Dear friends, I made it! We had the last day at the clinic today and i think we finished up! By that, i mean that we finished what we could.
Half an hour after we came in, the monsoon started and it is lightening and thundering hard. It was loudly exclaimed that thank goodness that we made it back in time. That treck would be impossibly slippery in a drizzle, let alone a storm.
Today is Willem’s birthday, so there will be some celebrating, but Im sure a wrap up of the clinic business and packing for our early morning farewell is in order.
In thinking about what I am taking away from this trip, besides the humbling acknowledgement that the talents of this medical team really can make a difference in lives, is that I believe I understand what this trip is all about for me.
Quite surprisingly, I find that this understanding mirrors my personality. I have always been able to take tasks, no matter how complex or difficult, and break them down into small pieces. If I can just pick off piece by piece – not necessarily in order, I can usually get the task done. I am not saying that everyone should have that character attribute – come to think of it if everyone were as slow as I am nothing would ever get done. However when faced with adversity or perceived giant tasks in my life, i have just put my head down and taken those small, not necessarily in the right direction, steps toward the given task or problem. This trip was not that difficult, but sometimes the trek up and down the mountain seemed that way, and was a great metaphor.
This trip wasn’t that difficult, the task at hand here in Haiti is. The beautiful smiles on the children do not foretell their difficult future. The poverty is breathless, there are no jobs, there is little industry, even the tourism that was growing was decimated by the earthquake, Fourteen is the most common age of pregnancy, Even if fully educated, Haitians are hardly sought out for scholarships abroad, and the unemployment rate of 20-30 year old males is a staggering 80 percent.
I think Little-by-Little’s charge is taking a large task like the health care of a small area, and improving it child-by-child, mother-by-mother, and others, visit-by-visit. What grew from one Nurse Practitioner’s desire to do what she could, has now grown to over one hundred health care providers broken up into four week-long intense clinics a year. No one on these trips expects that he or she will save Haiti, But by doing what we can, we are chipping away at a task. This type of aid and medicine is not about curing diseases or hoping you might be saving the next President of Haiti’s life, this is just making them better when they leave the clinic. This is not a bad thing or something to be discouraged about, it is a Little step that we can all be proud that we accomplished with the knowledge that we are chipping away at a major challenge, Little-by-Little
We are all humbled by our service here.
This is it from Haiti. I will recap the trip on a later blog, and might change/moderate my take – aways from Haiti as time digests my thoughts.
Sent from my iPad
