Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Thank you
I would really just like to add one last post to this blog to send a big THANK YOU to everyone who donated items and money, who came to my 'packing party' and ran out to buy me supplies at the last minute, who drove me to the airport despite it making them late for an appointment, who made sure my bank stuff was in order while I was away, who took care of my kitty and my plants, who ordered supplies for me while I was away, who tried to get my fridge fixed for me, who bought cat food, who wrote articles in the paper about me, who followed my blog and inadvertently supported me by doing so, who texted me on my Haitian phone so that I could have some contact with home when the internet wasn't working, who thought of me when I was sick, who lent me a sleeping bag and thermarest to take along... and to my darling co-workers who reworked their schedules COMPLETELY to let me go away to Haiti... THANK YOU.
One last thank you to Julia and Sarah and Valerye for having their babies BEFORE I left so that I could be there :-)
And thank you to Carey for waiting to have hers until I got back :-)
And to the women of Haiti - who allowed me to be a part of their lives and their children's lives.
And to Bumi Sehat for doing such a wonderful job in Haiti.
And to my clients in Vancouver who have been listening to my stories.
And to my new Haitian friends.
One last thank you to Julia and Sarah and Valerye for having their babies BEFORE I left so that I could be there :-)
And thank you to Carey for waiting to have hers until I got back :-)
And to the women of Haiti - who allowed me to be a part of their lives and their children's lives.
And to Bumi Sehat for doing such a wonderful job in Haiti.
And to my clients in Vancouver who have been listening to my stories.
And to my new Haitian friends.
Shockingly home
The universe worked in some mysterious ways in the last 2 days...
Firstly, by slipping me a NASTY stomach bug. I didn't even eat any street ice-cream. I was sick for 2 days amidst 2 births, and when the other midwives tried to start an IV on me, I nearly fainted in my chair and ended up laying on a mattress in the dining room for a couple of hours getting IV fluids and not at all enjoying my blood pressure of 76/48. Thank goodness for Ciprofloxin. Once I had healed enough to feel able to be more than 10 minutes from a washroom at any given time, Nathanael loaded me on the back of his scooter for one last trip to the beach. We drove farther this time, apparently until we were only 1 hour from the Dominican Republic by boat, and layed in the sun on the pebbly beach. It was my last swim in the insanely warm ocean :-( The sunset on the drive back was INCREDIBLE. And I can remember that it used to scare me to ride on the back of the scooter with no helmet, but on this ride, I couldn't get enough of the warm wind cooling my wet hair, and blowing dust into my eyes. I couldn't get enough of the palm trees, and corn fields, and the women carrying insanely heavy loads on their heads, and the little kids yelling 'blanc!' (aka 'white') at me. I wanted to take the whole scene and put it in an empty Prestige beer bottle and take it home.
The morning that I was to leave Jacmel at noon, I woke up, had a coffee with our new volunteers Pamela, Katherine (who is actually one of the board members for Bumi Sehat) and her sidekick Kate (a lovely and exceptionally talented 17-year old who came to Jacmel to photograph/blog about her experience). I was thinking about packing, and then Nadege, our birthing dome cleaner and washer of all birth-related laundry, came down to tell us that there was a woman in labour at the dome. We joked about whether or not I would have time to catch one more baby before leaving. We quickly gathered our things and headed up to the dome.
As we got closer to the dome, I could hear the woman pushing, and so broke out into a birth-induced sprint. Sure enough, I had enough time to put gloves on and barely catch the little baby girl that was born! Unfortunately the woman then began to bleed too much, so my last few hours in Jacmel were spent managing a PPH... but it made loading my things into the van for the road to Port-au-Prince even more surreal because of the extra dose of adrenaline I had on board!
We drove through the windy mountain roads to Port-au-Prince in the orphanage van (with air conditioning!) and I realized that I had no recollection of the trip out to Jacmel on that first day. Now Haiti had become so familiar to me. The earthquake damage in Leogane and Port-au-Prince was still shocking, and I tried my best to photograph it all while Emmanuel weaved through the traffic. It seemed like there was not much improvement in the clearing of the debris by the gigantic UN trucks since I first got in. I arrived at the airport with plenty of time to spare, just in time for torrential rains to start and for my flight to be delayed by an hour and a half.
