“ Everybody has to change, or they expire. Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons.
I want to keep my soul fertile for the changes, so things keep getting born in me, so things keep dying when it is time for things to die. I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently.
Only the good stories have the characters different at the end than they were at the beginning. And the closest thing I can liken life to is a book, the way it stretches out on paper, page after page, as if to trick the mind into thinking it isn’t all happening at once.”
(Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts)
It is incredibly hard for me to even attempt to describe what the last few days were like, because it is all jumbled up in my own mind, swimming around like so many different stories that are all part of one event. There are so many different lessons to take from the same 72 hours of existence that I could write many versions of it, in the way there are four gospels that are all different and all true. I have been re-reading one of my favorite books, Through Painted Deserts by Donald Miller and every word of it seems to be about what I’m going through, even though it’s really about a young man traveling in a crappy van across the US like a vagabond. You should read it right now and think of me while you’re doing it, but think about you too because it’s true for all of us. But I digress.
The Start
One of the hardest parts of coming to Haiti was not having exact plans laid for what I would be doing while I am here. The spiritual discipline of being without plans is something I will probably write more about another time, but for now I just want you to know that God showed incredible faithfulness towards me in leading me to the hospital where I am volunteering here in Haiti. Seriously, every email I sent and received was a prayer answered, which makes me wonder how much the Lord does to lead and direct my life everyday that I totally miss out on because I’m busy making my own plans. But on Thursday when I was riding into the city with Daniel I was nervous and excited because I knew the Lord had led and directed me to this hospital, where I would be working with American volunteers and Haitian staff, where I would be working in the Pediatric unit, where they know I am a new nurse who doesn’t know anything and they still want to have me there and teach me and use me.
On Thursday I met some great people that I will work with and I got the grand tour of the hospital and saw all of the crazy awesome things they do there. I got to hang out with the American nurses in the Peds unit and start to learn how things work, where things are. The unit is basically one big room with a nurse’s desk, supplies stashed in different drawers and shelves, four cribs on one end making up the PICU area, two cribs and four beds making up the regular peds area, and another small room attached to the end that has four isolettes and makes up the NICU. All the charts are paper and since the patients are cared for by Haitians and Americans they are written in both English and French. I used to think it was a challenge to interpret doctor’s handwritten orders, because they are usually messy. The real challenge is when they are messy and in French. I was only at the hospital for part of the day on Thurs and so I worked with an American nurse and helped with her patients and asked a thousand questions about where to find things and how to do things. It was a good day and I left that afternoon with Daniel feeling more excited and less nervous about working there. I knew I would learn a lot and there were people there to help me.
On Thursday I talked with the nurse that coordinates the unit about when she would want me there to work. As you probably know, we had a bit of an ominous weather forecast for the weekend, and she asked me how I would feel about maybe coming and staying at the hospital for the weekend to work Friday and Saturday. They were worried that with the tropical storm the Haitian staff wouldn’t be able to make it in and they would be short staffed. I was a little freaked out about jumping straight into working back to back 12-hour shifts at a time they were short-staffed and staying overnight at the hospital. (They have really nice bunkhouses for volunteers, because typically the American volunteers come in for a couple of weeks and stay there then leave, rather than live in Haiti like me.) I prayed about it and just felt like it was a leap of faith I should take.
For such a time as this…
(I am struggling to get all of these thoughts down that are swirling around in my head and my heart and reading Donald Miller doesn’t help because he writes like a poet and makes me think like a poet and wonder at God even more, which doesn’t make it any easier to just say things. The power is out and so were our batteries all day, so I spent the day unable to type, just thinking more and more about how to say all of this. I still don’t know…)
At some point I will describe everything about the hospital and what I am doing in more detail. The details are even fuzzy to me right now as I think about all of the ways God showed up.
Friday morning Daniel dropped me off at the hospital with my bag and my pillow. I spent most of the morning working with the same American nurse who was so kind and helpful the day before. We had five patients and in just a few hours I saw and did more than I did in dozens of clinical days in school. We held a baby for a lumbar puncture in the morning, I saw and held and loved on babies with spina bifida, hydrocephalus, developmental abnormalities, meningitis. I was scraping the bottom of my brain for every single cell that knew anything about nursing and just realizing how few it seemed like there were. Every minute was humbling, but everyone was so helpful and kind. The nurse I was working with was pulled away for a long time midday to help with a baby in the ER, so I just kept doing what I knew how and tried not to panic. It was exhausting. I didn’t eat a bite of food until 4pm. By shift change at 6 I was poured out.
It was scary. But I felt honored, blessed, unprepared, and totally in need of the Lord every minute.
