Sisters are something I’ve thought about a lot… Especially for someone without sisters.
I see a loyalty & connectedness in sisters that friends can’t duplicate but only imitate.
Think about it.
You maybe the “best friend forever”…bur who’s the maid-of-honor”?
Enough said.
Read about what’s being done to keep 4 sisters together in Cazale, Haiti.
Posted in Caring for the world, Haiti, poverty
You may be wondering, as I do several posts in a row about other people’s adoptions, how this all relates to me:
1. The obvious: Darin, my precious present, God brought us by adoption.
2. The memory: Jean-Roni, the one that got away.
Last summer in Haiti, Karen, Amanda, & I took care of Jean-Roni. He was a tiny, malnourished baby boy who came into the Real Hope for Haiti clinic while we were visiting.
We cared for him day & night for the majority of our trip.
We were told that he would not live at the size, age, and progression of his malnourishment.
And so don’t get attached.
That didn’t work.
So we dreamed & calculated how to bring him home with us.
But when we left, he stayed.
And 35 days later, while my arms still ached for him, Jean-Roni died.
We must fight everyday to save AS MANY CHILDREN AS WE CAN.
Our humanity requires this.
Posted in Adoption, Caring for the world, Haiti, Memories, poverty
I woke up this morning to a text message from Karen telling me that Jean-Roni passed away yesterday.
1 month ago, I spend 4 days 24-7 with Jean-Roni.
And now he’s dead.
I can’t grasp it.
Karen & I have daydreamed of an older Jean-Roni coming to stay with us.
I’ve wondered about his little face – what would it look like when kwashiorkor was not turning him ‘white’ like me?
And I agonized over turning him over to the busy Rescue Center with 60+ kids & no A/C. The workers gave me a funny look when I tried to read the ‘instructiona’ I had translated on google, explaining that Jean-Roni liked to have the little Walmart lantern turned on when he cried at night.
I miss him – I already have for 35 days.
I mourn the hope for a part in his future.
But I also TRUST in my Sovereign God, that He loved Jean-Roni before me & He has rescued him! Everyday from here on out is kwashiorkor-free.
Posted in Haiti
While the Rescue Center usually takes on children whose family members brought them into the clinic, and takes care of the 3-9 months just to address the malnutrition, there are around 6 kids who do not have family to return to.
These kids will either go to an orphanage, be placed for private adoption and/or stay at the Rescue Center for a really long time. (more on agencies here…)
If you think God might be leading you to adopt a child, consider these:
 Denny: super-smart kid, hydrocephalus with a shunt… he has been at the Rescue Center about 3 years. |
 Jenny: very alert & smiley girl, abandoned at the clinic, Cerebral Palsy mostly affecting her legs (read more…) |
Posted in Adoption, Caring for the world, Haiti
Heading to the airport in 1 hr.
We just spent the morning at the Rescue Center. It was really hard to pass
Jean-Roni off to them after spending 4 days 24-7 together. I used
google-translate to write a letter to his grandmother, who brought him here.
I really hope that they give it to her.
Sunday is very relaxed here. We took a walk to see if we could find the
local churches, but since they are in Creole we didn’t try to attend. It got
very hot on our walk, so we just changed our path to end up in the river (do
you see a theme here?) and cool off.
Jean-roni
Praise report: Friday night, Jean-Roni started eating like a champ. Prior to this, he has not been sucking on the bottle, and it has been so hard to just feed him an ounce. He took a super long nap after dinner Friday, and when he woke up, he drank from the bottle the correct way with a full latch on the nipple, and finished 1.3 oz in like 5 mins!
So, I got good rest last night, because it didn’t take long to feed him during the night!
Saturday:
We sifted this ENTIRE pile of manure!
Then we moved on to the dirt. Similar process, minus the beating – we just had to sift out the rocks, which were alot heavier than manure clumps. Someone had to be loosening the earth with a pick, while another shoveled the dirt onto the sifter, and someone had to shake the sifter to get the dirt away from the rocks, then toss the rocks aside. This took lots of upper body strength, which I lack in. And this was all in full sun! I didn’t make it very long helping with this task.
