Vasectomy Haiti: Afternoon Vasectomies then Happy Hour!
November 15, 2015
After finishing the morning vasectomy clinic in Fort Bourgeois and completing 18 vasectomy procedures, we departed for an afternoon vasectomy clinic at Fort St Micheal. View previous mission article:
Vasectomy Haiti: Treating Hydroceles And Meeting A Man Of God
If you would like to follow me as I diverged from the mission story line with the last two articles:
Haiti: Disney World For Christian Missionaries
Vasectomy Reversal and Tubal Reversal: God’s Mission?
Functioning air conditioner equals a happy team
We arrived in Fort St Micheal around lunch time. The team was ecstatic because the recently purchased air conditioner was installed and working. This was no small feat in a country like Haiti.
In the United States if your window air conditioner is out then you run down to HHGreg or Best Buy, whip out your credit card, purchase it and then arrange a delivery time. Unless some disastrous situation arises you can pretty much count on your newly purchased item arriving, being installed, and perfectly functioning. Not so in Haiti.
In Haiti there are no department stores. There does seem to be one or two appliance stores in Cap Haitian but their inventory is questionable. Looking into these stores reminded me of the bar scene in Star Wars when Han Solo shoots the bad guy, the music stops briefly, and then everyone continues on their merry way. It as quite chaotic.
Even buying underwear is a challenge in Haiti. One of the members of our team left his underwear at his home. He had a difficult time finding underwear to buy because there were no clothing stores and most people stopped selling items when the sun went down. Needless to say he went ‘commando’ for the remainder of the mission. Poor guy.
3 doctors 3 hours: 30 vasectomy procedures
We had a busy evening of vasectomies in the hospital. We completed 30 vasectomy procedures in three hours. At the end of the day we were beat and ready to return to the hotel.
Pastor Joel arrives to film vasectomy
Amazingly Pastor Joel showed up to film a segment despite being given brief notice. Dr. Stein can be very conviencing. We had actually finished the evenings vasectomies but Pastor Joel’s driver wanted to have a vasectomy and so the team obliged. Pastor Joel filmed the entire visit; the counseling, the vasectomy procedure, and the after care instructions. He said he would try to put the show on the airway to increase awareness of the benefits and importance of vasectomy in Haiti.
The team returned to the Roi De Christophe and it was about 630pm when we arrived back at the hotel. It had been a long, hot sweaty day. We had performed vasectomy procedures at two sites and also filmed a segment to increase vasectomy awareness in Haiti. We wanted some cold beers and a dip in the pool so we quickly changed into our trunks and headed straight for the pool. After a couple of beers on empty stomachs we swam as best we could. We must have been an interesting site to the other hotel guests.
Returning to the hotel: Swim, happy hour, eat, work!
After swimming we showered, changed, and met at the hotel restaurant. We were late getting there. The restaurant closes at 930pm. I was worried because if the restaurant shut down you were not going to eat that night. No room service late at night. No Dominoes pizza delivery. No fast food. There was nothing outside the hotel. It was perhaps the only place I had gone in the world and had never seen a McDonalds.
We order and we had grilled fish, rice and beans and beer. You can forget the beer. The hit of the night was mango juice. Some members of the team ordered it and it took 45 minutes to arrive. While we were waiting Dr Suarez shared his maxim of rules of eating in the developing world, ” If you can’t peel it or boil it then forget it!”
We were not sure why it took so long to bring the mango drinks until they brought them out to us. You could immediately tell they were freshly pressed. I had images of the kitchen staff running out late at night to climb up some mango tree because some Americans were ordering mango juice at night. They were absolutely delicious and probably the hit of the entire trip.
We finished up the remainder of the night in the hotel open air lobby swatting mosquitos and entering statistics about vasectomy patients into our database: patient age, number of children, number of partners, etc. Most vasectomy patients were in their 40s and had an average of 5 children and 2 partners. One man had 12 children with 6 partners… Papa was a rolling stone.
Next article: Haiti Vasectomy: The Last Day and The Haitian Mind Trick!
About Dr. Monteith and His Choice Vasectomy
Dr. Monteith is an Ob/gyn with a special interest in female and male reproduction.
He supervises a AAAHC accredited surgical facility and provides tubal ligation reversal for women and vasectomy and vasectomy reversal for men in Raleigh, North Carolina.
For more information about vasectomy or vasectomy reversal with Dr. Monteith visit his website www.BestVasectomy.com or call his office at (919) 968-4656
