Eveline came today.  I think she is in shock.  She told us that everything is very difficult especially for their 6 year daughter.  I found out that he was NOT driving the bus but was driving his pick-up truck.  It rolled down into a ravine and he hit his head and was killed.

Eveline said that she is unable to find the money to bury him.  She has some money but not enough.  She needs about $1200 USD to arrange his funeral. 

I told Eveline that many people were praying for her and the children.  We are praying for God to give them all strength to get through this terrible time in their lives.

If anyone would like to make a donation to help Eveline with the funeral costs, please donate via Paypal or call the US Office at 719-638-4348 and talk to Melinda or Jean.  If you donate through the Paypal button on the right side of this page, can you send us an email at gla-usa@glahaiti.org so we can make sure the funds get to Eveline as soon as possible?

This money is a fortune to her and the kids.  But if 120 people would give $10, you could take this burden and worry of Eveline’s shoulders.

One of our cooks at the main house,Eveline Faurisme, lost her husband in a bus accident Tuesday afternoon.  Her husband is a school bus driver for children in their small mountain community of Furcy.  He drives children down the hill to the larger village of Kenscoff every day. 

Thankfully, there were no children in his bus because he was on his way to picking up the children.  They are assuming that  the brakes failed.  The bus tumbled down the mountainside. He died at the scene of the accident.

Eveiyne in the blink of eye became a single mom with five children and the main wage earner in the family.  We are all very sad and send our prayers to her and the children.

We received a dossier from IBESR yesterday for a family that did not need a dispensation which is wonderful news!  This shows us that IBESR is working on dossiers like they said they would.

We also received word that IBESR wants to finish all dossiers for children that were evacuated after the earthquake.  They have asked us to make a list and send it to them.  We are not certain if they will actually authorize these adoptions or just return the dossiers to us.  I’ll keep you informed as I receive more information.

We also have more than 50% of the children at the orphanage matched with families now!  This is great news and we have 13 dossiers in Haiti waiting for children to be ready to propose.

We are so thankful that so many families have started their process to adopt a child from GLA.  We know that  Haiti is not an easy country to adopt from.  The process can be long and change without warning.  But the reward at the end is so worth the wait!  You just have to be strong and ask for lots of patience!

I am sitting her today so exhausted that I think I will go take a nap during lunch time!  I can’t seem to catch up on my sleep for some reason.  I thought I might feel better if I go back on my high protein/low carb diet, so I started it again today.  But I have to tell you that I have started it every day this week and last until 5 PM and then I eat what everyone else eats!  But today is a new day, so maybe I can stick to it today!  I feel like if I can get through one whole day on the diet, the next day will be easier!  At least I hope!!  So pray for me that I can start feeling a little better and get some rest this weekend!

LINSEY                                                                   CHRISTIN

Birthday: 7 April 2012                                                Birthday: 16 October 2011

Arrived: 10 April 2012                                                Arrived: 24 April 2012

Boy                                                                           Boy

SOFIA                                                                    MARKENSON

Birthday: 16 August 2011                                              Birthday: 29 March 2012

Admitted: 9 May 2012                                                   Admitted: 9 May 2012

Girl                                                                              Boy

           GETHRO                                                                  ROSELINE

Birthday: 7 August 2009                                         Birthday: 30 January 2012

Arrived: 19 April 2012                                            Arrived: 4 May 2012

Boy                                                                          Girl

(Sorry, I wrote Jessica but everyone tells me her name is Rebekah! I was sure it was Jessica!  )

Rebekah arrived after 5 PM last night along with her mother.  Lori at Real Hope for Haiti sent her because Rebekah weighs 2 pounds (1 kg) and was having trouble breathing.  By the time she arrived, she was having apnea (periods of not breathing) and she was not doing well.

Susan Westwood came over to the nursery when Rebekah arrived.  Susan set up CPAP to help her breath while I started her IV. 

Thankfully, she was stable during the night and seems to be holding her own this morning.  Please keep her in your prayers.

My dream:

I’m in a parking lot that is sloped downhill.  I am sitting in a shopping cart with no brakes, no steering, and it has bicycle pedals.  I can only steer it by pushing against the sides.  I am careening down the hill pedaling at times trying to dodge cars and people and trying to end up at the orphanage!  I am also holding a puppy which makes steering the thing even more difficult!  I feel like I am on a roller coaster but sitting in a bumper car.

