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POSTED: Sunday, Jun. 28, 2009

Abandoned Haitian boy finds help in Bellingham

BELLINGHAM - Nurse Jayne Karydis reached over and drew a black dot above Clepson Estiverne's blind left eye - a physical reminder to the surgeon to remove this orb with its milky iris.

"Clepson, are you hurting at all? Do you have any pain? Does your eye hurt?" Karydis asked on Wednesday, June 24, as she helped prepare the 12-year-old Haitian boy for the surgery to remove the left eye that painfully flares up at times.

"No," said Clepson, a nervous boy wearing a long-sleeved red T-shirt emblazoned with "Lake Erie Monsters," blue track pants and dark sneakers.

Near him in one of the rooms at Bellingham Surgery Center sat Nina Thompson. The Thompson clan - Nina, husband Terry, and their children, Noah, 11, and Zoe, 9 - have been hosting Clepson since he arrived in Bellingham during the first week of June from an orphanage of 60 children in Fond Parisien, Haiti.

In the hour or so before Clepson was wheeled into surgery, Thompson spent her time making sure the boy understood what the medical staff told him as well as comforting him by holding his hand or telling him funny stories.

"You OK? You scared?" Thompson asked.

"No," Clepson said quietly in English. (He also speaks Creole and French and will later learn Spanish.)

"It's hard because he knows what's happening and that's scary," Thompson said in an interview.

Run by a Christian humanitarian organization called Love a Child Inc., the orphanage that cares for Clepson also aims to send qualified youngsters to college in the hope that they will use that knowledge to better Haiti, which is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

Eighty percent of its people live under the poverty line, and its workforce of 3.6 million people has an abundance of unskilled labor, according to the CIA World Factbook.

Clepson has lived at the orphanage for a couple of years, according to Thompson, ever since his parents gave him up because of their belief in voodoo.

"They were convinced he was cursed because of his eye and they did not want him," said Thompson, a horse trainer and real estate agent for Coldwell Banker.

Clepson's stay in the U.S. and his care come with the aid of Thompson and The Medical Advocacy Team, a nonprofit organization that links foreign children who have unmet medical needs with U.S. doctors and hospitals willing to treat them without charge.

Thompson's sister, Sarah Gammons-Reese, helped start the advocacy team that has been helping young children primarily from Haiti.

Clepson is the first child Thompson is hosting, partly because he is close to her children's age. And she wanted her youngsters to see and appreciate what they have.

"It's brought more to us than to him," Thompson said. "He's a wonderful kid."

It was Thompson who lined up the surgeon, Dr. Mike Ford of Bellingham Eye Physicians.

He not only agreed to do the surgery but also found an ocularist in Seattle for the second part of Clepson's treatment.

"I have been told that children in Haiti who have any sort of physical deformity are shunned, sometimes even by their parents. I like kids and wanted to help him in any way I could," Ford said.

In the roughly two-hour surgery Wednesday, Ford removed the blind left eye that teared up at times and caused Clepson pain.

"Clepson told me he thinks that the eye has always been blind, but the cause is not known," Ford said in an interview.

Ford then replaced the left eye with an implant of similar size.

"The implant is permanent and takes up the space which was occupied by the eye. After the tissues heals, a prosthesis is made, which fits in front of the implant and healed tissues, but behind the eyelids," Ford explained. "This prosthesis is what one would think of as an 'artificial eye,' although its purpose is merely to approximate the appearance of a normal eye for cosmetic reasons.

"The implant I put in supports the prosthesis but is never visible after it is implanted," Ford added.

In addition to Ford and Bellingham Surgery Center, Bellingham Anesthesia Associates donated its services.

A day after the surgery, Thompson said Clepson was recovering well.

"He's doing great, really good," she said.

When he woke, the quiet boy with a silly streak wanted a glimpse of what was beneath the pressure bandage on his face.

"He immediately wanted to see what it looked like," Thompson said.

If all goes well, Clepson will return home in September or November, looking simply like another boy with dark-brown eyes.

FOLLOW CLEPSON'S STORY

Bellingham resident Nina Thompson has been writing a blog about Clepson Estiverne's stay at the family home while he's undergoing eye surgery. Find it and additional information about Love a Child Inc., a Christian humanitarian nonprofit, online at loveachild.com.

More on the Medical Advocacy Team, which helped bring Clepson over and arranged for his medical care, can be found at medicaladvocacyteam.blogspot.com.