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Hard for me to organize all of my thoughts from the last few days. A few people asked me if I was able to sleep inside or if we were camping on the grounds of the school. Our group of 8 people were able to secure a school room (6th grade classroom) where we unpacked our sleeping bags and are sleeping on cots and airmattresses.

Work for me has been pretty amazing. I've been assigned to work at a clinic that is operating out of the main police station right across from the crumbled Presidential Palace - It really is falling down.

The clinic calls itself "Mission Rescue." It seems to have been started by an American from Floriday who is trying to maintain a supply of medications and staff it with volunteers. In 2 days working there, I think we've seen more than 1000 patients with various maladies, some are fresh wounds while others are suffering from more ordinary afflictions like upset stomachs and fever/colds.

My role has been as a sort of pharmacist and organizer. I think I've learned the names of more medications in the past 2 days than I knew in my previous 33 years of existence. I package up multi-vitamins, anti-acids, antibiotics and other things so that they are easily distributed to our patients. I'm also working as a translator, but many young Creole/English speaking Haitians have volunteered to translate which is good because while I'm getting complimented on my French constantly, its only really working one-way with some of the poorer people who need treatment. Thats because you have to have some education to actually learn French in this country.

Despite some of the communication difficulties, I don't think I've ever done any work before like this that felt quite as worth while. The people coming to mission rescue line up very early and they come from different places nearby. There are quite a lot of tents (like 10s of thousands) in the surrounding neighborhoods so presumably the people are coming from there.

We've basically got the ground floor of one wing of the police station. We try to do OBGYN stuff in a seperate room, while children are sent to a pedi-care room staffed by som volunteers from Michigan. The team from Quisquea (me) sees general patients and we are staffed by a Dr, 2 very experienced EMTs, a retired nurse, and a Physician's assistant. I stand on my feet about 7+ hours just running around filling pills as I mentioned above, disinfecting and cleaning wounds, and sometimes giving instructions to the patients in French (take this one 3 times a day etc.) Some of the highlights of treatment have been me having to hold down a 'street kid' while we gave in a novacain injection and then stitched up a wound his friend had given him from a broken bottle - I also saw the Dr. lance a really gross boil today that kinda exploded - it was awesome!

Some of you are aware that I can feel a bit light headed from discussions of some medical topics, but that hasn't happened to me at all here. I'm seeing a lot of gross stuff and it isn't really phasing me at all.

One thing about the mission rescue site is that you can go up onto the roof to eat lunch when we managed to pull ourselves away for a break. Up there you get a great view of the crumbled presidential palace as well as the records building with all the adoption information next store (that one is just ruble). You also can take in the scope of the destruction from a high-ish place and its difficult not to be overwhealmed. Not every building has fallen down, but there are more in ruins than you can count. Who knows if they will ever climb back up from this - and they weren't really in a very high place before anyway.

From the roof today I got to see what we thought was Michelle Obama's helicopter touch down on the grounds of the Presidential palace. There were American soldiers up there with sniper rifles pointed toward the landing zone - kinda cool.

All in all I'd say that the experience has been exhausting, but I'm really feeling like I'm making a difference. Thanks to all of you who supported me and are continuing to pray.

Will try to blog again tomorrow or Thursday.