After the Boston training

It’s Friday evening, January 30. The blizzard caused our training to be condensed to two days instead of the usual two and a half; we finished today. Then a last-minute burst of shopping (I needed to get rubber boots for the treatment unit, since my feet are larger than the sizes they buy), a delicious crepe at one of those studenty holes-in-the-wall that Boston still abounds in, some packing – and now here I am.

The training ran the gamut from anxiety (apparently, almost everyone who has ever gotten a needle stick from a hollow bore needle – the kind you use in blood draws, etc. – has died) through fascination (there is this very elegant arrangement in Ebola Treatment Units (ETUs) that ensures that people (and fluids) always move from less-infectious to more-infectious areas, never the other way around) to inspiration (the – very young! – PiH point people for activities in Haiti and Sierra Leone are incredibly impressive and dedicated). Ending up, perhaps, in a sort of confidence – we’ve begun to get to know our fellow team-members, all of whom seem serious and able (apparently this was a more selective process than I realized), and the sense of support from the organization is solid and strong. I think we’re all pretty eager to start doing the work.

I’m not going to go into any of the details of what we learned right now – I’m sure I’ll have more to say about that once we’re there and it goes from theoretical to practical. For now, I just want to mention three things:

1.     We learned – completely incidentally – that PiH pays the community health workers it engages

2.     We were told that Paul Farmer – one of the founders of the organization and perhaps its most public “face” – always wants any facility they build – a hospital in Haiti; a treatment center in Sierra Leone – to be aesthetically attractive

3.     They spent a full two hours talking to us about our emotional well being, about reactions we might have like panic attacks, and about techniques for getting through them.

I love all these because they seem to me to mark PiH out as a “different” sort of organization. Not expecting poor people to work for free; wanting a hospital to be an attractive place to visit; thinking about the private emotions of staff members in a stressful and humanly painful situation – what could be more normal or natural than this? Except that, in my experience, almost no one bothers with any of it. That they do here makes me feel safe, and invited to be candid, and like I am working for a place that cares about LIVES, not just about problems. It’s a nice start.

Shuttle to the airport at 7 tomorrow morning. We’ll be in Sierra Leone about 31 hours after that!