drug dealing (again)

Its’ an exciting week, I’m off to see No2 Son in Antigua, one of the countries on the UK Green list, so it won’t be too onerous for him.  Quite stressful for me though as Antigua don’t accept the ‘had covid and now recovered’ certificate, and they want the more stringent PCR test.  Its only 70 days since my positive test, so it’s feasible I will show positive still.   It’s a nervous wait, but thankfully all is well and it comes back negative.

There is no water distribution system in Haiti since the UN induced Cholera epidemic.  Businesses, communities, hospitals, everyone in fact, relies on their nearest well, and some form of filtration / sterilisation – if they can afford it or have been educated.  Nor is there any sanitation or hygiene system, no rubbish collection. A toilet is often simply a dug latrine, or nothing.  All of the time I see men, women and children relieving themselves at the side of the road, against a building, in a field, even in the hospital.  Rubbish is discarded everywhere.  I went to a very poor community on Tuesday, their well was between a 50 and 500 yard walk away, depending on where their house was.  The well was uncapped without even a hand pump.  They simply lowered a broom handle attached to a water bottle into it.  So that’s 4 feet deep at best, and absolutely all of that sewage and surface contamination would find its way into that water course.  SO another project to get my teeth into, raising a grant application for a clean, deep well, similar to the one we had in the hospital earlier this year.

In other news this week I managed to run over our dog, thankfully only a bit of fur lot from his paw, but no matter what we do he insists on chasing and trying to bite the tyres when we leave or return to the compound, so I do feel bad, but not that bad.

Once upon a time I set up and ran a pharmacy; legalised drug dealing.  I haven’t done that for a while but I find myself doing it again here in Haiti.  A not-for-profit in USA buys drugs and ships them into Haiti to our requirement.  Of course not everything we need is available, and not everything we order arrives, but it saves us a huge amount of money.  Just finished our second order and we save an average of 50% against the price we would pay from local ‘dealers’.  Sounds like a no brainer, huh?  But it’s not straightforward.  Once I order it takes upto 6 weeks, and planning that far ahead is absolutely not a skill in Haiti, so its hard work.  But well worth it, drugs are our biggest expense after staff and we spend probably $30,000 US a month on them, so it’s a very exciting opportunity.