Invitation

As I work on these blogs, my main goal has been to reflect for myself about what I have seen and heard, but I want to invite you all to participate with me on this journey. Let me know what you think, challenge me, encourage me to think, grow and learn. I believe that God has placed us in community for a reason, so I welcome your comments!

How Great Thou Art

I am getting out of order a bit with this entry, but I think that sometimes it is crucial to write about things while they are very fresh in our minds, so here it goes. . .

I was in Brazil for a missionary retreat. At worship we had sung "How Great Thou Art" and the music filled the room. I have always loved that song. As we sang I had beautiful images dancing through my head. Forests, flowers, trees, brooks, mountains, ocean, etc. . . the beauty of God's creation. I sang with all my heart. With those images in my mind how could I help but sing, "How great Thou art".

Later in the service there was a call to a prayer of intersession for the people of Haiti. As we prayed together, I heard the song "How Great Thou Art" echoing in my mind, as I saw mental pictures of all of the horrors I had seen in Haiti over the past few months. With those images in my mind and the words, "Then sings my soul my Savior God to Thee, how great thou art, how great thou art. . ." going through my soul, I could feel God reminding me that He is God and He is still great in the midst of all the pain and disasters as well as in the beautiful moments of my life.

My eyes flooded with tears and it was almost painful for me to allow the words to the song and those images coexist in my mind, but there is deep truth in the fact that they do coexist in this world.

God, you are God and I praise You as God in the midst of the beauty my eyes have seen, and God, I praise you and recognize you as my God even as I witness things that break my heart. Our circumstances change, but in the midst of it all, you are God and you alone are great and worthy.

Shout out to the variety of International relief workers

Those first few days were incredible! I had never seen so many people from so many different places!

Spain's teams was fabulous! The did more casting than anyone else. Incredible! They worked so hard and were so positive.

Puerto Rico was a lot of fun! They taught me to mix meds and referred to me as Nebraska. They were many and brought lots of supplies.

Japan's team was awesome. We had trouble communicating, but they we willing to do whatever kind of surgery that needed to be done. Some of the other teams only wanted to work in their particular area, but Japan would do what needed to be done.

Peru, Mexico, US, Canada. . . all of these volunteers represented some of the best of humanity. They heard of the need and they just came. Most of them just happened on the hospital. They had come and brought what supplies they could just trusting that they would find a place to lend a hand! Incredible! Some of us are still in touch. It was so neat to see the world come together for the people of Haiti.

I wanna hold your hand

There was one little boy that I will never forget. I see his little face in my mind even now. He was alone on the back of a large truck. There were three groups of people, but this little boy was clearly alone. He lay there crooked in an uncomfortable looking position crying. He caught my eye from the pharmacy. At that point we had so many new people coming in that we were forced to keep them waiting to be evaluated before unloading them from the trucks.

I went over to that precious little boy and I sat beside him on the truck. I rubbed his little arm and spoke to him. I didn't speak Creole and his probably didn't understand my English or Spanish, but he did understand my touch and he grasped my hand as if it were a matter of life and death. As I held his hand and rubbed his arm I noticed he was burning up with fever. I left him to get some tylenol and he screamed bloody murder when I left him. As soon as I came back he grabbed my hand again.

I called over one of the doctors to evaluate him. They took him off the truck and started to unwrap the bandage around his right arm. He was screaming as the blood and infection stained bandage came off. The screams and the smell coming from his wound made me sick to my stomach. I kept holding his little hand and trying to have him look at me and not watch the doctors.

I looked into his eyes, as I heard the doctors talk about the wound. The verdict broke my heart. His arm was full of gangreen and needed to be amputated immediately to save his life. They carried him off in that very moment for surgery. I never saw him again. I was told later that he had lost all six of his family members in the quake. He was alone in the world and now missing an arm as well.

I searched for him among the crowds. I heard he had made it through the surgery, but I couldn't find him. . . I heard that someone had come to pick him up later--maybe an uncle. . . I heard that he had been taken to another hospital or orphanage. . . the truth is I don't know. I have told this story a few times and it has been too hard to admit to myself and to others that I never really knew what happened to this little boy whose face I can't erase from my mind that I have lied and told one of the endings like I knew it was real. I don't. If I lied to you, I ask your forgiveness.

I long to know the ending to his story. The truth is I don't know if he is alive or dead, with someone who loves him or alone. And that truth tears me up inside. It is sometimes easier to try to make yourself believe the lie than it is to tell the bitter truth. I want to believe that he is ok, I pray that he is.

