CLICK HERE FOR THOUSANDS OF FREE BLOGGER TEMPLATES »

Friday, May 7, 2010

P.E.Q. T. E. PART 2

The kids have all grown up so much! It's amazing! All those little boys are all talking so much and have left so much of the baby behind!!!!
The little house thay they have been living in is such a blessing, as so many in other places are still stuck outside in the elements. It is quite a hot little building, but 6 ceiling fans help a lot. There are some holes that need to be patched up, as we discovered when it really pours hard, some water finds its way in! There are three little rooms, and everyone has their own bed. The workers have been doing a great job of making do, and the kids look so healthy! For sure the regular scabies and impetigo, but nothing too crazy to deal with right there, thanks to all the supplies that I was able to bring in! THANKS SO MUCH for the polysporing and anti-fungal creams, and the funds to get many other medical supplies that we so needed! It was so wonderful to have everything I needed while I was there! I was also able to purhase some supplies while I was down in Haiti, and this really helped in some areas that were lacking.
The first few days were tough....so much to try and tackle, and then Yvenel's funeral, taking Michael back to his Haitian family, and then having a little baby get really sick, all in one day, really fried my brain for a couple days. I really had to slow down and one night my mind was just whirring and God just spoke to me about some things that I hadn't thought out too well in all of that, so I just had to slow down and pay attention.

It was funny to be there, with this big house that appears to only have superficial cracks, and have everyone outside! Really hard to kind of wrap my mind around!Though, I did decide, that in the future on really bad mosquito nights, I will most certainly be pulling out a tent!! Best bug net ever!!!!
Things are running pretty well, but I did decide that if the kids are going to be in that circumstance for a while, there is going to be need for a large cement pad to be laid in the back yard, with a shade of some sort! There is not really a clean place for the kids to play, out of the dirt(mud when it rains) and out of the sun at some times of the day. This would help a lot with the scabies we have been struggling with as the kids seem to always end up in the dirt after bathtime!
Please continue to pray for the planning of the future of HCH as there are a lot of things on the table right now and some big decisions to be made in the near future!
Mathieu, our Haitian director, has been doing an amazing job! He has taken many projects on to make things as they are as best as possible. I was quite blessed and amazed to see him getting his hands dirty along with everyone, really striving to make the best of things! We are so blessed to have him there! Please pray for him as he carries this huge responsibility!

It was so different to be there with so many of my kids gone! I always felt like we were missing someone, especially when we took the kids swimming or on walks, and well, we were! The group is so young now compared to when I arrived in 2007!! There are only 6 kids over three years old now! Crazy! So different! I was thinking onw night that I need to ravamp my kids songs repetoire, as most of them are a little old for the huge group of toddlers that are part of the singing group! And they LOVE to sing!

Please continue to pray for adoptions. They are opening up again, and we have about 33 kids who need homes! Lots of little boys looking for a family! We do have some files already on the way, so it's pretty exciting to see things moving along and God answering prayer!

Thursday, May 6, 2010

P.E.Q. T. E. (post-earthquake thoughts and experiences) PART 1

Well, I am on my way home and I figured I might as well start to jot down some thoughts about my trip. Mostly, I just can’t believe how fast 2 weeks can go by! Crazy! And Lame!
So…thoughts, notes, experiences, etc…
I drove in Port a few days after I arrived to drop a volunteer off at the airport and pick up a few things for HCH. On my way in I had seen a few glimpses of the effects of Jan. 12th, but not too much in the airport area. It blew my mind.I have NEVER seen anything like the effects of a huge earthquake firsthand, and it was really hard to absorb. I had seen many,many pictures, but actually seeing the destruction was quite devastating. I think it hit home the most when I saw the little store that we used to go to to do back-room-money-for-cheque-exchanges with the friendly Syrians(it’s not nearly as shady as it sounds). It was in a three story building that had been reduced to 2. The first floor was completely flattened. You could have literally walked in the door of what used to be a second floor store, now right at street level. I hadn’t known until that point that “One-Stop” had been destroyed and no one around seemed to know anything about our Syrian friends, or the super-nice owner Terrick who used to give us discounts and stuff that wasn’t selling in the store. This really threw me for a loop and thankfully we were just a couple blocks from one of our destinations cuz I wasn’t in a good state for driving in crazy Port-au-Prince. I was really thankful to find out that everyone inside had managed to make it out before the building fell! AMAZING! Hope to see those friends next time I am in Haiti. Word is they are planning to start over in a new spot.
Building after building was closed and blocked off, merchants making use of the miles of now free-for-all fencing and such to display their goods. There is rebar poking out all over like a pile of pick-up-sticks, and everwhere you look, piles of cement arranged just-so in an attempt to be neat despite the overwhelming amount of rubble. And this is almost 4 months later! Still so much to do, and yet there was no mistaking the reality that the Haitian people have and continue to pull themselves out of the rubble. One of the hardest things I think to absorb was the tent cities that have sprung up in every nook and cranny not already taken up with a house or the remnants of a house. There were some streets that are now one way because one side of the street has become the property of the people who have literally been forced to camp out on the street. In some places, there were even tents set up on the meridian dividing traffic flowing in opposite directions. And by tents, I don’t always mean actual tents. Many were wanna-be shelters, made up of bits of cloth and plastic, and for the lucky ones, also a tarp, somehow stitched together like a giant puzzle, attached to some piece of wood or PVC pipe.
Made my tent look like Chateau Lake Louise.
It rained like nothing I have seen for a long time in Haiti on Sunday night….I almost started complaining. Then I thought of the fact that my tent was still dry (which was not the case for all of us at HCH actually….definitely had some stuff to dry out) and that we had the edge of the house to escape to during the majority of the downpour. Seriously, the majority if the yard was a lake. And a large number of Haitians had nowhere to go, the floor of their “tents” the very lake we watched grow in our yard. I got an even bigger understanding of this when I flew out today, the usual green-ishness of Haiti seen from the sky scarred with hundreds and hundreds of little blue dots, tarps housing those who had lost so much a few short months ago.