Global Volunteer Network

May 20, 2010

Its strange. I’m homesick and have been feeling very ready to go back but I was just looking at photos of my dog and my house and all of the sudden I got really sad and not ready to leave Haiti at all. I am trying to process all of this and I think the bottom line is that I feel very caught between two worlds right now. I’m ready to be down here full time and its challenging to feel like such an outsider when my heart is attached to this place.

Anyway, moving on to what is happening here, this morning I met up with some with the Global Volunteer Network that I initially made contact with at Hotel Cyvadier, where we stayed last week. I honestly don’t know a great deal about their organization yet but they were really excited to come visit the orphanage and see what they could do to help. I gave them a tour and they wanted to come back with some more people tomorrow afternoon to run a program with the kids. Also, a bunch of people plan to come tomorrow morning to help with the retaining wall. (For those of you reading this who were just here helping with this endeavor, yes, we got more cement so work on the wall continues.) One of the women also mentioned that there are some people interested in sponsoring some of the children potentially. We’ll see if anything pans out but speaking with them was certainly encouraging.

Its kind of nuts here… all the NGOs and individuals and other organizations crawling all over the place. I feel comfortable with my role here because I’ve had a relationship with the Faith and Love in Action people for years now. I often stop to think, however, how all of this work should be fitting together. I hate that there are so many of us doing our own thing when we should be working collectively. It does take a lot of effort to network to collaborate but I believe that its totally worth it. Otherwise, we’re wasting so many resources. I wish I had time to just chill down here for longer and talk to all the white people running around doing who knows what.

This afternoon I went back to the orphanage to continue my task of getting photos of all the kids. I also handed out gift bags that people at Branch Creek Community Church put together for the kids. Unfortunately, this project happened before the earthquake and there have been a bunch of new editions to the orphanage and I don’t think we had a complete list of kids anyway to begin with so unfortunately not everyone got one. I’m not exactly happy with the fact that the team left me to hand these out because I had a bunch of unset kiddos on my hands. I was really stoked when I saw one of the kids handing out his candy to everyone else though. So sweet!

I’m going to try to get up and run in the morning which means 5am. Time to call it a night. :)