I got to Miami and my plans to rent a hotel room and have a good night's sleep in a giant bed were somewhat thwarted by the fact that by the time my plane got in, it was already midnight with all of the delays. I got to have a hot shower (which by the way, feels like heaven when you haven't had one in awhile) and sleep for 3 hours before having the head back to the airport. The culture shock started there... or maybe it started a little bit on the plane when I realized that most of the people who could afford to leave Haiti were either Europeans, or very upper class Haitian people. I looked at the tv like it was some kind of foreign useless object in the hotel room, and turned off the air conditioning in favour of overheating myself while I slept. I was so incredibly thankful for the woman next to me on the flight from Miami to Chicago, who wanted to know every detail of my trip. And when she asked me 'how did you actually cope with everything that you saw there??', I had to think long and hard, and got a bit teary, and my only answer was that I didn't know quite yet... Then Kelly's speech when Miss U.S.A. was visiting popped into my head - that it really wasn't about me anyway, because I didn't have to continue living in the conditions that the Haitian people are living in.
When I arrived in Canada, I went to Earl's in Yaletown for some food because my fridge decided to break while I was away. I also found that slightly entertaining since I've been basically living without a fridge for a month anyway! But what made me laugh was the conversations that I was hearing while I ate dinner - about one guy's inability to do bench presses, and another person's anger at the fact that their friend didn't call them back. I think it's in hearing those kinds of things that the culture shock really sets in.
And then there was the birth shock...
Because I am crazy, I went on call last night at 6pm after just getting back. And at 6pm I headed to the hospital to be at the birth of a friend (and client). They were so incredibly sweet, asking me how I was managing! Anyhow, I had so wanted to be there for their birth, and the universe basically handed me the honour of being there. And their little girl was born at around 9:30pm. Congratulations guys :-)
Now I am sitting in my apartment looking at my 'Haitian pink' toenail polish, trying to wrap my head around all of the ways in which my life and my practice as a midwife, and the person I am, have been changed by being in Haiti. And I can't wait to get all of the photos posted for you to see.
In case anyone still wants to donate to my cause in Haiti, the organization I worked with is in need of financial help to apply for a funding grant. So I will still be accepting donations and sending them on so that the amazing birth dome can continue offering what it does to the families of Jacmel.
Thank you for following my journey...
Firstly, by slipping me a NASTY stomach bug. I didn't even eat any street ice-cream. I was sick for 2 days amidst 2 births, and when the other midwives tried to start an IV on me, I nearly fainted in my chair and ended up laying on a mattress in the dining room for a couple of hours getting IV fluids and not at all enjoying my blood pressure of 76/48. Thank goodness for Ciprofloxin. Once I had healed enough to feel able to be more than 10 minutes from a washroom at any given time, Nathanael loaded me on the back of his scooter for one last trip to the beach. We drove farther this time, apparently until we were only 1 hour from the Dominican Republic by boat, and layed in the sun on the pebbly beach. It was my last swim in the insanely warm ocean :-( The sunset on the drive back was INCREDIBLE. And I can remember that it used to scare me to ride on the back of the scooter with no helmet, but on this ride, I couldn't get enough of the warm wind cooling my wet hair, and blowing dust into my eyes. I couldn't get enough of the palm trees, and corn fields, and the women carrying insanely heavy loads on their heads, and the little kids yelling 'blanc!' (aka 'white') at me. I wanted to take the whole scene and put it in an empty Prestige beer bottle and take it home.
The morning that I was to leave Jacmel at noon, I woke up, had a coffee with our new volunteers Pamela, Katherine (who is actually one of the board members for Bumi Sehat) and her sidekick Kate (a lovely and exceptionally talented 17-year old who came to Jacmel to photograph/blog about her experience). I was thinking about packing, and then Nadege, our birthing dome cleaner and washer of all birth-related laundry, came down to tell us that there was a woman in labour at the dome. We joked about whether or not I would have time to catch one more baby before leaving. We quickly gathered our things and headed up to the dome.
As we got closer to the dome, I could hear the woman pushing, and so broke out into a birth-induced sprint. Sure enough, I had enough time to put gloves on and barely catch the little baby girl that was born! Unfortunately the woman then began to bleed too much, so my last few hours in Jacmel were spent managing a PPH... but it made loading my things into the van for the road to Port-au-Prince even more surreal because of the extra dose of adrenaline I had on board!
