Before I left for the hurricane zone I had been getting several letters a week from my girlfriend Beth back in Peoria so I expected to find a pile of mail from her when I returned to Limbe’; instead I found no letters had arrived from her. I wrote and asked if she was alright – no response.
The next few weeks were hard for me. I had to continue to converse in Creole with my lab partner, Celemise, and the rest of the staff in the hospital since none of them spoke English. At the same time I was learning how to use the microscope to recognize parasites in urine and stool samples – after I had asked the patients to provide the sample in little bottles and match boxes. Especially difficult was drawing venous blood with a hypodermic needle and syringe. It took a month of practice on squirming patients before I could confidently drop the needle into the vein of an arm or wrist. The veins of babies and infants whose limbs were swollen with edema from malnutrition were beyond my capabilities; Doctor Bob usually had to cut through the swollen tissue to get to the vein.