Haiti mission trip

these are some pictures from my dad's trip to haiti. he is back safe as of last friday. he's the one with the syringe. he has white hair and really big glasses - hehe. i'm gonna post some excerpts from some of his emails below.

http://www.paulbrown.us/haiti/album1/

...I hope to get my first shower tonight. The team here is good, with 2 leaving today and us adding 2 new ones. I have a new roommate from Kansas. Food is good. Last night not much sleep. Work is good and not hard. I am doing the pharmacy and spending some time in the rooms with our staff and patients. Everyone is here for the right reasons and their priorities are right and the Lord is truly the Lord of their lives.

Hello from Haiti! Things are going real well here. We actually have empty beds in the hospital but there are still patients with earthquake injuries in the hospital and they are still showing up for treatment. It has really settled down. Samaritan's Purse has now committed to be here through March and discussions are underway to go past that. Four of our team left today and eight will leave on Saturday, which will leave only 4 of us here for about 8 hours until a new team that is mostly Canadian joins us. There are a lot of great stories happening here and none can be explained by man so we are just trusting that God is adequate and He is still in control. The current team is still good and it is the 4 of us left on Saturday to transition this operation over to the new arrivals. There is very little overlap between teams now. I watched a C-Section today and held the baby that was probably less than 15 minutes old. Probably did not do that with my own children. Things are expected to be slow for the next few day because Haiti has designated Feb 12-14 and a time of national mourning. Our cooks are gone as of today so we are on our own for a few days. I think we will survive. Temperature here is about 85 each day and we are all working in T shirts and scrubs.

Such a difference in medicine in a 3rd world country as compared to the US. Hospitals have no private rooms, grand pianos, water walls, or air conditioning. Our internet has been out for more than a day, and most of the computers are leaving Sat. Do not know when the next communication will be. Hope everyone has a great (and chilly I understand) Happy Valentine's Day.

It's Friday night in Haiti and it was a wonderful sun shiny day of about 85 here at the Baptist Mission. We are into to now turning the hospital back over to the local doctors but that full transition will take place over the next 4-6 weeks. Feb 12-14 is 3 day national holiday for the mourning of those lost in the earthquake. The church on our compound seats about 600 and there was over 1000 in attendance today. They were lined up around the walls and into the streets. They started before 8am and went to 12noon, with about 3 hours of that being singing. The pharmacy is located through the wall from the sanctuary so I got a full dose of that service. We had a great fellowship tonight with the missionaries with the 8 that are leaving the medical team tomorrow sharing their thoughts. The common theme was the love and thankfulness of the Haitian people towards us being here. We are truly the ones being blessed by a people that have so little in material possessions but have such a dependancy on the most important thing, the Lord and His acceptance of all of us no mattter what our circumstances.

Monday in Haiti was a very busy day. Even though many of the earthquake victims have been discharged, there is still some major efforts having to be done with those that we still have. Our sickest patient with a spinal cord injury from laying under a fallen wall for a long time was medEvaced to the US today. This has been being worked on since before we got here and it all of a sudden happened today when the Navy called and said their helicopoter was on the way. Another patient needed parenteral nutrution and I was able to find 4 bottles stashed away and only out of date by 6 months. We started it today and are trying to work it in between antibiotics so that we don't blow the IV line. Very interesting practicing medicine in a stop and go world when we are so used to running absolutely on schedule and everything expected at a moments notice. An 8 person Canadian team joined us on Sun and it is amazing how quickly people can come together when the same goals and beliefs are common. We are seeing a lot of things happen here that are out of the ordinary and know that we are just observers to something that is coming from a Higher Power. Sunshine and clouds here and still 70-85 degrees every day. We are blessed and know that we are in to turning this hospital back over to the Haitians.

haiti

please be in prayer, if you haven't already been, for the people in Haiti. lee and i sponsor a child through World Vision there. His name is Makendy and he is about to turn 16. we haven't heard how he is yet, but i think he was far enough from the earthquake to be okay. however, of course the quake still affects him.
i remember reading over a year ago about how a Haitian mother was making mud pies for her children to eat because they had nothing else. there was a tiny bit of nutrients in it, but really? mud pies.
we are so blessed and don't even know it!
also, there was another article about a woman and her one outfit from haiti. i blogged about it i guess a year ago.
so, please pray for Makendy, and all of the other people and the relief workers that are there. my dad is leaving tomorrow to go for 16 days to work in a hospital outside of Port-au-Prince. he is a pharmacist and will be putting in very long hours i'm sure. he is going as part of Samaritan's purse ministries. please pray for his safety and that he'll be the hands and feet of Christ to these suffering people.

reduce, reuse, recycle.

a friend recently made me realize that these should go in order. i need things spelled out for me sometimes. we are pretty good about recycling. but really that should be your last option. reduce first, reuse when possible, and if you have to, recycle.

what i learned at cvs last weekend

the cashier at cvs had a different kind of accent, so i asked him where he was from. i thought he might have been from brazil. he was from ghana. he asked me what i knew about ghana - i said not much - so he began to give me an education about his country. very interesting. i guess this is what happens when you run errands late at night. people aren't in a rush. there was nobody in line behind me, and a bad thunderstorm going on outside, so i just stood there and learned about ghana. world geography and history and sociology is so much more interesting outside of a book.

there's gold and diamonds there.
it's on the western coast of africa, so that's where a lot of the slave trade happened. he said it's very hard to talk about there. he says he might see one of his relative here in the states, but would never know because families were separated. sometimes when a child was misbehaving very badly, the parent would sell them to the slave trade. wow! i wonder if they knew what they were really doing to their child.
it is a democracy.
they like the British because they brought the Bible to their country and because of that, there are many Christians there.
they learn the Bible in school and have signs on storefronts that say Jesus Christ Saves, so that no one will have an excuse when the end comes.
many of the surrounding countries were (colonized? i guess) by the French - they did not have a Christian influence. on the weekends, they drink a lot of alcohol.
then he said something interesting - that those people from the other countries know that the people in Ghana are wiser than they are.

so there's a real life perspective from Ghana.

"my one outfit"

i know we've all heard stories like this before, but i know i always need a reminder - a good dose of reality to recognize a need vs. a want.

"Esther Dania, 52, single mother of six, lives with her children in a 12 foot tent the International Red Cross gave her last September. Hurricane Gustav and other storm-related floods killed more than 800 Haitians and left over 1 million homeless. Today the tent is her only possession, along with the clothes she is wearing. 'When my one outfit is dirty, I take it off to wash it and then wear it again.' Dania said."

World Magazine