Category: Blog

I am back in the States since Friday, and I am enjoying my family!  But, I miss Haiti and my friends there… pretty badly sometimes.  Here are a few last scenes…

The last prescription I filled

My dear fellow Mis Yos… ( I miss you girls!)

The farewell party the day before I left… Shana made some really good food.

One of my Haitian friends… her little boy always reaches his arms for me and gives me a smile!

The weekend before I left, we single girls and two of our brothers had the chance to go to the ocean for a couple of days.  We had planned to do this since last fall, and it never quite worked out.  I was so glad that we were able to do it before I left.  It was a lovely time of rest and relaxation… how could it not be?

My brother and I

My dear friends:

Breanna, Loretta, Rhonda, Janell, Rhoda, Anita, and I

Fish eyes anyone?  (Michael ate one…”kind of rubbery”)

How beautiful!  I love the ocean!

Michael dove to the bottom and brought up these star fish.  See the suction cups?  Oooo….they tickled!  I didn’t know that starfish could bend in half, did you?

Recently a small distribution of water purification units was done in an area in the mountains of southern Haiti. Here people have no access to clean water. Hours away is the closest city with clean water available to purchase. Water purification units were distributed to families and training was done to ensure proper use. These units are able to purify water enough water without electricity to supply the needs of entire families for years to come.

Saturday I was invited to one of my Haitian friend’s house for lunch.  Well, I got there and she wasn’t around.  Apparently my Kreyol isn’t as good as I hoped, and she thought I was coming next Saturday.  Well, she showed up, and as I am busy next Saturday, we started making lunch.  First she took the heads of millet and she and her friend pounded the grain loose.  I helped pound a bit, but soon blistered my hands!

Then they winnowed it and put the grain back in the “pilann” and pounded it with just a touch of water till the hulls and the thin skin surrounding the seed came off.  It took about an hour and half of solid pounding till the grain started to crack. Then they winnowed it again and washed it.

After that I sat and stirred the pot of boiling “pitami” till it was soft.  During the cooking process, I had to keep feeding the fire with dead congo bean plants.  It was SO smokey sometimes!  In the meantime, my friend made a sauce with a bit of meat she had.

I really enjoyed just spending time with her, and again was amazed at just how difficult it is for them to do anything, even cooking a meal.  They have to get water – 20 or 30 minutes to go and come; gather dried plant material or chop up a little wood using an ax that the head comes off of; use a VERY dull knife to cut up any meat or citrus; wash out the kettle without soap; pound HARD for an hour and a half to prepare grain; keep the children and chickens out of the food because you are working on the ground; lean over a very smokey fire for an hour with your eyes running tears; then finally – after 4 hours – you can eat.  And that is just cooking for one meal.

I got to hold her little boy while he fell asleep.  He is such a sweet child, very quiet, but when he smiles he lights up!

That was my Saturday two weeks ago.  This past Saturday Michael and I went out to Labich to visit some friends.  It is a 2 hour drive on the four-wheeler.  I didn’t get any pictures, but we had a good time.  The Pastor there has a very nice family.  I think his children are the most well-behaved children I’ve ever seen in Haiti.  We came back Sunday after church,… and we got rained on.  Oh well, part of the fun!  The four-wheeler ride was great, even though I was stiff the next day.  I loved being able to spend time with Michael!

The clinic move was way more involved than what I can write here.  The first whole week was spent making counters and shelves, painting, cleaning and finishing floors, cleaning doors and sills and windows and equipment, just a whole bunch of hard work.  The second week we started moving in and the above mentioned work continued.  I don’t have many pictures, and the ones I do are of my work.  If you want to see more, go to the GTH website http://www.gospeltohaiti.net and look at the blogs.

With help from Breanna and Rhoda  mostly, I sorted and organized the supplies and medicine in the clinic depot and the pharmacy.  It took the whole week, but we were done by Saturday evening.  Here are the shelves of supplies, after that came organizing the medicine.

It took a while, but the shelves were finally full and the boxes empty!  It wasn’t just a matter of stashing things, it had to make sense, and be organised.

Here is my empty pharmacy, by Saturday, it was looking like a huge job to get it organized and filled, but by Monday morning, it was up and running!

When we were hauling boxes out of the house to the Gator, Cherie came and said “Help”.  So I gave her a box and she toddled out the door with it, then decided that it wasn’t as easy as it looked, and left for activities more her age!

These other pictures are just a glimpse into the other work that was going on.

Here is a bonus picture.  My dad came down to teach a Pastor’s Conference.  He and Caleb Trent, who was helping teach, came up the mountains Friday afternoon to see the land and to see me.  It was so nice to take an hour and go spend a bit of time with them.  If you don’t know, Aid For Haiti bought some land 10 min out the road from here.  It is a nice fertile piece of land, and Michael is going to be working on fencing and building for the next couple of months.  When I return to Haiti, hopefully there will be a place to live up there.  I’m looking forward to that!  I hope you all will pray for God to speed the work and provide all we need for that project.  I’m so glad we found a place here in the area where we know people, and where we can have fellowship with the other missionaries.  Our cousins are currently building 40 min farther into the mountains.

