Catching Up

I always feel like I'm trying to catch up. 


It's been an incredibly long and difficult journey and I never feel fully rested. 


I am always at least a week behind in my journaling which makes it hard to remember what to write about when I do get a chance to sit down. 


Today I hope to repair that dysfunction. 


Laura Beth, Mitch's niece, and an absolute angel from God himself, has been here over 3 weeks now. She has been such a blessing! Even if she never did a think while she's here (which she has already done soooo much!) it would go down in my book as a success. What it has meant to me to be able to talk to someone who is similarly cultured and understand where I'm coming from...it has lifted a HUGE burden from me. I am now able to relax, focus and do what I enjoy doing. 


Of course, I can't blame this place (the mission or Haiti in general) for all of my woes. Let's face it, I martyr myself. That's what I do! I can't help myself. It's like I got labelled with that as a child and I continue to find myself playing that role no matter what I do or where I do it. 


So, back to catching up. 


I'm going to try to go back and post some of my photos. I've nearly forgotten I even had a camera here! 


Today's selection is a sample of things that we do around the mission just for the bonding and community of it. We are, after all, a fill in family for all of our children. 


In this first photo, you see our evening director, Yonel, who grew up at the mission and stayed on as director, being shampooed by a few of our girls, Bianka (6) Samanza (9) and Junie-Anna (7). What fun they had!

who doesn't love to have their hair washed? 

One of the mistakes I made when I got here was not getting enough background info on Birthday celebrations. Turns out by getting cakes for everyone's' birthdays individually, I was setting a precedence too difficult to maintain. So in November or December, we decided that we would pick one birthday each month to have cake for everyone who's birthday was in that month to do cake. For Dec, we had Kevin on the 22, Bianka on the 24 and Danny on the 28. (Apparently I'm not as behind in photos as I thought - this is for January) Moise (Moses) on Jan 1, Lorvens 4 on Jan 12 and Shedeline 5 on Jan 18. So instead of having several of the Epi D'or round cakes, we had one chocolatey goodness sheet cake from Petionville! Good call Miss Michele! This cake was soooo good!

the most delicious cake in Haiti!

This last one is my failed attempt at those really cool pix of people gobbling up the moon. We have such spectacular night skies but I a. have a crappy camera and 2. suck as a night photographer! 

Ti Martelli has a little green cheese snack!

Okay, well, that's it for this post. Stay tuned for more!