Laugh, Relax, Surrender, and March Forward.

Laugh, relax, surrender, and march forward.

I’ve come to expect the unexpected around here, which has proven well worthwhile. Haiti moves at its own pace in its own style, and it’s best not to fight it. You have to ease in and surrender to the reality of what is, maintain a flexible stance, open expectations, and a go-with-the-flow attitude to absorb the experience. This is a good lesson for me, one I had been trying to cultivate back in Chicago, and something I hope to carry forward into my life as a pre-doctoral intern at Michigan this fall. Having less control over your environment as I do in Haiti lends itself to some good insight and appreciation.

I spent a couple days early this week observing different teachers of the kindergarten kids. The strategy of choice for teachers here, at least as far as the kindergarteners are concerned, appears to be responding to frustration with yelling, smacking the desk with a plastic golf club, or grabbing a misbehaving kid and sitting them down in the corner. Unfortunately and predictably, none of this works and the kids keep misbehaving and appearing to learn at a snail’s pace. Moreover, the teachers’ method of helping kids to write is for them to write a sentence on the board and have the kids write it at their desks while the teacher sits and grades papers for the next 40 minutes. Any time the kids would come up with a question or start having conversations with each other, SMACK goes the club and everyone is quiet…for the next 30 seconds. 

It’s difficult to watch. I know there are more effective ways of teaching and providing discipline. I do empathize with the teachers’ lack of training, overcrowded classrooms with several students who would likely be in their own classrooms or have a 1:1 teacher in the United States, and the lack of stability most of the kids have at home. While I’ve been primarily engaged in conducting activities for the little kids and teaching English, my psychology brain is constantly asking how I can help the teachers more effectively manage their classes in regard to discipline and helping the kids to learn. It struck me that the principles I learned from having briefly taught parenting classes for graduate school several years ago could apply nicely for teachers at the school here. The idea is called Positive Discipline (excerpted from books by Jane Nelson, Ed.D.), which draws heavily from Adlerian psychology and is built on the idea that kids need primarily encouragement and mutual respect to flourish (with regard to parenting and classroom environments). The basic idea is that punishment, criticism, placating, and exercising one’s authority as an adult without due explanation and fairness all hinder positive development and lead to predictable misbehavior. Kids just want to fit in and feel useful and there’s usually a good reason for their misbehavior. If teachers/parents can learn to understand and respond to those reasons, they can alter the way they approach discipline to encourage the children to make choices, feel useful and loved, and experience the natural consequences of their actions (not contrived ones that don’t follow the behavior). There would likely be major changes in the children’s and teachers’ day-to-day experiences for the better. So today I spent a couple hours with a Haitian teacher who’s fluent in English translating a worksheet from English to Creole. I’m hoping Sister Gloria will arrange a meeting with everyone so I can explain it and have them use this as a resource for the classroom. I have no idea how successful it will be, but it’s always good to have more ideas than less, right?

Another lesson learned this week: never underestimate the creative potential of crate paper, twine, scissors, and tape. Maguy and I have continued doing art projects with the kids and she’s always interested in my ideas for good hand stretches and activities to get the kids to improve their concentration. This week we made origami boats and Haitian flags for Flag Day, a national holiday tomorrow. For the origami you would normally use 8.5 x 11 printing paper, but printing paper is a scarce commodity around here, so what sounded like an easy idea was actually quite a bit of leg work to prepare. I hand cut 30 pieces of exactly 8.5 x 11 pieces of  paper from a giant roll of poster paper (thankfully we found a paper cutter or else it would have been hopeless). The kids knew no difference and we had a fun time making boats. Maguy also let me lead the stretches at the beginning of class which I enjoyed. 

