Orevwa d'Ayiti

Those of you who told me the hardest part of my trip would be leaving to come home were absolutely right.  Saying goodbye to my new friends (the volunteers and staff), and especially to the babies, was very emotional.  I will no doubt write more on this later, when I am better rested.  I'll also post some pictures of the route from GLA to the Port-au-Prince airport. 

I arrived back in Calgary yesterday afternoon, but my bags are still somewhere between here and Miami.  Despite going to bed early last night, after taking a long, hot shower, I still don’t feel rested.   You’d think that I would have slept well in my own bed but, strangely, I missed the sounds of Kenscoff – the chirping tree frogs, barking dogs and crowing roosters.  My basement suite is uncomfortably cool, and my body clock is still on Central Time, so I woke up at 5:30 AM, which is 6:30 in Haiti.  But I digress.  I am so thankful for an amazing experience in Haiti, and also thankful to be home.  Everything seems strange here.  My apartment, foreign; the streets, so wide; my queen-size bed, extravagant.   I’m about to venture to Wal-Mart to buy groceries.  I can only imagine what a shock that’s going to be. 

Although my journey toward Haiti has, in a sense, ended, it has in other ways just begun.  I will continue to use this blog as a means of processing my re-entry into Canadian culture - of debriefing, if you will.  Although I was only away for two weeks, I experienced things that have changed who I am and, I believe, who I will become.  My hope is that I will be able to return to Haiti in the not-too-distant future, better prepared than I was for my first trip, and yet more aware of how little I actually know about this beautiful, broken land.  Until next time...