PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – It’s Saturday, and the entrance hall of a police station in front of the busy market in Salomon in the Haitian capital has become an improvised health post. Within a few minutes there is a long queue of people waiting to be seen by the Cuban medical brigade.
The police officer on duty said he was not authorized to speak to journalists, but the extent of police cooperation is obvious. The police station’s tables and chairs are quickly lined up along the entrance hall to facilitate the work of La Renaissance hospital workers, who carry out preventive health work here once a week.
“We are a mobile clinic,” said Damarys Ávila, the head of La Renaissance hospital, which is staffed by the Cuban medical mission. “We check for high blood pressure, cataracts, pterygium (a benign tumor of the conjunctiva) and glaucoma,” she told IPS. “We send people with these conditions to the hospital.”
Women are the majority of those waiting in line. “Women have the highest rate of high blood pressure because they bear the greatest burden of labor. Then there are dietary factors, like eating too much hot, spicy food, refined flour and salt,” she said.
“Many people have their blood pressure taken here for the first time in their lives,” Ávila said.
On a tour of this unusual health post, where in a single morning 167 poor women and men receive attention, expressions of gratitude abound.
“We seek out the Cuban doctors because they treat people well and they don’t charge. We are poor, we cannot afford to pay,” said a resident of Port-au-Prince before she raised the heavy load she was carrying on to her head.
The first Cuban medical brigade to Haiti arrived on Dec. 4, 1998, bringing relief in the aftermath of Hurricane Georges. Since then, cooperation has been uninterrupted and has had a decisive effect in this impoverished country, which in 2010 suffered an earthquake that killed 316,000 people, according to government figures, along with an ongoing cholera epidemic that has also claimed thousands of lives…
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