Jhpiego's Blog

On the Ground in Haiti

January 20, 2010 at 3:25 pm 1 comment

On Debussy Street: Jhpiego’s Lucito Jeannis Opens His Home to Neighbors in Need

After the earth shook violently and houses broke apart, the living walked into the street. Dr. Lucito Jeannis was among them, and thankful for it. The doctor’s house on Debussy Street in Port-au-Prince was still standing but his mother’s home and the house across the street and the one behind his were all damaged.

Dr. Jeannis gathered his neighbors close – they had survived the worst earthquake in a century and together they would survive its aftermath.

The risk of aftershocks – one rumbled through at 6 a.m. Wednesday – and the fear of being buried alive under rubble kept the neighbors in the street for a week – 17 in all, pooling resources, watching out for one another, sleeping under the stars to stay safe.

“We are alive,’’ said Dr. Jeannis plainly in a telephone call from Port-au-Prince. “I’m living here with my neighbors on the street. We can’t live inside the houses. The houses are shaking from time to time. We are eating together; we are sleeping together; they are washing themselves at my house. My wife is cooking for all of the neighborhood. We share everything we have.”

An expert trained by Jhpiego, Dr. Jeannis oversees the organization’s programs in Haiti. He works with the health ministry and alongside midwives to improve the health of women and newborns in sustainable ways. In its 15 years in Haiti, Jhpiego has trained more than 400 health care providers in maternal and child health, infection prevention and emergency obstetrics care; it has developed family planning and reproductive health initiatives and designed public health campaigns to prevent HIV/AIDS.

But since the earthquake decimated his city, killing as many as 250,000 by one official estimate, neighborhood people had sought out Dr. Jeannis because he is a medical doctor. He helped those he could and assisted a neighbor, a government doctor, who was seeing patients at her home. With few supplies and limited water, there was only so much they could do. Medication for a back ache or stomach pains, and for those more seriously injured, a referral to the local hospital.

Dr. Jeannis knew how lucky he and his newfound patients were; in the streets of Port- au-Prince, people were dying or already dead, and that was one image Dr. Jeannis could not forget, would never forget.

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=9607030

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