Back to life... back to reality...

I am sorry that it has been so long since our last post.

A quick update:

Our kids are in school and preschool and doing well!

We are trying to slowly but surely understand how we can continue, even from a distance, to help the kids that we grew to love in Haiti. Leaving them behind has been a painful experience. Coming back to electricity and a comfortable, easy life has been very hard. At night, we talk as a family about the hurricanes, hunger cries, and voodoo drums we heard.

By day, we wonder, should we have tried harder to bring some kids back and raise them as our own children?

Is international adoption the answer for many of the children we cared about? It is a hard question to answer. The children at our orphanage had parents who abandoned them for many different reasons, yet, they still loved their parents and felt connected to them.

http://livesayhaiti.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-ongoing-adoption-ethics-discussion.html

I respect what the Livesays have to say about international adoption. I respect the culture and values of the children we left behind in Haiti after learning to love them.

I find myself at a quiet, unprepared moment, walking into my kitchen, or to the park, or into a grocery store, STOPping. I think about the lives of the children I left behind in Haiti. Clara, Clarence, Daphne, so many, many kids that I loved, I weep for them. I know that bringing them all home with me was not a solution or even an option, but it was what my heart wanted, and the sadness of leaving the kids behind has kept me from posting on this blog, from breathing too deeply, and even from fully unpacking my boxes in my home.

I will always have a heart and love for the people of Haiti. I hope that real change can come to the country and I honor those that I met who are trying to help the people of Haiti elevate themselves and their homeland.

Haiti, you will always be in my heart.

Notes from the aftermath...

So we are here, back in our own home in California, settling into the busy routine of suburban life. We are working on reestablishing jobs, friendships, home decor (much of our storage was destroyed by a rainstorm!), and a sense of normalcy.

We have learned so very much from Haiti. We hope that our journey has been a humble step towards our goal of making the world a better place. Carl and I do not not plan on ending our quest to care for children, in fact, we are reapplying for our foster license and hope that we will make a difference in the lives of kids in need in our own community.

Thank you all for following us on this journey!

Here is a very good video by the Travel Channel about life in Haiti:

Last morning in Haiti

A light rain falls over our heads, drowning out the sounds of the unknown people in the car across the street, and giving us momentary relief from the hopeful crowing of roosters that lasts all night long. It is still dark and we had no power tonight, so I use my flashlight to try to drive back cockroaches as I get a drink of water from our 5 gallon jug. I hope our mouse isn’t nearby, or one of his unknown and possibly hundreds of offspring. We have caught 8 mice in our house in the last month.

Drums. Always the drums from all night church or voodoo services beat into the too-dark night. I listen for any sounds that someone is trying to break into our house. The kidnappings have become very common on our street and I am so worried that we will be attacked. Three weeks ago we lay awake two nights in a row listening to gunfire. We found out that it was an attempted kidnapping just down the street from us. At that point we decided to move up our return date. Yesterday one of our American friends was dragged from her car, beaten, and robbed while driving down a street that Carl drives on every day for his work. Haiti is not for the faint of heart.

The rain stops, and the world begins to lighten. Dump trucks begin their loud tired trek down our street. Roosters begin to crow in earnest, and dogs bark. Someone is playing “Oh, What a Friend We Have in Jesus” on the radio in Creole, and our neighbors wake up, banging their tin doors and tin pots around, getting ready for a day of sweeping dirt, wearing dirt, tasting dirt. Hopefully the rain will keep the dust down today, but then I remember that it doesn’t matter for us, we flying back to the States today.

I am not sad to leave this troubled island, but I am sad to leave behind the people that I have come to care about over the past 9 months, both Haitians and Americans. I will miss the children the most, the children with their bright, hopeful smiles, the smiles that don’t last into adulthood here. I will miss the adrenaline rush of Haitian traffic, the smile on my daughter’s face when the city power turns on, and odd freedom of living a developing country without all the regulations that keep life organized.

However, it is time to go home. The orphanage no longer needs us here. We have done what we could for them. It is time to support our own family, to give our kids their normal lives and friends back, and to find new ways of serving in our own community.

