New Normal

New Normal

So crazy, but I’ve actually been in Haiti for six weeks now! It’s amazing how normal it seems now in a lot of ways. Not that things are becoming more commonplace. The more I know of Haiti the more I realize there really is nothing “commonplace” here. Even though I have established a bit of routine in going to and from work at the hospital, traveling down and up the mountain with Daniel, one of my favorite things about this place is that it seems delightfully new every day. Even though we travel the same route there are always new things to see. I feel like this country is bursting with life everywhere; people walking around, sitting on the sidewalk selling shoes or fruit or chickens, dogs wandering, cars weaving, each building painted different colors, made of different shapes, all of the bright things springing forth from among the trash and rubble and dirt. Each morning we get treated to the sunrise and see the city come to life in the growing light. Each afternoon we sit in traffic and get accosted by people wanting to wash the car and sell us a drink or a snack or windshield wipers or a cell phone charger. At the hospital, normal is doing vital signs and walking back and forth from pharmacy and feeding babies and changing diapers and giving medications and knowing all along that no two days will ever be the same.

I think my new normal is delighting in the newness of each day, celebrating the infinite tiny details that make life here so rich and trying to notice more of them each trip outside the walls of this house. My new normal is having open eyes- to the love letters from God that are all around me; to the people that are all so different and yet all an image of the same God; to the beauty and the pain, accepting both.

Teamwork

Work at the hospital was so good this week. I’m coming to know and really enjoy the people who are here every week, both American and Haitian staff. On top of that, the volunteers that were here this week were so awesome and fun. We had a lot of challenging patients this week, but when you are working with a stellar team it feels like you can handle anything that comes. We work so closely with everyone here- doctors, nurses, pharmacists, EMTs, physical therapy. Every afternoon I got to walk through the unit on rounds with the pediatricians, pedi nurses, and the CMO (who is a rockstar, by the way, and one of the coolest people to have running a hospital). I don’t feel like I’m just carrying out orders. I get to work closely with the whole healthcare team, I get to see the bigger picture for my patients’ care, and I am actively evaluating and conversing with the docs about what goes on through the day. This really is an amazing learning experience.

Fast and Slow

Tuesday we had to re-intubate a baby on a vent when their ET tube got clogged. He then needed a lumbar puncture. Another post-op patient was having some unstable vitals and kept us hopping. On Wednesday we had to coordinate sending one of our kids to another hospital to get registered for TB meds, then a kid came into the ER and got intubated, as well as a baby in septic shock who they coded and intubated, which sent us scrambling to discharge patients so we could have places for the new ones and gave us three kids on ventilators (insanity). I don’t think anyone sat down or slowed down for two seconds on Wednesday.

Thursday was chill. We were all exhausted. Nobody was on a vent anymore: two were extubated and doing well, one died in the night. All the patients decided to behave themselves and be status quo and stable. The nurse I worked with in the PICU this week (also a rockstar) brought out a giant bag of peanut M&Ms and sat them on the nurse’s desk. Party time! It has been over six weeks since I’ve had chocolate candy and that is far too long, my friends. I ate a disgraceful amount of them. One of the EMT guys bought some accra off the street (fried malanga- a potato/tuber-ish kind of vegetable- tastes kind of like a hush puppy) and brought it to share with us. We got to sit down sometimes. We cleaned and organized. It was glorious. When we did rounds the CMO kept saying, “thank God for a day like this.” Thanking God is exactly what we did. He knows us. He knows when we need a day to sit and eat M&Ms.  Nom nom nom, Hallelujah!

Reminder

Like I just said, Wednesday was a chaotic storm of insanity and I was all over the place trying to help people out as they received the new babies. In the afternoon I was down in the NICU helping one of the Haitian nurses by doing some gavage feedings while she was getting blood from the septic shock baby for labs. A clump of gentlemen were being given a tour around the hospital and came through the unit, ending up down in the NICU as well. I’m not exactly sure what group or organization the men were with. People are coming through all the time, since the hospital works with loads of other organizations and is great about showing them the work that we do there. The men came down the stairs and were about to walk out the door when one of the men said that he wanted to pray over the children. The group stopped and joined hands and someone prayed in Kreyol- over the children, the hospital, and us- the workers.

