Just me and the chickens. And a couple of goats. And wall-sitting Haitians.

Some mornings, Dolly helped in the clinic. She was a labour and delivery nurse for many years and so she tolerates the sight of yukky things much better than I. So she weighed and measured babies and took blood pressures of mamas. 

I was banished to the road to help on a painting project. 

The road outside the clinic looks like this to the east...

...and this to the west.

Mamas knocking at the gate, rat-tat-tatting to be let in by Jason, the guard, is a common sight. 

There is a rooster, of uncertain ownership, that pecks around in the dirt outside the gate.

I am not clear on the attraction of roosters for the Haitian people. They are raucous at all hours of the day, but particularly at 4 o'clock in the morning, when the roosters perform their own version of the "twilight bark" from 101 Dalmations.

Segue please.

Haitian roosters make me grumpy.

In fact, I was asking Santo (resident translator and general go-to guy at the clinic) why we owned a rooster, he informed me that it was so that the hens would lay eggs.

But Santo, I said patiently, you don't need a rooster to get eggs.

Yes, you do, he replied, with a barely disguised pity in his eyes.

No, you don't, I insisted.

Yes, you do.

Oookay. I gave up. Sometimes, you just have to know when to concede defeat. This was one of them. There is also the matter of the lone egg that sits on the roosting shelf in the hen coop that supposedly incites the Dominican hens to lay eggs. Not working so far, people! I just hope that it never falls on the ground and breaks, or it will surely asphyxiate the chickens.

Aaand, there are the two pregnant mama goats, who belong to Jason, the afore-mentioned guard. I got a kick out of the number of times per hour that Jason peeks his head around the gate to check on his babies. He does love his goats!

Walls in Haiti are canvasses for art. 

Sometimes it is utilitarian, like this...

...and sometimes it is much more decorative.

I confessed to being slightly artistic, so Sarah asked me to help Wilfred, the brother of one of our translators, whom she had hired to paint a mural about healthy water practices. 

I love Haitian art. It is primitive and colourful and depicts ordinary, yet idealistic, aspects of everyday life in Haiti. It has an optimism that I like to think will be rewarded some day with bliss.

Wilfred has lofty goals. He told me that he wants to be a great person some day. I think he already is a great person, but I hope he also figures out how he can become successful, which is what I think he meant.

Wilfred used a pencil and an oft-abused level to rough out the rectangle that would contain the mural. 

No, he did not entrust me with any of this task.

But he did allow me to help paint the white background.

This is Jude, another brother, who is a happy fellow and liked to make fun of me, especially when I made strange noises because I was so hot. As in "elevated temperature", not "degree of coolness".

The wall on this side of the street was in direct sunlight all of the day, so the general strategy was to paint until you couldn't stand it any more, then go sit on the shady side of the street to recover.

Whereupon, I (and Dolly, when she was helping) learned the fine art of wall-sitting, one of my favourite aspects of Haitian culture.

Don't we do it well?

I had retired to the house one day and when I came outside again, Jude and another friend and helper (wall-sitter) Black Yves were snoring loudly next to the wall.

For a second, I believed them, but then they both burst out laughing.

Funny, guys!

It soon became apparent that I was not to be allowed to tarnish Wilfred's masterpiece with my amateur strokes, so I made this large painted space for notices. The usual practice is for people to slap notices randomly on walls, so Sarah decided to supply a delineated space and ask people to get permission from MBH before they posted their papers. 

I also made this tree for some of the local children to decorate with their hand-prints.

One day, it rained as we were working on our separate walls, and the boys rigged up this ingenious way of protecting their work.

It took them all week to complete the project.

Wilfred stopped by the night before we left. I had asked him to make a painting for me, but he had forgotten that I was leaving so soon. He told me that Jude had asked him to tell me that he thought of me as his friend.

Sweet Jude.

I left some money with Sarah, so I may yet get that painting.

What we did all day: Part 2

No sad stories this time.

There were a lot of people staying in the house during the last couple of days of our trip. It seems like we were invaded by every midwife in a fifty mile area. Have you ever spent much time around a gaggle of midwives? The conversations are eclectic, to put it mildly. There are images etched on my pre-frontal cortex that I will never be able to erase.

Dolly and I were sleeping in the pharmacy, which has curtains on two sides, one of which overlooks the downstairs post-partum room and the other the upstairs common area. We had no privacy whatsoever, so we were feeling the need to hide out. Luckily, there was a birth room downstairs that was needing some TLC.  Here are the results of our artistry. Some new curtains had been hung in the window and we used the design for inspiration. 

Formerly know as the hibiscus room, we laid odds on how long before it becomes "the bird room".

Sarah was very happy. She said that this room used to be the least attractive, with bare concrete walls and no curtains. Now it is a cheerful room and will be our little legacy at MamaBaby Haiti.

Look for a barrage of posts in the next few days as I catch up on some things I think you will find interesting.

Thanks for reading.

What we did all day: Part 1

Can you endure another sad story?

Mma (madame) Claudine, my new Haitian friend, is a lady of great dignity and grace. She came to the clinic a few months ago with her daughter, who was pregnant. Her son had killed himself and, as a result, her husband abandoned the family. She was forced to move in with a male relative in order to provide for her family. The relative raped her oldest daughter and she became pregnant. The two left the relative's home and had nowhere to go. She begged Sarah to help her and Sarah, in her compassion, found them a place to live and allowed them to come to the clinic each day to eat. The house is really a tiny room with no space for the other children, so another teenage daughter remains at risk in the home of the relative. Claudine makes herself useful around the place, gardening and tidying and helping every time she sees a need. I love that she doesn't expect a handout, but is willing to work. 