Thank you all for journeying with us. The internet has been so poor here that I haven’t been able to upload pictures, so when we are a bit settled I will post pictures from our trip. Please think of me today as I travel internationally with all three kids! Carl will be following in a week, he has to finish wrapping up our lives and his job here, and he is going to bring back the dog we got here who has faithfully protected us.

See you all soon!

Krystal

This is our life...

Hello all,

Well, February is upon us, and we are all settled back into our life here in Haiti. This past weekend we went to the beach, it was wonderful!

Then this week hit us pretty hard. Our water pump broke and we spent two days without water. Last night when Carl amazingly got the pump fixed, we all gratefully took showers, so thankful for the slightly murky water pumped directly from our well to our tank and trickling down into our house.

Water is so precious! I didn't even have my normal worries about bacteria or the cockroaches that crawl in our pipes and burst out at the worst moments, I just wanted to be clean and to be able to clean my kids and do wash.

I really want to draw attention to this post by Tara Porter-Livesay, another missionary here in Haiti:

http://livesayhaiti.blogspot.com/2013/02/you-say-you-care-about-poor.html?spref=fb

"You say you care about the poor.

Then tell me, what are their names?"

Gustavo Gutierrez

I haven't been lugging my camera back and forth to the orphanage this trip. I haven't been documenting the crazy amounts of bugs or the neighbors throwing rocks and brandishing machetes in the street or the number of voodoo ceremonies we hear. I haven't been doing this anymore because at first, everything was shiny and different and new, but now, this is our life.

When we get no rain and are suffocating in the clouds of dust, we are suffocating along with our neighbors and friends here. When it rains, we run outside to feel the cool relief along with everyone else. When roadblocks keep us from getting gas and we can't run the generator, well, our neighbors have no generator.

This is our life now, and we just hope that we can live it well and make as much of a difference as we can in the time given to us to live here, and that we can allow Haiti to teach our family all of the lessons we need learn.

Marketplace

These amazing kids!

My kids are awesome. No really.

One year ago, we were a normal (mostly) suburban family. Their days were spent at school, daycare, sports, and playing with their friends in our amazing neighborhood. Life was good.

Over the past year, my kids have moved homes five times, said goodbye to all that they knew several times, ate strange food that they had never seen before, and have kept a loving and happy spirit throughout all of these changes.

Now, life is also good. Today the kids helped Carl and I do all our laundry for the week (we have access to a washing machine! Yay! We don’t care that it is halfway across town!) We took them out to lunch. It was the first time all week that they had left our tiny house where we do homeschool and clean all day long. The dry season brings so much dirt and dust into the house that we would not be remiss to clean the house every 2 hours!

Then when we got home they helped Carl clean the yard, raking the dead grass and collecting all of our trash into a pile to burn. We have no trash service here, we have to burn all of the trash that we have. Remember us the next time you roll your trashcans down to the curb!

Next up: mango picking. Our mango tree is exuberantly dropping mangoes all over our yard, and we love it!

I think of everything that my kids have done in the past year, and I am truly amazed by them. They have voluntarily sold all of their toys, moved overseas, lived in excruciatingly poor circumstances, and they have kept kind hearts and spirits. In fact, their hearts have grown, and I know that they have learned to care about people in a way that they would never have learned if Carl and I had taken the easy path and stayed in our comfortable house with our comfortable lives. Now we know that we can have fun without electricity or any of the comforts of life in a first world country. Uno by candlelight, fun! Sleeping on the porch, fun! 

I am so proud of these amazing kids!

Back to Haiti... and loving it!

Here we are, back in Haiti. I was amazed by the kindness of strangers as my kids and I flew here without Carl. Everyone was helpful and nice to the children, from airline employees to fellow travelers. When we arrived, we got to experience the awesomeness of the new Port-au-Prince airport. It was clean! Air-conditioned! Organized! What a difference that made. Then we saw Carl at the exit and all was right in the world. Having our family apart is really difficult for all of us, we were so happy to see him.

Our house is unchanged, except that it is the dry season here so the dust is even more unrelenting in its quest to find its way into our house, our clothes, our food, and our eyes. I could focus on the 8 cockroaches Carl killed one night in our bathroom (one got away), or the fact that we have an undetermined amount of mice living behind our fridge and they nested in the bookshelf where we keep all our school books (we have caught 5 so far), or I could be annoyed that the power is being testy and the dark nights take some getting used to, but all in all I have felt really good about this trip back.

