another booster in six months.

Moving onto malaria: There is no vaccine, to the dismay of humanitarian organizations trying to combat the problem in poor countries plagued by the mosquito-spread disease.

Instead, I took Chloroquine pills once a week two weeks before the trip, once during the trip, and I will continue for four more weeks. If I come down with any symptoms of malaria in the next year, I am to head straight to my doctor and report myself as recently returned from a trip to Haiti.

The malaria pills work, but they are not 100 percent effective. As a safety precaution, I brought a mosquito net with me and a spray bottle of DEET that I used to douse myself with three times a day.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also recommends a rabies shot, which I declined. In six months, I am supposed to get a tuberculosis test to make sure I did not contract that disease on my visit.

Arranging my vaccines was the easy part compared to figuring out how I would file stories and update my blog from Haiti. Luckily I got a lot of help from our technology gurus at the Register, some advice from colleagues at other papers I’ve worked at, and pointers from my journalism professors at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

This is how I did it:

I carried everything I needed in a hip pack that never left my side during the trip — notepads and pens, a Flip digital video recorder, digital camera and my global edition BlackBerry, complete with international phone plan. I also had a laptop computer with an international air card.

It was a great setup except I had no cell phone service in Marbial, so it was impossible to file reports from the village. So I would spend one day in Marbial reporting on the medical clinic and taking photos and video and then the next morning I would hitch a ride down the 10-mile-long rocky riverbed to the town of Jacmel, where I could get online and file stories and photos from my laptop.

When the laptop would run out of power (in about 20 minutes) I would continue to take pictures and write stories on my BlackBerry, and then send them directly to the Register. Then it was back to Marbial to start the process anew.

We actually had electricity for five hours a day in Marbial so I could juice up all of my gadgets at night before the lights went out at 11 p.m. sharp. But the real rush of relief came when I would press “send” on my laptop every other morning and know that my reports would get to my editors back in New Haven.

Sometimes that moment came from the back seat of a Land Cruiser as we “off-roaded” over the riverbed. Sometimes it came from the floor outside the hospital in Jacmel where I was observing the surgery team operate on patients.

It’s a different kind of deadline, filing stories from Haiti. I am hoping it makes deadlines back in New Haven a little easier to handle. Then again, here I am late on a Friday afternoon filing my weekend story. I guess some things never change.

It was a long, hard journey home for the St. Mary medical mission, thanks in no small part to the major storm that churned through the northeast on Saturday.

After seven physically and emotionally draining days in Marbial, the medical team drove down the rocky riverbed one more time for the year and spent the night in a house in Jacmel owned by an American couple. For their hard work, the doctors and nurses were rewarded with a spectacular Caribbean sunrise before setting off for the airport in earthquake-torn Port-au-Prince.

The American Airlines flight took off late from Port-au-Prince Saturday afternoon, and was diverted to Miami because JFK airport in New York shut down for dangerously high winds. After taking an hour or more to go through customs, the team managed to find a nearby hotel that could accommodate the large group.

The next day, the flight home was delayed for four hours while American Airlines attempted not-so-successfully or smoothly to straighten out the mess caused by the storm cancellation. When the team finally arrived at JFK, more mayhem awaited. The tired doctors, nurses and volunteers stared at the baggage claim conveyor belt for two hours and collected 20 of 21 checked bags. One suitcase never made it back. Time to get in another line and wait.

By this time, the St. Mary medical mission team was getting good at waiting around for things.

But the team eventually and most importantly – safely – made it back to St. Mary’s Church in Milford Sunday night. It was just in time for everyone to go home, have a quick meal and a hot shower before going to bed and waking up to a fresh work week.

Even though they left Haiti behind, the place and its people will remain in their hearts and minds. And for some members of the team there is always the promise of next year, another chance to save some lives and spread some hope.

There is a word in Creole that does not exist in the English language: pedisyon.

It translates to something like this: being pregnant for a long time – years even – while still having a monthly menstrual cycle. It is an example of the void of education about women’s health issues among peasant populations in Haiti.

Multiple times during the trip, women of child-bearing age and some far too old to have children complained to doctors that they have been pregnant for years but the baby will not come out of the belly. The women usually describe getting pregnant and then having a hemorrhage, followed by a return of their monthly period. They think the baby is still in their belly. Some of the women say they can feel kicking. The women do not understand that they have miscarried and there is no baby.

Bridgeport Hospital medical resident Sangeetha Thiviyarajah examines one of these women and has to break the news to her.

“Tell her there is no chance she is pregnant. You cannot be pregnant for two years,” she tells the interpreter.

The woman looks confused, and disbelieving. She is rail thin and does not have the extended belly of a pregnant woman. But she uses the word “pedisyon,” a word she probably learned from her mother.

