Haiti Days 2-5. Soooo Much To Do...Soooo Little Time To Process...

I feel like the past few days I've seen so much and I've tried to process so much that I just don't have it in me to write down anything...but I know if I don't I will forget it all, so I'll do my best to hit the high points...

First and most most importantly, we've had spaghetti for breakfast 2 out of the past 3 days. Rock on! Let me just recall a conversation overheard at breakfast on Monday.

Allison: This is so amazing (in a Southern Alabama accent). What is in this...butter? Parmesan cheese? Bacon?
Katie: ...and Magic and Love!

Monday was a day to assess a lot of things. We've been able to drive all around Jacmel and get a good assessment of the damage. It seems like the more places we go, the more damage there is. There is so much to be done in this city, but I'm learning to trust God...that he will make this city whole again in HIS time..."I learn to get by, on little victories." On a complete sidenote, I think it is AWESOME that they are rebuilding this city with the rubble left from the destruction. Many people have saved bricks to rebuild their homes. They've take the debris from crumbled homes and repaired the streets with it. Talk about making lemonade out of lemons. It's just a neat thought to think about...Anyway, on MOnday, we visited a school where I was able to speak to a few of the classes and read a childrens' book about how to cope after witnessing a terrible thing (Thanks Beth!). Their classrooms are so simple. Just a chalkboard, a few tables with kids crammed into them. A few had books but not all, and the kids seemed so excited to be there I couldn't help but think how much I could teach these kids with just a few more tools (well, that and how much the rest of the day is going to stink for the teacher because I know how disfunctional the kids get in my clasroom after a surprise in the morning). And how easy it would be for me to bring these things down when I return in June...

On Monday we also went to visit the new land where we are going to build a new church building, school, feeding center and hopefully one day an orphanage. It was a really beautiful pieceo f land...partially open, partially covered with these pretty trees that had brings pink flowers on them. In one direction the earth jutted upward into a small rocky mountain, and there was a clearing just beyond that. There was lots of room to expand. I spent most of the visit just walking the perimeter, exploring, praying, and picturing where my classroom would one day be :)

Not far beyond the new land was the site where some of the church members had started building a house for an older woman who was taking care of a 14 year old girl. Three walls of the house were almost complete when the earthquake hit, but the bricks and cement used were of poor quality and the entire structure needed to come down and be rebuilt. It was a pretty awesome experience working on that project most of the Tuesday morning. We made a video tape like Ty Pennington does on Extreme Home Makeover just before demo. Ayo got all crazy and announced the demolition before Ben and Shane just pretty much pushed a wall down. We did a lot of clearing away of the rubble. The work was hard and it was extremely hot but we made it fun. Jean Marie kept singing praise songs at the top of his lungs the whole time. Katie almost got attacked by a tarantula that was hiding out in a brick we cleared away. Basil and I both ran screaming. In the middle of the work day, we all decided to take a break. Katie climbed a tree to pick custard apples. I made a broom out of some twigs to make the dust removal a little easier.

A few of our team members have taken turns spending a morning woking with the Salvation Army clearing away rubble. Our new friend Caleb, who works with Mentor Leaders and has been hanging out with us most of the week has gotten us involved with them. Caleb is totally awesome! He's been here pretty much since right after the earthquake. He lives in a tent with a Haitian family...he call his his Haitian brother (also named Caleb) his twin. Haitian Caleb is apparently on the national Haitian soccer team. They are both pretty awesome to work with, and we have learned A LOT about the lay of the land down here...the dangers, the right way to go about things, etc from both of them. Anyway, on Tuesday, Josh who was working the Salvation Army project had taken a hammer to a pipe, which just happened to be full of sewage. As you can image, the pipe exploded all over him. Apparently, Haitian Caleb had just told him seconds before NOT to hit that pipe, but Josh misunderstood. I've seen pictures. Disgusting! That sewage has been festering in that pipe for over 2 months! He took it with great stride. The team rushed him to the beach so he could clean off. We've been making jokes about it since Tuesday. Instead of Superman, we are calling him Sewage man. Just think, that could have been somone Haitian persons' last poop before they passed in the earthquake. Sad but true. ON a side note, the team who worked the Salvation Army project on Tuesday found a body in the rubble. Not RH members, but the people they were working with. Just bones and clothing on a bed. Soooo sad. Back to the work days...The rest of us also got an opportunity to go to the beach after workiong on the house. It was absolutely beautiful. Katie, Alison and I jumpted in the water fully clothed. Walter our translator-cop (who is flippin awesome!) was our photographer. The beach was very rocky...totally OK for Haitians to run about on, but I spent the whole evening and next morning trying to dig a claw-looking sharp rock out of the heel of my foot which has made working hard labor ever since a little painful.

