Back in the summer of 1981 as a sheltered and ignorant 16 year old from Southern California, I went off to a country not so far away from the US as a crow flies (but as far away as is possible on every other level) on a Christian mission trip. My motivation at that time was hardly pure. I wanted to go mostly because I was pretty sure I’d be able to lose a lot of weight over the course of seven weeks doing construction work in the heat. My choice of Haiti was not exactly noble either…it was the cheapest team I could choose, which meant the least amount of support would need to be raised. My experience was nothing I expected it to be. Previously hoping to enter the world of art, because of my experiences there I decided that I wanted to join the medical field instead. At the time I thought I wanted to be a doctor. But life and circumstances were used by God to guide me into a profession I never thought I’d end up in…nursing. Which is a very good thing because doctoring and I would have been a poor fit, but nursing and I are like hand and latex glove. My time and experiences in Haiti that summer as a teenager drove my life in all sorts of directions I had never before remotely considered. It opened my spiritual eyes, it opened my heart, it tore apart the world view I had at the time. To say it was a pivotal experience would be putting it lightly. It was that summer that God really got hold of me and started to reveal who He wanted me to be.
After the earthquake last year in Haiti, I put out feelers to many different organizations offering my skills as a nurse to the people of Haiti. No one took me up on that. Then the cholera epidemic hit. I put my feelers out to organizations working specifically with cholera victims. Last week one of those organizations called me and wanted to know if I could go…and go soon.
So, dear readers, after nearly 30 years I will be returning to the birthplace of so much of who I have become…Haiti. I leave on Valentine’s Day and return near the end of the month.
I will be working in cholera clinics in Cite Soleil with World Medical Missions, one of the ministries of Samaritan’s Purse.
“Nil gach uile fhanai caillte”…Not all who wander are lost…
Some of them are found.
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