Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Haiti Update

Day 3 (Monday):

We wake up around 5:30am everyday to be ready for coffee and oatmeal at 6:30am. For all of our meals we gather on the upstairs patio area under the mango tree - it's such a great way to start and end each day.  This morning we watched all of the younger kids get their uniforms on & get ready for school. And we brought our devices and showed them the internet & play music videos, and within seconds you'd have 15 kids climbing all over you because they wanted to see - it was so cute!!  The rest of the day consisted of splitting the team up in half (morning and afternoon shifts) to go visit another orphanage in town.  The orphanage takes in malnourished babies, toddlers, and sick women & men. We spent a couple of hours just holding & feeding the babies, and then playing with some of the toddlers.  They reach up and reach out so that you will pick them up; they are so starved for human touch & affection - it just breaks your heart.  Leaving was the hardest part because the minute they sensed us leaving & separating from them, the entire room started crying/screaming.  So that made us realize what a calming effect our presence had on them the entire time we were there.

When we returned to our orphanage, the girls on our team took a bunch of gifts (e.g. Hair clips, ribbons, bracelets, bubbles etc) over to the girls side of the orphanage and it was like Santa Clause arrived in Haiti - holy cow!  We must have had 50 little girls clammoring and screaming at us!  It put huge smiles on their faces, and it put huge smiles on our hearts. :-)

The other part of our day that really affected a lot of us was the walk into and around the town of Hinche.  A few of us have been to other poor countries, but we have never seen anything close to what we saw today...it's almost hard to put into words.  It was so surreal, and some of us commented that we felt like we must be on a movie set (because it didn't seem real) & that we felt like we had stepped back in time.  People were sewing on machines that looked like they were 50 yrs old, people pulling wooden carts with wooden wheels, women balancing stuff on their heads.  It was hot & humid and the air around us stunk, everything was so muddy & dirty, and the people are sitting on the ground or in their stalls trying to sell you stuff.  

At the end of they day we are hot, sweaty, tired, and we don't have much electricity or water supply here, so we don't really get to get cleaned up much.  But the team doesn't seem to mind because our days are so rewarding and so fulfilling, and we're enjoying adapting to the Haitian culture.

Praise God for this amazing experience!!

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