We drove through the windy mountain roads to Port-au-Prince in the orphanage van (with air conditioning!) and I realized that I had no recollection of the trip out to Jacmel on that first day. Now Haiti had become so familiar to me. The earthquake damage in Leogane and Port-au-Prince was still shocking, and I tried my best to photograph it all while Emmanuel weaved through the traffic. It seemed like there was not much improvement in the clearing of the debris by the gigantic UN trucks since I first got in. I arrived at the airport with plenty of time to spare, just in time for torrential rains to start and for my flight to be delayed by an hour and a half.
I got to Miami and my plans to rent a hotel room and have a good night's sleep in a giant bed were somewhat thwarted by the fact that by the time my plane got in, it was already midnight with all of the delays. I got to have a hot shower (which by the way, feels like heaven when you haven't had one in awhile) and sleep for 3 hours before having the head back to the airport. The culture shock started there... or maybe it started a little bit on the plane when I realized that most of the people who could afford to leave Haiti were either Europeans, or very upper class Haitian people. I looked at the tv like it was some kind of foreign useless object in the hotel room, and turned off the air conditioning in favour of overheating myself while I slept. I was so incredibly thankful for the woman next to me on the flight from Miami to Chicago, who wanted to know every detail of my trip. And when she asked me 'how did you actually cope with everything that you saw there??', I had to think long and hard, and got a bit teary, and my only answer was that I didn't know quite yet... Then Kelly's speech when Miss U.S.A. was visiting popped into my head - that it really wasn't about me anyway, because I didn't have to continue living in the conditions that the Haitian people are living in.
When I arrived in Canada, I went to Earl's in Yaletown for some food because my fridge decided to break while I was away. I also found that slightly entertaining since I've been basically living without a fridge for a month anyway! But what made me laugh was the conversations that I was hearing while I ate dinner - about one guy's inability to do bench presses, and another person's anger at the fact that their friend didn't call them back. I think it's in hearing those kinds of things that the culture shock really sets in.
And then there was the birth shock...
Because I am crazy, I went on call last night at 6pm after just getting back. And at 6pm I headed to the hospital to be at the birth of a friend (and client). They were so incredibly sweet, asking me how I was managing! Anyhow, I had so wanted to be there for their birth, and the universe basically handed me the honour of being there. And their little girl was born at around 9:30pm. Congratulations guys :-)
Now I am sitting in my apartment looking at my 'Haitian pink' toenail polish, trying to wrap my head around all of the ways in which my life and my practice as a midwife, and the person I am, have been changed by being in Haiti. And I can't wait to get all of the photos posted for you to see.
In case anyone still wants to donate to my cause in Haiti, the organization I worked with is in need of financial help to apply for a funding grant. So I will still be accepting donations and sending them on so that the amazing birth dome can continue offering what it does to the families of Jacmel.
Thank you for following my journey...
Friday, May 7, 2010
Birth announcement for birthing centre cat!
This morning at about 6:30am, I awoke to our resident pregnant kitty Jorshie meowing at the top of her lungs and wandering aimlessly around the house. Just a little bit of background: Jorshie arrived one day at the Bumi Sehat house full of midwives, totally pregnant, but too far along to get a kitty termination (said the vet). At first she didn't like anyone, but then warmed up quickly when the ladies here began feeding her, and soon enough she was spending most of her time sleeping in our laps! She's just a young kitty and was so skinny when I first got here!
So, the next thing that happened was that I fed her some leftover Kraft dinner which Tanya had made the night before and was apparently really gross because milk in 30 degrees heat is just not milk... She ate about half a cup of the stuff in 30 seconds but was still meowing away. So after putting the Kraft dinner back in the fridge and getting electrocuted by it (this is what happens with our fridge, in particular if you are not wearing shoes and standing in a puddle of water), I strolled back up the stairs to my bed. Kitty followed me up, hung out in my bed for awhile but kept getting restless and sliding out under the mosquito net. I went back downstairs, gave her more Kraft dinner, then as I was in my puzzled and half-awakened state and heading back up the stairs again with her meowing at my feet, I ran into Tanya in the hallway. She was asking me to go to the dome to assess a woman with ruptured membranes who had just come in. She asked me if the kitty was in labour, and I said, 'no, she's ok, she's just acting weird!', then as luck would have it, her water broke on the floor in the hallway! And so it all began... While I attended to a labouring woman at the dome, Tanya sat with Jorshie as she delivered her 3 kittens! Unfortunately one kitten died right after the birth, but the other two survived and are super cute! And as some of you might know, my midwife career began attending cat deliveries so this was a blast from the past...
