Warf Soleil, aka the Wharf at Cite Soleil

One of the organizations I worked with while in Haiti was Lamp for Haiti, an NGO (Non-Government Organization) that runs a couple clinics in Cite Soleil. I went to the one clinic last year with the residency, but this trip, I got to go to their new clinic site at the Wharf in Cite Soleil.

This clinic's interesting because it's basically a concrete shell of a building, with holes for windows and doors, but no windows or doors. Triage and the pharmacy are a table out front with a couple tubs of medications brought in from the primary Cite Soleil clinic.

The patient seeing areas are sparse open rooms, lit by sunlight from the windows, with benches or chairs to seat our patients. There is no such thing as an exam table here. My sink is a small bottle of hand sanitizer in my bag. Privacy is me asking people to step outside the room or away from the window if they aren't currently being seen. Sound echoes so much it's hard to use stethoscopes to hear fine detail over the background noise.

This area of Haiti is both beautiful and sad. The marked poverty the residents of this area struggle with every day is saddening. The land and the sea could be a beautiful tourist location, if not for the trash littered along the beach, the crumbling construction, and the overcrowded tin roof shacks and tarp-roofed structures that are most people's homes in this area.

This clinic is open 3 days a week, from around 11:45am-2:00pm, or however long it takes to see about 60 patients a day between the 2-3 docs there. This was a very challenging place to do medicine, but I would love to return again. These people are part of why I love family medicine and caring for the underserved.