That’s all for tonight.  God bless you!

Hello again from a LONG silence.  I wish it was because I had been hibernating, but unfortunately that is not the case.  I’ve been slightly busier than normal.  We closed clinic on the 22nd of December, and immediately picked up the pace on finishing the new clinic building.  There wasn’t terribly much that I did there the first week we were off, but with Christmas and New Year, I got to work in the kitchen and help make some special food for the holidays.  That was a lot of fun, and I had a bit of free time too.  I knew as soon as we could start moving in, there would be more than enough to keep me busy.  For Christmas Eve, we went up to Rhonda’s.  That was a fun time, and lots of good food.   We had ham and cheese sandwiches, pickles, chex mix, cheese ball, and cookies and chocolates; all because our families and friends remembered us and sent the things.  So thank you all for remembering us!  We sang for a while Christmas Eve, we had some extra folks around and some new songbooks!

Christmas day we had brunch, and then there was an emergency run that Michael had to do.  Thankfully he found another ride out to Ti Goave for the lady, so no one had to go all the way out on Christmas day.   We had the afternoon off, and then we had supper.  Wow, what a supper!  Ok, you have to realize that we eat food like is in these pictures one time a year.  This time.  My dad bought a cured ham down, and we made mashed potatoes, and sweet potato pudding, and carrots, and stuffing, and cranberry jelly, and cheese cake thanks to Breanna.  It was so good, I love ham and mashed potatoes.

After that, we opened our presents; we did a gift exchange.  My camera was too slow to catch Cherie hugging the little puppy I gave her, she loves “boof boof”s as she calls them.  This was her second puppy for the evening, but she still was excited.

Here is a picture of Michael and I, we may look a little weird, but that is us!  The other is all of us playing Apples to Apples, someone just brought the game down recently.

Now, let me think….one of those days in there…. oh yeah, the Sunday in between, the church here had a “fet”.  They make food for everyone who comes to church that Sunday.  The ladies responsible for cooking the food asked if Anita and I would help cook, and we convinced Breanna and Rhoda to come along.  They made 7 huge kettles of rice and beans, 3 kettles of fried beef chunks, and macaroni and potato salad, and a few other specialty items for the Pastors.  It was a lot of fun to help them cook, very meager utensils (just a couple long-handled spoons and only 1 very dull knife), but very enjoyable.  After the service all the other “blans” came down and we dished up the food into styrofoam plates.  I think there was over 300 people fed.  For the first time since they have been doing the “fet”, there was plenty of food for everyone.  The food was good, but after cooking everything in oil all morning, my hunger for that particular food was kind of dulled.  Here are some pictures.  The girls are sorting the hacked up chunks of beef in preparation for frying.

I will write about the clinic move in another post.  I hope you all had a blessed Christmas even though I didn’t wish you one.  Sorry!  Happy New Year!

I sewed up the back of a lady’s knee yesterday.  A pig bit her.  But… the worst thing was it was filthy with chewed up leaves, and I had to pick every speck out.  The Haitians, for whatever reason, like to chew up leaves and pack it into their wounds.  This was a 1″ by 2″ three-cornered tear, and it was so difficult to get those little specks of leaves out of it.  The lady was older, and her daughter was with her.  The daughter kept saying, ” I told you not to put leaves in it.  See I told you it wasn’t a good thing to do!”  I had to smile, at least some people are learning!

Guess what surprise I had this week!  My parents came down, and I had no idea they were coming!  I knew they were planning on coming the very end of the year, but it worked out better for them to come sooner.  Last Sunday morning they walked in and I was shocked!  They had to fly back Thursday, but I so enjoyed having them both here.  Mama had been to Haiti once before, but that was before I was down to live.  I was so much fun to show her my life here, and introduce her to my friends.

Another thing that has happened recently is a date for my return to the States.  I’m going back to TN the 21st of February.  I am going back to rest up a bit and gather some materials to start some Health and Hygiene and Prenatal Health classes.  Of course that will take quite a while to get the materials and training I need.  I really don’t know how this will all work out, but I do know that it is a dream that is becoming a vision as time goes by.  Please pray that God would direct each step of the way, and that I do not try to do things in my own strength.  I hope to come back to Haiti sometime next fall, but I’m not sure when and where to.  God will open the way if that is His w ill for me.

