Back Tracking Haiti~Day 3

Our first "real" day working in Haiti. After a hearty breakfast of sweet mango's, banana-nut muffins, and extremely strong coffee, we parted ways again with Nick taking off to work with Femi at the marriage seminar and I with the rest of the team to Pastor Cyr's school for a medical clinic.

For some reason the picture won't rotate, but I wanted you to get the idea of the good's we were eating!

I will be writing about my experience in the medical clinic and with the orphanage girls today and Nick will write about the seminar tomorrow.  As we traveled to the clinic, I was amazed at our drivers skill as he drove through people packed streets and manoeuvred into tight places that no truck should ever clear. And yet he did!  As we pulled into the alley that leads up to the school, I began to take in the environment which these children live and learn in. A small opened concrete room connected to a badly damaged house provided the children shelter under a tarp roof to study. Three large pieces of foam  board connected to a stand provided a divider-like wall for each "classroom."  Overused badly hung chalk boards stood at the head of each section while painted Disney characters graced the walls with their mocking grins.  Hard wood chairs or long desk's were the only furniture within the room. All this surrounded by a nice pool of sloppy slidey mud, all this to move and manipulate into a make-shift medical clinic for the next two days.

The school room turned Medical Clinic

Within no time, our team worked together to produce a well oiled machine where 250 patients were seen during the two days. We had two team members working with patients to get free eye-wear, two team members with interpreters checking blood pressures and getting information from the people, two doctors with interpreters looking into every patients need, 3 team members with one interpreter to fill prescriptions, and a dentist/doctor/jack-of-all-trades guy(Dr. Ed, who lives in Haiti)pulling teeth with a team member. During those two days we saw a little girl dying of cholera, a patient with typhoid fever, several malaria cases, a man who had been ran over by a truck, a woman with an abscessed tooth going through her beautiful cheek, extremely high blood pressures, and countless bodies who were damaged during the earthquake. Thank God He is our Jehovah Rapha-God who heals!

Our good friend Dr. Dada working with patients

After a pretty full day at the clinic, Saidah, Abby, and I piled into the truck and headed off to the orphanage to work with the group of girls. Once again we pulled out art materials and let them at it! We painted mini canvases, participated in large group projects, and passed out gift bags filled with individual art supplies for each girl to continue her creative expression. Someone asked me the other day, "why did you bring art supplies? Why did you do crafts with them?" I told them how art and the freedom of expression got me through a tough time in my life and made me feel somewhat normal, like I had a voice to tell my story.

Working with some girls on a group painting. The one in the ball cap is twelve years old and gave birth a week before we got there.

Which is exactly what I wanted for these girls, a chance to tell the world whatever it was they were feeling. I asked some of the girls to paint me a picture of how they felt during the earthquake. One painted several rows of dark colors while another drew a picture of an armless girl and wrote about her friend losing both arms in the earthquake but "never forgetting that life is still possible with God and His promises never change." Some girls drew self-portraits, Another girl wrote me a beautiful poem about her outlook on life after all she's seen and witnessed. To me, this is what the whole purpose of the art lessons were about. To bring a voice to those who are not heard. Ponder on this:

I want to be the sun,
For it to be in my heart, So that everywhere I go,
My heart is open and shining the light out.

As the afternoon ended and we started packing up, some of the girls decided to attack, and I mean attack, Abby and I's hair with such force that we were instantly glamorized into beautiful Haitian mama's. A baby appeared out of no where and as you might have guessed, wound up on my lap for some lov'n. It was soon time to say goodbye and as tears threatened my eyes, I said a prayer of thanks and blessing for these young girls. I know they are in my Father's hands...

Rock'n my new hair do and this lil mama