Spider Bites and Dirty Water.

Back at another semester full force. My first big paper is due in just under 3 weeks. Oh man.And I have been thinking about spider bites again. Be careful, there are some kind of gross pictures included in this one...It is too easy to tell people funny little stories about Haiti, and leave out the stories that aren't happy, that don't end well, that feel like failure.So here is a story that isn't so pretty. It's just a little story that is really totally unimportant, but opened my eyes wider to the realities of life in Haiti.This summer, I was sent to a mountain region of Haiti. I stayed in a village called Jolie Guilbert for a week. Saturday, July 5, a Haitian nurse and I jumped into a charcoal truck of supplies and took the 8 hour journey, southwest of Port au Prince.Sometime during the drive up, or maybe during the night, a spider bit me. Just a little spider I am sure. It didn't look like much when I noticed it Sunday morning.I then spent the next three days cleaning, sorting and organizing a hot, stuffy depot that some rats (and other creatures) decided they wanted to live in.By the time Miriam, Dr S, and the rest of the team arrived on Tuesday night, the little spider bite was not so little any more. It was angry enough that I went to Miriam about it. She gave me some antibiotic cream to put on it. It didn't work. I had been taking extra strength ibuprofen (which ALWAYS works for me). It didn't work. So I stopped taking it.By Thursday, I was seriously in pain, radiating into my groin and into my hip joint. Driving around and hiking in the heat over ridiculous terrain just made it worse. I finally talked to Dr S. He said we would need to lance it, which I was totally on board for. Except that we were in the jungles of Haiti, with nothing that we needed. So we decided to wait until we were at the hospital in Pestel the next day.Friday morning, I was up around 6, and my now VERY infected spider bite had barely started leaking. Keep in mind, I had stopped taking pain killers, breakfast isn't served until 8:00. Around 7, Dr S was up, and decided that we should take advantage of this and drain the spider bite. Here, between the house I was staying in, and the outdoor kitchen where the women were making breakfast:So I sat there, while Dr S forced the infection out of my leg, all the blood, all the puss, even some black stuff (apparently dead blood cells). This was the first time that I ever felt light headed because of pain. Sounds dramatic, but it's true.I couldn't even eat afterwards. I was given some oxycotin, which made me feel terrible. I started oral antibiotics. And then we jumped in the vehicle and drove for 2 hours on the rough trails called roads to Pestel. I didn't think I was going to make it to the hospital. But by the time we arrived, I was feeling SO much better.Saturday, we drove the 8 hours home to New Life.And WHY am I telling you this story, showing you these pictures??? BECAUSE THIS IS REALITY EVERYDAY FOR PEOPLE LIVING IN HAITI.I was using water for my bucket showers from a cistern that is cleaner than water from a river. I had bandages and ointment and alcohol swabs. I had SO MUCH compared to the local people. And the infection STILL got that bad.Can we even begin to imagine how bad it could have been if I DIDN'T have a nurse, a doctor, clean bandages, antibiotics, and the ability to go back to New Life to their filtered water?I can't imagine, and I have seen these kinds of situations over and over again in Haiti. It's not that the people are doing anything wrong a lot of the time. It is simply that they don't have access to even basic medical care.I have walked into a one room house, to find a woman dying of multi drug resistant, highly contagious tuberculosis, among other obvious, undiagnosed issues.I have seen babies and adults alike devouring a bowl of rice and beans, knowing it might be the last meal for days.I have seen a simple spider bite or machete wound oozing infection because there is not even clean water just to wash the wound.I have come back to Canada to sit through a class where we are told that we've basically eradicated tuberculosis, so we don't really do research on it any more.I have listened to people discuss why poverty is not an excuse for poor life choices, where illness and disease are blamed on the person living in poverty.We so often have no clue what injustice looks like.[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0pAUhN3JPA[/embed]To help me get back down to Haiti this summer so I can try to reverse some of these injustices, you can donate at http://www.gofundme.com/TALovesHaiti2015LoveLoveLove.