Arriving at Last

We had no problems, fortunately, getting into the country with all of our medicines. All of our team regrouped just before we crossed the border into Haiti from the Dominican, where we landed, because we had a couple folks whose flights were cancelled due to weather. We actually had four different flights cancelled trying to get here.

We were at the Fond Parisien Disaster Recovery Center (on the Haiti side of the border with the Dominican Republic) this morning, at the Love a Child foundation orphanage. We were speaking with the director of clinic operations, Robin Pareamone, to coordinate our work with the UN to field test an iPhone EMR to try and see which would be appropriate for the country to adopt. The one that they’ve been using here for the last week, iChart, is the one that we’re going to be using. We have, on loan from a friend, 12 iPhones that we have outfitted with iChart, with backups called mophies, so we can operate all day using the battery backups.

11:30AM (EST)

We just left the orphanage after collecting the data forms that the UN wants us to enter into iChart, and we also picked up a lot of UN medical records that we’ll be using. We’re driving in Haiti now, going to the house where we’re staying in order to set up our pharmacy and set up our first clinic this afternoon.

We’ve confirmed today that the place where we had hoped to work—which was a Fond Parisien place—had plenty of doctors, but we wanted to stop by and confirm that that was the case. So, we’re going into Port Au Prince, where the devastation is, and we’re in a big line of cars to get into town. There’s a huge amount of traffic at this time of day. We’ve been traveling since around 8:00PM (PST) Sunday night, so we’re going on about 40 hours of travel to try to get to our house. We arrived at the border too late to cross it last night, because they close it at 7:00PM. So, now we’re making our way to hopefully to set up our clinic.

February 16 - 10:30AM (EST)