Three Unforgetable Adventures in One Day

Family and Friends,

Day 161 of our Haiti Adventure!

The day before yesterday we face three trials that could have led to some major problems, but with God’s help we are overcoming them and are optimistic for positive outcomes in each situation. Instead of calling them trials, we like to call them adventures.

Adventure #1

Early in the morning Lynn rose to use the bathroom. Actually it was more like the middle of the night. She has a little toilet-contraption in the house crafted by Pastor Rick Van Ravenswaay of New Life Reformed in Sioux Center, Ia. Basically it is a little platform supported by four strong legs with a hole cut in the middle and a regular toilet seat attached to the top. It folds up nicely and can be stored in a suitcase. Under the hole he devised a way for a large plastic tupperware bowl to slide into a slot and receive donations. There is a lid that fits on the bowl after it is used.

After Lynn was finished I groggily got out of bed, took the bowl, and headed for the outhouse to dump the contents. I wasn’t completely awake. The next thing I remember is the bowl slipping out of my hands above the hole and falling down into the 12-foot pit. It all happened so fast, and yet it was like I was watching the bowl fall in slow motion. I stood there in disbelief. The bowl is big enough that it seemed like you would have to try on purpose to push it down the hole, yet somehow it had found a way to jump out of my hand and dive down there.

The indoor toilet would be pretty difficult to use without the bowl, and to find another perfectly sized replacement in Haiti would be nearly impossible. My mind flashed back to our first week here when I had to cart Lynn across the rocky yard in the rain to the outhouse each time she had to go. That wasn’t a fond memory, so I tried to clear my mind enough to think of a plan for rescuing the bowl without getting ridiculously dirty. One nice thing at this point was that no one else was awake, so I didn’t have to share the embarrassing situation with anyone but myself and God.

I finally came up with a plan. I went over to the wood pile and selected a couple of nine or ten foot boards. Holding them together I figured out which ends of the boards would fit together best to make some sort of a grabber at the end. As long as I held the boards together tightly, they put quite a bit of pressure against each other at the end. This was one time when I was thankful for warped lumber instead of perfectly straight.

I was barely able to get the boards through the door of the outhouse and down the hole. The angle almost prohibited me from using those long boards. Everything was pitch black besides the headlight on my head, so it was hard to see the bowl in the bottom. Luckily it didn’t land with the opening facing down. It just fell sideways and stuck that way, exposing the other edge to my grabber. The boards just barely reached. My arms were reaching way down the hole, and I politely asked the hoard of cockroaches not to crawl all over my neck and face as I worked. They complied.

After a few tries I thought I had a nice hold on the bowl and slowly started lifting it out. I was successful on the first attempt! After thanking God I gingerly carried the nasty bowl over to the water pump to try to clean it up. The smell was indescribable. I pumped a lot of water and splashed the bowl repeatedly until the big chunks were off. After that I submerged it in a bigger wash basin with a rock, dumped a nice amount of Clorox on, and filled the basin with water for the remainder of the night.

Adventure #1 completed!

Adventure #2

Sue was planning on doing a mobile clinic at the Mountain School that morning. All the people up there had been invited and she had several bags of medical supplies ready to go. We decided to try something new to make the hike more manageable. There is a dirt mountain road that leads most of the way to the school, and earlier this year it had been widened and leveled quite a bit. We figured the time had come to see how well the Isuzu Trooper would handle on it. We took off earlier in the morning with Sue, Antoine, Robinson, Francia (the oldest girl from the orphanage), and myself.

There were a few clouds in the sky, but they didn’t look too bad. We remarked how you probably wouldn’t want to be in the mountains with a car when it rained, but we never seriously considered turning back. The driving went very well. After I dropped the team off I decided I better head back down in case the weather turned bad. They would be able to hike down with the supplies much easier than up, and of course by that time much of the medicine would have been distributed. They headed up the walking trail towards the Mountain school, and I headed back down the dirt road we had ascended.

Of course it wasn’t too long until the winds picked up, the sky turned dark, and the first few sprinkles started to come. From the time when the first sprinkles came to when there was a complete downpour and I was spinning my wheels in the mud was somewhere between three and five minutes. It was insane! I almost made it back to the main road where it would have been fine driving in the rain, but I got stuck just before descending the final hill.

Looking back, though, if I had crested that hill and tried to drive down in the near mud-slide conditions that were occurring, things might have turned bad for me. Driving down the previous hill, which wasn’t as steep as that final hill, already felt a lot like driving on ice back home. God allowed me to be spared the opportunity to drive down that final steep, muddy hill in the rain. I finally made the decision to leave the vehicle and walk home. I figured it was going to be several hours or even a day or two until I could safely drive. I said a prayer for the safety of the Trooper from vandals and walked down the mountain in the rain.

