I returned home from Haiti on Friday night. It was an AWESOME week. I said I would send an overview of the trip so here it is. I already sent this to some people but I don't have everyone's email address so just decided to post it here. I know this is really long and it's pretty personal and I know some of you aren't even religious so I don't know what you will think of it. But here it is. :-) I definitely feel like God stirred my heart in a deep way. I don't know what it means exactly but I am praying about it.
We arrived in Port au Prince around 3:30 on Saturday and were picked up and taken to the Heartline guesthouse. We rode on top (yes on top) of a large truck/cage called the Cantor. This was very bumpy and hot but gave us a great view of the city and the scenery. In the city, the first thing I noticed was the overwhelming amount of trash that was everywhere. But for the most part, the city seemed not that bad, tons of people everywhere walking around, buying stuff from little makeshift stores, kids playing, etc.
The guesthouse we stayed at was really nice. It is run by the cutest couple, Ryan and Melissa, 29-year olds from Minnesota. They've only been there 2 months and will be there at least 2 years. They made us feel very welcome. We unloaded and sorted all the supplies we brought for all the Heartline staff which they were very greatful for. We met Tara and Troy Livesay and John McHoul, the founder of Heartline. He and his wife Beth have lived in Haiti for 22 years. They are total hippies. I love them. When we met him, he gave us kind of an overview of what our week would look like, thanked us for coming and then broke into the song "I Love You Lord." After a few seconds of awkwardness, we joined him in singing. :-)
On Sunday, John took us all to his church. This was the first time I have attended church in a different country and I loved it. Afterward we all went to John and Beth's house for lunch. There were about 40 people there. It was one of the Livesay children's birthdays so we had a party for her. It was very happy and joyful. That afternoon Evan (29 yr old Californian who has been volunteering for Heartline) drove us around the city for about 2 hours. We drove past Cite Soleil which is a huge tent city controlled by gangs. (I was told there is a documentary about it.) Very dangerous. Thousands of people live in there. (We didn't get out of the car.)
Interesting fact: Hundreds of thousands of people are still living in makeshift tent cities. Many of these people have houses that were not damaged in the earthquake, but instead of returning, they rent out their houses and stay in the tent cities b/c they get everything for free - free place to live, free food, free healthcare, free supplies, etc, from all the aid organizations. So why leave?
Sunday night we returned to the guesthouse for dinner (the food was AWESOME all week) and had another worship service. They had us on a pretty strict schedule Monday-Thursday. Wakeup at 6, breakfast at 6:30, morning devotionals at 7, leave for our assigned job for the day at 8. Return to the house at 5, dinner at 6, evening devotionals on the rooftop at 7:30. Our evening devotionals which were aptly named "rooftop reflections" :-) were basically talking about the day, what challenges we were experiencing, and praying.
Monday was pretty much a manual labor day - we did a lot of work on the Heartline property such as cleaning out and reorganizing a huge supply room, cleaning out a huge water fountain, hauling off a bunch of wood, etc. It was good teambuilding stuff and stuff that it would've taken the Heartline people weeks if not months to finish, but we were able to knock out pretty quickly.
Monday night I started to realize that I had not had a minute of alone time in 3 days. I'm a pretty social person, but I do live by myself and I realized that not having that hour or two of "me time" during a day was giving me some anxiety... but more on that later.
Tuesday a group of us were able to go to the Heartline maternity center. This is the main focus of Heartline. This was definitely a high point of the week. Every Tuesday about 40 Haitian women and their newborn babies come to the center where they have different parenting education classes, health checkups, etc. They start the classes before they have the baby and go till the baby is 6 months old. They also do childbirth education and deliver the babies. The 4 or 5 women who run the center are all midwives. (The teachers are both American and Haitian women.)
Interesting fact: Despite living in extreme poverty, most Haitian women do not breastfeed their babies. This is in large part due to ignorance over the benefits and myths about the baby not liking it or that it's bad for the baby. So one of the biggest things the Heartline women do is to teach about the importance of breastfeeding and teach them how to do it. This is huge.
Many Haitian women take their babies to orphanages b/c they think the orphanage can take better care of them. Heartline works to empower the mothers to take care of and bond with their babies. Rather than opening more orphanages, they help to empower mothers to take care of their own.
I got to know this girl, Heather. She is 36 and an American who is one of the midwives. She is also a great writer and writes this blog about the center and her family's life in Haiti.
http://allthingshendrick.blogspot.com/
One of the things that amazed me most about this trip were just the Heartline people, like Heather and John and Beth McHoul and Ryan and Melissa. These are Americans who just had "normal" lives before.. they aren't "super Christians" or "super humans"- they are funny, impatient, interesting, smart, frustrated people just like all of us. They just have a heart that was open to God and to serving. And they seem to be so happy. And their KIDS! These kids were some of the most polite, happy, well adjusted kids I think I've ever seen.