As much as the goodness of God knocks me over every day here, it is remarkably hard to take a pause in the middle of a busy day with never ending tasks. It’s amazing how, even when fighting to keep a baby alive, it is easy to feel too busy to call on the Lord. As if the tasks were saving the child, not it’s Maker. I was so thankful that when I was lost in the frenzy, someone came through and paused, unknowingly reminding me of my foremost duty to those kids- asking God for them. I needed the reminder. We all have days when we do. And other days we need to be the reminder for someone else. We are all one body after all. Let’s keep the body on its knees.


Praise- I feel awesome again! Thanks for praying!

Love yall! BTHO Arkansas! Whoop!

Do-over

Do-over

But You, O Lord, are a God full of compassion, and gracious, longsuffering and abundant in mercy and truth. Psalm 86:15

This week has been quite the opposite of last week in terms of chaos and busyness. I have been trying to recover from the sinus infection I obtained last week and therefore only went to the hospital one day. I was mistaken in thinking I was improved enough to go to work on Wednesday. There’s nothing like a commute down a significant change in elevation to show you just how much congestion is still in your head. My brain was in a bubble for several hours and it sounded like I was underwater when people talked to me all day. A curious sensation to say the least, and one that led me to re-evaluate my wellness and spend the rest of the week hammocking and reading Mere Christianity.

But it doesn’t take a week for the Lord to work and, little though I expected it, that one day at the hospital was enough for the Lord to show me even more of His goodness and mercy towards me. If you recall at the end of my post “Nursing Shortage” I talked about how I had failed to love on my patient’s moms in my stressful busyness. I had been particularly sad about my brusqueness towards the mom of the little boy who I cared for several days, the one we intubated on Friday. I was eager to see how he was doing. He was still there, so that in itself was a pleasant surprise. Heart still beating, lungs still filling and emptying. In fact, he had extubated himself- not exactly what you intend with someone who is supposed to be sedated, but it showed he was much stronger. I don’t know if his brain lesion was responding to any of the treatment. They have probably since done another CT scan to check, but I don’t know anything about it. I hope that I will see him next week and see evidence of answered prayers in his healing.

But God wanted to answer a different prayer of mine on Wednesday. He wanted to show me grace that I cannot deserve. When I was caring for the little boy his mom came over. I told her in Kreyol that he looked much better than last week. She lit up like a suburban house in a Christmas light competition. She agreed with me and commented on my being able to speak in Kreyol to her. I replied that I don’t know much but I’m learning (a statement that applies as much to the state of my soul as to my language ability). I went on to ask her how she was (okay), if she was tired (she was), how many kids she has (four), and whatever little questions I could muster. I helped her change his sheets. I smiled at her and she smiled back. Our interaction lasted for not even five minutes of the day.

I can hardly keep from crying even know as I think back on it days later. That I should be given the chance to try again where I had failed before. That I should have not only that chance, but the reward of that mom’s smile, of bringing her a moment of happiness, to show her love. I am so unworthy of the privilege, the great honor, of being the one to brighten her day. So undeserving of being a friend to her. It is such a beautiful and personal picture of God’s patience, his longsuffering towards me. His giving of a second chance, a do-over. There are infinite examples of this in each of our lives. Infinite gifts we are unworthy of. Infinite opportunities to discover the unending, unfailing, unfathomable love of God. But today I want to cherish this one. This one small moment in which God showed me He loves me enough to let me try again, to communicate that He will always let me try again, to try to be more like Him. In my Father’s heart there will always be room for one more do-over.

to dazzle us

I'm not a city-soul. I'm just not. My sanctuary is on my horse's back under the night sky, or toes in the sand, or rain on my face, or flower in my hand, or trees overhead, or ocean underneath. On Saturday we got out of the city. My soul breathed. We enjoyed fellowship and the best of God's creation.

