Parker is great. He is a little boy who has some challenges and has been through a lot but these past couple of weeks he has been more just a little boy.He is increasingly steady on his feet and he is very happy to hold both my hands and walk down down the long red-carpeted hallway in our apartment. I have learned it is better that I walk backwards with him coming toward me. If I walk behind him he throws his head to the rear with an arched back so that he can see me and he laughs deeply at my upside-down appearance.
His speech and hearing seem to be progressing as well. While he had mainly focused on vowels for the past several months, he has now started with some consonants. Notably he seems to be trying to pronounce his name as he will often be heard saying "aka". He also appears to be using a couple of new signs including one similar to mother where he puts his index finger to his chin. The actual sign is to take your open hand with your fingers spread wide and place the thumb on your chin but it is a start.
He is an incredibly curious boy whose favorite recent hobby seems to be removing all items from any shelf, drawer or other receptacle that he encounters. His sisters have decided that they don't appreciate this and try and lock him out of their rooms and we have had to better manage bookshelves with low-hanging articles closely.
He is a very healthy eater and follows closely after his sister, Axelle, and his father in terms of meat consumption. He continues to smack his lips happily and click his tongue to show that he appreciates his meals.
He is completely weaned of Urbanyl and we are going in for an EEG soon to see if there continue to be signs of cerebral instability but so far no visible signs have presented.
Renee asked me yesterday when I started to feel that things were "ok". I felt they were ok around Christmas, she started feeling that in the last week. Not to say things don't remain in terms of logistical challenges and everything is perfect, it just feels more manageable and somehow peaceful like there are other priorities that could be more important for us right now. It is a good feeling.
One thing that has pre-occupied us recently is the devastation in Haiti. Renee touched briefly on this in a previous blog but it is something that has effected me fairly deeply and is difficult to transmit fully the level of concern I have. I was 19 when I went to Haiti; part of the semi-obligatory missionary service required in our church and some of the most formative years in my life. At 19 you are naively self-confident. As a 19-year-old missionary for God you are invincible.
While I was slated to spend nearly two years there, due to political instability, I was in the country for less than 4 months.
Access to drinking water was never easy. When the water would come we would fill up our buckets and our water basin for when it did not. We had the luxury of having the water come directly to our home. Most Haitians would walk a mile up the street to the nearest water pipe and fill their buckets up and walk them home. Even this water was not safe to drink. The Haitians had built up a tolerance to the different bacteria in the water. We would chemically treat our water which the Haitians affectionately called "Clorox Juice".
Food was scarce for everyone. In the provinces they at least had access to natural agriculture and produce, Port-au-Prince has always struggled to feed the people there. I was stationed for the majority of my time in Haiti, near the tip of the south peninsula in the town of Jérémie. There, regardless of the amount of money you had, you could not buy anything. As missionaries we had about 100$/month to live on for food which also needed to cover the cost of 15$ a piece that we paid the maid who washed our clothes and cooked for us three days a week. Even with that I had 50$ a month to spare as there was simply nothing to buy.
Garbage and sanitation facilities were virtually non-existent and sewage flowed openly into the water systems and out to the sea. The water off the shore of every major coastline city was light brown for several miles out.
The roads are virtually unpaved and where they are paved they have sinkholes which make them useless. To travel the roughly 100 miles from Port-au-Prince to Jérémie would take almost 12 hours and required a 4x4 vehicle. Heavy machinery was virtually non-existent and even if it did exist I am not sure the roads would support it and most construction was done by wheelbarrow. For buildings that had fallen into disrepair or been damaged due to poor workmanship, they were left to crumble to the ground.
Political instability and corruption are the harsh daily reality. In 1991 Aristide was ousted by Raoul Cedras. Both were incapable of governing. I remember one man who explained to me what the difference between Haiti and the US was and why Haiti did not prosper. He took a US penny from his pocket (which was commonly used as a form of currency). He asked me to read the inscription. In God We Trust. In Haiti, he said, the government is not patient enough for God, they trust in other, darker things.
With the overthrow of Aristide I was evacuated from Jérémie to Port-au-Prince. When we left Jérémie I wore three pairs of underclothes, two pairs of socks, two shirts and a pair of pants as most of the rest of our clothes and belongings we had to leave behind because of weight restrictions for the small eight-seater airplane we took out of there. Jérémie has many memories for me, the kind that burn into your soul; born of intense fear and injustice followed by miraculous redemption. The kind I share sparingly if at all.
After Jérémie I spent one week in bed with dengue fever in Petionville, a suburb of Port-au-Prince. At the end of that week half of the missionaries were evacuated to other countries and states in the US; this group included all missionaries that were in my training group except for me.
The rest of us were re-deployed in areas around the capital. I was sent to the outskirts of Port-au-Prince in an area called Martissant. I was assigned a native Haitian missionary as a companion who was just starting his mission. Each day I rode the makeshift bus/taxi into the center passing the remains of our church's Martissant chapel. It had been ransacked and set on fire 9 months earlier when Aristide was elected and the church decided to meet elsewhere and not rebuild to avoid possible contention. It was a stark, visible reminder of instability.
At night there was a curfew at sundown and you could hear the military police patrolling the streets. One night we awoke to people yelling followed by automatic gunfire in front of our house. This was not the first time I heard gunfire in Haiti but it was never that close.
We evacuated Port-au-Prince one week after my arrival in Martissant. We were told two nights before to pack our things and then we flew to Miami via Puerto Rico. I was the youngest of the remaining 24 foreign missionaries. Despite the conditions, the violence, the poverty, I wept heavily when I left the country late in October 1991, most of us did. For several months we thought we would go back in once things calmed down but the rest of my 18 months as a missionary I spent in various Creole-speaking areas of south Florida and the Bahamas.
Haiti was a heart-breaking disaster before the earthquake, I can't fathom what it is like now.
I felt robbed of my time in Haiti. I felt I had earned something more adventurous and that I would learn more in Haiti than in safe, civilized Florida. As it turned out, I learned different, harder things, things that do not come from physical deprivation. I realize in retrospect and with current events in perspective that disappointment is a powerful tool in making stronger people.
In the past several weeks I sought out several ways to get to Haiti. I was already booked for a long-planned conference to Miami and I thought that it was fate that I could take a flight from there to join up with a group in Haiti and pitch in where I could. Although I don't have disaster related or medical skills, I thought that a knowledge of the people, country and language and a desire to help would be qualification enough. I could not seem to get the right audience to listen to me and with no commercial flights going into Haiti logistically I could not work out the challenges. Last Sunday I was driving around the Little Haiti area of Miami secretly hoping that I would find someone there who was leading up a task force to the country and would let me join. None of this materialized.
In those dark days with Parker I was reminded of my time in Haiti and that these types of trials seem to crop up every couple of years or so for me. There is obviously something I am not getting right from these experiences as I seem to need these reminders. While it seems that Haiti is not something I will be a part of right now, one of my former missionary companions suggested to me that given what is on our plate already this year, maybe it is ok to let someone else do the heavy lifting this time. Haiti will have problems for many years to come; I will have a chance to go back and help again at sometime. I suppose that is ok for now.
http://www.meridianmagazine.com/churchupdate/100202church.html
http://utahhospitaltaskforce.blogspot.com/