The lady who came into the dome delivered her baby (her 2nd) roughly an hour after she got there, once again in Haitian multip style, by having only 30min total of contractions. Finally a baby girl was born, we've had so many boys in the past few weeks. Too bad we couldn't just spend the rest of the day sitting around with the new kittens and staring at them, but it's been only Tanya and I doing all of the clinics and all of the births for the past few days since Amy left, so we had to do a FULL day of prenatal visits today in the extra scorching heat. The volunteers coming in the coming months are going to have to be hard workers, because we have roughly 20-30 due dates each month right now, and many women who just walk in in labour for care.
My other stories of the past few days involve cutting off an extra digit off a baby's hand... (yes, there are photos, and yes, the baby was fine! And for the record, Tanya did the cutting, I just gave her emotional support and did the photography). And the other story is the pretty much 20 hours that I spent with a 19-year old having her first baby, and sadly she decided to go to the hospital in the middle of the night while we were sleeping because she was just too tired to go and wanted an augment. I had spent the entire day with her and when I went to take a break, she cried because she didn't want me to leave. We didn't speak the same language, but somehow we had managed to connect... I spent a good part of the night with her when I came back from my break, rubbing her back with every single contraction, until it seemed like her contractions had slowed and it would be ok for us to sleep. This morning she was gone :-( Maybe I'll make a trip to St. Michel to see if she is doing alright.
I'll admit I am getting to be a bit sacked... probably a combination of being at a billion births in Canada just before leaving to come here, then going to something like 14 births in the 2.5 weeks that I've been here. Only 3 more days... wow, it's going to be really wild to be home. I can predict now how it's going to feel to be home - all of this will so easily seem like a dream.
Hope everyone out there is doing well back home. Hope Julia and Sarah and their new babies are doing amazingly. And congrats to Sarah in Campbell River for having her baby girl too!
Births all around.
So, the next thing that happened was that I fed her some leftover Kraft dinner which Tanya had made the night before and was apparently really gross because milk in 30 degrees heat is just not milk... She ate about half a cup of the stuff in 30 seconds but was still meowing away. So after putting the Kraft dinner back in the fridge and getting electrocuted by it (this is what happens with our fridge, in particular if you are not wearing shoes and standing in a puddle of water), I strolled back up the stairs to my bed. Kitty followed me up, hung out in my bed for awhile but kept getting restless and sliding out under the mosquito net. I went back downstairs, gave her more Kraft dinner, then as I was in my puzzled and half-awakened state and heading back up the stairs again with her meowing at my feet, I ran into Tanya in the hallway. She was asking me to go to the dome to assess a woman with ruptured membranes who had just come in. She asked me if the kitty was in labour, and I said, 'no, she's ok, she's just acting weird!', then as luck would have it, her water broke on the floor in the hallway! And so it all began... While I attended to a labouring woman at the dome, Tanya sat with Jorshie as she delivered her 3 kittens! Unfortunately one kitten died right after the birth, but the other two survived and are super cute! And as some of you might know, my midwife career began attending cat deliveries so this was a blast from the past...
The lady who came into the dome delivered her baby (her 2nd) roughly an hour after she got there, once again in Haitian multip style, by having only 30min total of contractions. Finally a baby girl was born, we've had so many boys in the past few weeks. Too bad we couldn't just spend the rest of the day sitting around with the new kittens and staring at them, but it's been only Tanya and I doing all of the clinics and all of the births for the past few days since Amy left, so we had to do a FULL day of prenatal visits today in the extra scorching heat. The volunteers coming in the coming months are going to have to be hard workers, because we have roughly 20-30 due dates each month right now, and many women who just walk in in labour for care.
My other stories of the past few days involve cutting off an extra digit off a baby's hand... (yes, there are photos, and yes, the baby was fine! And for the record, Tanya did the cutting, I just gave her emotional support and did the photography). And the other story is the pretty much 20 hours that I spent with a 19-year old having her first baby, and sadly she decided to go to the hospital in the middle of the night while we were sleeping because she was just too tired to go and wanted an augment. I had spent the entire day with her and when I went to take a break, she cried because she didn't want me to leave. We didn't speak the same language, but somehow we had managed to connect... I spent a good part of the night with her when I came back from my break, rubbing her back with every single contraction, until it seemed like her contractions had slowed and it would be ok for us to sleep. This morning she was gone :-( Maybe I'll make a trip to St. Michel to see if she is doing alright.