3:00pm-4:30pm – We went to the Rescue Center and did the weekly weigh-in of all 60 kids, charting gained and lost weight. Praise the Lord – Jean-Roni finally had a bowel movement!
This evening we have just relaxed.
Last night (Thursday night), I took the night shift with baby Jean-Roni, so
I fed him at 10pm, but ended up awake chatting til 11:30pm, then got up with
him to eat at 1pm. Pretty much newborn-duty. He got really fussy between
1pm-4pm so I stayed up, then only fell asleep for like 2 hrs…
So I stayed in with him most of the day, cuz I was pretty tired.
We did bring back Ojean from the Rescue Center to hang out for lunch, then
we took an afternoon nap with the baby. Our main task planned for today was
to process all the charts from the 3 clinic days, but Lori got pulled in to
translate for an inservice for the clinic nurses, so we were just waiting
around on her.
Around 4pm, we decided to take a walk around the village. Jess took us
through area with the homes of some of the people we know from here. Most
are concrete, mud, or sticks, and only about 10′ × 12′ total. Very
primitive.
When we circled back around on our walk, we ended up at the river, and
crossed the bridge to the rented house where the 3 ladies mentioned on the
Real Hope for Haiti Rescue Center blog recently live – all three ladies were in
malnutrition themselves when they came to Real Hope, and now are employed
and doing great. It was really neat to see them living in community and
raising their kids together. Adjacent to their 2-room house (3 moms,
multiple kids), lives a guy who fell out of a coconut tree and is paralyzed
below the waist – they take care of him, too.
We ended our walk in the river. It was so inviting that I started out
wading, but eventually just laid down in it! Everyone else in the river is
either fully naked (kids) or mostly naked (adults bathing – underwear only)
- but I was fully dressed I assure you! It felt amazing.
When we got back, Lori was ready for the filing process. It started with us
sorting all the papers from the 1,000 visits this week into piles of
prenatal, pediatric and general care. Then we got totals for each type of
visit, and then totals for which pediatric visits had malnutrition. Then
Lori goes through every paper (2-4 hrs… we only started, not finished,
tonight) and keeps track of how many of each category of illness were seen
(worms, headache, malaria, bloodpressure issue, etc) and each type of med
that was prescribed. I am really blown away at the level of data they are
working to collect. When this part of the task is done, all the papers will
be filed and ready for next Tuesday’s clinic.
Some other random clinic info I gathered:
- Alternating Mondays, they have a TB clinic for the 50+ active TB cases in the area. – Every child in the rescue center will be tested for TB & AIDS as soon as they are healthy enough to take a ride to a clinic 2 hrs away that has TB tests – for some reason Lori can’t get a hold of these tests. So she pays 2 staff to ride with the children, for their food, for a return trip to have the tests read. – The $1 Haitian that is paid for each clinic visit is enough to cover the 14 staff members that work there ($5-$11/day) (minimum daily wage in Haiti is $3.75), as well as most of the medicine, some of which comes from the US, some from India, some from Haiti.
Also a little history of Real Hope for Haiti specific to the clinic:
Lori & Licia’s mom Gretchen was a nurse, and come down to minister in
Port-au-Prince with another organization. When she was interested in opening
another clinic, they asked the government where the need was the greatest.
The government needed to open a clinic here, so happily sent them to open
this instead.
The new files started this week (people who have not been here before) are
numbers 104,000+.
Tomorrow (Saturday), we get to work with the Community Development group on
projects they plan to improve Cazale. More on that tomorrow!
Thursday: my spirit is much lighter today.
Marlene with Karen
Then I slept like a rock – 9:30p-8:30a! The power didn’t go out at the normal time, so I just kept sleeping.
Once I got up, I spent most of the day with the new baby who came in last night, Jean-roni. He is actually doing really well. It’s like feeding a preemie, one ounce at a time, every hours. But he seems like a fighter, and smiles when I get close to his face.