Crate Paper + Glue + Scissors = Flag

Although teaching English to the kids has been fun, I’ve grown to really love my weekly informal English lessons with the Haitian teachers. We all share a teacher lounge where we eat lunch together and hang out between classes. Many Haitian teachers are eager to learn English and we’ve started to sit down for 60-90 minutes every Friday to review. Last week was food (Haitian food in English words), and this week we’re going to make sentences with those words. I’m inspired by their desire to constantly learn so much, and I can only imagine if I were in a daily environment where it would behoove me to learn 3 languages, I’d be fluent sooner than later.

Last weekend we were invited to a party at the Chilean’s house about 1.5 miles from our seminary compound. This party was another good example of the benefits of surrendering to the situation. We arrived at around 7:00pm and were told we’d make pizzas. We got there before the sun set because we were walking and had never been there, so we didn’t want to get lost after dark. When we arrived, the Chileans were all hanging out but very low key, relaxed and quietly reading, sleeping, or spending time on Facebook. This went on for the next three hours, and Clare and I were thinking maybe we should have brought some cards or beer or something. Turns out they were all aware of something we weren’t: the party wasn’t even starting until 10 and would be raging all night. Around 10, a crew of U.N. Chilean soldiers who were friends of our friends arrived with an abundant supply of beer and pizza ingredients. Another two guys from the Dominican arrived with a serious set of P.A. speakers, and the party was on from there. Those Chileans (and Clare) kept dancing until the sun came up. They also LOVE American top 40 music and music that used to be top 40, like the Spice Girls. When you hear “I’ll tell you what I want what I really really want” being loudly sung by a machismo Chilean male, all you can do is laugh and keep dancing. I had to take a three hour break and sleep from about 2-5am. When I woke up to more top-40 pop tunes blaring in the room next to me, I figured what the hell; I might as well join the party and keep dancing. After the sun rose, Clare and I spent the next three hours with our friend Gonzalo on the roof discussing differences and similarities between American, Chilean, and Haitian culture and politics. We spent Sunday sleeping. 

View of the party from the roof

 Last Wednesday we had a national holiday and both our work was cancelled for the day. Clare and I were told the kids from the school were participating in a parade and we were invited to come along to watch (or so we thought). At 7:30 am we hopped in a pick-up truck Haitian style, meaning the cab was full and I rode alongside 25 Haitian kids – yes, I counted – jam packed in the bed of the normal-sized truck. We drove three miles to Bon Repos where the parade was supposed to be. I’m not sure what we expected, but when we arrived everyone hung out in a fenced in area for about an hour and then commenced to start marching in the parade. As it turned out, we were the parade. The parade involved all the kids and teachers from the school slowly following a pick-up truck blaring Haitian pop and hip-hop music with a couple teachers in the bed of the truck singing through the P.A. Apparently the march was for peace, but we couldn’t read the signs and nobody told us in English what was going on, so we were none the wiser. The kids were dancing and singing, loving every second of their march. It was pretty hilarious for the first 30 minutes, but temperatures have a way of soaring when you’re standing on the Haitian streets and because we didn’t know what we were in for, we didn’t bring water or money. Three hours later we finally arrived back to the compound, sunburnt and partially dehydrated. The Haitian kids and adults appeared to have gone on a leisurely stroll, laughing and wondering what was wrong with the Blancs (Creole for Whitey). Clare’s only way to help them understand was to have them imagine coming to Chicago in January with no winter coat or boots and going for a walk around the city for three hours. 

The march

At the march for peace

This weekend Clare and I are traveling to Kenskoff, a town up in the mountains about 2.5 hours and 5 tap-tap rides away from where we live in Croix-des-Bouquetes (pronounced Kwa-day-boo-kay). Maguy lives there with her two sons and invited us to stay with her for the weekend. We hear it’s beautiful and can’t wait to explore. It also gives me an appreciation for how far people travel on a regular basis for work. Maguy and I have been excitedly talking all week about food; she is eager to have American food and we’re eager to eat more Haitian (and I am also really missing good American food). So we decided that Clare and I would make recipes for two nights and she would do one for the other night. What could be more American than pizza and tacos?! We’re going to attempt to make homemade tacos and pizza and are hoping there’s enough semblance of an oven to make it all happen. Either way I’m sure it will be a great adventure. I’m just going to keep following the mantra: laugh, relax, surrender, and march forward.