 Here is a taste for you and some more thoughts from Donald Miller in Through Painted Deserts. I hope it refreshes your soul too.

“And maybe when a person doesn’t buy the lies anymore, when a human stops long  enough to realize the stuff people say to get us to part with our money often isn’t true, we can finally see the sunrise, smell the wetness in a Gulf Breeze, stand in awe at a downpour no less magnificent that a twenty-thousand-foot waterfall, ten square miles wide, wonder at the physics of a duck paddling itself across the surface of a pond, enjoy the reflection of the sun on the face of the moon, and know, This is what I was made to do. This is who I was made to be, that life is being given to me as a gift, that light is a metaphor, and God is doing these things to dazzle us.” 

“I wonder at what Paul said back in Portland, how God is good, how it doesn’t do any good to run from Him because what He has is good and who He is, is good. Even if I want to run, it isn’t really what I want—what I want is Him, even if I don’t believe it. If He made all this existence, you would think He would know what He is doing, and you would think He could be trusted. Everything I want is just Him, to get lost in Him, to feel His love and more and more of this dazzling that He does. I wonder at His beautiful system and how it feels better than anything I could choose or invent for myself.”

“Life is not a story about me, but it is being told to me, and I can be glad of that. I think that is the why of life and, in fact, the why of this ancient faith I am caught up in: to enjoy God. The stars were created to dazzle us, like a love letter; light itself is a metaphor, something that exists outside of time, made up of what seems like nothing, infinite in its power, something that can be experienced but not understood, like God. Relationships between men and women indicate something of the nature of God—that He is relational, that He feels love and loss. It’s all metaphor, and the story is about us; it’s about all of us who God made, and God himself, just enjoying each other.”

Nursing Shortage

Nursing Shortage

This week I stayed at the hospital from Monday morning until Friday afternoon. Both of the long-term American pediatric nurses that I have been working with were gone this week and there weren’t any nurses coming with the short-term team this week. It was trial-by-fire time, for sure. To contrast the lack of nursing power there were four American pediatricians here this week. That was awesome. It was an exhausting week, but one of the best learning experiences I’ve ever had. Instead of having another nurse to turn to, I had doctors always at hand. I followed them as they made their rounds and discussed the plan of care for each patient, they wrote orders and progress notes in my same language, and they were super friendly and willing to discuss patient care with me at any time. Since I was the only American nurse they came to me anytime they had a nursing question or needed something done for a patient, so I got to do everything under the sun. They had to jump in and help with nursing care several times, and it was crazy to me when they asked me how to do something. I couldn’t have asked for a nicer or more patient group of MDs to work with and I had a great time hanging out with them in our rare off times. We had a cook-out one night and went to the UN base to eat a couple nights. Other times we just sat and talked about how our perspective was being changed. I was deeply blessed by them.

Monday and Tuesday I was the third nurse on duty, which meant I had to take a full patient load myself since three nurses is the minimum needed to cover the unit. I’m getting more confident about managing patients myself. I make a plan in the morning, review all my charts and orders, make notes about what needs to be done, what meds need to be given, and I get to work. Monday I took care of four babies. Tuesday I had four 6-8 year olds. It was refreshing to have bigger kids that I could actually talk to after having babies so much of the time; although the term “talk to” in this case is very loosely applied, since I speak very little of their language.

Over my head

“It turns out the droplet of our knowledge is a bit lost in the ocean of our unknowing.” –Donald Miller

Wednesday I was the fourth nurse on, so I was the float nurse and didn’t take a patient load. I hoped it would be a chill day of feeding babies and running to pharmacy since I was pretty exhausted. That was so not the case. Around 10:00 a kid was brought in who was having almost continuous seizure activity. The vast majority of my focus and energy for the next three days was devoted to this three year old little boy.

