Back in Haiti!

May 15, 2010

Saturday

I arrived in Haiti, for the second time since the earthquake, about a week and a half ago… last Tuesday. Internet access has been quite intermittent so I’ve used that as an excuse to not update this site but it probably has more to do with the fact that I have been incredibly busy and too immersed in processing everything and getting through some days. That sounds awful but I do kind of feel that way; ultimately, there has been a whole lot of joy too though. Its not often that I have to force myself to write but this is one of those instances. Hopefully, after this, it will start to flow a bit better.

Our team, consisting of 35+ people, left yesterday afternoon, all headed back to their respective homes in the US and Canada. As I alluded to, its going to take a lot for me to process everything that happened over the past week, which was a lot, due in large part to the size of the team. We were divided between two different sites in the beginning- Lamentin and Jacmel. Some of those staying in Lamentin also worked and stayed in Carrefour and the medical portion of the team in Jacmel spent some time in Marbial (Marbielle). So I guess in total, we did work at four different sites. Since travel within the country is somewhat difficult, particularly trying to transport that number of people to all these different places, this trip proved to be the most challenging logistically. I think everyone made it back safely though and they all seemed healthy and fairly happy here.

Furthermore, I’m really pleased (and I hope God is too!) with what we were able to do over the course of the week while we were here. I speak for myself but I think also for many members of the team when I say that I’ve been blessed and humbled and learned a lot even in this short time and despite the fact that this place is so familiar to me. As I see myself here long term after I finish residency, its been cool to continue to try to learn as much as I can about Haitian culture and life here. I’ve gotten the opportunity to talk to many long term missionaries and my Haitian friends. I feel like I’m always asking everyone a million questions but I don’t want to have any romantic ideas of what living here would be like. I want reality; I’m ready for this to be home.

I spent the first four days in country visiting with my friend Marc and learning what a typical day is like for him here. Marc essentially grew up in Haiti, from the time he was five. His dad is a pilot for MAF, stationed in Port au Prince. I stayed with a couple of friends of Marc’s- Kim and Jenny (who I’ll refer to as Jenny1 as I got dubbed Jenny2). I could probably go on and on but suffice it to say that these two women are really wonderful and I’m absolutely thrilled to have met them. They’re doing a lot of great work here and were incredible hostesses. Staying with them was easy and fun. While I was in Port au Prince, I got to sit in on a couple of “book club” sessions that Marc holds two times a week with the youth group (Haitian) at his church. We went to the church well before the club gets started though and collected local Haitian kiddos on the way to play with them for awhile at the church playground, soccer and basketball fields. They all know him, like 20 of them, and (to my joy) I quickly started to hear shouts of “Jenny-fer” along with his name as we walked down the streets.

Marc also helps out at a feeding program three times a week at an orphanage run by an amazing family. CNN actually just ran something about it this past Saturday. I’ll try to find a link to post about it. The bottom line is, I had a blast basically hanging out and playing with a lot of amazing kids. I also met some incredible people doing other short term work with the orphanage so it was a cool time.

Anyway, going back to the team we had down here, I met up with the North Carolina/ Kansas/ California/ Canada group Saturday morning a week ago at the airport and we headed to the girls orphanage run by Grace International in Lamentin. After I spent a couple of hours driving around with a few people to every single pharmacy in the area searching for Albendazole (an antiparasitic agent.. worms are a huge issue here due to the unclean water), the Pennsylvania team arrived at the compound. We all ate dinner there and then the Jacmel team headed over the mountain.

From this point on, I’m going to post the events of the week in several separate entries so this one doesn’t get too long. Unfortunately I’m not going to be able to write much about what happened in Carrefour and Lamentin as all of my time has been spent in Jacmel but maybe someone on one of those teams will and I can copy and paste it here so you all can learn more if you’d like. For now, I will at least try to summarize the stories I was told when the team was reunited for a night here in Jacmel at the end of the trip.

More to come!