Today, at approximately 4:30pm, Week Two Team Idaho, will leave on the first leg of our journey! Hilary, Lindsey, May and I will pack into Linds' Subaru wagon and head on down to California. Our first stop is my brother Eric's house in Santa Clarita, CA. Visits and naps will be in order! He'll take us to LAX before he has to go to work, keeping the Subaru safe and picking us up upon our midnight return on the 17th. We will have about 8 hours in LAX. Yay. Oh well, could be worse, right?!
Our next leg will be from LAX to FLL, with a 35 minute layover. No rush, right! Yikes! We take off from Fort Lauderdale at 0635 and land in Port au Prince around 0830. The California group arrives around 0800 and will have to wait for us. We will then pile into a couple of vans/trucks and head to the welcome home to regroup before the 4 hour drive to Maissade.
This will be my fourth trip to Maissade and my 6th to Haiti. I know that May, Linds, and Hilary are looking at me for guidance and I pray that I will be able to take care of them and make them feel safe. My good friends from previous trips, Jeff, Brian and Steve, along with my father, will be there as well.
Maissade is where Jeremiah's family lives and where Sherri and I traveled to a year and a half ago to adopt him. It is a safe town with wonderful people trying to survive without half of the items we go camping with on a daily basis. Illness is an accepted way of life, hunger as well. We hope to change some of that with this trip.
Today, I will finish packing, pick up prescriptions, activate the global phone, etc.
Yesterday we had a scare. May woke up in excruciating pain, vomiting, and screaming. I was leaving work and got a text message from Sherri, telling me to call ASAP, that she was taking May to the ER. That kept me awake after a long night shift! I met them at the hospital and it turned out, after an ultrasound, labs, IV fluids and meds, to be an inflamed ovarian cyst. She's had one before, but this gave us a scare because it was the day before we were scheduled to leave. When I got the room and she saw me, she broke down in tears. This really put things into perspective for me. At that point, I realized that as much as I wanted to go, I wanted her to be okay. I was ready to forgo the trip, but then I realized I had a lot of others relying on me as well. The project would go on without me. It helped me remember that God loves May and the people of Maissade, Haiti more than I ever will. The cool thing is that God allowed this to happen to May before our trip and we were able to get meds for her if this happened again while we were gone.
Well, I'm off to pack and do all of the other things listed above. Prayers and kind thoughts always appreciated! Please follow this blog as Sherri will be updating it as I text her from Maissade.
Also, the good doctors from Saltzer Medical in Nampa upped their donation to $4400! I am so Lucky to be a part of all of this!!
-Steve
No comments:
Post a Comment