Heartline also runs a sewing and jewelry making center that we got to see where they teach women how to sew and make jewelry so that they can have a way to support themselves. They make purses, necklaces, earrings, etc. These are then sold under the brand of "Haitian Creations." 60% of the proceeds go back to the woman who made it, and the rest helps support Heartline's ministry. (I brought several purses back with me, let me know if you'd like to buy one!)
The topic of the classes on Tuesday was on birth control. Another interesting (and sad) fact: women in Haiti have virtually no rights. Few men will marry the mother of their children. A woman cannot choose to not have sex. It's not her choice. Hence the birth control. They were giving women who wanted it free depo shots which are good for 3 months. Unfortunately birth control is another area where there are lots of myths and not that many women got the shot. But a few did. Overall seeing the women with their babies and just the program in general was so positive and encouraging. It was obvious that the mothers HAD bonded with their babies and had even found community with each other. It was awesome.
That evening we discussed our plans for Wednesday. John said they would take a group of 5 to go to the cholera cinic run by Real Hope for Haiti, another non profit. The rest of the group would stay and do more manual labor (specifically clean out a fish pond.) One of the guys in the group told us that someone from a past team who had also gone to the cholera clinic said that they had to empty buckets of diarrhea. Um yeah that was all it took - I was out. Bring on the fish guts! It didn't matter that I also knew a girl who had gone on a previous trip to the cholera clinic and told me that it was the best day of the trip. No thank you.
We had 2 nurses in our group who both really wanted to go. The rest of our group pretty much avoided eye contact when they asked us who would like to go. Jim, the trip leader, asked me directly if I wanted to go and with unusual bluntness I replied, "No I don't want to go.... but I will go if they need people." We all went to bed.
The next morning I woke up and still did not want to go. I prayed and told God that I was willing to go if he wanted me to. I just needed a sign. We had our 7 a.m. morning devotional around the big dining room table (I can't even remember the topic) but during our prayer time I had a vision of me praying with one of the patients. I knew that was my sign. After we were done praying I knew that I should go to the clinic. So there were four of us.
The other group left to go clean fish scum and we waited for our ride. I went into the dining room to pray that God would give me strength to go and that he would protect me from what I would see. I should've known then that God was doing something big in my heart because right there as I was praying I just started crying. It was like I was feeling the sadness of it before I even saw it. One of the girls came in and asked me if I was ok and what I was afraid of. I said I was afraid to see people suffering but I knew that God wanted me to go. Our ride came and we drove an hour and a half, leaving the city behind and venturing into the Haitian countryside. It was really pretty. Finally after winding through hills on barely there roads we came to a clinic in the middle of nowhere.
Interesting Fact: We passed several Haitian cemeteries with elaborate tombs. Many Haitians are very scared of being haunted by spirits and will spend all their money on elaborate funerals so that their family member won't come back and haunt them. Meanwhile they have no money to feed their kids. They are afraid of dogs because a former Haitian president said that after he dies he wil come back as a dog and attack them.
We entered the main clinic where there were about 30 or so Hatians waiting in chairs outside. For $1, Haitians can come to the clinic for any reason and see the nurse and get free medicine. They treat everything from burns, infection, illness, etc. On an average day they treat 300 people. After the earthquake, they saw 600 people per day. This was a slow day, they would only see 150. They then took us up to the cholera house, which is a separate house, up on a hill. (Late last year, there was a huge cholera outbreak that has killed more than 4,000 people.)
We entered a gate and each of us had to be sprayed down with a bleach/water solution. We washed our hands and put on gloves and went inside. It was very clean and smelled like bleach ( a great smell in any healthcare facility). It was nowhere near as bad as I was expecting. In each of the 3 rooms were rows of cots but several of them were empty. There were probably 20 patients in there, men, women and babies, all getting IV fluids. There we also met Jacob, a firefighter from Dripping Springs (right outside Austin) who was there volunteering for the week. Small world.
Of course I migrated to the babies in the room who were crying and I held them and they both fell asleep. Perhaps I am the baby whisperer? The patients didn't seem THAT sick, they were mostly either sleeping or just kind of laying there. We did some cleaning and organizing but there wasn't too much to do since it was a slow day for them.
At lunchtime we went back down to the main clinic and had lunch (it was really good surprisingly) with another missions team from Tennessee. After lunch we got a tour of the healthclinic by one of the women who run the clinic, along with her sister and their dad. (Their parents moved to Haiti full time in 94, the daughters followed in 98.) We got to meet the dad (Mr. Zachary) who is in his 60s now and has the most charismatic, outgoing personality. He shared his testimony with us - former drug addict, dramatic Jesus experience, decided to sell all his possessions - you know, the usual.