-Aaron

As Aaron mentioned, we’ve had some more practice at some of life’s great lessons this week. Being here is a strange way to learn how to do the simple things like slow down, be patient, let go of control of a situation, and ease into a rhythm foreign to you. I realized this early in the party Saturday night (or by that time was it Sunday morning?). While I was eating pizza and listening to that Black Eyed Peas song for the 3^rd time, I realized those were to only two things familiar to me most of the night and that day. Earlier that day to get to the party at the Chileans house, we walked through the labyrinth of tall poured concrete walls, inconsistent hand painted street signs, and rocky/dusty roads armed only with a hand-drawn map to lead us to an unknown destination. It made me recall a feeling of panic I may have had if I was driving anywhere in Chicago for the first time without my GPS. Or how I may have felt going to a party where I didn’t know anyone in Chicago. But none of that brought us stress and instead we were thrilled to get off the compound, be more proficient in getting around, and loved making new friends through the universal language of parties and gestures. There’s really no other way to feel because everything around us and a lot of the experiences are simply brand new or part of our everyday life that was once a new experience.

As Aaron mentioned, the first few hours before the Chilean party was the calm before the storm. I’ve never seen a house full of people move so slowly and I had the impression by about 10 pm most of them were waking up from a long nap. Slowly the Barbancourt, Prestige, and Pisco (a Chilean liquor made from grapes) came out and things picked up steadily over several hours and erupted into a full blown out dance party by 2am which continued until about 6 am. The thing I love most about the Chileans is no one feels shy on the dance floor. There’s not a wall flower in the bunch and it makes it easy to get along with them. I had fun showing a few of my Chilean co-workers pictures of a party I went to my first weekend in Haiti in 2010 at the same house with the same old dog still laying around. There’s a lot of history there and the relationship between the American Haiti Medical Missions of Memphis (HMMoM) and America Solidaria volunteers runs deep. 

The Chilean house courtyard at dusk - all clean and ready to party

Chilean's communal living room

Even Arturo the house dog knows to chill and store up energy before the party

I loved hearing how their impressions of Haiti were so different than what had been showed in our respective countries on the news, as I could totally relate. Having your family and friends believe you’re trekking off into a war zone is part of the ex-pat experience no matter what country you’re from. At the risk of sounding cliché, nothing in the media can give you a sense of what a beautiful and culturally rich country Haiti is. We then got into the topic of what our home towns were like and I told them I was from Detroit. They were all familiar with the city through the bad press and images of a completely depressed landscape. I went on to defend Detroit for how unique and culturally rich the city is when one of them pointed out, “It sounds like Detroit is like Haiti in that way.”

A conversation in three languages

Our Tri-lingual therapy team past and present

Did I mention the Chileans are damn good dancers?

Looking on in amazement

Learning how to do the Chilean version of the electric slide

Can you guess who won?

This week I made educating my patients a focus and can only say amazing things about my Parkinson’s patient.  She’s progressing well through the LSVT exercises for only being seen once a week, making accommodations to her lifestyle, moving with greater amplitude and most importantly perhaps, taking her sinamet regularly. Last week she was asking difficult questions about Parkinson’s that really made me appreciate how hard it is for a Haitian to get a clear understanding of what’s ailing them. Her questions (in this order I believe) were “Is Parkinson’s contagious? Will I ever be cured? Does it get worse?” I answered all of them truthfully with hope, expecting an outpouring of grieving, but instead she wanted to get to work and was anxious to learn what was in her power to control. Today we went back to the OT basics and we did some complex self-care tasks Haitian style. I believe there’s even a glimmer of hope for Rosy too, as her Mom was cuing in a much more appropriate way this week. I’m cautious to call it a victory yet or anytime soon, but I’m hopeful. Wednesdays are frightening for me because we see all pediatrics all day, which is far from my specialty, but Kendra the American PT (and pediatric expert) has been great at gently leading me through some treatment ideas. I can ask her anything without worrying about how experienced I sound (or don’t) and I’m super grateful for her mentorship with the peds and in all things Haitian in general. A technician on leave had me leading a few stroke exercise classes this week but I spent a good amount of time explaining stroke and answering questions they had. I used what I could recall from grad school of the Kawa Model frame of reference to explain stroke through metaphors used in nature. While my knowledge of the model is super rusty, I appreciate that non-Western thinkers and people from developing nations need a way to understand their illness that fits with how they know the world. My average American patient wants to hear of the latest research supporting my treatment, but I find Haitians want their treatment and education of their illness to match their intuition.