That first day one of the MDs and I stayed at the bedside and tried everything we could to bring the little guy out of his seizures. I would give him some anti-seizure medication and we would watch him and wait. He would seize some more and I would give him more medication.  I gave him enough anti-seizure medications to knock out an elephant. We couldn’t take our eyes off of him, since we fully expected him to stop breathing at any moment from the drugs we were pumping into him. But still he kept seizing and still we gave him more medication. I carried his little body to CT scan, X-Ray, back to CT scan. I assisted the doctor in doing a lumbar puncture on him. The MDs identified a brain lesion that was causing the seizures, which looked infectious but could have several possible causes. By Wednesday evening he was not seizing and still breathing, so I sat down and breathed a little too.

Thursday I was a float nurse again, and once again I spent most of my time giving the little boy anti-seizure medication. The pediatrician team brainstormed possible causes of the brain lesion, because ultimately without fixing the cause of the seizures they won’t stop and the boy won’t live. We started treating him for a couple of different infections. It was hard to believe that only a few days before this had been a normal little kid- running, playing, laughing. We were starting to feel frustrated and discouraged that we couldn’t keep him out of his seizures, we couldn’t figure out the cause, we couldn’t fix him. The pediatricians were consulting other MDs, emailing neurologists in the States, we even had a neurosurgeon from the US come in this week who was consulted. It is amazing how one little kid can take a dozen doctor’s worth of brainpower and make it not seem very powerful at all. In all of our knowledge we know so little, are so little in control.

On Friday I was the third nurse again, so I had four patients, one of whom was the little boy. It was crazy from the very start. The boy was having seizures from the time I walked in, so instead of being able to slowly get my bearings and make my plan for the day I had to just jump straight into action. Then I discovered that the night nurse had missed several medications and let some IV fluids run out, so I was playing catch up right from the beginning. I cut my finger when I broke open a glass ampule, rushed to get caught up on medications, and felt my mental state become less and less composed.

Then the little boy started gasping. He had impressed us by continuing to breathe despite all the meds we had been giving him for days, so by all means it should have happened much sooner than it did, but mid-morning Friday the Peds team decided we would have to support the boy’s respiratory system with a ventilator. Knowing this would be far beyond my ability level, I recruited the CNO (chief nursing officer) for help, so the MDs would have a nurse helping who had a clue what they were doing. But I was still front row, hands on for the whole thing and I was scared out of my mind. “If I ever needed you Lord, it’s now.” For you lay persons, intubation involves completely sedating the patient, putting a tube in their trachea, and letting a machine breathe for them. Nursing folks- I’d like you to appreciate that here, in order to verify tube placement, I had to carry the intubated kid, while someone else walked along bagging him, another person carried the O2 tank, over to another building where the X-ray is, then parade back in the same manner. Just keep in mind to be thankful every time you call x-ray and they show up at your patient’s room and take the image right there in their bed.

Once the little boy was on the vent, we could increase the anti-seizure meds as much as needed to stop his seizures and keep him totally sedated. I successfully started a new IV on him, which was my first one on a little dark-skinned kid, so holla! When he was settled and stable on the vent I went to assess my other patients and make sure they were still okay. I literally turned around and looked at one of my other patients, post-op hydrocephalus kid, and he is having a seizure. You are freakin kidding me. So I draw up yet another dose of anti-seizure meds and as I’m giving them to him I say, “okay you, I can only handle one person having a crisis at a time, and it is NOT your turn!! So you better straighten up!” I’m happy to report that his talking-to had the desired effect and he was seizure-free for the rest of the day. It took the rest of the day just to catch up. I was stressed that I gave meds an hour late and didn’t change a diaper for far too many hours. I’m still learning to take things as they come, to not stress the little things. I’m learning that I can’t do it all and that’s okay.

Around 2:00 I was caught back up on all the tasks I had missed during the intubation excitement. The pediatricians practically pushed me out of the unit to go eat since I hadn’t had a morsel all day. Did I mention that I had a sinus infection and felt like crap this whole time? Somehow I made it through the day, through the week. I learned and did so much. I was poured out, all my energy, all my brainpower. And as I left the hospital Friday afternoon I was doubtful if the little boy I had worked so hard for was even going to make it. We give it all we have and it might not change anything. I prayed and prayed over that boy and didn’t see him get better. It’s a beat down. But ultimately it makes me have to cling to the Father even more. Because I can’t give any more or less than everything I have to give, and at the end of the day I just want His will to be done, whatever that means. I’m ready for Jesus to come back. I’m sick of babies dying. I hate babies dying.

