A labour of love

We posted a recruitment notice last week for a VCT nurse.

VCT stands for “voluntary counselling and testing,” as in counselling and testing for HIV. We treat women during labour and babies after they are born to prevent vertical (i.e. mother-to-child) transmission. Our VCT nurses do the testing, do the prophylactic treatment, and refer patients for follow-up because we do not do HIV care outside of the delivery period. Patients need full-service HIV clinics for that.

We’re recruiting for some daily workers, rather than a full-time VCT nurse. Our full-time positions are filled, but we need a pool of trained staff to fill vacations and sick leave.

My name and telephone number are at the bottom of the notice.

I’ve been getting a lot of calls, from nurses and auxiliaries, all looking for more information. Many haven’t yet passed their state exam and so are not licensed, which means they are not eligible. Some don’t speak much French, also a requirement to work with us. Some have no idea what VCT is and are looking for general nursing work.

Yesterday, my phone rang at four-thirty in the morning. OK, strictly speaking, it was 0442h. The woman on the line had a very soft voice. I had a lot of trouble understanding her, but she was calling to enquire about the job. Her soft voice was all the more inaudible because she was standing next to a rooster who was crowing loudly and repeatedly.

Or perhaps it was the rooster who was calling me, and he happened to be standing next to a nurse with a soft voice?

I’m not sure. It was four-thirty in the morning.

Here in the mountains, it is cool and quiet. All the ambient noise stress of Port-au-Prince is absent. No generators, no traffic. You can hear voices from below in the valley. The wind rustles the pine trees. It’s lovely and peaceful. A good place for restoration and re-grounding.

Re-grounding is necessary. Friday was a busy day. I had intended to get to some of the meat of reports that are overdue and plans that are urgent. Instead, after doing rounds and one circuit of the hospital to see what was going on, I then had a list of things. Six requests for logistics. Three big issues to discuss with the project coordinator. Two subjects, probably for new protocols, for the chief gynecologist. It seemed that every time I sat down at my desk to start something, I had to get up immediately to urgently attend to something else.

The public hospitals are again not functioning. One is on strike. The other is having intermittent electricity problems and a more chronic oxygen problem. The others are full. Again, then, we have problems transferring patients out and focusing on the most critically complicated pregnancies.

Still to do: the monthly medical report, which is very, very late because of the move; create a global plan to address the shortage in our blood bank; revise the job profile for the expat gynecologist who is arriving soon (and who will eventually take over my job); start formally evaluating the local doctors that I supervise; improve our HIV program…