Function never goes out of style

 This upcoming month we have a million things to look forward to. Our much anticipated trip to Kenskoff is less than a day away. Anyone can check out a resort in Haiti, but I’m honored to be invited into the home of a lovely Haitian teacher and partner in education of Aaron’s…in the beautiful mountains no less! Plus, to have the opportunity to cook food and break bread with new friends is perhaps the best part. The weekend after that we got invited to a compound wide party at a very nice beach I’m told. Two weekends after that is Aaron’s birthday trip to the beautiful and historic beachside city of Jacmel, followed by the weekend of Andy and Kelli’s wedding in Greeektown, Detroit.

We haven’t even been here a month, but I can feel that time is moving too quickly. So I’m trying to stand still in the evenings as the air gets cool and listen to the chickens and peacocks crowing, dogs barking, radios far off blaring kampa music, children playing, birds chirping, motos growling, the beat of cars’ horns and hand drums, mangoes thumping against the ground, and the usual distant rain storm rolling in that ushers in the evening.

-Clare

When life hands you mangoes...

With some free time on our hands, as well as a love of mangoes and kitchen projects, Aaron and I decided it was time to make use of the dozens of mangoes that fall from the tree above our roof daily.

First; wait for mangoes to fall. A big guest of wind or a little shake of a tree branch will usually do the trick

Then scoop 'em up!

Cut 'em up with the Bear Grylls hiking knife

Grab a partner and arrange those beauties on some plates while you partner swats at the flies

Drag an old bed frame and a piece of glass on the roof to act as a dehydrator (thanks to Erica who pioneered this method)

Let the mangoes sit out in the sun until they're perfectly beautiful (about a day and a half's worth of Haitian sun) bag them up and scarf 'em down

Bonus treat! Refrigerate the mango seeds and then you have a delicious juicy lollipop to enjoy

 The final step (not pictured) is to floss the mango fibers out of your teeth! 

Wait for the next big gust of wind and repeat...

Breaking Us In

Week two in Haiti has proven eventful and fun. Monday was my first day teaching English for the 7th graders. I had two classes and the English Club, an informal elective in which the students can practice their English and learn more of what they want. I found out that day I would be co-teaching with a new Haitian English teacher named Dacila, which was fantastic news. An energetic and enthusiastic man in his mid-thirties, Dacila speaks English well and as a Haitian is fluent in Creole. Our lesson in the class was focused on reading some dialogue, telling time, asking for and giving permission, and other things along those lines. The classrooms, no matter what age, all have one thing in common: they are loud and somewhat chaotic. Dacila and the other teachers also have one thing in common: they are also loud and therefore able to control the class. I'm not a shy person per se, but I realized that to even be heard in class I had to basically use a yelling volume. It was good for me. The kids all (eventually) began repeating my phrases, though I'm not sure how much they comprehended in the end.

Interestingly, I realized students' grade level doesn't necessarily reflect their age; my 7th grade students ranged from 12-16 years old and appear to all have varying degrees of English language ability. It makes it difficult to know if our lesson is on target, but it's what the principal wanted us to use, so that's what it is.

