Final push

My time in Haiti is drawing to a close, and there's still lots to do, some of which I hope to do in CA by email. But much of it really ought to get done today.

Please pray that I'd be able to finish well here. There's a lot on my plate, and I'm starting to become forgetful of details, little things here and there. And feeling a little anxious. And you never know in Haiti how much circumstances will allow you to get done in a day.

One little incident I had last Fri. There's a baby AV, who has a congenital heart defect, and needs an operation to fix it. He's 1 of 2 twin brothers, and his twin has been growing and is healthy, while he is severely underweight and needs a lot of care.

So his mom went to a particular orphanage to ask for help, and the directors decided to help. There's a nurse from UCLA who's been living at the orphanage for a number of months, and she's been helping to care for him. Still, as far as I know, there's been no legal documentation to show that AV is in the orphanage's care. He's living there, and his mom comes by every once in a while to see him.

They asked us to help with arranging Haitian and US permission to go to the US for heart surgery. Most of the application is done--a hospital and doctor in PA agreed to treat him for free, and there was a host family found that agreed to care for him during his stay in the US (most likely a few months).

For various reasons, I wanted AV's mom to sign a Power of Attorney (POA) form. I couldn't have the orphanage director do it, because he didn't have legal custody of AV in Haiti.

Through various conversations and questions and emails, I heard that a PA hospital would probably need a notarized signature on a POA form. I also heard (turned out I misunderstood) that a particular type of national ID card (there are 2) for AV's mom would be needed for a notary.

I'd received a 3 page POA form in English from another orphanage director, but also wanted a French translation, because any official business in Haiti is done in French. And I wanted her to understand what she was signing.

So I emailed someone at the orphanage to see if they had a French version. About a week later, I got an email with 2 jpeg images of 2 pages in French. Looking at the formatting, I figured out that I didn't have a French translation of the 1st page.

So, I used Google Translate on the first page of the English version to get a loose translation into French, and asked By, our Haitian staff worker, to revise it. And also arranged a day for us to meet AV's mom, so that we could take her to a notary.

That done, I realized that AV's mom might not be able to read French. Or might not be able to read at all (remember, about 80-90% don't finish high school). So I prepared a Creole translation, again with Google Translate, so that someone could at least read out loud the Creole version to her.

So, with English, French, and Creole versions of the 3 page POA form, I drove to the orphanage. Turns out AV's mom had a CIN, one type of ID card, but not a NIF, which was the type of ID I believed would be necessary for a notary.

Well, the reasons I had for wanting her to sign didn't absolutely require notarization. So we decided to go ahead with just a signature, along with a witness signature.

We decided to go over the form at the orphanage, at the kitchen table. The nurse was there, and a 17 year old Haitian guy (one of the orphanage kids) was there to translate for us.

I had to leave to take care of something else, and came back about 45 minutes after they'd started. The nurse had explained the basics of the medical procedure to AV's mom through the interpreter, and when I arrived, she had started on the beginning of the POA form.

Remember this is a 3 page form, single spaced, detailing all the bad things that might happen, and saying that the person signing wouldn't hold the person who was granted the Power of Attorney responsible for the bad results of any medical decisions he or she made.

So a little bit into it, we get to the word "sue", and the translator talks to her in Creole, and she replies, and the translator asks, "What is 'sue'?"

Hmm, something that was never explicitly covered in law school (or at least if it was, I didn't remember).

So I explain: "it means you won't ask a court to force these people to give you money if something goes wrong with AV."

Her response: "I trust in God's hands. Whatever He wants will happen to AV."

A little while later, we get to the end of the form, and we ask her to sign. She doesn't know how to sign her name. So I ask her to put an "X" on the signature line. She's not so sure about that. So we show her on another piece of paper how to draw an X, and she copies that slowly on the English form. Then does it again for the French form.

Clash of cultures: American medical liability forms and an illiterate Haitian woman's faith in God's hands for her son.

Anyway, please pray for me, especially for today (Wed).