Life in a sarong

Oh my gosh, after a LONG week of no contact with home, the internet is back!!! Hopefully for long enough for me to write this post!

What a week it's been! The pace has definitely been steadily picking up as far as births go at the dome since it first opened. We are averaging about 1-2 births a day, and since we do back up for each other for the deliveries, I feel like I've been at nearly every birth. Overall the babies and moms have been healthy, with the exception of 2 babies admitted to hospital for fevers/infection (we have since decided that because the temperature in the dome is something like 38.5 degrees celcius, we are not doing anymore baby temperatures during the day unless they are outside - we figure we can avoid some 'fevers' this way...). And we had 2 moms admitted to hospital for inductions - both were apparently 45 weeks pregnant (aka 5 weeks past their due dates!) but then again we actually have no idea when anyone's due date is most of the time. I feel like I'm really falling into the swing of things, now that I only have 1 week left here!

Other than that... 2 really nice days this past week - one at Bassin Bleu, a canyon with beautiful cold freshwater swimming holes, but a nasty bumpy motorcycle ride up to it through a garbage dump. On the way home we literally had to ride through a pile of flaming garbage - I felt like some kind of stunt woman. I wish I could post photos up here but the internet is too slow... I'll show you all on Flickr once I'm back!

The other really nice day recently was Jacmel Day, the annual party for the city that we are living in. We went and walked down by the beach through Belair, the old port which apparently was quite the amazing site in the 60's. The buildings were so amazing - all in wood and painted in beautiful bright colours. It's too bad that it's all deserted now. Little known facts - Jacmel was one of the first ports to get electricity and was the major port for Haiti initially. We also walked through some areas that were really hit hard by the earthquake and as someone explained to me, all of the crumbled houses are still holding the bodies of the many of the victims. In graphic detail, the whole city smelled like what you can imagine immediately after the quake with the heat. It was also explained to me that the smell is no longer there as the bodies have decomposed by now. What a powerful vision to carry around when walking through the streets. It's especially powerful to think about given that Port au Prince got hit with a 5.2 scale 'aftershock' today resulting in more deaths. Don't worry - we are staying in a wooden house here - most of the houses still standing after the quake were wooden because they could bend with the tremors. Apparently we are getting small aftershocks often, though I have never felt one.

We spent Jacmel day splurging on pastries, buying jewellery made from coral and taking heaps of pictures of the partying going on. I had a fun time watching the swimming races they had at the beach - basically a boat fills up with people and dumps them off some distance of the beach and they all swim back as fast as they can! Interestingly every Haitian person I know here does not feel comfortable swimming. I thought about doing the race myself but the water here is so incredibly salty and burns my eyes so much that I would probably end up dropping out to cry.

I am nearing the end of my trip now... and I can't get over how much I have learned in such a short time. I have so many more stories to tell you but will have to sign off for tonight because another lady is in labour and their is much work to be done in terms of creating better charting/educational materials for the birthing centre.
I'm hoping to get a few more stories about people and what their experiences of the earthquake were before I go. Certainly we see on women's charts often that their husbands/boyfriends had died in the earthquake.

Tomorrow Amy leaves back to the U.S. and the next day we get a new midwife joining us. This has been such a surreal experience, and it's interesting that I feel that every midwife who's come, for whatever short time we overlapped, will always be on my mind for what we've done here together.

Sweet dreams to you all.