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Helping out in Haiti Steve Stabile and Andy deFuniak started off the new year with a new adventure and medical mission to the small mountain village of Baudin, Haiti during the second week of January. The trip was an annual mission of the Parish Twinning Program, an inter-faith program pairing U.S. and Canadian parishes with a counterpart in Haiti or Honduras. This was Dr. Stabile and Dr. deFuniak’s first trip to Haiti, but fortunately the third doctor in their group was a pediatrician who had been to the village before. A pharmacist, two nurses, some volunteers and four Haitian translators completed their group. The weeklong mission provided health care services to about 2,000 patients in this poor community by providing primary care services. Among the priorities for this trip were providing a clean water supply, administering medicines to fix worms and parasite problems, and treating hypertension, chronic and acute illnesses and some injuries. The most common problem the group saw was malnutrition in both children and adults. Dr. Stabile found most amazing on this trip was the absolute lack of resources in Haiti. "The environment there is completely devastated," he says. "They don’t have good land for farming, they lack economic resources. The government has no public health programs to help the citizens. It’s really a bleak situation there."
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