Our first couple of days we had dinner with friends, went to a fish fry, cleaned and unpacked, and even went to the beach with some wonderful missionary friends. Carl has been very busy at his job managing the fish farm for Operation Blessing. He loves his job and it allows us to be able to have a car to drive around and to have extra money for food. I am still getting used to how expensive food is here! I started homeschooling the kids already, I just love watching their minds figure out new ideas. I also love their nap time… but what mom doesn’t? J

Today as part of our home school we are going to plant seeds in old egg containers I had been saving. Once the seeds sprout and are strong we will take them over to the Good Rest garden and plant them. They are having trouble with the garden and it is my top priority to help them have a producing garden before we leave. 

It was such a wonderful welcome back to Haiti for our kids and for me. I was very worried about coming back, but so far, everything has been much better than expected. I can’t believe we are already halfway through the year that we committed to being here. We have so much more that we want to do here! 

With love from Haiti!!!

Merry Christmas to all

Merry Christmas!

Hello friends!

I wanted to share with you a few thoughts as I am here in Texas helping my sister with her newborn twins.

The most wonderful thing we have learned on this journey is that we can be a happy family in almost any circumstances, whether or not we are living comfortably in the nice Southern CA home that we own, living in poverty in a small rental house in Haiti with inconsistent water and electricity, or temporarily living with a stranger (now friend!) in two rented rooms in Texas.

Our journey has been very different than we originally planned. We have learned that everything in Haiti has its own timing. We have learned how to live without most of the conveniences that we were used to as Americans. We have also learned how very complicated the situation is with orphans in Haiti, and how the most important thing is to try to keep families together, not to put more "orphans" in orphanages.

Carl has been working hard with Operation Blessing in Haiti to help with their fish farm, and we are so thankful that this opportunity was given to him so that we could be more self-sufficient financially. Life in Haiti is very expensive, especially food. We had many days when the contents of our care packages were the only things we had to eat!

We will all be back in Haiti at the beginning of January, and I am already starting to plan: what things will I be able to accomplish in the second half of our trip? Silly me. I need to remember the biggest lesson Haiti has taught me: it is not my plan, but God's plan that matters. It is not what I can do in Haiti, but what the kids of Good Rest can do for themselves to give themselves a future. Thank you all for your support and kind words  that have made all of this possible.

Merry Christmas to all, I hope that your holidays are filled with love and peace.

The Fielstras

The shoes are here!

Thank you to everyone who helped with our shoe drive! Lani from Temecula Dance Company put the whole thing together with help from my dear friend Mary Price, and Dr. Combs was kind enough to bring the shoes to us on his medical trip to Haiti.

Here is a link to more picture from our fun day trying on shoes: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.304082086363965.62121.195801107192064&type=1&l=e2b3dc01af

Language of Legos

Today we learned that all boys love Legos, and it is possible to build creative contraptions together without being able to speak more than a few words of each other's language!

Lessons from a third world puppy

It is a truth universally acknowledged that when people struggle to survive, people mistreat animals terribly. Haitian dogs are beaten, starved, kicked, and abused every day of their lives. We have seen little boys chasing and beating a three-legged dog, we have seen puppies being kicked and burned, and we have seen multitudes of small unkindness, the pulling of tails, the hitting with sticks, and the many cruelties that add up to a society that does not care for its weaker species.

This morning as we drove a borrowed truck to church, we splashed through hurricane Sandy’s dirty brown runoff and anticipated a day spent speaking English with friends. We had to swerve to avoid three small puppies running/splashing across the flooded road. They were tiny and bony. I convinced Carl to stop.

I approached them cautiously. They were obviously starving and freezing. Two ran off down a swollen river embankment. One paused to look at me and wag his tail. I picked him up. He was just a pile of little bones and a wiggly tail. We couldn’t leave him, and we couldn’t reach the other two puppies.

After a wonderful day with friends and fellowship, (and our first Chinese food in over 4 months!!!) we got our little guy home. We bathed him, fed him, and I cautioned my kids that he may not survive. We discussed why Haiti has so many abandoned and abused dogs when compared to, say, Southern California. My kids are filled with compassion and love for the little guy, helping me bathe him and dry him and feed him.

