My first day in Cap Haitian

This morning I woke up at 3:00am in order to get on the 6:00am flight to Haiti. They weighed every piece of luggage and every passenger before loading the little plane with 25 people and 10 roosters that were crowing the whole journey... it was a once in a life-time experience! I have been in taxis with chickens while I was in Africa but this is the first time I have ever flown with roosters!

We arrived at 9:30am to our hotel and were told that there were over 100 people waiting for us at a training centre at 11:00am. After quickly getting settled we gathered our materials and started our first day of training. We divided the group into four smaller groups and they rotated through the four sessions. My workshop was on working with children, and my colleagues did workshops on understanding the dying process, post-traumatic stress syndrom and self-care when caring for others. In the training today I would guess that about 15 people were in Port-au-Prince on the day of the earthquake and escaped with their lives. Many of them are still traumatized by what they experienced and what they saw that day and the following days.

It was a challenge to connect with the participants - the Haitians are a very formal people. All the women were wearing skirts or dresses (except the three of us who were leading the training!) and they each stood up to introduce themselves or to answer or ask a question. It took me a while to understand them and I think they are struggling to understand me! French is not their first language and it is not my first language so we are all adapting to find the language to communicate with each other.

The hotel we are staying at is nice. There are big spacious area with tables and chairs - an open lobby (where I am right now) with free wireless from time to time! I have tried several times to get on line so I am hoping this works. There is even water in the swimming pool now! It is very hot and humid so that pool could come in very handy when I get a chance!

Tomorrow we have a training session with the educational leaders of the city. People from several schools are coming. I heard that there will be about 75 people tomorrow. Right now the schools are all closed until March 15th because of the mud-slides that happened here a couple weeks ago. Four children died and all the schools decided to close until they could assess the emotional affects of those deaths and the earthquake on the children of the Cap.

There is certainly a United Nations presence here - I saw hundreds of people standing in line waiting for the food distribution program to give them rice. The pastor who welcomed us today and is coordinating our trip told me that he estimates that there are about 250,000 people in Cap Haitian who are displaced from Port-au_Prince because of the earthquake. Unfortunately there is not the infrastructure to meet the needs of all these people and many people have no job, no money, no food and no where to stay.

I am thankful that we made it here safely and continue to pray that God uses us to meet the need of these people who have been so traumatized.