My English Clubs went well too (on different days of the week, one for 7th, 8th, and 9th). I'm still trying to figure out the best way to run it because some students are much more active and well versed in English so I tend to let them ask the questions and try to apply it to everyone else in the class. I gave them music as a topic to consider for the following week since they all love music. My best English speaker in 8th grade asked if we could review some Lil' Wayne so I told him I'd check it out, not having really ever listened to his music. Needless to say, it will be a severely truncated review and maybe we can do a chorus or two of one of the songs, but otherwise it's hilariously and totally inappropriate. The kids laughed when I told them I didn't know the music well and thought it was funny they knew more American music than I do - which is totally true with regard to pop culture.

Cultural lesson #1 of the week: When you make even the slightest suggestion that you may do something, it appears to be a promise set in stone (at least to kids and adolescents at the school). Since telling that one student I would probably sing for him at some point, him and at least 10 other boys and girls from school have come up to me and demanded, "Ou chante! Ou chante pou mwen konye a!" (You sing! You sing for me now!) It hasn't stopped since last week. My other student who wanted to go over Justin Bieber wasn't present in my English Club, and when one of the girls looked at me with rolled eyes and gestured like she was singing into a microphone as if to say, "You promised...what's up with that?!" So knowing it was inevitable, I asked what the class wanted me to sing. The only thing they could agree on was the United States' National Anthem. "Okay, I can do that for you" I said, only then realizing I might not even know all the lyrics by heart since I've never sang it solo before. With a class full of expectant eyes and a grinning Dacila next to me, I proceeded to sing all of the National Anthem with only one line of fudged words that nobody noticed. Everyone appeared to be satisfied with that and gave me a round of applause like I had just introduced a baseball game or something. I then of course asked them to sing their national anthem, which they did without batting an eye. It was impressive; they even hummed the horn parts together in between the verses!

Cultural lesson #2 of the week: Being a White person makes me easily remembered by EVERYONE. Even after a week and a half of being at the school every day, not a day goes by where kids aren’t coming up to me and shouting my name, “Hey Mr. Aaron! Mr. Ceresnie!!” I was impressed they remembered my name, but more so I was impressed that nobody mispronounces my last name in Haiti. This is hilarious to me because about 75% of people who try to say “Ceresnie” for the first time in the United States inevitably mispronounce it in some fashion.

I had a fun week with the little kids too. We threw a big party for two Italian kids who attended the school and moved back to Italy on Friday. They have lived here for the past three years and their parents worked on various gardening, teaching, and construction projects from what I could gather. The children’s mother came with three cakes and a bunch of juice for the packed classroom of about 60 kids for their party. They set up the school P.A. and everyone got to sing or say their final appreciations and goodbyes to the kids. It was really sweet.

Maguy the resource teacher, another volunteer Karla, and the primary teachers took the kids on a tour of some of the farther reaches of the St. Charles Seminary compound (where we live and where the rehab and primary clinic are located). It was a lot of fun! We got an in-depth view of the vast gardens, cement brick factory, and industrial bakery which makes bread rolls and different types of pasta for the compound to eat and to sell. We got hands on demonstrations of the process and got a much closer view than would likely be allowed back in the United States (which was both awesome and a bit nerve wracking given the little kids, ages 4-6, wanting to explore and touch everything).

Teaching the kids how to make bread

Cement block factory

Maguy showing the kiddos the beautiful gardens on the compound

Pigs at the end of the garden!

I got a chance to sit down with Maguy later in the week one-on-one, which was really helpful. She explained to me more of her role and objectives with the school. I learned that she has is new there and met with skepticism from the teachers who don't want to change any of their teaching methods. She has some ideas adopted from a Chilean teaching program and wants me to sit down and observe the classrooms while she is out of town during the next two weeks and write my impressions of what the teachers are doing in class. This shouldn’t be too difficult, even without speaking too much of the language.