I slept through the worst of the storm, I think, and on Saturday it rained constantly but not hard. We were short staff and the American nurses who I had been working with were pulled away by a child that was brought into the ER the night before. I went into the unit and one of the Haitian nurses handed me four charts and pointed to four tiny babies. I tried to keep breathing. I tried to remind myself that I am a real nurse and I’ve managed a full load of patients before and that I can do this, I can do this, I can do this, but still my feet went kind of numb and my brain was kind of fuzzy. I pulled myself together and got organized, read my charts (sort of, they are in French, remember), made my notes and got to work. One of the American nurses came through and answered all my questions and reassured me. On Saturday I learned what it means to pray without ceasing. Please Jesus, keep all my babies alive. I did assessments, I held my babies, I fed my babies, I gave them meds, I prayed, I prayed, I prayed and I kept them all alive.
God my Helper-
With babies, little babies, all they can do is eat and sleep and poop. And when you’re a tiny person eating, sleeping, pooping, growing, breathing, is quite the task. With sick babies, it can be hard to know if the little eaters-sleepers-poopers are okay, so we strap little probes on their little bodies to tell us if their blood has enough oxygen to power their little bodies and brains to keep them eating, sleeping, and pooping. On Saturday, three of my four babies had SPO2 monitors on, and when you’re a new nurse who only knows enough to know that you don’t know anything about babies- every time an alarm goes off on one of the monitors you can’t breathe. You hold your breath and look over and think “please Jesus,” and always the baby is fine and the alarms stop and your heart starts beating again.
One of my babies was a preemie who was born with some physical and developmental abnormalities. I love that little baby. So tiny, only a few pounds, but breathing okay and getting tube feedings and living. Later in the afternoon, he started crying and his monitor started alarming. I fed him, changed his diaper, held, comforted, removed and reapplied the monitor, turned it off and on and still he cried, still the alarm sounded, and still I could not breathe. I was about to go find another nurse, I was completely at my wits end, and I prayed. Please, please Jesus, I don’t know what to do, but I can’t breathe, and I can’t make him stop crying, and I just need him to stop and breathe and the alarm to stop going off so I can breathe too, please Jesus please I just need him to be okay. Please, please, I need him to be okay right now. I closed my eyes, please, please Jesus, I have nothing. Please, I need you to do this. Please help him.
And he stopped crying. And he breathed. And the alarm stopped. And I breathed. And I praised the Good Lord. The Lord of infinite mercy. Who loves that tiny baby and who loves me. I have never been in that place before. Of needing the Lord so acutely and Him answering right there in the moment. The baby was fine. He breathed. I breathed. Jesus did it completely. I had nothing and He was faithful to me. I will never forget his faithfulness to me in that moment.
Changed
I feel changed. I feel like I experienced God in a way I never have before. I feel like things are dying and being born in my heart. That I am learning to need God like never before and finding I don’t need things I thought I needed. That things which seemed so important before seem less important, and true things seem more true. Hard to imagine three days making you a different person. I feel like I drew deeper, closer into the Lord and I don’t ever want to move away. Maybe this was just the start of change, just the seeds. I just know it is good.
In three days I saw the most real, crushing brokenness I have ever experienced. I saw it with my eyes, held it in my hands, felt it in my soul. And I prayed, and prayed, and prayed. And I felt peace like I have never felt before. I had a song in my heart at all times. I felt the presence of the Lord always with me. I felt unfathomably blessed at all times. I cannot understand the things I saw. I will never know why a baby is born with no hands and a brain that will never be smart. I will never know why a beautiful child can have their body torn apart in an accident. But I felt such love for them. I love those babies. And peace. Peace which passes understanding. Because all I can do is trust the Creator. I don’t know how anyone can live in this brokenness and not know Him.
This is what it means to rejoice at all times. I didn’t know it was possible to experience the hardest of hard things and feel this kind of peace, to have a song in my heart all the time. I feel like this country is giving me a deeper experience of beauty. Like my eyes are being opened. Like I am finding what is true in life. Like it is removing a layer of all the crap we think life is about sometimes. The things we pretend are important that are really just lies. I feel those things dying in me and I hope they are really dead. I hope this new thing being born in me is real and forever. This new reality of oneness with God. Of standing in wonder with a worshipping heart and knowing that this is what life is really about. About feeling the crushing terrible things and astoundingly beautiful things, knowing it is all full of the Creator. I am so thankful I can’t even begin to say.
Pray:
Pray for our knowing Kreyol. Pray for my heart-change to be forever and contagious. Pray for broken babies born into a broken world, in a country where different is outcast and downtrodden. Pray for people who lost whatever scrap of tent they lived in before the storm hit. Pray for Jesus to come and make everything right.
