Saturday - Apparent Project mobile clinic

Today we set up a mobile clinic at The Apparent Project. We saw 120 patient's in six hours. It was awesome, and I even got to be helpful. I was a gopher, I helped with crowd control and keeping order, I took blood pressures (which I'd forgotten to tell Jenny I knew how to do), and I even gave a scabies treatment! It was fabulous. What I loved most was meeting the artisans and their families and spending time with them. We treated lots of infections, and rashes and good ol' coughs and colds, but got none of the horror stories we had heard at the orphanage yesterday. It just demonstrates how important the parents' involvement is in their children's lives, and what a wonderful thing AP is doing in this community.




This baby did NOT think I was funny, but she loved Ashton!!








This family was particularly poor. You could tell because they would all come in their best clothes to see the doctor, and this little boy's pants and shirt were ripped. Jenny said he had blood spattered on his back, but she cleaned him up, and it wasn't his. I can't imagine what it might be. Stephanie asked him to step on the scale, but she forgot to tell him to get down, and he stood there for at least 5 whole minutes while Courtney took grandma's blood pressure. :)





Our day ended with a shopping trip (in the AP shop) which was awesome. I've got tons of product, so let me know when I get home if you want to shop in my dining room!

Phillips Sweatshop - Haiti style

We started the day counting vitamins into 30 days worth...

Lots of germs...

I don't know what "germalot" is, but I'm pretty sure i don't want any part of it.




One of the streets in better repair...



Lots of things have god and Jesus in the names, even though they are not religious in nature. "Praise Jesus Boutique," for example, and my peresonal favorite, "sons of god lotto."

Friday, Part 5 of 5

Stephanie is a natural with the little children. She came armed with chalk and coloring pages and headbands and was immediately the center of the Children's activities.




Other new friends... Memie is one of the house-parents. F is a sixteen year old who asked me when we left if I was coming back tomorrow.





We drove away about seven o'clock, tired and hungry. Dusk had fully fallen, and the streets were still lined with people around drum fires, or just sitting. The orphanage had a well in the courtyard, and even though it had a toilet, you had to carry water in a bucket to flush the toilet. (again, in disrepair? Or simply never finished?). We had been set up in the courtyard, and it wasn't until we were pulling away that I realized they didn't have power and I wondered what those children would be eating tonight.

Friday, Part 4

The Brewer place is run by an American couple from "Mur-ville" TN, but we only met the wife. There are 25 children in residence, the youngest is four and the oldest said she was 16, but the other teenagers told me she was 15. As soon as we walked in, I was surrounded by little children touching me, not wanting to be picked up, just touching me. They had beautiful smiling faces and were so warm and friendly. As I sat with the teens and tried to remember my high school French, I listened as the missionary gave Jenny backgrounds on each child as they came through. S was a child slave at a voodoo temple. M has TB of the spine. W arrived at age 5 with gonorrhea. Here was my favorite, although I'm pretty sure I was her favorite, too.







She signed her name on my hand and spent a lot of time sitting with me. I was struck by her because she reminded me of my favorite [only] Aunt Jenny. Look how proud she is of the barrettes I gave her!

Friday, Part 3

After a nap, a lunch, and an attempt to organize, we headed out to an orphanage that everyone keeps referring to as "the Brewer place." We ride in Chadasha's own tap-tap. In the public sector, tap-taps are taxis that a dozen people will climb into and then indicate they want to get out by tapping on the roof. My brother had told me about tap-taps in Kenya, so it must be a wide-spread concept.

Friday, Part 2

Everything seems to be in a state of transition; the only thing
permanent is rows and rows of walls surrounding in some places mansions and in some places tent cities. "The Guesthouse," where we're staying, is surrounded by a wall that is topped with barbed wire, plus there are bars on all the doors and windows. I suppose I feel safe knowing how much is between me and the wide, wide world, but i do also feel unsettled by what must be a real need for such protection.

Friday, Part1

Our day started with us awake but missing the wedding. The gate agent was kind enough to give us the exit row so we could all sit together, but she made me take seven pounds out of my checked luggage. Ok, she didn't make me; I could've paid the sixty dollar overage fee and chose not to. In line for security, Jenny and I were singled out and asked to fit our carry-on in the box that tests for size. Jenny's didn't fit, but she pulled the "medical equipment" card and was passed. Mine fit perfectly and then - as Anne smirked smugly behind me - I couldn't get it back out and had to use all my "assets" to free my stuff! (note: Anne was smirking at the snarky gate agent who was picking on me, only to be thwarted by my traveler-husband's perfectly sized bag.)

I slept through the entire flight, and woke up in another world. What I learned preparing for this trip is that Haiti has a proud-if-mercurial history. Haiti was a wealthy nation in the nineteenth century, and then again enjoyed prosperity in the mid-twentieth century, but since has fallen on tough times. As you look around, it is difficult to tell what is in the process of being built, what is being re-built since the earthquake, and what was just started and abandoned.

