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Sunday, May 12, 2013

May 12, 2013 Fond Parisien, Haiti

Doug-
This evening finds me on the porch of the guest apartment at Haitian Christian Mission on the second day of a mission trip. This one isn't exactly a Ke Nou trip, it's led by Guesly Dessieux and is in conjunction with Corban University. Corban is a small Christian college in Oregon. Seventeen undergraduate health careers students are with 6 providers and 6 nurses for this trip.
Yesterday was for flying and unpacking, and not sleeping. The Oregon group started flying on Friday.
Today the team split into two groups each attending a different church and holding clinic in that church afterwards. My group went to the same church I wrote about in "Ghosts of Port-au-Prince" .
The church looks the same, 3 walls, still, 18 months later and nothing more rebuilt.
The ghosts feel like they are gone, though.
I don't know if it's like this with many disasters, but Port au Prince seems eager to put the earthquake behind them.  No one here talks about it much, although it's almost all anyone in the US knows about Haiti. It's good, I think, the moving past.
My fear, though is that Haiti, despite all its effort to rebuild, will again be caught off guard by the next disaster.
Church today was long. Not America long, Haiti long. 3 and a half hours. In Creole. I struggle to keep track of what's going on, thinking, at 2 hours in "That's a lot of reading and introductions, but was any of that a sermon?" Just then, Sabine leans over and whispers to me "he hasn't even begun to preach yet" And then he did. It was loud. It was passionate. It was 90 minutes. A confession: I struggle to stay awake in English services when I am actually following and interested in the preaching and I am not sleep deprived
Then clinic. I love the buzz and chaos and eagerness of the Haitian patients. This is an easy clinic. The kids are healthy, minor colds, allergies and scabies. The kids are shy and charming and peak in timid Creole.
We see 97 patients in a smooth 3 hours.
We get home, eat and play soccer against the local schoolkids. They are confident. They say they will score 10 goals on us. They score 2. We score 6.  I am easily the slowest and least skilled payer out there.
All in all a great day in Haiti.