Day 3--Doug--Chasing a Dream

Today is our first day of clinic in Latennerie. I ride with Dr. Eugene, our local physician, to get medication that we need but did not bring. Albendazole, a medicine to treat worms, costs $0.40 per dose here. In the States, it costs $120 per dose. We get the meds, and I have time to get to know Dr. Eugene. He is a dreamer. After medical school in Haiti, he trained for a time in North Carolina. His children were born there. He had the opportunity to stay, but he came back here to Haiti to serve the people who need it the most. He basically has 5 jobs, dividing his time among several different clinics in the area. For all that, he earns roughly 1/10th of what American doctors make. Still, he has big dreams. The contryside around Latennerie has about 200,000 people. If he wants a patient to get a CT scan, they have to go six hours away to Port-au-Prince, if they can get there, if they can afford it. Then Dr. Eugene will be lucky to get a result one month later, and he never actually sees the films. So he is building a hospital,. He has the land. He has to start building something because if he doesn't do anything with the land, the government will give it to someone else. So he's building a modern hospital in the middle of rural Haiti. Some dreams are worth chasing.