I hope my kids keep those tender hearts of theirs forever. I hope that the world never teaches them that it is ok to hurt an innocent animal or person, or even to look the other way when an animal or person is being hurt. I hope that in the greater scheme of learning to grow up and finding their own way in the world that my kids are never too busy to stop their car, to pull over, and to rescue a puppy from certain starvation.

Carl's day doing Hurricane Sandy relief work

Yesterday Carl had the privilege of helping an amazing Operation Blessing team that was providing assistance to a nearby riverside village. The village had 60 families whose homes were lost to the raging river waters, and hundreds of people were left homeless, wet, and cold. The pictures speak for themselves. 

Thanks for safe passage through Hurricane Sandy, now worries for those facing a difficult day.

From an observation point in Santo, Carl took these pictures this morning of the river bordering Port-au-Prince, Santo, and Croix des Bouquets. It has overflown its banks and has begun to wash away houses. He watched two houses sink into the swirling brown water, as neighbors all around tried to remove and save their tin roofs and belongings. We are hoping that the rain stops and the flooding calms down , as there is a large tent city in danger, just inches above the raging water.

The river is high above its normal banks and threatens many homes as well as a large tent city.

Friends and family stare at the spot where their house used to be.

Hurricane Sandy

Ms. Hurricane Sandy is about to pass us in on the Eastern side. While we will not bear the brunt of her windy exuberance, we know that Jamaica is getting the full force of her winds and rain.

So far today has been breezy, with occasional spurts of rain. The local school cancelled its afternoon classes due to the weather. Hopefully this storm will not be too violent to our little island.

Please pray again for all of the people without adequate shelter tonight. I am watching our neighbor's tin roof bounce up and down in the wind, I hope they and all of the people here in the Caribbean can stay warm and dry tonight!

How we should be spending Haiti's earthquake relief money.

The Clintons and Sean Penn are throwing a party here in Haiti and I wasn't invited. US politicians and celebrities are gathering today in Northern Haiti to celebrate the opening of an industrial complex built with $124 million of relief money. The complex is controversial among local Haitians, many feeling that the US is helping other countries to take advantage of relatively cheap Haitian labor (minimum wage is $5 per day).

A link to a detailed NY Times article HERE

So what are we really celebrating? This money was supposed to help the country recover from the devastating 2010 earthquake, yet the facility is located 100 miles north of the damaged capital, Port-au-Prince. Life is hard in Haiti, and it is very hard in the poor North. Small villages cling to steep mountains. People have to walk miles for clean water, most use mountain streams to bath, wash clothes, and drink.

A typical hut in Northern Haiti

The US's answer to the poverty in Haiti is to build a giant industrial building in a place where Haitians are trying to conserve some of their mostly stripped vegetation, then to allow foreign companies to come do business in Haiti. A South Korean clothing giant rents the majority of the space in the complex.   There are at least 5 better ways to spend money helping Haiti.

1. Make education free. Use the earthquake relief money to pay teacher's salaries, to set up additional schools, and to provide books for the children. Educating every child in Haiti would do more for the country than any project or grand building. Many Haitian parents cannot afford to pay the school fees, or to buy uniforms and books. Their children are uneducated, without a chance at a job even if jobs were available. Our next door neighbor makes his living as a motorcycle taxi driver, he does not make enough money to send his kids to school. His four children literally play in the dirt all day long. They have no running water, no electricity, no books. The destructive cycle of poverty and ignorance must be broken, and free education is crucial.

2.  Build and staff a teaching hospital. Medical care is severely lacking in Haiti. A friend of mine recently needed gallbladder surgery. She went to a local hospital, but ended up having to remove her own IV and fly to the States. You can read her story: HERE. The US and other countries regularly send medical teams to the Haiti. These kind doctors and nurses have to bring their own medicine and often travel to remote places providing the only medical care that many Haitians will ever receive. As a step toward independence, these groups could be organized to teach their medical knowledge to locals at a teaching hospital so that the local "intern doctors" could then set up clinics to provide long term care across the country.