Sarah has also taught Claudine to give a chair massage, so sometimes at lunchtime the volunteers and midwives will sit for a massage and pay her. 

 Dolly and I spent some time in the mornings working on sewing projects.
Well, Dolly worked the treadle machine, because this handy seamstress just could not get the hang of it, and I measured and cut. We made baby slings and cut post-partum pads from the left-over fabric..

The slings were in high demand with the new moms and we didn't always have enough to go around.

This young lady sat and watched us for a few hours and Dolly handed her a sling as she finished it. She was so enthralled that she wore it all day and she hasn't even had her baby yet!

Isn't she beautiful?

One morning, the machine was vacant for a few minutes and when I turned back to it, Mma Claudine was gesturing to me as if she wanted to sew. I smiled and gestured for her to go ahead.

From then on, this sweet lady was the new seamstress.

And that, my friends, was what we did in the mornings.

Well, some of them.

Mamas (and daddies) and babies

This is Inocent, whose wife died after she gave birth (not at MamaBaby Haiti!) to their third child. He said she went crazy after every birth and ran away. This time, she didn't come back. He came to the clinic looking for help because he couldn't look after the children and also work, so he had no money for food. He had been feeding the baby sugar water and she was pitifully malnourished. The two older children were not in school and he had nowhere to turn. 

Sarah gave him some work painting around the clinic and formula for the baby. He is such a loving Dad and his helplessness in his situation is palpable. 

While we were in Haiti, several options were tried and there is hope that he will be able to put his baby in an orphanage for a few months until he can take care of her. 

There is hope that his two older children will be sponsored by World Vision through the church of one of our translators and be able to attend school. Sarah already arranged for their schooling and had uniforms made. When the children turned up for school the first day, they were told that the school had run out of money and would be closing. And so it goes in Haiti.

There is hope that he will get a micro-loan through Children of the Promise, the organization that runs the orphanage. 

There are no guarantees, only hope. And so he sits and waits for his hopes to materialize.

Here he is, carrying his baby as he walks the dusty roads of Mourne Rouge with his baby in a sling that was given to him by Sarah.

 

More babies that passed through the clinic during our stay.

These lucky mamas, who came for baby clinic, were all given baby blankets that were made for MBH babies by some of you!

In a later post, you will be seeing our sewing friend. This Mom took her baby home in a sling that was made from two receiving blankets. These slings were a hot item, as you will see, and so helpful to young mothers who carry their babies for miles.

These sweethearts are female twins. Their mother died after a Caesarean section at the hospital. The story involves a couple of falls, a split incision, and a motorcycle, and I never did quite get the whole thing. But the babies are now two months old and dearly loved by their Dad and Aunty. He also cannot work and look after the babies and came to us for help. We tried to get the sisters into COTP but they refused, so the babies' future is uncertain. MBH has been supplying formula and doing what they can to help the brother and sister to take care of the babies. The love is strong, their gratitude is great, but what will become of them is unsure. When I last saw them they said God bless you, and I hugged them and said God bless you back.

One of Dolly's little friends, of whom she had many.

Marie, the Haitian midwife at the clinic, met "her babies" everywhere we went.

Dolly was sad to say goodbye to this little girl, who hugged her and wouldn't let go.

If you have a mind to, please pray for these families. There are many more heartbreaking stories of families divided and fighting for their very lives. Their love and dignity is great, their faith in Christ is strong. It is hard to know how best to help them, but we do what we can and hope that God's grace will fill in the gaps. 

Totally tourist

On Sunday, Dolly got up early and went to the local Baptist church.

I slept in. Are you surprised? We are sleeping in a room that is only closed off with curtains, so the two births that night managed to create enough noise that I couldn’t go to sleep for hours, tired as I was.

Later that day, ten of us piled into the Toyota Land Cruiser (we were squished in a way that I have never been squished before) and took a trip to an old fishing village.
Feast your eyes on these babies.

Old boats lay abandoned on the sand all along the coast.

Here is a new and innovative use for old shoe soles.

Should you ever need one.

This is Rachel.

If I ever have another daughter, I want it to be her.

We walked along a narrow pier. Sunday must be net-fixing day and this pleasant gentleman was happy to have his photo taken.

Not so all Haitians. Today, I took photos of some children who were begging me to take pictures of them. I complied and they were enormously amused at the images of themselves. Then along came an older lady with a bundle on her head who kept calling me blan and making sideways motions across her throat with her hand. I think she was telling me to give her money, but I fled. With great dignity, of course, but fled nonetheless. I later found out that that particular gesture meant that she was hungry.
I felt bad.

I couldn’t help but think that his afternoon on the boat was pretty idyllic, with the sunshine and the quietness of the sea all around him. No doubt, to him it was just work, but he could do worse.

This boat is, I fear, beyond hope.

Pop bottles are used as floats for crab or lobster traps that are made from some kind of reeds or leaves, perhaps banana leaves.

This gave me a chuckle.

This post took me five days to upload, so feel free to hit the "like" button in appreciaton.

Mesi.