When a Medical Mission Becomes a Ministry
Date: May 23, 2004

His name is Hugues Bastien, but the physicians and nurses who travel whenever possible to his school, a missionary outpost in the rain forested mountains of Haiti, call him Hughes.

A trained engineer, Hughes gave up a career in New York City in favor of returning to his home country of Haiti, where needs are great and resources are little, to help his fellow countrymen.

Hughes’ own story is inspiring. He immigrated to the United States as a teenager, unable to speak the language and yet filled with hope. He applied himself, earned a college degree and had plans to continue his pursuit of the American dream when he returned with his parents to Haiti.

Once there, he knew he could not return to America and instead set about a new mission of providing care and education to the children of Haiti. For the past decade Hughes has worked to build a school in Ouanamienthe (Wan-a-MINT). Funding is not great, so Hughes returns to New York for a few months each year to drive a taxi and save his money to further finance his dream in Haiti. He depends on the kindness of others to provide additional assistance, and Floyd Medical Center’s Family Practice Residency Program is an unofficial partner with Hughes.

It remains something of a secret in Northwest Georgia that Floyd Medical Center is also an institution of higher learning. Each year more than 20 physicians receive post-doctoral education in our Family Practice Residency Program, and one of the electives that we offer is medical missions.

Each year students in our program have the opportunity to travel to a second- or third-world country to provide medical care for the world’s most needy people. It is through this elective that I first met Hughes, and, after learning of his dedication to the people of Haiti, that I worked to focus Floyd’s missionary efforts on helping the people of this strife-filled island country.

Haiti is a study in what can happen when government fails and things go terribly wrong. The small country shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic, and the two could not be more different. Dominican Republic is lush and green with paved roads and modern amenities, but cross the border into Haiti near Ouanamienthe and you come upon washed out dirt roads and bald hillsides and mountains where tropical forests once grew.

Unrest among the people is prevalent in this land failed by the regimes of Papa Doc, Baby Doc and Aristide. In fact, during our most recent trip in March, we were unable to visit Hughes and his school due to the uprising in Haiti. We instead focused our efforts in the Dominican Republic.

Over time, the people we serve have come to recognize the North American and European medical professionals who come to their aid not so much for their immediate medical needs, but as a conduit for common medicines they can’t get on their own — medicines we take for granted like a simple aspirin or an antihistamine. The people camp all night to see us, and they line up in numbers too great for us to manage. At times, limited resources have forced us to ask members of a family to send us the two people in their family who are most in need of care.

When we travel to Hispaniola each person is allowed to bring two bags weighing no more than 70 pounds. We ask our missionaries to pack one bag for themselves and the second with medicines and drugs that we get from pharmaceutical companies and individual donations. When we set up our clinics, the people line up, and we quickly notice a pattern: they all have headaches, toothaches, coughs, colds or urinary tract infections. What we have discovered is that the people decide ahead of time to complain of these common ailments so they will have enough medicine to last them until the next missionary crew arrives, forgoing their own true medical needs in favor of the greater need of the community.

I have made it my personal mission to try to get high blood pressure medications for these individuals. In Haiti, 30 percent of the population has high blood pressure. Time and time again, I find Haitians with hypertension, but we are equipped only to treat them for a month. Then, when we come back, I see the same people with the same need. Treating hypertension this way is unhealthy. It can cause stroke or other medical issues.

Now, we tell them not to eat salt, and we have begun to select the worst hypertensive cases and provide them with the least expensive, most commonly available medicines we know we can keep in stock for them.

In addition, each year we pass the plate for donations to Hughes’ school, and each year he tells me “That is three more rows of cinder blocks.”

I believe we are making a difference. Hughes’ school is the yardstick by which I measure our progress.

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