The item in this photo is a negative pressure pump. Negative pressure pumps are used in wound treatment to provide drainage and to prevent wounds from dehiscensce (bursting at the point of suture). It doesn’t look like the typical negative pressure pump used in a hospital setting. This is a typical negative pressure pump:
As you can see, it’s an electronic contraption that runs on a battery, while the one in the picture above is a manual pump. The other significant difference is price: an electronic one costs a couple of hundred bucks minimum, while the manual one costs $3.00.
The manual one was designed by a doctoral student at MIT, specifically for use in disaster relief situations, where treatment conditions might be primitive, and where reduced cost of the device means more devices can be provided within the budget constraints of relief aid. Designed with the specific intent to be used in humanitarian relief in Rwanda, instead the designer and the pumps have ended up with a team of medical personnel from Boston’s Brigham & Women’s Hospital treating the thousands of victims of the Haiti earthquake.
Rush Limbaugh notwithstanding, it seems like everybody has been motivated to do something to try to help the people of Haiti. Early last week, Charlotte’s teacher sent an e-mail to all of the parents of her class to let us know that they would be running a lemonade stand to solicit donations for Haitian relief efforts from their classmates; parents were asked to contribute items they would need, such as cups, juicers and a huge amount of fresh lemons, and, if possible, to sign up to help out on the day of the event. We signed up to provide the cups, and I volunteered to go in and help out.
I think the actual task was a little bit bigger than the teacher had imagined when she came up with the idea, but the kids were exceedingly well-behaved and did whatever was asked of them. As the momentum of things shifted from one task to another, I tried to run interference and do whatever seemed to need to be done: showing the kids how to stir the bottoms of the containers to dissolve all the sugar, ferrying completed containers to the “Ice Patrol” to keep them working steadily, clearing away the emptied water jugs, and so on. Our hour and a half sped by, and the kids were rewarded with a cup of their lemonade; as you can imagine, some batches were unbearably sweet, others impossibly tart, some just watery. The kids mostly drank their cups, though some only took a sip or two. The kids were then seated for an early lunch so they could spend their regular lunch period selling the lemonade, and the adults handled cleanup and pre-pouring the lemonade for service. A second shift of parents had volunteered for the lunch hour selling, and they began to drift in just as we finished and the rest of the school kids were starting to line up for the caf.
A before-and-after comparison of the Presidential Palace in Port-au-Prince. (via Huffington Post)
A survivor awaiting medical assistance. (via The Big Picture)