God bless each one of you!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

You might wonder about what I mean in the title till you remember I work in a clinic.  Last Thursday I was sitting in my room getting ready to write a post on here when I heard my fellow nurse, Breanna, being called to go check out the crowd that carried someone into clinic.   She radioed back that the person was unconscious, and me being nosy and wanting to be around if she needed help, went over.  The older man was lying there snoring rather loudly, and couldn’t be wakened.  I asked for the story and a man stepped forward out of the crowd of about 50 jabbering people.  Apparently the unconscious man was working with him in the field this morning, and started to “dekonpoze” or feel faint, and then he passed out.  I think the Creole word for fainting is kind of funny, it is very close to and also means to decompose.  Back to my story, I asked if he had eaten anything that morning?  ”No, but he drank some ‘alkol’ ”  There I had it!  He was hypoglycemic.  Not eating, drinking something alcoholic…. sure enough, the blood sugar test read Low.  I helped Breanna put him on an IV of  dextrose, we put some glucose in his cheeks, and within 15 minutes he had come round and was trying to figure out what had happened.  But what does this have to do with a broken head?  His friends in their concerned rush to the clinic, made a bamboo stretcher to carry him with.  For whatever reason, it broke on the way in, and spilled the poor man onto the rocks giving him a nice 1″ cut above his eye.  So after he recovered from his low blood sugar attack, I had to stitch him up.  He really was a nice old man, and when I asked him if he was ready for me to stitch his head, he answered, “yes, if you please”.  We fixed him up, and the crowd left with him to take him home.

No more than 10 minutes later another crowd came in, this time with a little boy who was unconscious.  He had been kicked in the head by a mule.  His mom passed their house leading the mule and he ran out after them unbeknownst to her.  The little tyke had a great lump on his head, but it really wasn’t bleeding. What concerned us was that he went unresponsive 30 minutes after being kicked, not right away.  So Michael sat with him for the next 30 minutes, and checked on him throughout the night, rousing him and keeping an eye on his pupils and the other ” increased brain pressure” indicators.  (Don’t laugh if you are medical and this sounds funny, tell me a better way to say it.)  By the next morning he was fine, walking, talking, a normal 4-year-old.

Yesterday, Sunday, I was on call.  We had just got home from church, and were getting ready to eat lunch when Breanna and I were called to clinic.  I was immediately wondering what I would find since we were both called at once.  There sat a 10-year-old boy with a cloth wrapped around his head.  Great, another head injury!  He couldn’t remember what had happened, and the man who was with him was hyper and didn’t know much.  I found out later he didn’t even know the boy’s name, I honestly don’t know how he was connected to him.  The most I could gather was that he fell onto a rock, and his shoulder and arm were bruised and scraped as well.  The wound was a crush cut, and the boy’s thick hair was way down in the cut.  It took a lot of careful picking and trimming of the pulverized flesh and hair before the wound was ready to be stitched.  I didn’t know if I would ever get done cleaning it out;  this was the first really messy cut I have had to clean up.  But with Breanna’s good help, we got done, and wrapped up his head.  I kept him over night to make sure he was ok, he had come from an hours walk away and I didn’t feel right about sending him home immediately.  His mom came, and spent the night with him, and the hyper man left.

Then, the smile of the week–Friday night we had a birth.  Just after the baby was born we were suctioning it’s nose and mouth, hadn’t even cut the cord yet, when I heard “Mis, Mis”.  I looked up, and the aunt motioned toward the baby then squeezed her own cheeks between two fingers.  I immediately understood, and very deliberately reached down and gave the baby girl dimples.  Yes, the Haitians believe that if you squeeze the baby’s cheeks just after it is born, you can give it dimples.  I haven’t ever been asked to do that before, but it sure made me smile!

The joy of the Lord is my STRENGTH!  How true that is, if I could only continue in the joy of the Lord the whole time.  I look at circumstances and myself way too much and thus miss His joy, and it only follows that I have no strength.  God help me to keep my gaze on HIM and His goodness and holiness!

This past week has been very good in several areas.  There has been a revival in the hearts of some of us here on the compound, mine included, and all the glory goes to God.  Nothing really bad was happening, but you know how bad attitudes and spiritual depression can set in without you even noticing.  But praise God, He has opened our eyes and we are once again gazing on His beauty!  It changes life!

Also, if you have read any of the clinic blog for GTH, you probably know of “the foot lady”.  She has been coming every day for a year now to get her foot bandaged, and it is almost totally healed now.  Yesterday in church, she repented of turning away from God some time back.  She said she used to know God,  then she left Him, and now He has brought her back!  Glory to His name!  She has His joy in her face now.

Then, last night, we had a young couple come in for the birth of their child.   A year ago, on Dec. 4 (a Sunday as well), they had come into clinic for the birth of their first child.  The little girl never breathed well, and died after 48 hours.  God used the death of that little baby turn the life of her father around.  The couple had gotten pregnant before marriage, and during the pregnancy, the girl gave her life to God.  The young man however, was rebellious and very troubled.  God opened his eyes through that hard time, and they have both been growing in the Lord, one of the few godly young couples in this area.  We were all praying very hard that this birth would go well and that the baby would be healthy.  Imagine our joy when the beautiful baby cried!  We all laughed!  It was almost too good to be true.  And, to top it all off, it was another little girl!  In this case it is – ”the Lord takes away, and the Lord GIVES, blessed be the name of the Lord”.  You can’t replace a child, but it is more than coincidental that this little one was a girl too, born a year after the loss of the first one.  She is so very beautiful, more so than most newborns, and I don’t think it is prejudice.  Here, you take a look and see what you think…

Her happy daddy, with Michael taking a picture.

Our very happy crowd!

Pray for this couple as they raise their little girl for Him.  God bless you all!