Editor's Note: This story of two nurses volunteering in Haiti is to highlight the beginning of Haiti Human Rights Week at Carleton and St. Olaf colleges. For more on the designated week, which begins Sunday, click here.

The easy way that Natalee Johnson and Cathy Priess-Perrott laughed and conversed together made it clear that they had been friends for years.

But the way they choked back words and suppressed tears made it obvious that they had experienced something profound and unspeakable together.

Indeed they had.

The experience

The two spent two weeks in Haiti last summer, just six months after an earthquake devastated the already impoverished island country.

Eight months later they still speak guardedly about the experience.

At times, pain was evident on Johnson’s face when she looked off in the distance as though viewing tragic scenes on some distant screen. Priess-Perrott drew her body in and brought her hands to her face protectively as tears welled in her eyes.

“No humans should have to live in those conditions,” Johnson said.

Priess-Perrott said they saw life, death, drugs and sex in just two weeks Haiti, and added that nothing could have prepared them for the wrenching decisions they would have to make.

Yet sadness was only a small part of the conversation.

Instead, they laughed about the improvisations made necessary by destitution. They marveled at the resiliency of the Haitian people they encountered. They rejoiced at the roar of the Haitians celebrating each goal in the World Cup soccer tournament. They relished every invitation to go into their makeshift homes and cherished every modest yet heartfelt gift they received.

Trained as nurse midwives, the two spent June 18-July 1, 2010, in Haiti with Midwives for Haiti, a nonprofit organization that trains Haitian women to provide prenatal care and birth assistance to local women. Haiti has the highest rate of infant mortality in the Western Hemisphere.

Weren’t there more prevalent medical needs in the wake of the earthquake?

“Irregardless of the earthquake, they’re still having babies,” Priess-Perrott said.

They did use their midwifery skills, but the two did much more than tend to pregnant women. They treated skin issues and infections, administered antibiotics and anti-fungal ointments, took vitals, handed out vitamins, performed gynecological exams—“everything outside of brain surgery,” Priess-Perrott said with a laugh.

A longstanding desire

Humor is woven through the story from the beginning. Ask the tandem how the idea came about and you’ll be answered with laughter.

Johnson said she had been trying to get Priess-Perrott to go to Haiti with her since a 2005 family practice conference, where she heard about an organization in Haiti that provides care to impoverished mothers and babies. The idea of going to Haiti with an organization that would put their midwifery skills to use appealed to Johnson.

Her inchoate desire to go to Haiti took on shape and urgency after the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake. She asked Priess-Perrott once again, and this time gave the answer Johnson sought.

“OK, I’ll go to Haiti with you,” said Johnson, laughing while imitating Priess-Perrott’s resigned response. But as she heard accounts of relief efforts, Priess-Perrott decided, “I can do that.”

They served in Carrefour, a poor community outside Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, and less than 10 miles from the earthquake’s epicenter. According to ABC News, 40 to 50 percent of Carrefour’s buildings were destroyed in the worst-affected areas. The local hospital was among the damaged buildings.

By local standards their accommodations there were “luxurious."

"We didn’t have chocolates on our pillows,” Johnson said with a laugh. Rather, a patient room in the hospital, equipped with mosquito net-swathed cots and indoor plumbing were luxuries of which many local people, some million of whom still live in tarpaulin “tents,” could only dream.

Another developing world luxury was the subject of mirth with the two women.

Priess-Perrott gave Johnson a hard time for giving up space in her carry-on bag for toilet paper rather than energy bars. But Johnson didn’t seem to regret the decision.

A world apart

They laughed as they talked about the conditions under which they worked—perhaps the only way one could function in the tragic circumstances.

A reminder of its history as a European colony, French is one of Haiti’s official languages, along with Haitian Creole.

The two said this obstacle would have been insurmountable if not for their very “driven,” skilled interpreters, four college-aged Haitians named Judith, Moise, Peterson and Mackenzie, who will be referred to by their first names for privacy reasons.

Judith shared their room; the men who slept nearby in case someone came for treatment in the night. They were not only necessary for their survival, Priess-Perrott said, but a source of hope.

“I think the interpreters were the best part,” Johnson said. “They were delightful.”

The Americans did much of their work making “house calls” in the tent cities as well as a street clinic run by Haiti Family Ministries.

“It literally was a tarp that was being held up by sticks that were being held up with rocks,” Johnson said.

The waiting room consisted of planks laid across piles of rubble. Medical “charts” were scraps of paper no bigger than a business card on which the patient’s vitals and complaint were recorded. As bad as things were, Priess-Perrott questioned how much worse it was now than before the earthquake.

“You could have put street clinics on any of a hundred streets we walked,” Johnson said, because the need was so great.

Add to that the fact that practicing medicine in the tropics, as well as in the midst of poverty, is a world apart from what they were accustomed to, and the challenges were overwhelming.

“It was a very steep learning curve,” Johnson said. They were confronted with five different kinds of fevers, none of which occur in Minnesota. Parasites were so prevalent that Johnson routinely gave a de-worming pill to every patient.

Facilities were about as far as possible from clean and modern.

For example, women seeking pregnancy tests had little more than a small paper cup and pile of rubble behind which to produce a urine sample.

Lack of facilities also meant there was no lab available for tests, Priess-Perrott said.

“You just had to do the best you could with what you had,” she said.

For instance, they lacked certain supplies to do Pap smears, which are a routine part of a gynecological exam. They didn’t even have materials for an outdated method, which involves wiping a sample of a woman’s cells on a slide and “fixing” them with a chemical so they can be examined under a microscope.

Their interpreters came to the rescue in more than just communication situations.

Judith interpreted a medical procedure for the Americans—explaining how local medical personnel fix the cells by heating the slide over a flame. The nurses also discovered later that hair spray from the stash of another volunteer also did the trick.

Aside from the expected communication difficulties, language differences created other challenges. Not only were many of the drugs labeled in French, but they were different drugs than the ones used in the United States, Priess-Perrott said.

Plus, Haiti uses the metric system of measurement. So weight, for instance, is measured in kilograms rather than pounds. Lacking ready access to Internet conversion tools, they did their best to do the calculations in their heads. But mistakes were a constant worry.

“You just didn’t want to mess up,” Johnson said.

Their pharmacy also consisted of $6,000 of medicine and equipment—four large suitcases worth—donated by family and friends.

For non-critical care pharmaceuticals like daily blood pressure pills, the women urged patients to make use of the “mobile pharmacies” that were common in Haiti. Men walked the streets with tall cones of pills, which could be purchased singly and without a prescription.

Another item they brought provide provided an unexpected bit of humor. Lacking toys, they inflated condoms and gave them to the children in place of balloons.

Lives changed

As one might expect, their time in Haiti was life changing.

“I came back hoping I would never complain about anything every again,” Priess-Perrott said, with a laugh that suggested that her hope hasn’t been entirely fulfilled.

Johnson grew pensive at the question, and finally said that the experience impressed upon her the world-wide need for women’s health care.

“Birth control access can change a woman’s life,” she said. Getting pregnant, Priess-Perrott added, should never be a death sentence.

Despite what they had seen—or maybe because of it—both said they would be willing to go back to Haiti someday.

As Priess-Perrott says, “I left Haiti, but Haiti did not leave me.”

Their return will no doubt mean more laughs and more tears for them.

For Haiti, it will mean more meds dispensed, more midwives trained, more condom balloons to delight more children—and fewer death sentences for pregnant women.

There is little question that, whenever it is that they return, the people of Haiti will still need them.