Failing

Through the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning; Great is your faithfulness. –Lamentations 3:22-23

As I’m learning and doing more each day than I ever have before, it’s exciting to know I’m growing. I’m getting incredible experience. But I’m also realizing my shortcomings which, although difficult, I’m grateful for. This weekend I’m broken by the ways I failed this week. On Friday I was a stress ball. I was thrown in the way deep end and half drowning. During my flustered hyperactivity, patient’s moms would come up to me and ask for a diaper or ask me to address the malfunctioning AC unit. In my stress, several times I just waved them off and was totally unable to come up with a single kreyol word other than “later.” I was so rude to them. To these moms that spend 24-hours a day on a plastic chair next to their suffering, maybe dying kids. Not having time, not having composure, not having the language ability to be polite is no excuse for me. I feel rotten.

The mom of the little boy having seizures asked me to change his diaper all the time. Usually at the most inopportune times, too. Or she would change it herself, which would invariably cause him to have seizures since he was so hyperirritable. I found myself annoyed by her at times, and even waved her off once when I was doing something else and couldn’t think of how to tell her I couldn’t help her right then. I have a heavy heart when I think about that now. This lady traveled from three hours away. She has nowhere to go sleep, no ability to go check on her other kids, no ability to understand just how grave her son’s condition is. And most likely, her precious son is about to die. And even if just for a moment, I was rude and uncompassionate towards her. I want to be a good nurse. I want to be good at my skills and smart in my treatment. But more than anything I never want to be that person again. Before skills and knowledge, I want God’s love to come out of me. I want to be compassionate. I never want stress to get in the way of kindness. I know that I’ll probably fail at this again and again. I’m so thankful that I’m forgiven. I’ll never stop needing forgiveness.

Pray

Pray for my body. I’m recovered from the GI distress from a couple weeks ago, but since then I’ve had a small bout of food poisoning and now I have a sinus infection. I was pretty worn down last week. I’m going to take a few days to rest this week and hopefully recover from all that.

Pray for my babies. If there are happy, healthy babies and kids in your life, give thanks every moment. Pray for healing and health for my kids. Pray for Jesus to make everything new. Pray for the day to come when no more babies will die.

Pray for my growth, that I would be more like Jesus in my interactions. That I would show Christ’s love to my patients and their families. Pray for me to learn Kreyol so I can communicate love to Haitians and that boundary would be broken. Pray for me to be patient and forgiving towards myself.

I love y’all. Thanks for loving me.

Making Room and other stories

Floating
This week at the hospital I worked M-F, 630-4ish each day. There were several volunteers in Peds this week, so I was not given a full patient load so that I could be available to float and help out with the kids having surgery. There was a visiting pediatric surgeon here who did 2-3 procedures each day. So this week I did a lot of monitoring kiddos coming out of anesthesia. That looks something like this:

-Strap a bunch of monitors on the little body to make sure they are in fact bringing you a sedated child and not a dead one. Take vital signs. Record vital signs. The OR is a meat locker, so start defrosting the child.
-If necessary, apply an oxygen delivery device to the child’s face in some manner. Note: if the anesthesiologist tells you to put some O2 on the kid and it takes four people to hold the crazed munchkin down so you can even get the nasal cannula within 5 feet of their face- kid don’t need oxygen. They breathin just fine.
-Wait 15 minutes. Record vital signs. Wait 15 minutes. Record vital signs. Wait 15 minutes. Record vital signs. Wait 15 minutes. Record vital signs.
-In the meantime, make sure said crazed munchkin is closely supervised during the waking up period. The loopy little characters are prone to thrashing, which can easily lead to carefully placed tubes in their bodies getting ripped out. We put lots of tubes in children when they have procedures, down their nose, out their chest, in their vein, out their wound, out their, well, other stuff. Having any of the aforementioned tubes prematurely evicted by the little drunken looney toon leads to much gnashing of teeth and other unpleasantries on my part.
-Make sure nothing is leaking out of the child that should be staying in. Make sure things start coming out that are supposed to come out.

