Kim Priore

Oh we’re rockin’ out people.  Choir practice is going strong…choir practice is where they sing the same song for roughly 2 hours at MAXIMUM volume…and then I get to hear it again in church tomorrow.  Woo!

So the word on Pastor Jephthe is that his malaria test came back negative but they’re treating him anyways…apparently this is common.  Kara tells me at the Pignon hospital they will give you 3 things: chloroquine (the malaria drug), vitamin C, and penicillin.  So we’re not sure what’s wrong with him, it’s possible that the test is a false negative, also possible that it’s some mystery illness.  He’s really bummed out about not feeling well, and I feel really bad for him.  However he was up and around a little bit today, unlike yesterday when I didn’t see  him all day and I basically retreated up the hill to Caleb and Debbie’s with Kara for the whole day.  I feel bad not hanging around the guest house more, but I can’t tell you how exhausting it is to feel like you’re being stared at all the time by people you can’t communicate with.  And with Jephthe ill I’ve been eating by myself which is just like the pinnacle of pathetic for me.  I have to like psych myself up to go out for breakfast, because when you’re the only one eating you can’t hide it if you don’t like it.  Anyways, sorry to vent but I was having kind of a bad attitude today.

BUT it got SO much better when Jephthe announced that “they” were doing “something” related to the water project, and that I could go down and see it and take pictures.  Woohoo!  I’m like what, 9 days into this trip and I get to start doing my job?  Sweet.  So it was great because Phenes and Joe and a bunch of the guys who live at Caleb’s took me and Kara down to the site and it was sort of a joint interpreting effort.  For those who were here before, it’s like the walk down to the river but just not all the way…but so basically climbing down a really steep sort of stream bed only with no water, just some mud…so I’m in a skirt…thankfully a shorter one today…totally neglected to put on the nice sturdy Teva sandals that I bought so I’m rockin’ like the cheap Target flip-flops, but I totally don’t care.  I’m like hopping over logs and from rock to rock (Dougie, totally like New Hampshire when we used to be all Indiana Jones and climb the rocks!) and snapping pictures and taking notes, and for like about 15 minutes I was Kim Priore, Intrepid Third World Girl Reporter.  I’m goin’ all Christiane Amanpour.  So anyways, they’re basically hooking up this big electric pump that will take water from the spring, pump it up to the top of the mountain where it gets processed, and then distribute it down the town.  Or something.  I’m a little fuzzy on the details, but hey, that’s Haiti.

Jephthe also assures me that he has “people” working on “reports” for me, and that he’s on top of the info for BH.  He was hoping the reports would be in tonight, but so far no dice.  So I’m just hoping they’re in with enough time to spare for me to read them over and ask any follow-up questions.  It looks like I’m most likely leaving Pignon sometime on Monday and spending the night in Cap for my flight out on Tuesday.  I forget what I’ve posted already and I’m too lazy to go back and look, but Kara has decided she wants to go home for a little break, so she’s on my MFI flight, as well as Ma Sidoine and some of the grandkids she’s flying back to Florida.  Or something.  Again, you learn not to expect details.  But it’s nice to know there will be a bunch of Pignon-ians on my flight back to keep me company.  At any rate it’s looking like tomorrow will be my last full day in Pignon!  Crazy.  I’m definitely ready to come home, and will be processing for weeks to come but at this point, am totally glad I came and it’s been a character building experience for sure, but just very different than I think I expected.  Not sure what I expected really.  I’m rambling, and that’s what my journal’s for.

So anyways, that’s all for now folks, hopefully I’ll get to do one last post, we’ll see, but for now, hope you’re all having a fabulous weekend!

