a dusty Monday in the Haitian mountains

Another balmy night in Haiti, refreshed after scraping off the dust and sweat, and trying to make sense of our adventures in the mountains today before collapsing to bed.

Following a white-knuckled ride on a bumpy road peppered with goats, donkeys, and daredevil motorcycles, with stretches of cliff on either side was we climbed further uphill, we found ourselves at a rural school/church complex in the mountains.  Families were waiting for us in the sanctuary, and as our medical team set up their mobile pharmacy, Brian Dean and I found restless babies to cuddle, Mothers were eager to surrender their babies to us for a few moments of more restful waiting (or to attend to their other children) while we rocked, bounced, and gently lured babies to sleep.  I must add that Brian is one of the great baby cuddling masters, transforming crankiness into peace within moments. Occasionally, a goat or a mule would wander by, and a mini chicken pecked furiously around us.

While our medical team cared for 187 patients of all varieties, well-baby visits and infections, prenatal care and fevers, a few of us ran a Bible school program in the outdoor "classroom."   The teachers at this school were more than willing to surrender their schedule and eager students to us, and we spent several sessions reading Noah's Ark alternately in English and French Creole, followed by making rainbow bracelets, moraccas, singing an array of songs with gusto, and playing a string of games.  Our theme was finding God's promise in the rainbow, looking for the rainbows around us, and naming the gifts in our life that come in so many colors.  

That is also our question for the week: where do we find God's promise in Haiti?  Promise comes in so many forms, and not obvious ones.  The children here looked bewildered by crayons, many were shoeless and some were dressed in rags, had never seen a doctor in their life, and were in a school with no supplies aside from one book per child and one pencil.  I asked them all to draw what they were most excited about, and almost all of them drew flowers, intricate petals and blossoms.  One boy drew himself holding a Haitian flag.  Towards the end of the day, they began asking for food, repeating, "J'ai faim."  Of course, since these children had been around us most of the day and didn't eat lunch, they were understandably hungry, but their hunger was far greater than missing one meal because they were having fun playing charades with a couple of Americans in the afternoon sun. 

Where is God's rainbow?

I was grateful to hear that when I asked the children about rainbows, every single child had seen one.