That is essentially the quick and dirty post-anesthesia care that I learned this week. The Lord took care of me and my kids. No one had any bad reactions or complications from their surgeries.


Dust
I saw my first dead body this week. And then another one a few days later. They were both small, newborn babies and I didn’t see or care for either of them while they were alive, so it was very unemotional. It was so strange to see their bodies laying there on the bed, waiting to be taken away to who knows where. They were so grey and dusky. You don’t really realize how much color our blood gives us until you see a body without it flowing through. Seeing a lifeless body makes me even more unable to understand how anyone can think this life is all there is. A body is such a vacant thing without its soul. From dust we came and that is really all that is left behind, dust.

We also had a baby born at the hospital this week. Which was actually a real surprise, since we don’t do labor and delivery there. I do love the birthday parties. It was good to see the beautiful, healthy baby girl, since we only get the really sick ones usually. It makes me realize even more how alive we are. The light behind our eyes. The warmth in our bodies. The breath in the lungs and the beating hearts. Life is beautiful. But there is SO MUCH MORE than this. Because whether you are hours or decades or a century on earth, still all that is left behind is dust.

Sometimes I long to know what heaven will be like. When we don’t need these fragile, weak, broken dust-bodies. When we are made new by the God who is making all things new. I’m a dancer, and when you’re a dancer everything in life really becomes a dance of sorts. And to me, heaven is dancing. Oh, how we’ll dance and dance. When I dance, here and now, in this fragile dust-body, I dream of heaven. And I almost touch it sometimes. Because one day, this body will just be a grey shell of dust too. And that is when I’ll be truly alive.


Making room
On Friday we had two emergencies come in. One was a premature baby brought from another hospital. As I mentioned earlier, our hospital doesn’t do labor and delivery. However, we have a pediatric unit and one of the only NICUs in the country. Most hospitals that deliver babies don’t have the ability to care for the babies. Welcome to Haiti. So what happens if someone has a baby at another hospital and it is premature or not thriving and needs further care, is the dad or aunt or someone takes the baby, wraps it up, and gets in the car, or tap-tap, or motorcycle and goes from hospital to hospital trying to find someone who will take the baby and care for it. If the hospital is full they will get turned away. As you can probably imagine, these babies don’t have great chances. But if they make it to us and we have a place to keep them, we will do all we can for them. We admitted the baby into our only open bed.

About an hour later someone steps into the unit and hands the doctor a newborn with a cleft palate that was brought in to see the doctor in the day clinic. “Something’s wrong,” they say. In this particular case, “something’s wrong” meant “not breathing.” Commence flurry of activity. Five nurses and a pediatrician can in fact somehow all fit around one tiny little body. Somebody doing chest compressions, somebody giving breaths with the ambu bag, somebody starting an IV, somebody giving epinephrine. I darted around grabbing supplies, mostly, after reaching over people to get the monitors on the baby. Did I mention that we just put the baby down on top of a cabinet in the unit that’s full of broken equipment because we didn’t have a bed? So all this excitement was happening in a very small space with people just climbing all over each other. You know, just to make it fun. Somehow we got the baby stabilized. Wow, God. Part of the problem was the baby’s blood sugar was next to nothing because it couldn’t eat. The best part is that it was seen at another hospital the day before and given vaccinations and just sent home like nothing was wrong, like this baby with no upper lip and no ability to eat in any way would be just fine. I don’t know if the baby will make it ultimately, but God was certainly looking out for it in that moment by getting it to us.