Nicholas is another guy we've met and spent quite a bit of time working with down here. He is with a group called Foreign Edge and has been working construction type work on several houses in the area. He's a young kid and he's been paired with an older couple, Polly and Nick who are really cool, but I think he is thankful for the younger company. Last night we were at a church event that lasted several hour. It was extremely dark by the time we were to head home. Nick's mode of transportation has been a motor bike, but as we were leaving, Pastor, Fedony and others were trying to convince him to ditch the bike and just ride home with us. We didn't understand until Caleb explained to us that since the earchquake there had been a lot of cocaine smuggling in the area. Not only were there a lot of "high" people around at night, but many white people had been attacked with machetti's because the Haitians automatically think that they had money. It was beginning to become more clear why we had Walter the translator-cop with us all the time. At one point earlier in the day, we had seen a mob of people at a gas station starting to break out in a riot. Apparently, Jacmel and Port-au-Prince had run out of gasoline. A small shipment had come in a riots were beginning to break out. We heard stories from PaP that there was a machetti fight for gas at one point. Crazy. We have been very thankful for Walter. He is like a renaissance man! He many not be a very good translator (his reponse to everything is "OK, No Problem"), but is our body guard, photographer, and a constant source of laughter with the wierd things he says. Walter is trainded in like 20 different types of self defense. He's always watching out for us...assessing the situation, giving instructions and making sure the job is done. He is very stoic ALL THE TIME. We've been trying for a few days not to get him to smile. Allison, Josh, C-Tine and I have been comparing EVERYTHING we do to the LOST island (look for a future blog post on this) and Walter is definitely our MR. ECHO! Anyway, Walter has been a personal body guard to me over the past few days. Apparently I've picked up not 1 but 2 Haitian stalkers. They live across the street from the hotel and come to the church sometimes. I've seen them each day, and the conversations they try to have with me are suspicious in nature. Rodrigue kicked them out of the hotel when they showed up on the roof one night. He said that he had had some problems with them. They waited for us to get back the second night and tried to make me stay downstairs to "talk" but Walter pulled out his Chuck Norris intimidation moves and saved me from that situation. Today, they wrote me a love letter and dropped it off at the church. Silly boy!

We've been able to spend a lot of time around the chuch and the Restore Haiti staff and kids. I got to help out wiht the feeding program both Monday and Wednesday, and every day since I"ve been here I've gotten to spend quite a bit of time with 2 of my sponsor kids and their mother. Mom has 3 kids...all from different fathers. The third sister is sponsored by Theresa. It has been absolutely amazing just being around them, watching their family dynamic. Theresa's girl (Lucia) is the helper. Saincia is the wild child...she's such a boy, always doing sports, always off doing her own thing...the adventurer...reminds me of me. Guvienson is the oldest and he is kind of the sentry. He's followed me and protected me. When he is with the other boys he just sits back and listens and jumps in when its important. I can tell he is very wise. He speaks a little English and knows French very well. He made me promise to learn French by the time I come back in June so we can communicate better. I guess I'm going to learn French well...I can't let the kid down. He told me I was his American mother. I almost cried! It feels almost natural the way this family has welcomed me into it. They hug me every time we pass. Mom has given me Mangos to take home with me to the hotel each night. It feels like family. It feels like home.

There is so much that I've seen here...so much to process through and I'm having a hard time doing so...not hard in a bad way, but just trying to reconcile these feelings of complete and utter heartbreak (from what I'm seeing geographically and structurally) and the feeling of home, comfort, peace, and love I am getting from my friends here, the people I am meeting, and the attitudes of all of those around me. I think it will probably be quite some time before I come to terms with what I've seen...quite some time before I can put any words that make sense to it. I am already starting to feel like "How on Earth will I be able to go home after this...to go home to all of the stupid junk going on with the State of Illinois, the education system, national politics, etc when I can stay here and actually make a difference. Haitian Caleb told us last night that there are so many people willing to throw money around and say here, do it yourself, but the fact that we are here willing to work, willing to give our time and ourselvese means so much more to them than anything else right now. And there are so few of us actually her in Jacmel doing it. It makes me just want to drop everything and stay here forever.

I know I'm going to think of a million more things I wanted to say the second I post this...but this is what you all get for now. I'll try to blog again tomorrow (but there just seems like so much to do...why sit in front of my computer when I can do something else...).

Joyful

Prayer Requests...

David is sick. I'm a little worried about him. He has been working like a horse the past 3 days and today he woke up fatigued and didn't even make it throught he morning before we brought him back to the hotel...he's been sleeping most of the day...and didn't eat lunch. Please pray for healing and Strength.

I'm in no way worried at all about our safety, but we have been hearing some stories about dangerous things going on around us. Pray for continued protections. Thank you God for putting people like the Calebs, Walter, and Nicholas in our lives during this trip who have given us some good advice and protection.