Then came the really hard part. The daughter took us into a small exam room where two Haitian women (a mom and a grandma) were each holding a child. The boy that the grandma was holding looked about 5 or so but his body was so swollen. His eyes were swollen shut and he lay completely limp and unresponsive. He was suffering from extreme malnourishmen called kwashiorkor, where basically you are going into organ failure. They said he had more chance of dying than of living. Next, they took us to a small back room where they stored all the medicine and several people were working. On the FLOOR were about 8 babies, all 1 yr or less, most hooked up to IVs. These were severe cases. One baby was one years old but looked like a 2 month old. She said they normally keep these babies in a tent but it's too hot during the day so they have to move them inside during the day.
Part of the malnourishment problem is poverty, but also ignorance. Parents don't understand that they can't feed their babies rice everyday like the rest of the family eats and no protein. So the staff
tries to educate the parents by explaining what protein is and how they find it in the forest.
For the kids that are really bad off, the parents can leave them with the clinic for 4-5 months and the staff at the clinic nurses them back to health. Then the parent MUST come back form them. (They will actually go to the police and file an arrest warrant if the parent doesn't come back. That usually works.)
So then she took us to the small house behind the clinic where they keep the kids who have been left there to be nursed back. We walked in and there were probably 50 kids in there, babies through about 5, in about a two bedroom house. Many of them seemed very happy and playful. Some just sat there with blank expressions on their face. There were maybe 3-4 nurses in there taking care of all of them. It was overwhelming, to say the least. One little boy ran up to me and jumped in my arms and wrapped his arms and legs around me like a monkey. I got the impression that these kids were being taken care of very well. The house was clean and the kids were clean and well cared for. It was just that there were so many of them in so small a space. Real Hope is trying to raise money to build a larger facility on their property.
You can read Real Hope for Haiti's blog here: http://www.realhopeforhaiti.org/
After I returned home and looked up RHFH on Facebook, they had already posted an update on Franklin, the poor little boy who was so swollen. He was already doing better and was able to sit up and open one eye. I was so greatful to see that. Otherwise I would never know what happened to him. ( I attached a photo of him that was posted on the Facebook page. As sad as he looks, he looks much better than when I saw him.)
Anyway, it's hard to describe the feeling I had in my heart that evening after we returned back to the guest house. It was a feeling of despair over those poor kids. I felt so heavy and burdened and overwhelmed. That night on the rooftop we were talking about brokenness and what does that look like. I wasn't even able to vocalize what I was feeling. I just wanted to go be alone and process it.
I told everyone I was going to bed but as I was walking away a couple of the girls told me to wait and asked if I was ok. That was really when I lost it. I couldn't breathe and I just broke down sobbing. They were so sweet, they held me and prayed for me, that God would use my brokenness. That helped a lot and after a while I thanked them and went upstairs to go to bed. I cried for another hour then fell asleep. I asked God, "what do I do with this feeling?" I felt overwhelmed. Fortunately I slept well that night and the next morning that intense heaviness had lifted some. During morning devotionals I shared how difficult that day had been for me. It had been a test of faith for me - do I really believe that God is sovereign and in control and that he is with those little sick babies? Yes I do. But I was left wondering what do I do with the sadness.
John gave a good word about how when we find ourselves in place where we feel overwhelmed and under qualified, that's a good place to be, because that's when God can really use us. He uses broken people to help broken people. He kept saying God is God and we aren't. I thought about how we live in a fallen world and how we are all broken, just in different ways, and we all need God to redeem us. And that one day, He will redeem the world.
Thankfully Thursday was an easier day, we just did some painting, then went to the market and then Evan took us to this really pretty waterfall and we did an awesome hike. That night we prayed for the country of Haiti and also for ourselves, that we would see our own brokenness and that we would not become complacent to the hurting around us.
And Friday we came home!
So I mentioned before about how after a couple days there I started to feel anxiety about being around people so much? The funny thing is that after we came back, we all MISSED each other so much. These were people I didn't even know before. Five of us went to dinner the next night and since then we've all been communicating through Facebook chat, lol. The kind of intentional community that we had there is just nearly impossible to have here, unfortunately.
I've been in Austin for 8 years and on several occasions have thought about moving or doing something different but for whatever reason I've felt like God was holding me here and telling me to wait. But I feel pretty restless now and I don't know what that means. What I DON'T want is to just get sucked back into my same routine and completely forget about everything I am feeling now.
Last night on our extended Facebook chat, some of us were talking about starting our own non-profit or ministry. Maybe that is crazy but it did make me excited. When Mr. Zach at Real Hope told us his
testimony he said that after he became a believer he said he wanted to be "all in." He said that is a dangerous prayer and don't pray it unless you mean it. That was 20 or so years ago and look at what he has accomplished. I really am praying that. So who knows what will happen! :-)
Thank you for your prayers and for supporting me and helping me to go on this trip. I'm excited for what the future holds.
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