Invasion by "poul poul"

  In the last several weeks it seems there are some creatures that don't appreciate us living here. It started one day with an invasion by bees. I guess they were trying to find a new home. Never the less, there were many, many bees in the house and it was lunch time. Sallie and I could just hang out in our  rooms since they aren't connected to the house. Candace was attempting to make lunch in between spraying bees. I was warned not to go in the house barefoot but I had no shoes handy so just went without. I hadn't even fully sat down in my chair by the table when I was stung on one of my little toes. I don't know where I would choose to be stung if I could choose but I know it definitely wouldn't be on my little toe! Talk about full body shock waves originating from your "wee, wee, wee all the way home" toe!
    In the next several hours the bee presence did decrease. But....
Only two days later Sallie and I were talking... Neither of us had slept very well the night before. I was just terribly itchy, especially my face. I had even gotten up in the wee hours of the morning to see if I did have anything on my face and to put on some lotion to try and decrease the itching sensation. It didn't work. Then we were both in our rooms when we made a startling discovery. We both had tiny creatures crawling on our pillows. The wall between our rooms doesn't go all the way to the ceiling so we were talking back and forth and both discovered these critters at almost exactly the same time. It was too late in the day to wash our sheets, they would never have been dry and we don't have a dryer so we got out the bug spray. We coated our sheets but it did no good. They were smaller than a piece of pepper from a salt and pepper shaker and dark brown or black. They were not fleas because they didn't jump. They weren't lice or bedbugs either. They didn't bite that we could tell just crawled on a person's skin and made them itch. You had to look at your arm very closely especially if you had freckles and watch to see if these "spots" moved. By now everyone in the house knew we had a problem and had been out to our rooms to investigate. It wasn't long and everyone felt itchy just from seeing these things. Keith was looking online trying to determine what the things were and Sallie and I then tried flea and tick spray for animals on our sheets. Then we found out the wall our windows are on was absolutely covered with these things. Sallie and I slept in the house that night then the next morning Keith talked to some of the local Haitians to see if they knew what these bugs were. Oh yes, they are chicken mites! Poul poul is their name in creole. They are only around in dry season and live in banana trees. So we took all the rugs, sheets, mattresses and pillows out of our rooms and sprayed our rooms with some kind of chemical. This also meant all the clumps of banana trees in the yard got cleaned up and so on and on... Thankfully after two days they were all gone and we have moved back into our rooms.   It may not be a consolation to anyone else but Sallie and I were glad that both of us had these creature invasions... You know... Misery LOVES company!
   One day an 11 year old girl came to the clinic with some of her neighbors. She had cut her thumb 22 days before and finally the neighbor brought her to the clinic because it just wasn't healing. The end part of her thumb was almost cut off. We didn't think the end piece was even getting enough blood flow to heal plus how do you sew a 22 day old wound up? The girl just wanted us to cut the end piece off and we really didn't feel we had many other options. We did a digital block on her thumb then also numbed around where we would cut. I didn't get a picture after our little surgery but will try to if and when she comes back.

    We also had a man come to our clinic form 4 hours away. He has many large white patches of scaly skin. It is scattered on his head, chest, back and arms and almost totally covers his legs. He has had this sickness for one and a half years. He has been to a hospital for this but their treatment didn't help.  Nobody else in his family had this sickness. The skin is so dry in places it just cracks open and it is painful and itchy. We aren't sure what it is but we are treating it as a fungal infection now. Since he is from so far away and fungus heals slowly we asked him to return in one month for a follow-up.