The people who had watched us drive up the mountain were now sitting on their porches laughing at me as I walked by in the rain. I kept wondering what they were thinking. Probably something like this: “How do those Americans get so rich anyway? Look at that one there in the rain. He doesn’t look like he’s got too much going on between the ears. He just drove a car into the mountain when anyone could see it was going to rain. Now he’s walking home completely soaked and will probably give himself a cold. I just don’t understand those people.”

Adventure #2 still in progress…

Adventure #3

Around noon Robinson came walking briskly into the orphanage compound. If you’ve never been down here, Robinson is one of the core members of the youth group and a great help to Mission Haiti in many ways. He was sweating profusely and looked a little panic-stricken. I was afraid something had happened with Sue or at the clinic, and I asked him if everything was okay. He didn’t say much but instead went into the eating area, collapsed, and put his head down on his arms on the table.

After a minute or two I went back to check on him. The rest of the medical team wasn’t back yet, so he must have really hustled down the trail to arrive so far ahead. I asked him again if he was okay. This time when he looked up I could tell something was wrong. He wasn’t speaking very clearly, and his face looked about ten years older. His skin was pulled back and his cheeks were sunken. I quickly got him more water and coaxed him to drink it. Complaining of a stomache ache, he wasn’t interested in eating any food.

Finally Sue arrived back at the compound. Everyone was covered in mud, sweating profusely, and exhausted. Sue went over and took a look at Robinson and decided we better send him to the hospital in Les Cayes. He had fever as well, and she thought maybe he had appendicitis or bowel obstruction. We made the necessary plans to get going. There was also a man from the clinic carrying his little baby girl who needed an x-ray on her head, so we needed to get them to the hospital, too.

Of course the car was still in the mountains, so we decided to look for a tap-tap. We didn’t have any luck getting that together, because they don’t run much on rainy days, and when they finally do get going they are jammed full of people. At last we decided to send our motorcycle and another one from the neighborhood. I wasn’t too excited about the idea, to be honest, because driving in wet conditions is difficult on these muddy roads, and I didn’t want to compound the situation we were already in with a crash or some other problem. However, we decided it was the best solution.

There didn’t turn out to be room for me to go, so I sent Antoine and Patchouko in charge of the whole thing, and they loaded up a very sick Robinson, who was now vomiting. Antoine was holding Robinson in place behind Patchouko, who was driving, and the little family mentioned earlier got on behind the other motorcycle driver. They headed up the road and I said a quick prayer for their safety.

A little later I called Pam and filled her in on everything that was going on, and she promised to pray and send out a prayer request to the Mission Haiti supporters. After that I headed out on foot for English class, which is about a brisk forty-minute walk. I kept praying about everything that was going on. Just as I reached the English school I received a call from Antoine saying that Robinson had cholera. It all made sense to me at that moment, and I couldn’t believe I didn’t reach that conclusion on my own. He had looked just like all of those people I saw before at the cholera camp. It now made sense.

Antoine told me that the little girl who needed the x-ray was fine, Robinson would be left in the hospital, and everyone else was on the way home. I felt relieved about this outcome, because Robinson will get relatively good care at the cholera camp. I texted the update to Pam. After that I pulled aside Chelo, our friend and director of the English school, and asked him to cover my class for the day. I felt I needed to head home in case I was needed later for something. I felt too distracted to do a good job at teaching at that point. Then I headed back home.

Adventure #3 completed…

It hadn’t rained for several hours at this point, and we decided the time had come to try to rescue the Trooper from the mountain. Patchouko kept listing all of the items that could be stolen off of the car…radio, battery, tires, gas, etc… I said, “Patchouko, it almost sounds like you might have been the one doing the stealing in some former life.” He laughed. Patchouko and I headed out together on the motorcycle.

Amazingly the big hill which had become a river earlier that morning was now nearly dry. The car was still in one piece, and I drove down the rest of the way with ease. Remarkably, another storm came up at that moment and completely soaked Patchouko on the motorcycle as he followed me home. Good thing we got the car when we did!

Adventure #2 completed…

That night at youth group we did a lot of reflecting on the day. Not too many showed up because of the rain, but the small group of us decided to go over to Robinson’s house and pray with his family. We were happy to discover that his mother had gone on to Cayes to spend the night with him in the hospital. We sat down and talked with his little brothers and some aunts and cousins. We encouraged them and we prayed together. Plans were made to go check on Robinson and his mother the next day and bring them necessary supplies.

FROM MY JOURNAL THE NEXT DAY: We did go see Robinson at the Cholera Clinic in Les Cayes this morning, and he was looking and feeling much better. They have him on an IV and he is gradually working the sickness out of his system. I can also happily report that the Cholera clinic is looking much improved these days. The vast majority of people in there were sitting up and talking with others. It was much cleaner, better supplied, and well-staffed. I was impressed.

Well, there you have it, three unforgettable adventures in one day. As memorable as it was we are hoping the rest of this week will be more boring and forgetable! You never know in Haiti, though. The next adventure could be right around the corner.

 
Enjoy Your Adventure(s) Today!
-The Grimm Family Adventurers