Facebook has broken my brain.

As I sat down to write tonight, I realized that most of my thoughts come in pictures with captions. Isn't this how life is lived? Each moment separate from the next in disjointed sets of laughter and tears and boredom and confusion? I'm thinking that's not how it's supposed to be. I want very much to try to piece together the events of today into more than just a narrative.

I wrote a nice long blog entry, but can't get it to load. If I can load this, i'll try smaller posts. Perhaps Facebook is right.




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Safe and Soundly asleep

I don't know what time it is. I mean, I can see that it's 10:19 a.m., but my body can't guess if it's day or night. I slept about 90 minutes in the airport last night, and then I slept so hard on the plane that for a moment Jenny honestly thought I was dead. We're at the guest house, have eaten breakfast, and are going to take a nap before we head out this afternoon. I can't get my photos to load; hopefully it's a temporary condition.

After midnight

Just offering a little proof that we still have our senses of humor.




And I am so glad to have our team together! Two more women are already in Haiti since they were coming from Alabama and didn't have our adventures. We swapped stories (like school girls) that all seemed to start with "I'm so thankful that..." You can read about Anne's adventures at My Life In Single Exposures. We have to board our flight in four hours, so it's time to catch some Z's.

Never alone...

I'm sitting in the Fort Lauderdale airport, waiting for my checked bag to arrive, easily identifiable tag courtesy of the awesome Jill.




I called Ben to tell him I was safely here, and had confirmed my six am flight out tomorrow. The ticket counters are closed, security is closed, and there is no one here except me, the lost-luggage guy, and the old man at the desk with the very misleading "welcome desk" sign. In fairness to him, he was very welcoming. He let me ask three questions before he politely explained that runs the welcome desk for Holland Cruises and knows absolutely nothing about any flights. :)

Anyway, I was talking to Ben, and telling him about my various adventures today. The tub of peanut butter I had brought was too big for checked baggage, so I had to go back to the check-in counter and sweetly ask them - in the middle of all the evacuation chaos - to please find my black duffel-just-like-everyone-else's and add this tub of peanut butter, please. Sigh... But the good news is that I made it through security twice without being frisked! I lost my boarding pass twice before I got on the first plane, and again when I was trying to prove I did have a missing bag. Sigh...

So here I am: me, and the disgruntled luggage guy, and the polite cruise line guy, when Ben says, "text me when Jenny lands so I'll know you're no longer alone." interestingly, it has been 14 hours since he dropped me off, and I even spent almost two hours by myself at a restaurant, but I have not felt alone. Nothing deep (or trite) about having Jesus with me, or cliche about being alone in a crowd, or even funny about being out standing (outstanding) in the field. (that one's for my dad.) I'm just saying that I haven't felt alone.

But now there are people starting to trickle in, including an unsuspecting woman that I just heard ask for flight information at The Welcome Desk, so hopefully my bag is here and I can go meet my team.

Semantics

As i loaded the car, in the beautiful sunshine, I thought to myself (since I can't think to anyone else) that it didn't feel like an emergency. There were so many people out walking, talking about the latest news, assessing our relative lack of damage, it felt good. Weird, huh?

Ben and the kids dropped me off at the airport. As I hugged them and waved them off for an unexpected long weekend at Grandma's, I thanked God for the realization that - had the storm rendered us houseless - it would not have left me homeless.

Lesson for today: don't make big decisions at 4 am...

I had turned my cell phone off to conserve battery, and when I turned it on at 3:30 this morning, I discovered that my flight had been canceled.  This was, of course, no great surprise, but I am a little sorry that I didn't get the voice mail at 10:00 last night!  Anyway, we had purchased my tickets (international and domestic) separately because of how we were using frequent flyer points, so my flight from For Lauderdale to Port Au Prince was not automatically rescheduled.  Ben called American Airlines and spoke to a representative who used a very sympathetic tone of voice when she informed us that it would be almost three hundred dollars to change the ticket.  Ben hung up the phone and briefly considered driving me to Florida, but I was not keen on arriving in Haiti a day ahead of the rest of the team!  I suggested we sleep on it, and we could re-visit the situation when the kids woke us up at six.  Biggest reason: I didn't want to pay the money, change the ticket, and then not be able to use that one either.  What if the Huntsville airport wasn't able to re-open?

Sure enough, six rolled around and three children - very surprised to see me - climbed in the bed to talk about their day.   By then WDRM was reporting that the airport was open, so I felt comfortable changing the ticket.  Ben called, got a completely different agent who was Genuinely sympathetic, (and had seen the news, and had rightly guessed the nature of my trip), and changed my flight without charging me a cent.  Woot, woot!  

It still seems crazy to go flying out when most of alabama is in a state of emergency, but it doesn't seem as scary by the light of day as it did in the (unbelievable) darkness of last night.  Kate (praise God) woke up fever-free so I feel much better leaving her, and now the kids get to take me to the airport.  My heart goes out to all those affected by last night's storms.

