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Terping at El Pino Hospital
By Jac | February 15, 2010
A couple Saturdays after the Haiti quake Anton and I were asked to go down to a hospital outside the city of La Vega where 7 of our Haitian brothers and sisters had been taken to receive treatment. They were desperately short on interpreters and the brother in charge new I spoke a bit of Creole. They asked us to do the overnight shift, which, of course, we were more than happy to do. We even brought our new friend David Porter along to keep us company.
When we first got there we started off by meeting the friends receiving treatment and their family members. They asked how David and I learned Creole, and Anton entertained them with the Creole slang he knows. We used a bit of sign language, which sparked everyone’s interest, including the Dominican patients in the room and the doctors! We read a bit, and chatted, mostly about light topics, until it was time for them to go to bed.
The night shift was the perfect one for us, since the Creole we speak is pretty limited. There were only a few important messages we needed to convey, and thankfully, we were able to do so. Jeremy Fryc, who serves in the Bonao Creole group, stayed the whole night with us as well, just in case. It was a good thing he did too! In the middle of the night one of the patients had a nightmare and ended up having a pretty bad freakout. I was in the room with him when it started and sent for Jeremy, since it was a male patient. They ended up being able to calm him down. It’s just heartbreaking what our friends are suffering.
Somewhere around 3 am I fell asleep and ended up waking up a few hours later to find that the boys had done the same:
It was a long night, but we were happy to help.
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2 Responses to “Terping at El Pino Hospital”
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June 16th, 2010 at 11:09 am
Alex and I talk about Jeremy Fryc all the time. If he remembers us at all please tell him Hi!
October 31st, 2011 at 1:55 pm
Haha Donna – I am so bad at keeping up with this, but I will definitely tell him. Get ready to have your mind blown, I am updating the blog!