Time flies when you're in the Haiti sun

Keeping up with a blog is hard on this mission. The days are long, the work is tiring, and when you have any free time it is usually spent sleeping, eating, or chatting it up with new people on the ship. I have met so many people in the past three weeks, from so many different backgrounds and interests and specialties. From the nurses and surgeons, who speak a language of medical terminology O could never understand and perform miracles I could never fathom doing, to the Project Hope and other NGO volunteers, who chose to be here to help people without getting paid, I have never worked with such an awesome, motivated group of people.

Haiti has been hard. Not only is it a hard work environment- hot, dirty, did I say hot?- but it is also hard seeing the poverty and the circumstances in which people live. I have seen some medical cases that I didn't even know existed outside of textbooks- huge growths and tumors on faces and necks of children, cleft pallets, out of control cases of cancer, things I could not even try to explain in writing. Seeing so many people suffering and living in a country where 80% of the people make less than $2 a day so they cannot afford to go to the doctor, even when it is life threatening, so sad. The hardest part is knowing that we can't help everyone who comes to us, that we can only help so many people in the two weeks we are here.

But the feeling of seeing the people we have helped is indescribable. We have had countless volunteers helping us during our time in Haiti, mostly translators, and also from NGOs in the country. Every night we have a meeting at 7pm, in which we not only talk about the plan for the next day but we also have a chance to thank people for helping us during the mission. For the past several nights the Continuing Promise mission leadership has presented the NGOs and volunteer translators with certificates to thank them for their help. In response, the volunteers had a chance to talk about their experiences in working with us during our time in Haiti. I knew that the work we were doing here and medical care we were able to provide people was amazing, but I didn't really realize the true impact until I saw these volunteers stand up before us with the microphone and express their gratitude, many with tears in their eyes. The one sentence I keep hearing repeated over and over by these volunteers is "there are no words that can describe how thankful we are for what you've done."

This is definitely the most emotionally and physically draining work I have ever been involved in, but it is worth it, and now that we are wrapping up our mission in Haiti I can't wait until we get to the Dominican Republic so we can do it all over again.