3. Provide better training and salaries to the local police, craft laws to protect Haitian citizens, as well as build up a small, well trained military. The UN's presence takes a toll on the country's sense of self. UN convoys destroy already poorly maintained roads, and their militaristic presence is a constant reminder that the country is unable to police itself. Under the UN watch, human and child trafficking, violent demonstrations, kidnappings, and armed robberies are all part of daily life in Haiti. With training and support, Haitians could do more to make their country a peaceful place then the UN could ever achieve.

4. Jobs, jobs, jobs. The US's solution to the staggering unemployment in Haiti is flawed. Building an industrial complex that foreign companies rent opens Haitians up to exploitation. Instead, the money should have been spent establishing Haitian businesses, run by a joint Haitian/foreign board, with clear parameters for managing profits. I picture Bill and Hillary sitting down with the CEOs of major construction companies, asking them to partner with Haitians to create Haitian construction companies. The businessmen would be partners that would provide training in business and in the trades lacking, but once the Haitian companies became successful, the foreigners need to step away and let the companies be purely Haitian run. If a company did not work then it would fold and be started again with different people and business plans. Within a few years, enough of the companies would survive so that Haitians would be bringing their economy up with their own hard work, not dependent on the South Korean clothing business.

5. Power, factories, and fields. Ah, industrialization. Haiti desperately needs reliable power instead of the fitful and sporadic electricity that it currently receives. The relief money donated could have been used to provide Haiti with a reliable source of power, and provide training and safety materials to Haitian electrical workers. With reliable power, factories could be built to process Haitian crops: the coffee beans, the sugar cane, the avocados and mangos should all be exported and sold, the money used to modernize Haitian farming and expand current crop yields.

Any one of these issues would improve life for all Haitians. As a teacher and perpetual student myself, I believe that without free education for all children, a country will not be able to advance itself.

Haitians do need help from their richer and more powerful neighbors, but Haitians do not need to be patronized. They need the tools and training to pull themselves, their families, and their country out of poverty, then they need the rest of the world to step back and let them succeed.

Confession

OK, I admit it, I am homesick. We had no power the last two nights and that makes for hot sticky pillows and closed-eye desperation of hoping for a breeze. Without good sleep, life becomes a bit blurry for me, it takes me longer to process what I hear ("Mom, can I go outside and play in the old well?" "Hmm... what... sure. No wait. No. Bad idea, kid.")

Last night I struggled with my asthma as well as the heat. Our neighbors seem to have an endless supply of tires and other rubber that they burn right next our wall, the smoke drifts into our bedroom window and chokes us while we try to sleep.

I almost admitted that I was homesick last week when Carl brought us this bag of oranges and I could barely keep from bursting into tears. I may have spent a little too much time holding the poor bag, wondering about its own journey from California to Haiti.

So it's Monday morning in Haiti.

I will try not to think of all the friends, family, and places that I miss back in the States. I will instead focus on the joy of spending the day with my children, and the simple goodness of a ripe Haitian avocado.

Have a good week, everyone!

Changes

Hello to everyone! 

I am making some recommended changes to our blog. I will still post pictures, anecdotes, and observations on life in Haiti, but for privacy reasons (both ours and the children at Good Rest's) I will be emailing to our supporters details about our ministry. If you would like to be included in my emails, please let me know at fielstrak@gmail.com. Thanks for your understanding!

Why our family will no longer celebrate Columbus Day

Two weeks ago we visited the Musee du Pantheon National Haitien in Port-au-Prince. My in-laws were visiting and we had heard that the museum holds one of the anchors from the three ships sailed by Christopher Columbus! My heart beat with excitement at the thought of seeing such an amazing historical artifact. The Santa Maria, the flagship, ran aground on the northern tip of the island, then called Haiti (mountainous land) and her lumber was used to build the first settlement in the New World.

No pictures are allowed inside the museum, although I begged our tour guide a bit pathetically. I have only my memories of a rusted anchor, the solemnity of standing in front of a pivotal piece of history, and the backdrop murals of the many ways the Spanish creatively killed off the native Taino people. 

