A month in Haiti...

... goes by extremely fast! People have been coming and going from the Apparent Project Guest house and the Clay family household every week for the past month. This past week we had an awesome team leave us. Thank you Sarah and Nate Woodward for being such great leaders!! The team brought down a ton of supplies including miles and miles of elastic and beading thread and bags of silver clasps. Much needed items. They also distributed tents and baby formula and built our first house! They were a huge blessing to our neighborhood.

I rode a motorcycle today for the first time in my life. It was great. I went downtown to see the destroyed palace and the fallen Iron Market. The downtown area had so much destruction. Its crazy. The saddest part is seeing the buildings that fell and the levels are sitting on top of each other like pancakes and you know that all the people are still in there dead. Its like there are giant tombs all over the city. But weirdly life goes on all around them. People have set up shop right next to these demolished places. I think the strangest thing is seeing a place where there used to be a building but now having just nothing there. Some rubble has been cleared. And its like some buildings never even existed. Its disorienting. Sometimes I can't tell where I am because my landmarks have disappeared. Or the landmark is now a tent city. There used to be this beautiful area right in front of the palace that is now covered in tents. We stopped next to one of these tents today and a man called out to me, "Excuse me can I talk to you for a minute?!" exactly like the man from this video... Hilarious. I asked him for his number, naturally.

Haitian culture is always confusing to me. Whenever I think I am starting to grasp something I am reminded of how much I do not understand. In Haiti people go to the doctor frequently. Or they would if they had the money. A couple days ago I had some dirt in my eye and it was a little red. A Haitian lady told me I needed to go to the doctor. I started to try to explain that I didn't. It was just irritated and would go away. And she replied, "Go to the doctor." All of that to say, it is confusing me about when someone legitimately needs to go to the doctor or hospital. One friend is pregnant and says she is bleeding and has pain and wants the doctor, but her boyfriend says she is just trying to kill the baby. One friend is talking about suicide because he is lonely in a tent all by himself. He has random intense pain where he can not walk and had just been very strange lately. One friend has an intense burn on her chest from when she was a kid that has started giving her a lot of pain recently, also has a baby who almost died yesterday from a freakishly high fever. One neighbor has a twelve year old who is literally the skinniest person I have ever seen, the mom just laughs when I talk to her about needing to feed her daughter more. One friend has back pain everyday, one has a headache every other day. I swear when you ask people 'How are you?' The acceptable responses are, 'good', 'not bad', and 'sick'. Mwen pa kompren.