“I think they need education on pregnancy and menstrual cycles,” Thiviyarajah later explains. The misinformation gets passed down through generations of women.

The team also treats multiple women for sexually transmitted disease. They prescribe antibiotics for the women and try to explain to them that they need to have their sexual partners get treated for the disease as well. There is also wide-spread anemia among women of child-bearing age because they are malnourished and have multiple children at a young age. One 40-year-old woman tells doctors she has had 16 children, although six of them died.

There is a lot of ground to cover with the education of women about health issues, but the team has made a start, one woman at a time. Dispelling the idea of pedisyon is just the beginning.

Daily life is getting easier and, at the same time, harder for the members of the St. Mary medical mission in Marbial. On the first couple of nights, simple things like showering, brushing teeth, getting ready for bed and going to the bathroom were difficult. Using the toilet involves filling up a bucket of well water for flushing. Showering involves filling up the same bucket, lugging it into a small room with a drain, and pouring cold well water over yourself. Those things are getting easier.


Sleeping through the night is getting a little easier as well. Now that the mosquito nets are up and in place, getting into bed simply means crawling under your net, tucking it under the mattress and closing your eyes. And people generally are so tired from working long, hard days in the sun caring for patients that they fall asleep more easily. You still don’t need an alarm clock – the roosters crow like clockwork.

But things are getting tougher as well. The team of four doctors, three nurses and two volunteers is worn out after three long days treating an average of 200 patients a day. The difficult cases, terrible poverty and sad stories of the Haitians is taking a toll on the volunteers.  And the question of whether the mission can obtain more medicine is weighing heavily on everyone’s mind.

And then there are the dogs. When the sun goes down and after everyone goes to bed, the dogs that lay around in the hot sun all day perk up and get rowdy. When one doctor goes outside to brush her teeth, she comes running back into the room followed by a pack of barking dogs. She dives across her bed, tearing down the mosquito net and rolling backward onto the floor. The dogs stop at the door and do not come inside, but everyone is so terrified they refuse to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. There is talk of setting a time in the middle of the night to wake up and take a team trip to the bathroom.

Every Tuesday in Marbial, more than 1,000 people travel from near and far – some walk half a day to get here – for the big social event of the week, the market.

The scene is a whirlwind of exotic sights and sounds and smells. You feel like you’ve landed in the middle of a National Geographic spread on some far-away third-world country. Then again, that’s where you are.

Brightly garbed women carry plantains, baskets, buckets and jugs on their heads. Men lead donkeys loaded down with baskets of vegetables, cornmeal, rice, coffee and tobacco. Children ride motorcycles through the market and run around hawking candy and trinkets.

The scene is crowded and chaotic. A guide recommends that anyone who goes down to the Tuesday market bring a partner because it is so big you can get lost.

I ignored the advice and managed to avoid getting lost, but I attracted a following of small, curious children wanting money or food from the single red-headed white person at the market.

A group from the medical mission decided to head down to the market to buy some baskets as souvenirs from their trip. Luckily they had Agathe Mezik with them. Mezik is a nurse in Connecticut who is Haitian by birth. She speaks Creole and is able to haggle with the basket weaver to buy six baskets for the tourist-doctors standing out like sore thumbs in the bustling market.

On the walk back to the medical clinic, a man spoke in Creole to Mezik and told him that his daughter needs to see a doctor, can she help? She told him to go to the clinic and wait in line with his daughter.

“She will get help there,” she says in Creole.

Bridgeport Hospital surgeon Richard Garvey assists Mark Bianchi in a surgery Monday. Frantz Paul looks on.

People in Marbial line up bright and early Monday to receive care from the St. Mary medical mission team.

The St. Mary medical mission got a surprise when they came to Marbial – electricity. After three hours of driving through the ruins of Port-au-Prince and the mountains of central Haiti and then one mile down a rocky riverbed in the dark, it almost seemed surreal to be pulling alongside a building that glowed from the inside with electricity.

But sure enough, the people of St. Therese Church were eager to show off the generator donated to them last year by St. Mary Church in Milford. Waiting inside for the team was a nicely set table and a spread of food that included rice, pasta, meat, and dumpling soup.
The church even had a room set aside with beds for the group, another welcome surprise.

The place still maintained a rustic feel… To flush the toilet, you fill up a bucket of water and take it with you to do the flushing. And the beds required a MacGyver-like configuration of mosquito nets. Think duct tape, tent poles, rubber bands, well hooks and more duct tape.
And obviously there is no cell phone service. This reporter had to hitch a ride 10 miles down the not-so-dry rocky riverbed to be able to get cell phone service and file stories. The team has a satellite phone in Marbial for emergencies.