Speaking of Creole, Clare and I started our lessons last week with Jonel, one of the principals of the school. We learned the alphabet, numbers, days, months, some common phrases and other vocabulary. The other teachers and kitchen personnel at the school have also spent time every day sitting down with me and Karla (the other school volunteer from Chile) to give us informal lessons. Many of the teachers at the school speak multiple languages and will sit across the table from me and Karla giving us the same lesson, explaining it first in Spanish and then in English. I’m feeling more a little more confident each day with my Creole and at this point can hold very basic conversations, although it’s pretty easy to get lost. On a daily basis I hear English, Spanish, Creole, Italian, and French…it’s a remarkably diverse linguistic environment, though none of the nuns here speak English.

We mentioned in our first blog post that I left my guitar at my brother’s house in Florida by accident, which I was pretty bummed about. Earlier this past week I mentioned to Sister Gloria (the feisty nun in charge of the school and my main boss) that I played guitar but didn’t have one here. She jumped up excitedly, bolted out of the dining room, and proudly displayed a Spanish classical guitar that some volunteer left a while ago. She told me to hang on to it, but not before she picked it up and laughingly strummed a few chords. The nuns here seem to have an uncanny ability to make anything appear out of nowhere.

Sister Gloria basking in the glow of making my music dreams come true

On Friday I’m not sure what I ate or was exposed to, but I got really nauseous and sick to my stomach all day. I went back to my room and rested for a bit, but I couldn’t miss my meeting with one of the Haitian workers on the compound to show me how to make pikliz (pronounced pick-leez), a spicy Haitian coleslaw I’ve been excited about trying since I learned about it before coming here. So I sat and watched her show me how to make it and was sad I couldn’t stomach any food that day (or the next). But I got to try it today and it’s delicious…totally worth the wait! 

Pikliz!!

I was feeling pretty much back to normal with a healthy appetite by Sunday, ready to drink a Prestige after dinner and relax before tackling the week ahead. Sunday night the nuns threw a nice Colombian dinner of empanadas, fried plantains, juice and beer outside under the courtyard arbor to celebrate/commemorate three volunteers who were leaving. The nuns don’t like spicy food, but the Haitian cooks requested I bust out the pikliz, which all the Haitians and volunteers present loved. Culture win!

 

Aaron

View at sunset out of our window

View of the clinic and dormitories from Google earth

View of the larger compound and surrounding neighborhood from Google Earth

To echo what Aaron said, week two has been a lot of fun. Clinic-wise, I’ve enjoyed working with the patients immensely and am thrilled when I can connect with them or make then laugh with (or maybe because of) my limited creole. I would describe creole as a string of beads on a necklace with each bead being a 2-syllable word with very subtle vowel sounds. When people speak to me, I feel like I can grab a few beads at a time and usually not in the consecutive order they are strung. But ultimately, I enjoy my work for what is it and what it always has been, which is connecting with my patients. I was encouraged by a patient last week who said I will learn creole quickly if I enjoy people. I hope that’s the case.

My Parkinson’s patient somehow got a hold of another round of Sinamet (I still have no idea how) and was able to demonstrate really god carry-over of her large amplitude exercises so it was a win-win across the board. I pulled my favorite “I’m watching you” trick of shouting out clinic window at her to mache gwo (walk big) as she was leaving and she turned and around, smiled, and increased her stride length and arm swing. I feel like she is going to make slow and steady progress and overtime require no cuing at all.

