Monday May 31st: Day #3 in Haiti

I woke up today knowing that it was going to be a very difficult day- it was the first day of doing manual labor did I mention for almost 8 hours!? We could choose to either help paint, pick up trash, work on a roof, or sort medical supplies. Well I am way too ADD to paint, so that was a no go. Work on a roof?? Nobody would EVER want me to work on their roof, it would probably collapse so that was a negative as well...that left picking up trash or sorting medical supplies, hmmm not a tough choice at all! You guessed it, I choose to help sort medical supplies.

The MOH has a donation tent and a tent for medical supplies that they want to keep for their clinic. So basically, we would take supplies from the "keep" tent to the "donate" tent and visa-versa. After the earthquake, dozens of pallets full of medical supplies were being shipped to the MOH (even before the Red Cross or UN). They were getting tons of aid, unfortunately they did not have enough hands to sort thru all of this aid. So what was happening is doctors would come volunteer for a week at the clinic but then they were spending half of their time sorting thru these pallets looking for supplies...So Daniel, a college student, volunteered a month of his time to stay at the MOH and try to organize this chaotic mess... So I got to work with Daniel most of the week and the ultimate goal was to be able to create a permanent system that can take incoming supplies, and separate them into three basic categories (Trash, Keep, and Donate). Trash consisted of anything that is expired, or anything that cannot be used by anybody in Haiti (get this- there were hundreds of blizzard blankets shipped in from the US to Haiti...pretty sure there is NO place in Haiti that is cold, needless to say we shipped those someplace else). The Donate pile consisted of anything that we at MOH cannot use but some other clinic or hospital in Haiti could use. The keep pile consisted of anything that MOH can and will use. After that, the next step would be to organize the keeps into categories that will be easily accessible for the nurses and doctors. This whole plan seems to be simple and easy enough on paper. But that is where the pictures come in. I hope that I will be able to include a couple pictures so that you will understand how much supplies there really is.

The hardest part about sorting the medical supplies for me was watching thousands of dollars worth of medicine go up in flames. If the medicine was expired we had to throw it away even though Haitians really needed it.

Unfortunately, we came across at least a dozen pallets that were full of body bags. It was devastating and very hard for me to process.

Later that evening we had the chance to go visit the MOH orphanage, which is known as the Hope House. We got to spend an hour visiting and we helped them make crafts and balloon animals. These children were so smart and most of them could speak English because they are taught it at the MOH School.

This is the MOH School! There are currently 1500 students attending that come from all around and they hope to double attendance by next year :)

After we visited the orphanage we had dinner, and then team time, and then got ready for bed! We were all exhausted and tried to get some rest before we had another hard day at work.

Here is a video of the Mission of Hope orphanage and the power of God in the lives of these children.

http://www.vimeo.com/11688313