So recall that we didn’t have any open beds. None. And we needed to put the new baby somewhere. We did have one baby in the NICU who was ready to go home. He is now a whopping 3 ½ pounds and loves to eat. He is the cutest thing I have ever seen. He looks like he’s made out of chocolate and belongs in an Easter basket. I said I’d take him home with me, but they said no. His parents were coming to get him later on, but we needed the bed now. So our little friend got relocated to a small plastic laundry basket on the nurse’s desk. That’s right, laundry basket. Yep, that’s how we do.

Here is chocolate baby’s little hand on my pinky finger. Crazy freakin’ cute, right? But more than that, he’s a picture of life. Of overcoming. Because there are probably dozens of babies that die for every one that has a chance. Because he could have been another grey, dusky shell on the bed. But he lived. He got strong and got to move into a laundry basket on the nurse’s desk. He went home. We joked that he is going to be the future president of Haiti, because he’s such a tenacious little guy. It’s kids like him that remind me not to give up, to keep making room in my heart even if I have to use a laundry basket.


Pray:
Next week there aren’t enough volunteer nurses coming in, so I am going to stay at the hospital overnight so I can work full shifts Monday- Thursday and most of Friday. That’s a lot. Pray that I depend totally on the Lord for it and not myself. Pray that I have patience and peace. Please continue to pray for my body to be strong and healthy.
Pray for me in building relationships with the Haitian staff, I don’t feel like I have been doing a great job at it. It’s really tempting to spend all my energy getting to know the American volunteers that are only there for a week at a time, but I want to invest more in the people that are here all the time. A lot of them speak English so I have no excuse.
This is small, but I’m missing my people back home. Pray for comfort for my heart.

Love y'all. 

Haitian Style

So, I thought I'd share a few fun pictures from around the house, so you can enjoy some of the unique things that I appreciate about living in Haiti...

Well, in Haiti there is not actually enough power (electricity) for everyone to have it all the time... naturally. We are spoiled because we have back up power (aka- a little hut outside with about 16 car-sized batteries) for when the city power is out. City power comes and goes, but at our house is on more than not. 

Sometimes, like after the tropical storm, the batteries died before the city power came back (took about 4 days that time). So if need be, we can fire up the generator to re-charge the batteries. Generator=diesel guzzler so we try not to awaken the beast unless absolutely necessary. 

There is a little pink light downstairs that is only on when there is city or generator power. This is an important feature in our lives, because there are a few things the batteries cannot power, such as the water pump. So the little pink light on means we get to take showers!! See how excited that makes us!!

The green monster in the background is the generator. On a different note, doesn't the baby palm tree look like a truffula tree? The Lorax would have some harsh words for this country. Deforestation, tsk, tsk.

Laundry alters our view on life a little bit around here too....

We also find ourselves pitted in battle against new enemies... mosquitoes.

Fortunately this is the 21st century and we are way too advanced for measly old flyswatters. Say hello to the bug zapper. And trust me, we know how to use them. Look at those hunters. The mosquitoes shudder around here. 

We also hunt rats... but I can't pretend that is a uniquely Haitian pass time. Just ask my dad how many rats he has taken down with a pellet gun at my old barn. He used to go out there at night and hunt them with a flashlight held on top of his pellet gun sniper-style. I'm my father's daughter. 

Now I don't want you to think we hate all the creepy, crawly things. We do a lot of lizard hunting too. They get named, appreciated, sequestered in the tub of despair for a few days and lovingly set free. 

There are a lot of fun new things that come along with living in Haiti. There are hard things, too. But the good things are crazy good. On the other side of one of our walls there is a Haitian church and we get to listen to them singing hymns all the time. And we get a view like this. Haitian life is good.

Haitian life is good. 

Life is good.

We are blessed, all of us.

Pray:

Praise! I feel way better! At the end of last week/this weekend my insides decided to go all civil war on me. Glad that's over. Thanks for your prayers. 

I'm back in the hospital this week. Settling into going everyday. Trying to get a routine. There's not much that is "routine" about working there, so I guess pray for flexibility and a willing heart to accept whatever comes each day. 

Love y'all! Thanks for being on my team!!

Change

“ 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.