The Silence of the Starved

BELLADERE, Haiti – No one knew her name. No one knew her age. But everyone knew why she was there.

As a volunteer at Belladere Hospital began to peel back the layers of a thin blanket cocooning this unknown woman, onlookers began to gasp and place their hands over their nose and mouth as her emaciated body was revealed and her soiled stench spread across the hospital plaza.

Just two days ago, officials from the mayor’s office brought her to the hospital after finding her lying in the street, abandoned and left to die.

She was cleaned and placed in an empty, unfinished ward – soon to be the hospital’s expanded surgery ward.

There were signs of mental illness, but as we crouched down beside her bed, she began to slowly respond to our questions.

“Are you hungry? How can we help? Would you like something to eat?” we asked.

“Oui,” she croaked back after several minutes of coaxing.

Her eyes remained fixed on us, and as we smiled, the corners of her lips curled up into a faint smile. And then came the cries.

There were no tears. Instead, like a songbird preparing to die, she sang out two notes with hauntingly perfect pitch that echoed throughout the empty room for several seconds. Then, her eyelids fluttered and closed.

This woman’s story is a tragic, yet very real example of the poverty crisis in Haiti. For the poor, there is no clean water, medical care is hard to come by, and malnutrition is rampant.

At Belladere Hospital, no one is turned away, but with only 40 beds and a small staff, the burden of caring for the needy grows daily.

“We would like to help everyone, but we just don’t have the capacity,” said Dr. Ralph Ternier, the hospital’s medical director. “We won’t throw anyone out, but there’s a cost and I don’t know how far we’ll be able to go.”

One of those costs is water. For the last two years, the hospital has been without running water. Patients have had to bring in jugs of city water or draw from the hospital’s cistern – neither of which offers clean drinking water.

In fact, the hospital spends several hundred dollars a month purchasing water to fill the cistern and supplying drinking water for the staff.

But in just 2 days, the hospital got a much-needed transformation.

Together with Partners in Health, Operation Blessing installed new underground piping, connected the hospital to the city water line and installed a chlorinator to purify the city water before being stored in a large 30-foot high water tank.

“This is good. This is health. This is life,” said Guy Figaro, the hospital’s dentist, as he washed his hands in the sink for the first time.

We left the hospital that day with bittersweet emotions: Sadness for the unknown woman left clinging to life, yet joy for the clean water now offering health and life to patients and the community of Belladere.

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