I can hardly believe it has been almost a year since I last wrote here. Looking back it is almost impossible to take in all that has happened in the past 12 months. It was right around this time last year that I packed my bags once again and headed off to Port au Prince, Haiti. I am always prepared for adventure when I follow the Lord on one of these trips, but nothing, NOTHING, could have prepared me for what lay ahead for me in Haiti.
With my bags packed, I waved goodbye to family and friends once again, fully intending to settle down in Haiti and stay for at least a year, but thinking it would probably be more than that. My first few months were spent getting up to speed at school. Arriving after the official start of the school year left me with lots of things to learn and figure out! I was fortunate and blessed to be surrounded by colleagues, missionaries, and friends who were so helpful, kind, supportive, and caring. I found a church that I loved, got to know roommates, neighbors, coworkers, students, and others slowly but surely! It was challenging, as life in a third world country always is, but things were shaping up for a great year. Unlike living in Taiwan, where I had just a handful of close friends, there was a whole community of people around to laugh with, work with, and do life with. It was refreshing! Fall passed as I adjusted, established a routine and learned how to live in Port au Prince. I celebrated Thanksgiving last year among my new church family and spent the rest of the weekend with a lovely couple I worked with in the mountains. After Thanksgiving, the countdown was on till Christmas break, which I planned to spend at home for the first time in two years! I was so eager to be in Michigan with family and friends for the holidays!
January began with fantastic news!! Things were going very well with Robert, and we began to talk seriously about our relationship and future! I practically floated back to Haiti on a cloud! Arriving back in January I was refreshed, excited about what was going on in my classroom, overjoyed about what was happening with Robert, and feeling happier than I had in a long, long time! Those first few days of January passed in a happy, content, and glorious haze. I felt that I was exactly where I was supposed to be, doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing!
January 12 dawned like any other day. I prepared for the day, went in to my classroom, taught all day, said goodbye to my students and gathered up all the materials I'd need for the next day's lessons before leaving with my friend Coby for a shopping trip and a visit to see the new baby of one of our coworkers. I walked out of my classroom that day never dreaming that I would not teach there again, not see my students again, and that I was catching my last glimpses of the Port au Prince I had come to know. A few minutes before 5:00 PM a 7.0 earthquake shook Haiti to its very foundations, and shook many of us who were there to our foundations as well.
Earthquakes are unique in their destructive power, their ability to disorient, destroy, and terrify. I have experienced earthquakes before. Taiwan has them regularly. Generally minor, these small tremors I had experienced before did not prepare me for the sudden, violent shaking of the earth I experienced on January 12. During the one minute that the earth shook, I remember feeling completely disoriented. Things that were supposed to be stable and steady were suddenly crumbling all around me. Things like floors, walls, and ceilings that we trust to be sturdy and protect us turned to jello during the earthquake. There was not one solid thing in view to hold on to. There was no safe place to go. Inside buildings were crumbling, outside walls disintegrated onto passers by, crushing them. There was terror, confusion, fear, and pain all around me from the time of the earthquake. Many in Haiti are still living with these as constant companions.
The drive from my friend's home back to my home took several hours. I could never describe the sights, sounds, feelings, and fears I experienced on that drive through a city that had only moments before been nearly completely destroyed in 60 seconds time. Only those that were there during the earthquake and in those moments and hours that followed will ever really be able to understand the experience. There are moments in life that one feels their humanity utterly. The earthquake that shook down so much of Port au Prince at the same time shook down the myriad of walls that people build around themselves. For a brief time I was intimately connected to the people around me. We were not Hatians or Americans, rich or poor, black or asian, educated or uneducated, young or old... we were just human beings who had experienced a devastation that none of us could understand. We were quite simply people who were confused, afraid, grief stricken, vulnerable, in need of comfort and help. Perhaps in those moments I was more authentically human than any other moments of my life. There was no pretense of me being in control, having things figured out, or being able to fix this situation in any way. I was, in those moments, as I always am before the Lord... completely helpless, completely at His mercy, completely dependent on Him, utterly unable to do anything for myself, totally incapable of doing anything at all.
The next 5 days are a blur to me... there are so many things that happened... I don't have a very clear time line of when things happened, just jigsaw memories of significant experiences and impressions. There were nights sleeping out on the soccer field for fear of sleeping indoors, there was the palpable fear of another earthquake, the terror that even the smallest tremor produced, the complete inadequacy to help anyone with injuries, the frantic "work" that we busied ourselves with... collecting bandaids, asprin, hand sanitizer... as if these supplies could possibly fix the broken limbs and crushed bodies of the injured as they came to us for help. There was rationing of water, collecting of food, calling on cell phones that didn't work in a desperate attempt to find out if friends, students, coworkers, family were alive or dead. There were trips to places nearby for water, cooking, internet; all the while trying to process the bodies, the destruction, the grief, the fear filling Haiti. There were so many things I was numb to... I did very little real praying and didn't read my Bible at all during those days. But in my head that was a constant cry, from the moment of the earthquake till the day I left Haiti, of "Oh my God, help us" over and over and over again.
I was evacuated out of Haiti on the Saturday after the quake. That is a story in and of itself. Leaving Haiti was one of the most bittersweet things in my life. I was so relieved to be going home, and yet felt (and still feel) so guilty about leaving. There are so many stories of how God worked in the days following the earthquake, perhaps I'll blog about them someday. The days and weeks after arriving home are also a bit of a blur. I have been and continue to process all the things I've experienced. Perhaps the biggest lesson is that God is bigger. He is bigger than natural disasters, bigger than my questions and fears about His goodness, bigger than all the pain and suffering in Haiti, bigger than death even on a huge scale like this. He is bigger than all of the loss that happened and continues to happen in Haiti.
After arriving back home Robert and I decided to keep our plans to meet in Florida in February. We spent a glorious week and a half together! God made very clear at that time that we were to be together. We began to talk about getting married! After getting back home, we started to make definite plans! Our next visit was when Robert came to Grand Rapids to meet my family over Easter. I went to spend three months in Northern Ireland from June- September and met Robert's family and friends and got acquainted with life over there. Over the summer Robert took me on a special trip to Edinburgh, Scotland! We got engaged there!!! We will be married in February! I am so happy and filled with joy and excitement about our future together! While we find the separation difficult for now, we know that it will just be temporary and are so eager to start our life together!
Anything can happen in a year! In this last year I've had the most horrible and the most wonderful experiences of my life so far. At times I find it difficult to hold both of those things in my heart. I'm afraid of losing any of the joy of being engaged to Robert, but at the same time also afraid of forgetting what happened in Haiti. My heart may not be big enough to hold these two things at one time, but God's heart is big enough. I am learning I can trust Him to hold them both for me.
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