Ke Kontan

Ke Kontan

Thursday 29 November 2012

Living in the Grey..

Today has been a day of mixed emotions. We have two new little additions to our home. They are unique and beautiful, they are twins. Jodline and Jodnise will be staying with us until they are able to gain some weight and muscles as they are very malnourished. They are one year and two months and are the size of my five month old baby. They live in Wharf Jeramie. As I sit here tonight holding Jodnise in my arms with Justin (our newest volunteer) sitting beside me and holding Jodline I can't help but stop and take a breath and realize how blessed I am despite the lack of sleep I will get tonight and the exhaustion I will face tomorrow. How blessed am I to have the opportunity to get to know these little girls, to develop a relationship with them, and to watch them grow and become healthy. I am looking forward to the day when they have the strength in their body to laugh, to stand, and to play.

I have really enjoyed having Justin here as we have had so many deep discussions about life, about Haiti, as well as many laughs- like right now as we watch the baby girls crawl from the mat onto the cold hard concrete floor and Jodline cross her legs like a little lady (this has now been repeated about 20 times as Justin and I keep getting up to put them back onto the mat). We also had a good laugh tonight as I started screaming as something was biting me in my shirt and finally it went away then Justin joked that I had ants in my clothes and that soon I'd have the ants in my pants. Sure enough, the next thing you know I'm dancing around going crazy and a huge "Prince Ant" (as Justin calls it) falls out of my pants. Not impressed.


Sitting here tonight and venting to Justin about the daily struggles in Haiti I have realized that I haven't taken the time to stop lately and breathe and to enjoy the beauty of Haiti that I once fell in love with. Haiti is the most trying country and it will push you to your limits and start to suck the joy out of you- but only if you let it. However, as I have said in my previous posts, it does offer you the most amazing gifts and unites you with people who will touch your heart and change you forever. We have talked a lot today about living on the edge and taking risks. Risks are all I have ever known my entire life. I tend to make crazy decisions. Whenever I feel that tug in my heart I always tend to follow it (& yes sometimes without using my head first). No matter what the consequences I know that if I feel the need to do something, I have to do it or I won't be able to sleep, to function, and it will just eat away at me. And to be honest, every time that I have listened to that tug in my heart I have always ended up being rewarded with something great, even if it was just another lesson learned.

Every time I think about all of the huge, self discovery-type lessons that I've learned in the past seven months, I find myself thinking, "well how much more could I possibly learn about myself?! I live with myself every second of every day, so why do these life changing discoveries still continue to shock the holy heck out of me??" The process of growth fascinates me. At this current moment, personal growth is happening in the most exotic of settings but in the most mundane of situations. I am experiencing some mind-blowing realizations about myself while sitting on my bed, doing nothing, in Haiti. What a paradox--you would expect these changes to occur while, I don't know, say, perhaps climbing a mountain, running between hospitals beds and saving lives, or doing something absolutely spectacular.

This may come as a shock to those who know me, but I have always been very "black or white." Something either is or isn't. I need concreteness. I need stability. I need order. I need to be able to label and classify. When all of these "needs" are removed from my world, my brain goes into overtime to try to reorganize, reclassify, relabel, etc. The absence of "is or isn't" causes me to over analyze EVERYTHING, while simultaneously stressing and worrying about things that would normally not require such thought and analysis. I was so intensely uncomfortable with the grey and the uncertainty that I found myself feeling like my life was spinning out of control and that there was nothing I could do about it.

Right now, my life in Haiti is nothing BUT grey and uncertain, the only thing I am certain about is my love for this country and my love for these children. It's unpredictable. It has no order. It is chaos. It is so unlike my world back home. When I came back from my trip home in October I found myself desperately trying to hang on to certain aspects of my life that I thought I wanted to remain the same. I wanted this "sameness" because it gave me a sense of comfort and familiarity, a feeling that has taken me a long time to develop over here. But naturally, nothing in my world right now has even the slightest chance of remaining the same. At first I was so worried that this change would force me to grow apart from the people I care about most. And so it scared me to start feeling these changes taking place. I felt like I was going to lose important relationships simply as a result of change and because I decided to follow one of those tugs in my heart. What it boils down to, in terms of my own life and why I am here in the first place, is this: I did not come to Haiti to remain the same. I came here to grow as an individual and to develop new relationships with people that could inspire me in great ways. Growth requires change. I do not expect to be an entirely different person from this experience by any means; but I do expect to be a better, "improved" version of myself. And just because I am experiencing these changes DOES NOT mean that my relationships with people back home will inevitably fall apart. In fact, I can now fully anticipate these relationships continuing to strengthen as a result of my changes, simply because I will be bringing back this new and improved person into the equation. I have now realized that the most important relationships withstand the most dramatic and intense changes. The relationships that matter will survive through the storms and the chaos. I have learned that uncertainty is what keeps my life exciting, never knowing what to expect the next day. It has taught me patience and to stop trying to make sense of everything and to just go with the flow.



I still need to constantly remind myself that it's okay to live in the grey and to face uncertainty. It'll be uncomfortable. It'll be painful at times. It'll push me to my absolute limits- if it hasn't already. But the rewards far outweigh the pains, even if it takes me months to fully appreciate the rewards. I feel like this is the reason behind my being here--to learn to live in the grey and, more importantly, thrive while doing so. If I can conquer this fear of the unknown, I will be so much better equipped to deal with the more "traditional" changes that I anticipate coming up in the near future. Surviving and thriving in this "world" of Haiti: yeah, I think I'll be able to conquer anything that's put in my path...

Well off to bed I go as I prepare myself for a night of waking to crying teething babies and bed bugs and more uncertainty tomorrow !







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