I am feeling a little down today. Sometimes it’s good for me to just to write. Some days I feel like it’s all I can do to keep my head above water. Emotions are all over the place these days. We laugh, we get angry, and we cry. Sometimes we do all 3 at the same time. We hear stories of loved ones reuniting, we hear stories of horror and sadness, and sometimes we just close our ears – because we really can’t take hearing anymore of anything.
We sent our medical workers to the hospital in Port-de-Paix yesterday and they were greeted with a very busy and overwhelmed staff there. There are patients missing limbs, some with broken legs or arms, and some with severe cuts on their bodies/heads. Yet as overwhelmed as this hospital is – it’s like this even on a good day.
Please pray for our staff here – Haitian and American. As much as we try – it’s hard not to think about what’s happening here. Especially when you have an aftershock every day. Many people find it hard to sleep or concentrate. Jose often wakes up at night thinking that the house is shaking. Others who have come here from Port-au-Prince go through the same thing and find it hard to function.
Our kids talk about the quake just like your kids talk about what they ate for lunch. Malaya prayed last night that the people who died would all go to Heaven. Mikela prays for people to understand there is only ONE God and that He will take care of them. Rosie prays for people who are still under concrete. All three of them ask me why this happened and will it happen again. Malaya ran out of her room last night at 3am telling me the house was going to fall on her. Those are daily conversations.
As I type tears just stream down my cheeks. As a mother I find it so overwhelming sometimes that I cannot comfort my children or keep their minds from thinking about what is happening in our country. How do the Haitian mothers tell their children in Port-au-Prince that everything is going to be okay? How do they bring them comfort? What burdens must they carry. The ground still shakes there – but their faith remains firm. I pray that I might have just an ounce of their faith.
Yesterday I booked 22 surgical people to come to Haiti. We hope to start surgeries this weekend. I know many people want to volunteer. There is a fine balance though between having too many people and not enough resources. We are not ready/nor do we have the resources yet to open the mission up to lots of volunteers. Please pray that we are able to touch many lives with what we have readily available and that with everything we do – we honor God above all us.