Mwen Pa Konnen

This post is titled "I don't know" in Haitian Creole.  Not just because I said that phrase so many times over the five weeks I spent in Haiti - to the children, to the local staff, in English to the project director - but because ultimately it's the best phrase I can come up with to summarize my experience.  I know perhaps more than I did before I went, but even more sharply I understand there are many things I don't know.

But I supposed I should first finished the story I began way back here and continued earlier this week.

After spending a week and a half planning out how to get Julio an x-ray and an ultrasound, checking the costs, planning how to get to the lab, etc.  We finally had a plan.  Except we didn't go.  

Not because of the costs, although of course everything is ultimately about the cost/benefit ratio, but because over that period of time it became increasingly clear that there was nothing really wrong with our little friend.  If asked, he complains of vague stomach pain that comes and goes every couple of days.  But in the same hour he'll launch himself into a hug with me that betrays no such pain, even with some surreptitious (and then less surreptitious, building up to a rib-cracking hug me tighter contest) taps and squeezes in the area of this "pain."

I don't doubt that he still has a long struggle ahead - he'll still have kidney stones, and have to manage that for probably the rest of his life.  But at least for now we're no longer worried about an acute problem.  I know this doesn't make a perfect story - I'm telling it partly because I hope you might be curious to know how Julio's path continued, but mostly because I feel like it's a great way for me to convey that my time in Haiti didn't particularly make a perfect story.  Didn't fit into boxes, didn't end with a particular bang or a denouement.  The work continues.  The children scramble on, managing health problems, learning deficiencies, developmental delays, and behavioral trails - just as they have for years now.  Sometimes we had great days:  Little Kevens, 7 years old but no bigger than a 5 year old and very learning delayed thanks to severe malnutrition, can tie his sneakers all on his own now.  Somewhere in the madness of driving to the doctor's office, I taught Julio how to subtract bigger numbers.  Leyla can successful identify the color green (and a handful more, if she's focused that second).  I talked with Mica in Creole, made jokes, made her laugh, encouraged her to stand up to the driver, maybe even taught her how to do the accounting work she's supposed to be doing for the garden project.  None of that is glorious.  None of it makes a great finale, but in the end it's that work that I'm the most proud of.  

I spent close to five weeks in Haiti.  I still don't speak Haitian Creole perfectly, and I still don't understand the country at all.  Mwen pa konnen, mwen pa comprann.  I don't know, I don't understand.  But I'm glad I went.