I'll admit I am getting to be a bit sacked... probably a combination of being at a billion births in Canada just before leaving to come here, then going to something like 14 births in the 2.5 weeks that I've been here. Only 3 more days... wow, it's going to be really wild to be home. I can predict now how it's going to feel to be home - all of this will so easily seem like a dream.
Hope everyone out there is doing well back home. Hope Julia and Sarah and their new babies are doing amazingly. And congrats to Sarah in Campbell River for having her baby girl too!
Births all around.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
The Haitian birth experience
I thought that I would take a moment today to write about the amazing experience of birth for Haitian women. I've noticed that every culture has their own 'way' of birthing and this culture is definitely keeping me on my feet!
The first time moms here tend to have very long labours, most of the time they are at the dome for at least one day. One woman yesterday was 7-8cm dilated for pretty much the whole day. But the brilliant thing about being nowhere near any interventions, is that you just get to sit and watch and listen to the women labouring and there are no timelines. The mother yesterday had her contractions completely stop at 7cm and then she had a nap, and then they restarted. But they were never regular contractions, nor were they very long, and then all of a sudden, there she was pushing her baby out! The same thing happened today, I went up to the birth dome at 5am to check a woman who was 3cm dilated and having her first baby. She was having irregular, short contractions, and then the next call I got from the night nurse, was that the head was crowning at 7:45! I ran up the hill as fast as one can in flip flops on an uneven street surface, and got there in time to find one of our translators catching the baby. The brilliant thing is also that there seems to be a correlation between the fact that we don't interfere, and the fact that these women do not have tears. Maybe it's just that they have incredibly healthy perineal tissues, or smaller babies, or they just seem to know that perfect positions to push in... who knows, but I have not sutured once since being here, and I've been to something like 12 births now. Even when I have had to coach them to push really hard as the baby is coming, because of the baby's heart rate dropping, they still have not had a tear! Anyway, I digress about the tearing...
Women who have had babies before are a whole other story! We've had many women just walk in, have one contraction that we've seen and the baby's out. Or some have given birth in the street on the way to the birth dome. The usual story is that they have some contractions that look mildly uncomfortable at best, for awhile, and then one or two strong ones and the baby is coming. Births here have been nothing like back home, and my mind is trying to wrap itself around the possible reasons why. Definitely there is a peacefulness in being a midwife here, just laying around in the excrutiating heat with a fan pointed at you, reading a book and listening to the women's songs echo through the dome. They surround themselves with their mothers, sisters, cousins, husbands, and my job has really just been to give them the best care I can and catch their little babies - they are amazed to have anyone cleaning their bedpans. I haven't really done a lot of midwifing the way it seems I do in Canada, or maybe I am realizing that even though I like to think that I don't interfere in birth, I actually do! I love not cutting the cord, and just letting the placenta come when it does. The great thing about the way things work here, is that we also don't seem to have complications. Despite our lack of intervention, virtually every woman so far has just pushed out their placenta with no oxytocin, in a reasonable time frame, then not bled a drop after. I laughed when another midwife from Canada was afraid to tell anyone that she had to open the birth instruments and use them to help get a placenta to deliver! The ol' birth instruments package had a fine coating of dust on it...
I'm sure that I won't be able to apply what works for these women's bodies in this culture, to our situation in Canada, but I hope that I've learned some tricks about investing in an even greater degree of patience and faith in women's bodies and in babies to just find their way.
The first time moms here tend to have very long labours, most of the time they are at the dome for at least one day. One woman yesterday was 7-8cm dilated for pretty much the whole day. But the brilliant thing about being nowhere near any interventions, is that you just get to sit and watch and listen to the women labouring and there are no timelines. The mother yesterday had her contractions completely stop at 7cm and then she had a nap, and then they restarted. But they were never regular contractions, nor were they very long, and then all of a sudden, there she was pushing her baby out! The same thing happened today, I went up to the birth dome at 5am to check a woman who was 3cm dilated and having her first baby. She was having irregular, short contractions, and then the next call I got from the night nurse, was that the head was crowning at 7:45! I ran up the hill as fast as one can in flip flops on an uneven street surface, and got there in time to find one of our translators catching the baby. The brilliant thing is also that there seems to be a correlation between the fact that we don't interfere, and the fact that these women do not have tears. Maybe it's just that they have incredibly healthy perineal tissues, or smaller babies, or they just seem to know that perfect positions to push in... who knows, but I have not sutured once since being here, and I've been to something like 12 births now. Even when I have had to coach them to push really hard as the baby is coming, because of the baby's heart rate dropping, they still have not had a tear! Anyway, I digress about the tearing...