Hey guys – not much to report today as it was a pretty slow day for me.  BUT bigtime prayer request…Pastor Jephthe has malaria.  He was complaining of not feeling well yesterday on the trip to Cap, and was worse this morning so they made him go to the doctor.  Those in the malaria know (basically everyone except me, they’ve all had it multiple times) say that he caught it early enough (unlike last time when he stubbornly refused to go to the doctor) that he should start feeling better in a day or so.  They also say, however, that when you have to do the malaria treatment in such huge doses all at once that it makes you feel really run down and crappy.  So this is a prayer request on a number of levels…OBVIOUSLY first and foremost for Jephthe…what I should have mentioned yesterday is that the reason he was late leaving for Cap is he was preaching at a prayer meeting at church…as in a prayer meeting that meets before the sun’s even up.  Then after we got back from that hellish ride, he didn’t even have time to sit and eat, he was off to lead a Bible study.  All of this on no sleep because they have an 18-month-old and a newborn.  The man’s amazing, he never stops going.  So I’m very concerned for him.  Also, not to be selfish and make it about me…but this is what I get for trying to be all laid back and Haitian and not pepper him with a million questions all at once.  Now time is running out for me to get the info I need for Bright Hope, and I’m trying not to panic about it.  So anyways, if you all could keep him in prayer, as well as me that whatever God wants me to accomplish on this trip he will make happen and that I will just have to trust in that. 

Other than that, I’m being very chill.  I’m up at Caleb and Debbie’s right now, and with our few hours of city power the kids are watching Return of the Jedi.  Hardly roughing it.  But eventually I’ll have to return to the guest house and the no running water.  Oh well.  A few more days and I’m home!  Love to you all.  And bigtime shout out to Jamie for hooking me up with the malaria pills!  Good thing I covered that base. 

Today I had a very Haitian day.  It started out at 4:45 this morning.  Jephthe and I had discussed yesterday the possibility of me going along on his ride to Cap Haitien to pick up his dad from the airport.  Cap is 40 miles from Pignon but it takes about 4 hours to get there because the road is sooooooooo bad.  There were some last minute questions as to whether or not there would be room for me in the car, but I never got a definitive answer.  So I figured, I’ll be up at 5 (the time he said he wanted to leave) and be ready to go.  I hear him up and around, but he doesn’t come knocking.  I sit there for awhile till about 5:30 when I decide he’s most likely left without me and there wasn’t room, crawl back into my bunk but stay dressed just in case.  About 6 I finally decide, he’s definitely gone by now, and I get undressed again, and take the contacts out.  6:22 a.m. I hear “My Keeem? Are you ready?”  GL.  So we’re up and at ‘em.  Then I started timing, and it was literally 7:30 before we left Pignon.  That my friends is a Haitian morning.

The road to Cap is unbelievable.  I did it once before, in the back of a truck.  We went in a Jeep this time, and there were 5 adults, two children who DEFINITELY should have been in car seats, and one girl of about 10 or 11 maybe, on my lap.  Britney Spears has nothin’ on us, y’all, THIS is country.  It’s impossible to sum up the ride in one word, so here are a few:  terrifying, bone-jarring, exhilarating, breath-taking, exhausting.  My favorite are the parts when you round a bend and think, why, the road is completely gone.  And then you realize the car is going RIGHT THRU THE RIVER.  This was a lot less scary when we did it in a big truck.  I could have reached out and touched the water, I’m not sure how we didn’t stall out.  I told Jephthe that in Boston people pay a lot of money and call this a Duck Tour.  He thought that was pretty funny.  Then we’d come across these enormous mud puddles, and he’d either charge right thru with no way of knowing (in my judgment anyway) how deep they were, and I’d think “this is it we’re going to get stuck” OR he’d sort of skirt the edge of this really deep puddle, and I’d think “this is it, we’re going to tip over.”  This happens…roughly every 5 feet.  For four hours.  I said lots of Hail Mary’s, my Nana Mella would be proud.  (Mum you can leave that part out when you read to Nana Phyllis.) 

The thing about this drive is it also features some of the most breathtaking mountain vistas I’ve ever seen in my life, and I don’t even have pictures, because the road is too bumpy to take any.  But my deep thought for the day is, if you only focus on how rough the road is, you miss the beautiful view of the bigger picture.  Ok that’s it for my Jack Handy moment.

