The resident interns, who function as the main physicians at the hospital, demanded more and better quality equipment in order to provide care for patients.

The conditions in the hospital resemble those in such institutions in many semicolonial countries. Pierre Paul, a member of the Federation of University Students of Haiti (FEUH) and a student intern at the hospital, said that workers and peasants from city and countryside use the facility.

When the ward runs out of bed space, he said, patients are assigned two to a bed. Unsanitary conditions promote the spread of disease and infections, while medicines are expensive and scarce. This reporter saw only two patients being given intravenous drugs. The hospital depends upon patients’ families to supply medicines. Several patients suffer from malnutrition and some die from routine infections owing to the lack of medicines.

In the orthopedic ward, which deals primarily with broken bones, jugs filled with sand, rocks, or other heavy objects serve as traction. Pierre Paul said that several amputees were injured at work when their arms were pulled into manually-fed machines used in the sugar processing mills in the countryside.

The resident interns won some of their demands for better equipment and returned to work the next day, May 17.

In the last couple of months workers and peasants have held other demonstrations around the country. On April 2, peasants blocked the national highway in the town of L’Estere demanding that running water, telephone service, and electricity be provided in the Artibonite Valley. On April 29 and 30, demonstrators in the capital burned tires and threw rocks to protest the unfilled promises of the Aristide government. They demanded health care, schools, jobs, telephone service, and running water.

Municipal workers in the Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Pétion-Ville staged a walkout because they had not been paid in ten months.

Workers at Guacimal orange plantation in St. Raphael in the north of the country have been fighting for union recognition and the right to collective bargaining since they formed a union two years ago during a fight for better pay and working conditions. The St. Raphael workers grow and harvest oranges that provide the extract for liqueurs for Remy Cointreau. The French company is a part-owner of the plantation. Union supporters recently came up against repression by the government and the company. In late March one worker was brutally beaten, while two peasants have also been imprisoned for more than a month. Many peasants have relatives who work on the company’s orange plantation.

Guacimal has failed to carry out improvements to the local infrastructure agreed to as part of the land-lease agreement signed 40 years ago. Peasant supporters of the union have been prevented from cultivating the plots of land between the orange trees during the off-season.  
 
 
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