Some treatment techniques are not as universal as my current struggle with the mother of a 25 year-old developmentally delayed woman named Rosy with poor initiation, attention, and little non-verbal communication who has the goal of being able to do something, anything at home. She’s perfectly capable of assisting with tasks and can carry out 1-2 step directions, so this goal seems right within reach but she needs cuing and supervision, which is where her mother comes in. I was lucky enough to have probably the best and brightest 16 year-old English translator from the Louviture Clearly school to help me educate the mother, but we still have a long way to go. The mother at this time cues her the only way she knows how to cue a misbehaving child: in harsh tone, slap and a tug, and enough verbal cues to send anyone into a processing overload. Naturally Rosy’s response to this is to bat back at her mother and shut down completely from all interaction. This is really heartbreaking to witness. At this point, I’m aiming to have the mother view Rosy as someone with logical motivation instead of someone who is defiant and rebellious when she shuts down. Our new goal (a few steps back from where I initially started) is to have the mother interact in a positive way with Rosy, to make her smile and laugh, so she can see those motivations in action. I’m really hoping to win the mother over with this new way of dealing with her daughter. For now, I at least won over the interpreter, who was able to coax Rosy back into the clinic after she had shut down by engaging her with a puzzle as we walked. It was really sweet to see this 16 year-old interpreter step up and coax Rosy that way. I know from experience that not all Haitian mothers view their disabled children the way Rosy’s mother does, but I felt better knowing that Rosy’s community has one more patient and understanding advocate in it (the interpreter).

Another challenge this week was to do a cognitive and visual exam on a 20 something young Haitian man who was blind from a congenital birth defect. Although it’s not fair to blame Haiti for the lump in my throat, this assessment would’ve been plenty difficult at home. His goal is to go to school which is tough for anyone in Haiti with a disability. I reasoned with him that he would at least need to be able to navigate an unfamiliar environment without someone holding onto him, and with that we set some goals. First, Verito, the other Chilean OT, and I had to determine what he could see. With some creative pantomiming and descriptions from our Haitian rehab manager/interpreter, we were able to establish he could see shadows by him asking us “What’s the word in English when the sun makes two of you?” Generally though, he could not pick out shapes when they were held against the blinds so it seems that the shadows he sees are pretty vague. He can sometimes pick out familiar people in the right lighting. I tossed out my ideas for a low vision cognitive assessment, walked him outside into the courtyard, and presented him with some off-the-cuff cause and effect problems: “Why won’t water go into this bucket?” After examining the bucket with his hands he said, “Because the lid is on.” “What could I do to make this rope work better?” “Undo the knot in it.” After a few more (challenging) questions to determine that his cognition was solid, we worked on having him ambulate with a cane sweep to navigate his environment. It’s a shaky thing to learn at his age, but I’m hopeful he’ll get more confident with some practice. The rehab technician jumped into the exercise by placing obstacles in his path, and for a first time, I felt he did alright navigating around them with a cane sweep. There’s a grocery stand down the street from the clinic with his name on it; my long term goal is to have him get himself there confidently. Gulp.

Verito and I - hermanas de terapi occupational

Other than that, the week has been a slow-paced one for me, as a few bouts of illness had me run down. The first was a head cold and the second was a touch of (likely) viral gastroenteritis that I caught from Aaron. I look at it as Haiti’s way of breaking in my immune system. Hopefully I’m good to go but the nausea hasn’t totally let up yet. The nuns, cooks, and other workers have all been looking out for us really well and like to make us soup when they know a bug is going around. It’s sweet how maternal they are when they know we’re not well. I really feel part of a family here.

Speaking of family, our rehab team is established here with me and Verito as the two OTs and Kenda and Paulina (who arrived from Chile last week) as the two PTs. We have two Haitian rehab technicians/assistants. It’s been a great idea sharing and swapping environment in the clinic with any combination of 3 languages spoken at a time. Erin left last week and I was sad to see her go. Inspired by her tireless efforts, Aaron and I got to work this weekend on some projects she wanted to complete. Below are pictures of a platform walker we worked on. We had a curious little helper from the school wander into the clinic while we were working so we put him to work on some smaller tasks. He was eager to help us problem solve and try out the platform walker once we’d finished it. Mesi anpil zanmi mwen! (Thank you very much my friend!)

Using a drill bit to puncture aluminum framing

Weekend Warriors

Alright so he's a little big for this walker but it looks like a win!

Next week I hope for better health, better Creole, and most importantly success and progress in the clinic. Haiti is a beautiful country and I look forward to experiencing it with some upcoming outings. More on that later.

Clare

Our peacock admiring his reflection...for hours, and probably doing so as you're reading this