Hello Everyone.. I'm sorry the updates are not coming everyday and I'm a bit behind. I've been very busy and the internet is VERY slow! It takes me 3-5 hrs to upload pictures and video for 1 blog. So please be patient with me :-)
My morning usually starts with morning therapy with the children in the clinic. We sit under the mango tree. It's a mixture of playtime and therapy... something new for me!
Doing therapy under the mango tree... its nice to be outside and enjoy the fresh air! I'm going to have a hard time going back to Alaska and do therapy in the clinic after enjoying this!
Flat Stanley is checking out the tents where some college students are staying.
Flat Stanley loves to play with the children of the orphanage. He especially loves the monkey bars and the slide!
Flat Stanley is enjoying helping the children garden just in front of the orphanage. The vegetables are used in the meals in the orphanage. Some of the older children are in charge of tilling, watering, and picking the vegetables.
The children also have a lot of pet bunnies. Flat Stanley likes to feed and pet them.
Below: One of the New Life Children's Home's classrooms. The school they attended was destroyed by the earthquake. Workers erected this shelter from the sun in 2 days using what they had. They just started back up with school on Monday for the first time since January 12 when the earthquake hit.
There are 2 babies in the clinic. One one's father is unable to care for his son because he lives in a tent city, so the Children's Home provides the child with care and all of his needs. The other little boy lost both of his parents in the earthquake. They are well loved and taken care of here. Everyone who comes and volunteers always want to hold and feed them.
Back on the other side of the campus in the clinic...
This little guy is just so adorable and he never cries!
The children always want their pictures taken and they love to play with my camera. So there are LOTS of pictures of them!
Miss N is very quiet... while Miss F giving some attitude.
We have plenty of bottled water. We can drink the water here because of a filtration system. These are all pictures inside of the clinic.
Girl F resting on her crutches... even though I tell her not too... This is inside the clinic where the children who need nursing and therapy assistance stay.
Someone left some ribbon in my room. I decided to decorate all the the children's walkers and crutches with it. The loved it!
This man is a relative of one of the girls in the clinic. There is a lot of "downtime" for the family members, so they try to make the best of it. He decided to sing to me in Crieole.
Boy P speaks good English and he's a help to me!! It's hard to communicate with the children when you don't speak their language. I'm trying very hard to learn as much as I can. I do a lot of mirroring and do what I'm doing... it's working well.
We are right by the landing strip of the airport in Port-au-Prince. We see a log of chartered and military planes coming and going. The UN helicopters are always around. This is video from our compound.
On Tuesday, I went to the Medishare clinic. It's a tent trauma 1 hospital ran by U of Miami, but everyone who works there is from all over the United States. I went with 2 of my kiddies over there. The group I roomed with at the Children's Home was from there. I told them to tell them about me and sent the Medishare people my PT licenses. When I got there, the kids went to an outpatient wound care tent. As soon as they found out I was a PT and I was the one they knew about, they sent me to go treat spinal cord injury patients. There are a lot of amputees and spinal cord injuries. It was crazy. The airconditioning was out, so the big top tent was like 130 degrees!! It was unbearable!! My kids were done within 90 min or so, so I got out of there. They really need help there, and that's what I thought I was coming to do. I told them I will try to get a ride over there Thursday to help. The Medishare tent is just on the other side of the airport, but it takes 45-60 min to get over there because of the crazy traffic. They only have 2 PTs there for about 100 patients. The one is doing the hospital PT and the other is doing wound care and giving exercises to patients. So they were absolutely delighted to see me.
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