High Above Haiti, There is Hope

Dr. Rodney Baptiste
(Picture by John Rennison, Hamilton Spectator)

High Above Haiti, There is Hope.

(Article first appeared in the Spectator May 10th, 2011,

written by Susan Clairmont, photograph by John Rennison)

Drive until the road ends. Then walk up the mountain for six hours.
There, high above Haiti in the village of Roque, there are babies needing to be born. Broken bones needing to be set. Cholera needing to be cured.


This is the world of Dr. Rodney Baptiste. A family physician for all of four years. Once a month, he leaves his home in Cap Haitien, on the island’s northern edge, and goes to some of the most remote villages in the nation.


Once, he treated 400 patients in one day. By himself.


Another time, villagers woke him at 2 a.m. A pregnant woman, just 17, was suffering from eclampsia, a potentially deadly disorder. She needed a hospital. But it was a day’s walk down the mountain. Up the mountain, two hours away, was the next nearest village. There, a man with a “tap-tap” – a truck - lived. In the end, the distance was too great. “The baby died. The young woman died”, the doctor says quietly, in English.


Dr. Rodney, as he likes to be called, is here in Hamilton for two weeks. It is the 35-year- old’s first time off the island that comprises Haiti and the Dominican Republic, where he attended medical school. He has travelled here at the behest of the many Hamilton friends he has made, people who have been to his home to build schools or deliver medical care. They are great believers in the work he does and have found a way to help him help more Haitians.


They want to provide him with mobile clinics to take to the mountain villages.


A Hamilton-based non-profit organization called Empower Global is working with Dr. Rodney to open a stationary health-care clinic in Cap-Haitien in September, to start a health-care education program and to purchase off-road ex-military vehicles capable of driving up steep hills, through water and over rugged terrain.


One of these vehicles has already been purchased, but has been operating in the capital city of Port-au-Prince since the earthquake. Two more vehicles are hoped for to venture weekly into the rural areas around Cap-Haitien. About $40,000.00 has already been raised to buy, stock and operate the vehicles, but another $90,000.00 is needed, says Cal Schultz, director of Haiti operations for Empower Global. One off-road clinic – equipped with beds, oxygen, water, narcotics will serve 5,800 Haitians a year.


Haitian medical experts and visiting Canadian physicians and nurses will work alongside Dr. Rodney.


To help raise funds for his program, Dr. Rodney is spreading the word in Ontario, including at a sold-out event last Friday night that was attended by many members of the Hamilton and Halton medical communities. A Hamilton nurse who knows Dr. Rodney from her volunteer work in Haiti, planned to take him on a tour of St. Joseph’s Hospital. Another nurse, who specializes in disaster medicine, has arranged for him to ride with a Barrie paramedic team. He is also visiting some medical clinics and speaking at two elementary schools in Hamilton.


To anyone who will listen, Dr. Rodney will talk of the need for basic health care in Hamilton. “So many people die for nothing”, he says.


Cap-Haitien wasn’t affected much by last year’s earthquake. But those who were left homeless in the south of the country – in Port-au-Prince and Jacmel – have flooded the undamaged northern community. The people in the city and in the mountains need treatment for malaria, typhoid, diarrhea, malnutrition, tuberculosis. They need to be educated that the spread of AIDS can be lessened if precautions are taken. They need treatment for the cholera that erupted in Haiti after the earthquake when water became contaminated. Treatment that is as simple as hydration.


“They don’t have good water”, says Dr. Rodney. “Cholera makes me very sad because so many people died in Haiti. It is sad when you see people die for basic things”.


Already, the doctor has helped villagers in the mountains plant vegetable gardens. Now they have food. Now they can have medicine that must be taken with food.


Dr. Rodney shrugs when asked why he became a doctor. “When I look at the need of my people, I remember why God made me become a doctor”.


To donate to Dr. Rodney’s mobile clinics , call Empower Global at 905-334-9595.


Susan Clairmont’s commentary appears regularly in The Spectator. sclairmont@thespec.com 905-526-3539.