Haitian Courier #1: Into the Mountains

Alo, zanmi mwen! (Hello, my friends!)

As you can guess from the title, I'm no longer in Africa (nor the US). This time, it's Haiti (named for its mountainous landscape), which is pretty much like Africa on an island (or a third of it). I've been here for two weeks now, and I'm writing to tell you what I've been up to.

I came here with a team of seven: two doctors, a pastor, and a few church members from Abundant Mission Church in Los Angeles. During the first week, we went around to several villages around Port-au-Prince giving free treatment and medicine. After the first week, the team went back to California, leaving me with two Korean missionaries at an orphanage/church called House of Love. Since then I've been looking after the children while learning a lot of Creole and French by hanging out with the Bible college students that the missionary pastor is training.

One really cool thing that I want to share with you is that I visited Zanmi Lasante in Cange! If you don't know what it is, it's a humongous medical complex in the middle of nowhere built by an American doctor named Paul Farmer. Now run mostly by natives, Zanmi Lasante provides world class medical treatment to the poor in Haiti for a whopping price of $0! Seriously, I couldn’t believe my eyes, that such an amazing facility could exist here (from what I’ve seen of Haiti so far). If you’re interested, you should read Paul Farmer’s biography Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder.

In other news, I haven’t heard back from any of the med schools that I interviewed yet.

I won’t deny that it can get quite lonely here. No one here really speaks English. I talk with the missionaries in Korean (and if you know me, my Korean isn’t so good), and I communicate with the Bible college students in a mix of Creole, French, English, and Korean (they take Korean lessons here). It would make a world of difference just to hear from you, so please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have the time. My cell phone number is: +509-441-3451 (509 is the country code. Yes, the entire country uses only 7 digits). You can try SMS, but I don’t know if it’ll work (apparently a lot of SMS didn’t work while I was in Kenya). If it does, I’ll respond.

Please keep me in your prayers.

God Bless,
SunMin

You can read more about my experience in Haiti on my blog:
http://doxadeo.blogspot.com OR http://www.xanga.com/doxa

To subscribe to Haitian Courier Newsletter, visit
http://groups.google.com/group/african-courier/