And they just kept coming - all 140ish of them!

After being in Haiti for 6 days, I’ve learned a lot. I’ve been exposed to the Haitian culture. Sweating is the national pastime. Noah

Noah is willing to do anything - here he is putting our nametags together.

Coming back here after 16 years with Noah has been a pivotal experience for me.  The sights, smells, sounds, that were our world, when Noah was only 4 months old, once again envelope us.  Creole words swirl around us.  This time, I know these words, they are not completely foreign and I love that I can communicate, even joke with Haitians, in their language.  We are working hard…seeing 120 patients + per clinic day.  It has been a stretch for us nurses to adapt to nurse practitioner-like roles, but we have a very fantastic physician in Antoinette, that makes the transition less painful.  Our team is excellent, I am so impressed by their attitudes and servant hearted ways.  This has been a God- orchestrated experience…the best kind…not without frustrations and physical demands that tax us, but when you know it is where God wants you, there is no other place to be but at the center of His will.  Noah and Mignon are our two teenagers and they are an encouragement to the rest of us as they work hard right alongside us-what a blessing they are!  I will speak for Jeanette, who says she can’t count to 90.  Perplexing comment, eh?  Nightly, we count out pills with our wonderful pharmacist coaching us and you’d be surprized how hard it is to count the 90 pills out, especially when our more mischevious team mates try to throw us off our counts just for fun.  Noah is keeping his comments to a bare minimum as you can see.  He is taking it all in stride, he has Gord and Dallas and Doug as his roomates, so I hear from them that he asks some tough questions at night after he has tried to process all he sees here. 

Well, that is all for our contribution to this blog..Stay tuned for more team input.  Bondye bene ou. (God bless you)  And a special hug and kiss to Dan and Ben.  Tannis

Well I think it is time that I had a little say – I hardly know where to begin – Moving into the new clinic has been such a privilege. We had a pretty chaotic day on the first day but after putting a few heads together and discussing the situation we made some changes and what a difference it made. On Tuesday morning I overheard the Haitian translators having a very animated meeting with Marc Eddy and they were not a happy crew. However after the day on Tuesday, they were all happy as the day went amazingly smooth.  Drs Francelot and Dr Jacob, our Haitian doctors have been helping out as they could and we are working at mentoring as many Haitians as we can from the registration and medical records area, lab, footcare and clinic rooms.  I am going to post some photos of the clinic rooms as they have been set up. The container with furnishings for the clinic is still waiting at Port au Prince and so we don’t want to make any major changes so we are always improvising.

This baby is the same age as my little grand daughter.

Our counselling room, supply room and flip flops

First row waiting for blood pressure, weights and deworming pill
and second row is patients waiting to get into a clinic room.

Clinic room

Another clinic room.

 Well it is late and I will post this and get some rest.  Sharon