I'm back!
......and that's not a threat. I left for Haiti on August 7th, and returned today, the 20th. We pulled in at home at about 3:00 PM. I will post more about the trip later. I'm not ready to tackle that task just yet, because it will probably get long and drawn out. I do have more than 5 gigabytes of pictures and video from the trip. There would quite a bit more, but the camera quit working on Saturday, the 15th. Also, video uses up a lot of space in a huryy. Bethanie left me borrow her camera to get a few more pictures here and there, and gave me some CD-RW's for more storage space. I had to give back the camera before leaving Port au Prince, so I don't have any digital pictures of the return flights. Would it suffice to say that I saw a lot of dry rugged desert land, lots of poor hungry and sick people, and saw that the folks at the mission in La Source have their hands full of more stuff to get done than they can do alone? No, it probably wouldn't suffice. Some say that a picture is worth thousands of words, and a video is worth exponentially more, but I say it isn't even close to the same thing as being there yourself. For example, it is about 120 miles from Port au Prince to La Source, but it takes about 6 hours to get there on a good day. That means we averaged 20 mph (key word there is "average"), but a good bit of the ride was spent going about 10 mph or less. This was not due to a traffic jam, a motor vehicle accident, bad weather, or construction. It was because the road conditions were just that terrible, but that is normal there. It took about 45 minutes to fly back to Port au Prince on a little single prop airplane piloted by a saintly chap from MAF. Check 'em out at http://www.maf.org/
Some of you who check this blog often may remember how I once mused about the two very different worlds of functioning as a silo builder and a student nurse, and how it is almost impossible to portray to either the Jo Wengers or the other student nurses what it is like to work with the opposite group. Well, it's all about experiences. I can tell you what it's like to bounce around on some dirt road in Haiti, and I can show you some pictures and video, but unless you've been there you won't get the backache or utilize all of your 5 senses at once in that setting. (I did bring some Couronne back to taste, but not any Rocky Road because the kind of rocky road they have down there isn't another flavor of ice cream.) I had a bunch of little boys crowding over my shoulders one day to see some pictures of my neighbor's house from earlier this year when they were logging out the woods. I forgot to delete those pictures from the SD card before leaving for Haiti. In the same way that I can show you a piece of Haiti through a camera and a lengthy discussion, I could not begin to explain what it is like to live in Pennsylvania and have a paved road in front of almost everyone's house just by showing those little boys a picture on my camera screen. It's like speaking pig Latin to a little green Martian, or like trying to explain pathophysiology to a Jo Wenger, or like trying to portray heavy manual labor to a college freshman who is there straight out of highschool on Daddy's money. If there is one thing that I could take to Haiti for everyone to have, and if I could spread it out for everyone as easily as confetti, it would be a good quality education. However, even with that, they would have to pick it up and run with it; you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. There is very little infrastructure whatsoever in Haiti, the economy there is one of the worst in the world, polotics are extremely corrupt, security is very limited and concentrated in select areas, and the demand of gross product per capita is greater than natural supply from the land. The country folks are very set in their ways of folklore, fatalistic external locus of control, and pagan fears, so that in some ways progress is stalled and unecessary harm occurs.
Ok, I already wrote more here than what I planned to. I do want to write more later, and I'm not sure yet if it will all happen at once or in a series of blog posts, but I'll figure that out later. For now, I'll post a few new pictures to my Photobucket slide show at the top right corner of this page. Enjoy! There's more to come. And I'd be glad to sit down and show you all of my pictures sometime.
Some of you who check this blog often may remember how I once mused about the two very different worlds of functioning as a silo builder and a student nurse, and how it is almost impossible to portray to either the Jo Wengers or the other student nurses what it is like to work with the opposite group. Well, it's all about experiences. I can tell you what it's like to bounce around on some dirt road in Haiti, and I can show you some pictures and video, but unless you've been there you won't get the backache or utilize all of your 5 senses at once in that setting. (I did bring some Couronne back to taste, but not any Rocky Road because the kind of rocky road they have down there isn't another flavor of ice cream.) I had a bunch of little boys crowding over my shoulders one day to see some pictures of my neighbor's house from earlier this year when they were logging out the woods. I forgot to delete those pictures from the SD card before leaving for Haiti. In the same way that I can show you a piece of Haiti through a camera and a lengthy discussion, I could not begin to explain what it is like to live in Pennsylvania and have a paved road in front of almost everyone's house just by showing those little boys a picture on my camera screen. It's like speaking pig Latin to a little green Martian, or like trying to explain pathophysiology to a Jo Wenger, or like trying to portray heavy manual labor to a college freshman who is there straight out of highschool on Daddy's money. If there is one thing that I could take to Haiti for everyone to have, and if I could spread it out for everyone as easily as confetti, it would be a good quality education. However, even with that, they would have to pick it up and run with it; you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. There is very little infrastructure whatsoever in Haiti, the economy there is one of the worst in the world, polotics are extremely corrupt, security is very limited and concentrated in select areas, and the demand of gross product per capita is greater than natural supply from the land. The country folks are very set in their ways of folklore, fatalistic external locus of control, and pagan fears, so that in some ways progress is stalled and unecessary harm occurs.
Ok, I already wrote more here than what I planned to. I do want to write more later, and I'm not sure yet if it will all happen at once or in a series of blog posts, but I'll figure that out later. For now, I'll post a few new pictures to my Photobucket slide show at the top right corner of this page. Enjoy! There's more to come. And I'd be glad to sit down and show you all of my pictures sometime.
posted by GKStauffer at 20:29
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