I'm actually emailing from Pestel! Write this one down as one of the "firsts" for my trips to Haiti. Also a first, we went to Pestel by road from PAP....down to Les Cayes and then over the very high mountains (and down those same tall mountains) to Pestel. Our driver, Ezai, is also our host in PAP (and the father of Nakeysha, the little girl who had heart surgery at Hershey and stayed at our house).
I"m here now with Johnny Zook who will be super-busy the next couple of days as he visits several villages and trains them on the CharRocket stoves! Steve Miller is also busy snapping lots of photographs for promotional purposes. ANd John Lane will be arriving tomorrow to start the water testing throughout Pestel. I'll be training the health workers.
I had a really good meeting with Dr. Seneque. This remains something to praise God about. If Dr. Seneque is not for something it does not happen. He has a lot of clout in Pestel, as he should. I came out of the meeting both encouraged and surprised. I learned, for example, that the one missing element in order for him to provide immunizations to kids in Pestel is this: 2 containers of propane per month. Estimated cost: $35 per month. The reality is this: he gets immunizations for free. He has to ship a bunch of them to a nearby city of Corail simply because he does not have the ongoing funding to purchase these two tanks. He has two fridges, both of which run on propane. And when the propane runs out....the medication goes bad.
SO I think this is a no-brainer. On my first visit to Pestel he told me about a 7 year old boy who had died the week prior of tetanus. Vaccine-preventable diseases like measles and tetanus are NOT a thing of the past in Pestel, but they certainly ought to be. No reason (or, as it turns out, a very poor poor reason).
Plenty to write about, but I'm getting tired. :)
I hope to write more tomorrow.
Thanks all!
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