Women who have had babies before are a whole other story! We've had many women just walk in, have one contraction that we've seen and the baby's out. Or some have given birth in the street on the way to the birth dome. The usual story is that they have some contractions that look mildly uncomfortable at best, for awhile, and then one or two strong ones and the baby is coming. Births here have been nothing like back home, and my mind is trying to wrap itself around the possible reasons why. Definitely there is a peacefulness in being a midwife here, just laying around in the excrutiating heat with a fan pointed at you, reading a book and listening to the women's songs echo through the dome. They surround themselves with their mothers, sisters, cousins, husbands, and my job has really just been to give them the best care I can and catch their little babies - they are amazed to have anyone cleaning their bedpans. I haven't really done a lot of midwifing the way it seems I do in Canada, or maybe I am realizing that even though I like to think that I don't interfere in birth, I actually do! I love not cutting the cord, and just letting the placenta come when it does. The great thing about the way things work here, is that we also don't seem to have complications. Despite our lack of intervention, virtually every woman so far has just pushed out their placenta with no oxytocin, in a reasonable time frame, then not bled a drop after. I laughed when another midwife from Canada was afraid to tell anyone that she had to open the birth instruments and use them to help get a placenta to deliver! The ol' birth instruments package had a fine coating of dust on it...
I'm sure that I won't be able to apply what works for these women's bodies in this culture, to our situation in Canada, but I hope that I've learned some tricks about investing in an even greater degree of patience and faith in women's bodies and in babies to just find their way.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Random thoughts
Hello again! I am taking advantage of the fact that I still have internet to write again! Just wanted to write a couple of things about Haiti before I forget:
- I hate cockroaches, especially when they fly in your hair.
- I also hate ants that bite. Though I found them quite interesting when they walked in a little line up my mosquito netting and ate the dead mosquito that I killed there a couple of days ago.
- Haitian rum and Haitian coffee are two beautiful things.
- Buying a huge bag of mangoes on the street for something like $2 rocks.
- There is no such thing as multigrain bread, hot water showers, or vegetarianism here.
- Virtually all volunteers have developed some kind of bad habit while here - for some it is smoking, but for me, I am now the diabetic who drinks the occasional Coca Cola! What??!! Bad, bad diabetic. Though I have to say that since being in Haiti in this scorching heat, I've become mostly non-diabetic. Only 1-2 insulin injections per day, instead of 4-5. In some kind of weird way, despite the copious amounts of fried food, refined sugar and lack of vegetables in our diet here, I have actually become more healthy!
- It is not unusual to receive daily marriage proposals from Haitian men. They are very, very persistent.
- My dorm room now seems eerily quiet with Amy gone and Tanya sleeping in her own room! I've lost Elleana and Amy all in one week! Luckily a new volunteer is coming soon... Until then I will play musical beds.
Please read more about the Haiti earthquake:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Haiti_earthquake
Ok, back to work... just wanted to write this down before I forgot!
xo
- I hate cockroaches, especially when they fly in your hair.
- I also hate ants that bite. Though I found them quite interesting when they walked in a little line up my mosquito netting and ate the dead mosquito that I killed there a couple of days ago.
- Haitian rum and Haitian coffee are two beautiful things.
- Buying a huge bag of mangoes on the street for something like $2 rocks.
- There is no such thing as multigrain bread, hot water showers, or vegetarianism here.
- Virtually all volunteers have developed some kind of bad habit while here - for some it is smoking, but for me, I am now the diabetic who drinks the occasional Coca Cola! What??!! Bad, bad diabetic. Though I have to say that since being in Haiti in this scorching heat, I've become mostly non-diabetic. Only 1-2 insulin injections per day, instead of 4-5. In some kind of weird way, despite the copious amounts of fried food, refined sugar and lack of vegetables in our diet here, I have actually become more healthy!
- It is not unusual to receive daily marriage proposals from Haitian men. They are very, very persistent.
- My dorm room now seems eerily quiet with Amy gone and Tanya sleeping in her own room! I've lost Elleana and Amy all in one week! Luckily a new volunteer is coming soon... Until then I will play musical beds.
Please read more about the Haiti earthquake:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Haiti_earthquake
Ok, back to work... just wanted to write this down before I forgot!
xo
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
