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Haiti Volunteer Profile: Shana Spitzman, R.N.
Spitzman helps a woman at the Centre Medico-Social clinic, with a translator looking on.
“How could I not go to Haiti?”
That was Shana Spitzman’s reaction when she heard about the health clinics that Housing Works and other New York City groups opened in Haiti after the cataclysmic earthquake on January 12.
A registered nurse, Spitzman, 29, found out about our relief efforts while working part-time at the Housing Works’ Cylar House Adult Day Health Center. Her nursing experience with underserved populations both in New York and with nonprofit groups in rural Kenya and Guatemala served her well during her recent one-week stint volunteering at the two Port-au-Prince clinics.
“You’re dealing with limited resources, so you have to be creative about treating people, just like you do in New York City when people don’t have insurance or limited access to electricity and water or where there is a language barrier,” Spitzman said.
See Spitzman talk about her experience:
During her Haiti rotation, which wrapped up last Saturday, Spitzman alternated between the Centre Medico-Social de Port-au-Prince family clinic and the PHAP+ clinic, treating 60 patients. She said continuity of care was a tough challenge.
“A woman came to me at the family clinic with a swollen foot and ankle, three weeks after she had been sent to get X-rays. The X-ray was okay, but her leg was still infected. You would hope that she would’ve come back to the clinic one day after getting her X-ray, but her lifestyle gets in the way of her making it back,” Spitzman said.
That “lifestyle” for the woman and for 1.3 million other homeless Haitians means the constant instability of living on the streets in tents or under tarps, if they are lucky. Spitzman attributes the most common complaints she saw—allergies, stomach aches, headaches, vague pain—to the trauma of the earthquake and the rigors of living on the streets.
Spitzman hopes that other nurses and doctors will imitate her example and volunteer with Housing Works. “There is a little guilt to working in a place like Haiti,” she said. “You’re coming to save the day and leaving. We have to think, ‘How can we make this happen long-term?’”
Find out how to volunteer in Haiti
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Comments (1)
Shana is great! We miss her at Cylar house.
Posted by Johnny, March 15, 2010 at 4:46pm