Pray for continued community among our group. We have such a GREAT group of people down here...so many different personalities and talents, but this trip just wouldn't be the same without each and every one of them. On the days when a few of us have been working at the Salvation Army, I've missed those team members so much! Pray for continued community.

Pray for my leadership/administrative abilities. I am such a reluctant leader (hence why I am the Jack Shepherd of the LOST island), expecially when it comes to leading people over the age of 14. Pray that God would give me confidence amidst the mixture of feelings I am experienceing while down here.

AND PRAY FOR HAITI!!!! Greater thing are yet to come to this country/city!!!!

The Earth Shook in Haiti Last Night...

The Earth shook in Haiti last night. After more than 24 hours of travel by car, plane, and motorbus, I arrived in Jacmel, settled into my home for the next week, only to be jolted out of a a sound sleep by an earthquake. I think I will probably have a lot of those under my belt by the time I leave here. We are seriously thinking of dragging our blankets to the roof tonight and sleeping up there for the rest of the week...One because the weather, while humid, it very nice here; but two because of these damn earthquakes!

Our journey wasn't completely disaster-free. Most of the team(C-Tine, David, Ben, Allison, Josh, Katie, Shane, Renee, Basil, Ayo and I) met in the Nashville airport at 4:30 am Saturday morning. Theresa got me squared away with all of my leadership duties and we were off. We had a 4 and half hour layover in Miami where we were to meet up with Pastor and 2 other team members (Deb from MN and Danelle from Buffalo). While there, we got the opportunity to talk with some really cool people who were also heading to Haiti. Most of them were relief workers of some sort. I talked to a couple of paramedics from the Dallas/Fort Worth TX area. Katie and Deb started to chat up a woman who turned out to be a former Prime Minister of Haiti! Crazy! Anyway, It became clear the Danelle might not make our flight because of the connection time so Pastor and I went to work on a contingency plan. After much work and pretty much sending Ben all over the Miami airport, it turned out that Danelle's bags made it on our flight, but Danelle did not. She would have to come on a flight in the morning. Again, thank God for Ben who volunteered to take that 6 hour round trip bus ride to and from Port-au-Prince to go collect her Sunday morning. I was too go since I am the "leader," but we ultimately decided that is wasn't safe.

On a side note, C-Tine, the Tinnius's and I are all big LOST fans and we had some really in-depth discussions about our theories of the show during our lay-over. On the flight from Miami to PaP, we decided Haiti was going to be our LOST island (and in reality, everything here is exactly like the show...scenery, eerieness, wierd things happening), and our team would be the cast of the show. They voted me as Jack since I am the reluctant leader of this trip. C-Tine is Kate. Josh and Alison are Sun and Jin...and the list goes on. More on that in future blog posts I'd imagine...

Port-au-Prince's airport was much different than last time. We not longer got to get out of the plane "presidential-style" and walk to the terminal. In fact, the terminal was damaged so they took us off the plane and loaded us immediately onto a bus that took us to a make-shift warehouse-type building. Customs was a breeze to get thrpugh, but then we were herded into a large area where the airline workes just came and dropped the baggage and it was a free-for-all to find your bags. Thank goodness our bags all had the same tags on to make them easily identifiable. We didn't encounter anyone trying to help us for money until were were ready to leave the airport. Then men at the gate didn't want to let us out until we paid them. Pastor, Jean Marie (a Jacmel native), and some other dude (more on him later) who had come to collect us broke bad on them and the finally let us through. We loaded up one bus completely with our luggage..we even had to rope some bags to the top which was concerning considering all of the twists and turns through the mountain we would be taking. All of our team members and the guys who had picked us up (15 in all) piled into another motorbus and began the 3 hour drive through PaP and over the mountain on the way to Jacmel.

The images in PaP are just as you have seen on TV. There are American military ships and a Mercy Hostpital Ship anchored in the bay. We drove past the Presidential Palace which is almost completely collapsed. Many of the streets are only wide enough to pass one car because debris is piled up in the road. In three seperate areas, I even got my first smell of death. Once by the palace, once near an area of completely collapsed buildings, and again near a cemetery. Definitely not a smell I want to encounter again. I will post pictures on facebook of some of the images from PaP...or at least steal some from C-Tine and Katie who are taking way more than I am The images are heart-wrenching, yet the people are resilient--just going about their daily lives more or less because they have to. The rest of the ride over the mountain was uneventful. It was almost familiar to me even though it is just 2 hours of winding road literally on the side of a mountain oin the last hours of daylight, but I could still pick out the familiar places...the place where the road had washed out during the hurricane in '08. The place where the mud slide stranded us for 4 hours on our last journey home. At one point, we must have come arcross the fault line of the earthquake (which did happen directly inbtween Jacmel and PaP). There was a place where it literally looked like the mountain was cut in TWO. It was eerie, but I never saw a more beautiful sight than when we rounded that last turn and could see the lights of Jacmel nestled next to the bay.