This is NOT how I had planned this day

Six am, tornado sirens. I hate the tornado sirens, mostly because they add such an air of tension to my day.  For those of you not in North Alabama, it may be difficult to explain, but we have spent the last *fifteen* hours listening to the weathermen - on Every Station - carefully identifying the areas of greatest danger. Without pause. No commercials. I'm not exaggerating.  And so, to the backdrop of your entire day, you add the soundtrack of fear and warning.

Add to that the fact that Kate was absolutely the sickest today that I have ever seen her.  This is the child who has such a freakish tolerance for pain that she didn't cry when she got her six-month immunizations.  One time, she knocked off her toenail and didn't notice. Today she was pale and shaking, and whimpering, plus dizzy, throwing up, and feverish.

Six hours, two needles, and a CT scan later, we were sent home sure that it was none of the big stuff, or at least no surgery required. Thank God for nurses who watched the little ones so they wouldn't have to witness the blood-letting, who gave me their personal cell phone numbers and offered to keep the little ones during the CT scan ... and thank God for Beth who rescued them from the tense faces and worried glances (despite our best efforts not to freak Kate out). And all this with the tornado sirens punctuating each hour and the weathermen proclaiming their harbingers of doom.

But we are home now, and home is fine.  Ben walked in with pizza ten minutes before the power went out, and the flashlights I had bought for the trip came in handy.  Not so relieved tonight is my friend "C" - her brother was at his MIL's funeral when he got the the call from a neighbor that his house was gone.  And - as if it could not be worse - the deceased woman's other child got the same call. It's hard to wrap your head around the loss. Two children1, no mother, no home.  But being at the funeral spared their lives, so there is blessing even in that.

I am packed and ready to go ... if I'm even able.  Seems a little crazy to me, to leave all this adventure behind.  Three hundred thousand people are without power, some are estimating that it will take days to get us up and running again, and I'm thinking of getting on a plane in a few hours? Ben thinks I'm crazy not to go; "what's a power outage?" he says.  I guess it just hammers home ... I want to go, but I don't want to leave.

Prayers, please

Big fat confession: when people ask me to pray for them, I always do but I never feel like it makes a difference. Today, I believe that it makes a difference, because I find myself coveting your prayers. :) I woke up yesterday in a stone-cold panic that I am about to do an unbelievably reckless and irresponsible thing. I mean, I've got three little kids! What in the world am I doing jetting off to a third-world country? The immunizations required should be enough to warn me that this is no light matter! But this was only the second moment that I had a hesitation. (the first was when Jenny said it would be a ten day trip, and I balked. But she shortened it to nine and I was back on board!). For the rest of the moments in the last two months, I've been excited about this opportunity and eager to go. And then I woke up scared.

Getting my act together helped a LOT. Writing letters to the kids' teachers, getting my suitcase packed, meeting with the team one more time ... all these things helped me. What helped most, though, was all the outpouring of offers for help and prayers. It's great to know people are going to be looking out for my family, and that God is looking out for me. So keep praying; it makes a difference.

Cardboard for The Apparent Project

I asked people to save me their cardboard, and you came through with flying colors!

I spent my weekend cutting the gummy tabs off over thirty pounds of cereal boxes, cookie boxes, and cracker boxes! I loved looking at the colors, and imagining what the necklaces would look when they were finished. I also loved looking at what my friends eat, and laughing at how many of you bought Little Debbie Easter cakes!


Just in case there's someone out there that I *haven't* pressured into buying jewelry from me, this is what the cardboard becomes:

You can find out more about this awesome program at apparentproject.org ! Be sure and let me know if you see anything on the website that you want me to bring back for you. This is one of the places where we'll be working, and I'm really excited about it.

My Team

Today I met with my team. Jack took the photo.

Pictured here are a doctor, a nurse, a pharmacist, and a math teacher. Who feels like the odd-man-out?  But I've been perfectly clear: if anyone's Calculus gets broken, I'm on the case!  Jenny and Anne I've known for years, and Karen I loved immediately.  I'm the only first-timer in the group, and I'm excited to draw from wisdom.  I'm a little concerned that some things will be so natural and obvious to them that they'll forget to tell me ... for example, "pajamas" isn't on the packing lists they've sent!

starts with THINKING outside my box...

A year ago, an earthquake hit Haiti, and my friend Jenny jumped in to the relief efforts with both feet.  Less than three months ago, I was giving my testimony to our church's officers and I said that sometimes I feel overwhelmed wondering how I can help the hurt I see here at home, as well as around the world in Haiti.  I said it hypothetically, but Henry approached me and talked to me as though I really might go.  In that moment, the idea that I might go to Haiti with Jenny was planted. 

I have been intrigued with the idea of going on an international mission trip, because I had begun to believe that my life was too simple and contained.  Sure, I serve at church and at school, but those are safe places where I know what I'm doing.  Is it possible I might have something to offer to a stranger?  I guess I'll find out!  Wanna come along?