Battling cholera in Haiti's frontier
Sunday, December 19, 2010 at 11:18AM A rusted metal twin-bed frame with strips of bamboo bowed to create a sheet-covered dome shield a girl inside from the beating sun. The makeshift stretcher is more elaborate than most, likely built for a long walk down a dusty road.
A corner of the thin, faded Little Mermaid sheet is turned up, revealing the girl's face and shoulders, heaving in deep breaths.
A young girl carried in a makeshift stretcher, a metal bed frame. (Amber Hildebrandt/CBC)
The girl appears unconscious as her loved ones carry the bed on their shoulders, gripping two lengths of bamboo protruding from under the frame.
The group walks the bed toward the first building they see at Hospital Albert Schweitzer in the town of Deschapelles, Haiti. A man points them to a building in the back. They trudge over and put the bed down. An American health care worker comes out and directs them to another building, the assessment centre. They pick her up again and walk slowly to their final stop before health-care workers take over.
"She probably has cholera," Paul Hendershot, the supporting director of hospital services, remarks after whisking the girl into the assessment centre.
Cholera patients descend on the hospital's doorstep every day in all manner of transport. "Doors. Doors are pretty standard. Or just a piece of wood, whatever they can find," says Carolyn Weinrobe, manager of monitoring and evaluation at Hospital Albert Schweitzer.
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