When we arrived at the Loving Light hotel, Rodrige greeted me with a big hug and his usual sweet-talk! We unloaded baggage, settled ourselves into our rooms and headed to the roof for dinner. Fedonay had a chicken and beef boullion prepared for us. There were a bunch of familiar faces waiting for us on the roof and it felt almost like coming home as they all welcomed us. As we ate dinner on the roof, Pastor introduced us to the "other" man who had come to pick us up from the airport. His name was Walter and he was a "security" man. Apparently, people had been stopping busses in Gonnaviase (A neighborhood on the souther bay in PaP) and demanding money from the occupants. Pastor thought it best that we have an "escort" for our time here in Haiti. Since this announcement, we have been referring to Walter as a "translator" (picture me doing air quotes).

After dinner and prayer, I headed downstairs to take a much needed cold shower (because that's all we have) and go to bed, only to be jolted away by an earthquake sometime in the early hours of the morning. I had taken my anti-malaria pill at dinner which in the past has caused me to have "vivid" dreams. I thought maybe this was one of them because Christine didn't wake up for it, but I pinched myself, and the dogs outside started going crazy so I knew it was real. I didn't sleep much the rest of the night. When I woke up for breakfast, everyone was talking about the quake in the morning. What a way to start our trip.

Sunday morning began for me on the roof bymyself, reading through some CS Lewis and praying. The streets here in Jacmel aren't as populated as they used to be. Somthing like 70% of the city was leveled and most of the buildings around the hotel are marked with the very familiar circle with a dot inside which means the building is unsafe to go in to. In between the car horns and motor bikes passing by, I could hear people singing praises to God in the background towards the river. It was an awesome sound to hear.

Breakfast was french toast. I was hoping for spagetti for breakfast, but not today. I put in a good word with Rodrigue so maybe tomorrow. After, we all piled into the tap-tap (And YES, Gerard, is our driver again! So excited to see him and sing my tap-tap song about him every time we go somewhere now) and headed for church. Again, driving though Jacmel in the daylight reveald a lot of destruction that we were not able to see in the darkness the night before. Many many building here are inhabitable and there are many people living in make-shift tents and outside.

Church was much the same as usual except for the fact that the soccer field in front of the church building (the one where I got my awesome injuries last summer) are not covered with tents that are serving as several families homes. Childrens' church was so much fun. Sooo many familiar faces of kids, and so many of them have grown so much since the last I saw them. James in practically a little man. Jemica is talking now and has just as much personality as ever! And I even found Saincia...one of my sponsor kids. She was unsure if I remembered her at first, but when I waved at her from across the tent, she ran up to me and gave me a huge hug and kiss. Myt heart lept! I can't wait to spend more time with her as the week goes on. Her English has gotten so much better since she started going to school again! Alison and Josh came up with a great Palm Sunday skit. We gave all of the kids palms made out of construction paper and we reinacted the story of Jesus entering Jarusalem and later sang praises to Jesus waiving them in the air. It was kind of strange because all of the kids seemed to know who I was. I wonder if Pastor had shown them a picture or something because I can't imagine they remember my face from almost a year and a half ago. Many of them kept pointing to me and when we finally sat down for songs and prayer, about a million of the little ones all came and piled themselves on top of me, fighting to sit on my lap and/or just snuggle up next to me. I had forgotten how much they just want to be touched. After, the adult church service lasted about 4 hours (which is short), the team introduced themselves, and we worshipped with the people. After we visited with people from the community and had lunch. Lunch was (of all things) hot dogs, fried plantains and coke.

Now we are back at the hotel for an afternoon off. Some of us took naps. Most of us are on the roof now, playing cards, Josh is flying a kite, a few of the Haitian teenage boys are hanging out with us practicing their English, and I am blogging. Ben and Danelle just arrived which is a huge worry off of our shoulders. There is another church event tonight...and tomorrow we have a long day of work which will include rebuilding a wall to the church, and visitng some land we will be purchasing for the furture sight of our new school! Yay! Hopefully, I can get a good night sleep...no more earthquakes! But yes, the earth is shaking in Haiti...in more ways than one. Greater things are yet to come for this country, for sure!

I'll write more soon...

<3 Joyful

ps. Andrea and Barb...I delivered your gifts to Ezekial and Michael today. The rest will go soon...

pss. I'm learning Creole fast...theblogspot website is all in Creole and I can't figure out how to change it back to English! AHHHHH!

Euro Trip Summer '09

So I never blogged about the end of my Euro Trip after getting Swine Flu in Rome. Let's chalk it up to "what happens in Europe, stays in Europe." :)