The great moving

I don't know much about disaster relief and how it normally happens, but one of the hardest things those first few days was a lack of unity and consistency. Every group and even every individual that came in wanted to do their own thing. With each new shift and wave a people there was a new way of doing things. One group wanted to give everyone their meds at the same time, another wanted to do it on an as needed basis and write down times, others wanted to give the patients meds to keep taking on their own.

So much was done and re-done in different ways. Someone would change a bandage and as they were just finishing taking off the bandage someone else would say, I just cleaned and changed that bandage 10 mins. ago. It was chaos!

Then we got a new leader on the floor. He had worked lots of other disasters and he was going to get us organized! First, he wanted everyone and I mean EVERYONE cleared out of the main area, which happened to be the open area outside of the pharmacy. That was going to be the intensive care area, so everybody needed to be moved out, then evaluated and only the worst off patients moved into that area. There would be NO EXCEPTIONS!

That seems easy enough until you are moving a patient with burns over about 65% of his body and another guy with a chest tube and others with severed limbs and others. . . and others. . . and moving them not once, but twice . . . first out then in. NO EXCEPTIONS.

I thought we might loose a couple of the guys just in the moving process. It seemed so wrong and so harsh. I hated being a part of it and throughout the process the echos of the pained screams rang in my ears.

Finally it was over. The next day success of the effort was declared because the only two patients that had died that night had died in the intensive care area, and so we knew that they were not likely to make it and were doing all that we could for them, while those who were in less urgent conditions and were going to make it through the night, were perhaps given less attention.

I still don't know why we couldn't just assume that the guy with the chest tube and the guy with the burns would be in the critical care area so that they didn't have to be moved twice, but it wasn't my call and I was kind of relieved just to have a leader at that point to organize the chaos.

It may not be worth much, but I did make one contribution that night. While the leader wanted to use boxes of supplies to divide the most critical area from the second most critical area, I convinced him to keep the supplies in the pharmacy and to divide the two areas with a ace wrap rope that I made. I also sent our team out to get tarps to keep the sun off the burn victim and our other critical care patients. Thinking creatively is crucial in these circumstances. ;)

Moses and Aaron

As I looked through the window of my little pharmacy, I saw many things. One image which I hope to never forget is that of two young women. They had been together in a church as it collapsed and one was severely injured.

Every morning and every evening, the healthy sister would sit behind the injured one and hold her up as they sang praises to God.

I remember being in that pharmacy questioning God and asking how He could be a gracious and loving God and still let this happen, and then looking through that window and hearing these two women praise that same God. As I looked on, the healthy young woman lifted her sister's weak arms holding them up as the praised.

My mind flashed to Moses on the mountain top with the army of Israel fighting below. As long as his arms were raised in prayer the army was victorious if his arms lowered they began to loose the battle, so Aaron held up Moses' arms as he prayed.

With warriors like these two young women, I knew that their was hope for Haiti and that hope is in the God that I questioned while they praised.

I don't think it is wrong to question God, but I did feel a bit humbled to be in that situation with a whole healthy body and be out praised by people who had lost everything they knew, nearly their own lives and whose future was so uncertain. It is good to be humbled!

Hording supplies

One of my most painful memories of those first few days was when I caught myself losing a bit of my humanity. You see, some supplies we had in abundance, some we were short on, and some we just didn't know if we had much of or not.

The doctors were giving out the meds, but I was able to hand out diapers and such directly. My life was a whirlwind of grabbing supplies for each doctor that came in to the pharmacy and mixing the meds that they asked for and also trying to attend to the patients and their needs as well. I was running around in circles. All of a sudden I realized that to the parents who came to me asking for diapers for their babies, I was giving out a single diaper.

How ridiculous was that? I know that babies poop and pee pretty darn regularly and the last thing that their parents needed at that incredibly difficult time in their lives was to have to walk over the the pharmacy every couple of hours to ask the silly American who doesn't speak their language for another diaper. I didn't realize who I was becoming until I turned to one parent who spoke English and said, "but I just gave you a diaper". And he responded, "yes, but the baby pooped again".

Imagine that!

It was at that moment that I took a step back and looked at the person I was already becoming. Stress does crazy things to people. I don't want to believe that I am normally the type of person who could behave so harshly and in a weird sense selfishly to other people especially as I am witnessing so much pain, but in that moment I saw that I was something far less than the person God created me to be. It still brings tears to my eyes to think about what kind of a witness I was in that moment. May God and my brothers and sisters forgive me.