Anyways once in Cap it was a lot of driving around and waiting and sweating and driving around and waiting and sweating and driving around and waiting.  And sweating.  Have I mentioned the sweating?  Because there was a lot of it.  We dropped someone off at the Hotel Mont Joli, so I got to see that again, and ate at the Lakay restaurant where my team ate last time, the site of the infamous Mambo #5.  Sometimes it’s fun to re-live memories, and sometimes it can be hard.  Particularly when people were a part of them who aren’t in your life anymore, or who aren’t there in the same capacity they once were.  So that was actually a little difficult for me.

We finally arrived back in Pignon circa 8:00 this evening.  The ride home featured me jammed in the back seat with 3 other women.  One of whom was Jephthe’s mom.  “Ma’am Sidoine” as she is known, is like the matriarch of this clan which boasts 9 children, many of them pastors, and grandchildren too numerous to count, spread across Haiti and the US.  She’s amazing to me.  I treat her with the utmost deference.  She was now seated on my lap.  Awesome.  BUT…I got to shower tonight, and it’s amazing what a difference being clean can make.

So that’s all from Haiti tonight folks.  Prayer requests are, that I would be able to pin Jephthe down on the information that I need for Bright Hope and make good use of my remaining time here, that I would continue to be able to build a relationship with his wife Mitou who is really sweet and shy and her English is limited.  Asking direct questions is not a part of Haitian culture, they tend to find it really jarring when you do that and they don’t do it to you.  So I’m still trying to figure out how exactly you get to know a Haitian.  Ha.  I’m also processing some stuff in my personal life, just in terms of relationships and learning to let go of some things, and I could really use prayer for that as I seek some closure and peace.   At the same time not wanting it to dominate my thoughts either. 

Miss you all and love you all tons!  Thank you so much for the emails…my internet time is so limited and the connection so slow that I’m not able to answer them all but receiving them when I log on is a big encouragement! 

Love from Haiti, Kim

So this weekend blew my weekend at the KSG ID conference away, I’ll tell you that right now.  I went to the Boulders Resort in Scottsdale, AZ, in honor of my friend Alli’s 30th birthday.  It was fan-friggin-tastic.  For my 30th birthday, I hope to get…socks.  A book of some kind, perhaps.  I don’t know.  I’ve still got a year to figure it out.  At any rate, Alli is one of my oldest and dearest friends, who managed to stick with me from my days as a wide-eyed naive Christian firstyear at Wellesley until I was a bleary-eyed jaded Christian senior at the same place.  And she managed to remain cool the whole time.  She also managed to remain cool while dating and marrying her high school sweetheart, becoming a mom, moving around the country, etc etc.  Any number of these points are the point at which most other friends tend to drop off the radar.  They get hopelessly distracted by anything with testosterone, can’t multitask, whatever.  But Alli’s a rock.  Perhaps this is why the Boulders was chosen as the location for celebrating 3 decades of Alli.  Perhaps it was just a happy coincidence.

We managed to surprise her (which surprised the rest of us, because it’s hard to get anything past her) and have a fabulous weekend of being pampered while the guys played golf, stuffing ourselves obscenely full of delicious food (another time-honored Kim and Alli tradition) and being captivated by her charming 10-month old, Sophia.  (In addition to her other attributes, Alli has a knack for making beautiful children.  I guess Mark helps.) 

Anyways I was nervous about meeting new people and being out of my element, but I should have known that Alli’s friends and relatives are almost as cool as she is, and funny too, and the guys are manly men who do things like make fire and hunt bobcats.  I guess.  I’m told.  Anyways, fab weekend all around and mad props to Big Z in the Sky for footin’ the bill.  Can’t wait till Alli’s 31st, here’s hoping it’s a tradition.

Meanwhile, coming back to reality (there’s a song in there, if you’re old like me) is a biatch.  I am hopelessly behind on school, work study, life decisions, laundry, and all-around emotional health.  Marsha!!!!