We had just wandered through a display of Taino artifacts: their bowls, ceremonial axes, their huts, and their spears. Now we witnessed their death. Columbus himself described the Taino people, “They traded with us and gave us everything they had, with good will..they took great delight in pleasing us..They are very gentle and without knowledge of what is evil; nor do they murder or steal..Your highness may believe that in all the world there can be no better people ..They love their neighbours as themselves, and they have the sweetest talk in the world, and are gentle and always laughing.” Yet, by the time of his second voyage to the island that he gloriously renamed Hispaniola, he began to require tribute of gold or cotton from every adult male over the age of fourteen. If they did not provide the tribute they lost hands, or were torn apart by Spanish dogs. My boys looked at the murals, listened to our guide speaking, and turned to me to ask, “Why did he do that, mommy?” I have no answer.

Within 30 years, it is estimated that 80% to 90% of the local population had died, killed either by malice or by disease. The Spanish overlords turned to the slave trade and in less than one hundred years, the census of 1572 showed over 12,000 African slaves on the island. That day in the museum, we heard and saw some of their stories. We touched shackles, we saw voodoo drums, we marveled at swords and guns that were used by the great generals of the revolution that culminated in Haiti's 1804 independence.

I was proud to learn for myself and to show my children the real history behind Columbus and the Spanish "discovery" of the Americas. I hope, as so many have hoped before me, that through knowledge we can prevent the tragedies of the past from being repeated. I do not believe that we should celebrate Columbus Day. It is a shame to honor someone who either wittingly or unwittingly set into motion the massacre of an entire people and displacement and slavery of another.

I was born a slave, but nature gave me the soul of a free man. Toussaint L'Ouvture

First Day of School in Haiti!

Today was a BIG DAY at Good Rest and for all of Haiti... the first day of school! The kids were all happy and excited to start school today, and all of the girl's hair was beautiful! I am so impressed with Sherlie for getting all of the the kids enrolled and putting together the many things needed to get everyone ready for school today, she did a great job!

Walking with all our kids on their first day of school!

These handsome boys were the first ones to get to school... after a stop by our house for a picture :)

Some of our cute girls entering the door of their school!

I do realize that the kids may have thought I was a little crazy... I tried to explain that in America we love to take pictures of our kids on the first day of school. Hopefully some of my happiness for them made it through translation!

We know that school and so many things would not be possible without the sponsorship money donated by caring people to the kids here. Thank you to every sponsor and to Children's Heritage. I wish I could bottle up the kid's amazing smiles and send them to you - today was a great day!

Three months!

Tomorrow when we wake up in Haiti we will have been here three months! It is hard to believe how different our lives are now. We have done a great deal of adjusting to the culture change, it feels more like home here now. While I am sure that we still do things that must look crazy to our neighbors, at least we now can apologize in Creole! :)

It has either cooled down a bit or our bodies have adjusted to the heat, we are much happier when we aren’t waking up at night and toweling sweat off ourselves and our kids to keep them cool.

We have figured out how to use our oven without blowing up the house and can even make cookies!

Homeschooling is a delight… I love watching my kids get excited about learning new things.

I love making Haitian food and had rice with avocados on top for lunch today. I also enjoy cooking the red sauce that they use with rice and beans. My favorite thing that I learned is how to make fresh passion fruit juice. It is delicious!

We have learned many things about the Haitians around us, but the most important thing that we have learned is respect. I deeply respect their ability to love God and how dedicated they are to their faith.  I respect the mothers who care for their infants in this dusty city. I respect the men and women who work harder than I have ever had to work, carrying huge heavy bins on their heads, pushing carts, toiling in the fields.

Thank you Haiti for welcoming us for these three months. It has been a time of learning for us and I can't wait to see what we will learn next (though I hope for a few less lessons on patience and a few more yummy cooking recipes!)

Meet Jimmy

Jimmy has been on our hearts this week. Jimmy has a sweet, kind soul. His smile is constant, his patience and kindness an integral part of his personality. Yet, he seems lonely. Instead of spending time with the kids around him, he works hard to help with the gate at Good Rest and goes out of his way to help Carl every day.

Jimmy's story seems to be one of many kids abandoned, yet we can't forget him. His biggest dream is to be a pilot, to learn to fly. We sympathize with him, we wish we could give him the opportunity to fulfill his dreams. Jimmy is one of kind, an amazing and wonderful young man. We are proud to get to know him.