June 9th's Events

Today started off great and was that way all the way through. I woke up with a couple of mosquito bites because I had kicked my sheet and mosquito net off during the night and while I had put bug spray on during the night, I didn’t spray my blanket because the generator went out at 9:40 and I was strained not in bed yet, so I had to feel my way until I got back to the girl intern’s dorm where some of my friends had flash lights. But the few bites I have are completely manageable (and don’t worry mom, I am taking my malaria medication like a champ!)

We all got dressed and went to devotional where worship was led by another summer intern named Lisa. Side note-Lisa works in the mission’s birthing center and delivered a healthy baby girl yesterday afternoon. Once the baby was delivered, the mother raised her hands up to praise God and then immediately started praying over her child. He is sooo good! After devo was breakfast where we ate cereal consisting of bland corn flakes and Haitian milk. To make the cereal more tasty, we can add sugar, so in reality, it was just like American cereal but the milk was sweeter.

After breakfast I headed straight down the Miriam Center where I immediately started helping Autumn and Stephanie with the kids’ breakfast. The children of the Miriam Center receive many of the same meals that the staff and volunteers do for our meals, but just in special needs and child form. So 18-22 of our kids received their corn flakes mushed up with the help of a blender, while the other got real cereal in its true form. To make sure that the kid’s get plenty of nutrients each day and to attempt to add some weight to each of their bodies, we added bananas to their cereal as well!

After that I helped Stephanie gather some supplies to help clean the kids up in order to take each of their pictures. This is when she showed me the secret depot storage area that the Miriam Center has. It contains a great deal of the supplies that are in short supply and locked so that they can make sure the kids who absolutely need them get them along with having special foods that can be added to the children’s diets based off of what they are being served for the different meals. Because of the foods (some of them being things that can melt and even eggs, the room is air conditioned! So Stephanie told me exactly where the keys where, and that if I ever needed to just get away, I could go there! There’s a good chance I could be using this offer in the next five weeks…

We took the kids outside under a tree to take their pictures. It was quite chaotic because when we would take a kid out to take their picture, they then wouldn’t want to go back inside, so towards the end it took a lot more effort to look after the kids who had already gotten their picture taken rather than dressing, cleaning and taking the photo. I am really excited about what the pictures could eventually do for the center. Autumn and Stephanie are using these (with the help of Justin, the Miriam Center’s right hand/handy man) to create two billboards that will hopefully help significantly with feeding the kids. One of the billboards will be for those who haven’t been fed each meal, and those feeding the kids will be able to move the child’s picture over after they have been fed to the other board. There will also be a way for the workers to determine easily who gets the blended food and who gets the real version of whatever the children are eating at that time. This could potentially be a huge heal to us because with close to 50 kids to feed three times a day, seven days a week (that’s a lot of meals), it can get pretty messy determining which kids have eaten and which kids haven’t. I am really excited to see this once it is all put together!

After helping out with the photos it was time to prepare the lunches for the kids! The three of us (Autumn, Stephanie and myself) blended the meal for those who needed it and then had to cut up the dumplings, lamb, and sweat potatoes into bite size pieces. This was no easy task with the amount of plates that needed to be served, but we managed!

Today the kids of the Miriam Center had a later lunch and we didn’t finish until 1:15. The staff’s lunch is ALWAYS served at noon. So the three of us were a little late for that, but thankfully Justin has caught on to this with Autumn and Stephanie in the last few weeks and has saved them plates in the kitchen, he has graciously added a third plate to this group so that I can eat late with them as well! I also bought a coke today for a U.S. dollar from our on campus store. The best part about it: it was actually a cold drink since we don’t have ice.

Once we had finished with lunch we all stayed upstairs in the common area feeding Petey (Heather’s kid) and then Stephanie brought up T-Stevenson, a young boy had been crying downstairs in the Miriam Center, so she brought him up for me to hold upstairs.

A little bit about T-Stevenson, he has Dwarfism. He looks like a 5 month old infant but is in fact 5 years old. When he was a child, his mother noticed that he wasn’t growing, knew that something was wrong with him, and gave him to a witch doctor to try and “fix” him. In Haiti there is a lot of voodoo and witch doctors are definitely a part of this. Unfortunately, the witch doctor’s form of treatment for T-Stevenson was something closer to torture and involved possibly burning or starving. T-Stevenson has scars all over his arms. It makes me really upset, angry and sad to know that someone actually did this to them, and actually thought that this was okay. It also makes me super angry that he had to experience this at such a young age and had no way of defending himself and no way of knowing what or why this was happening to him. Within his first fear years of life, when so many kids are experiencing and understanding love for the first time from their parents, this poor kid was not.

I really really really loved getting to spend time getting to know T-Stevenson today. I even took him down stairs with me when Autumn gave me a binder with all the information on each of the Miriam Center kids in it so I could get some knowledge on each of them. It was very good to be able to see the diagnosis for many of the kids and put some names to faces of kids I haven’t been able to spend much time with. It was also very moving though because one of the sections of information involved any medical history we have on the children. For three of these kids, the earthquake in Haiti was involved. One of the girls is a victim of the earthquake and has suffered from severe PTSD among many other things since while one of our other super cute girls lost her mother in the earthquake and made it to the M.C. Lastly, another girl was found face down in the rubble and has been with us ever since! It kind of pained me to realize that these kids have been through more than I can imagine and they are all still so young! But the good news is that I get to be here for the next five weeks or so to love on them and serve them and try to make their life as much better as I can! And that is such a blessing.

After reading all these papers, it was time for dinner. We had spaghetti downstairs in the M.C. tonight and preparing that was fun! Haitian spaghetti is very much similar to American spaghetti except that it uses a bit less sauce and more noodles and instead of hamburger meat they use hot dogs. At dinner I fed a kid who needed to take two pills, but unfortunately, I was not given them until he was almost full. So that was quite a challenge. He took the smaller pill with a little edging, but the bigger pill he kept spitting out. Autumn and I were able to find him a piece of hot dog and we hid it inside that (thanks mom, for hiding my pills growing up so I could easily think of such an idea).

I have been spit up on, and have challenges of feeding kids and getting spaghetti all over me, I have bug bites and am constantly sweating and gross. I am eating food that I sometimes don’t know what it is and I am showering out of a bucket with water that many in America would not even drink from. But honestly, I would absolutely not trade any of this for the world. Because today I was able to feed kids that can’t eat for themselves, and I was able to see T-Stevenson laugh and I was able to help make a feeding program more efficient for close to 50 kids! I wouldn’t trade that for air conditioning, or a nice shower, or make-up or anything.

“Pure and genuine religion in the sight of God the Father means caring for the orphans and widows in their distress and refusing to let the world corrupt you.” -James 1:27 This is a picture of T-Stevenson. He is so precious!