When I was telling Melissa Friesen about it, she said well that has kind of been your life lately, hasn’t it? 

I thought, oh my gosh, it has!  I have been on this wild ride, without having much control over it at all!  Sometimes things have been so out of control, that I feel like I’m running just trying to keep up with everything that is happening!

I pray that things will quiet down soon and by “soon” I mean tomorrow! 

Frantina was discharged from Dr. Robert Reid Cabral Children’s Hospital on Friday morning and is going well back at the apartment in Santo Domingo.  I talked to her yesterday and she sounded great!  She will be able to return to Haiti later this month.  We will have to go to Santo Domingo once a month for a little while to see the neurosurgeon, but as long as there are no complications, she should do well from this point forward!  We cannot wait to get her in the walker and have her start using her feet to move herself around and learning to crawl again!

I arrived at the bus station in Petion-Ville at 5 PM on Thursday and had to go straight to a Port-au-Prince hospital because Susan Westwood, our NICU nurse, was very sick.  It turns out she had acute appendicitis and had been sick since Monday with it.  She was admitted after I arrived at the hospital and she had surgery on Friday morning at 7 AM.  It was ruptured and so she has to be on IV antibiotics for a little extra time.  She was supposed to come home at noon today if everything was ok.  But she vomited several times during the night and just wasn’t ready yet and so she will stay until Monday.

We nurses are terrible about self diagnosing and self medicating ourselves!  Sometimes it doesn’t work very well for us! 

Please keep both Frantina and Susan in your prayers that all will go well from this point forward!

I spoke to the neurosurgeon today and he said that if Frantina continues to do as well as she is today, then she can be released to go back to our apartment either Thursday or Friday.  He did not promise anything but he said that was his plan if all continues to go well.  Katie and Vivianne are very happy because they are tired of spending all day and night in the hospital in a chair!

We are all very happy that she is doing well.  I truly think the doctor was kind of concerned going into this operation and thought about how he was going to exactly do the surgery for a long time before scheduling it. 

She had a CT Scan a couple of days ago and it shows that the spinal cord is already expanding and not compressed anymore.  He said it looked very good. 

Frantina is sitting up and actually holding herself up without any of us helping her!  She pulls herself forward and then pushes herself back.  She is moving her legs all over the place and even has some strength in them already.  She pushes against the arm of the chair with her legs and she couldn’t do that before surgery! 

Before surgery, she would have terrible tremors in her legs and the doctors called it infantile paralysis.  Her legs were stiff and she would hold them out in front of her when sitting or we moved her around.  She is not doing that anymore!  She bends her legs and moves them and does not hold them stiff. 

It is going to take awhile for her to learn to sit on her own, crawl, and stand up.   She will have to learn how to do these things all over again.  But once we get her back to Haiti and around the other children, she will want to do what they are doing! 

Dr. Sanchez said she can go back to Haiti at the end of the month!  She will have to come back to Santo Domingo every month for him to check her, but hopefully we won’t have to do this for too long.

Thank you all for your prayers!  Nobody can believe how well she is doing except all of us who know that her life is in God’s hands!

We have had the GREATEST teams (some of them family of GLA staff) in the last few months.  They have worked so hard and even with the rainy season making it difficult to work in the mud and clay soil, they still got a lot done!  Recently, a team from Burnett Fellowship in Maple Ridge, British Columbia started pouring the sidewalk in front of the Toddler Houses.  This sidewalk will allow the children to ride their tricycles, skateboard, roller skate, and just have a nice smooth surface to play on. 

Where you see the dirt in the photos will be a really nice playground that was donated to GLA by the Emmanuel Foundation out of Canada.  Their ministry receives playground equipment from city parks where they are replacing their older playgrounds with new.  They refurbish it, and then donate it to orphanages and schools in third world countries.  They will be coming this Fall to construct the playground at Fort Jacques.

Frantina is doing so well today!  She is sitting up and Katie was holding her in the chair when we arrived this morning.  It is like day and night difference between how she was over the weekend and how she is today.  Thank you to everyone that has been praying for her!  Nobody can believe how well she is doing considering what type of surgery she had done just a few days ago.  She is smiling and happy which I hope means she is recovering well.

It is difficult for Katie and Vivianne to spend 24 hours at the hospital every other day.  They trade off so that they can come home and sleep on the day that the other one is there.  The chairs do not recline, but they are able to put their feet up.  Frantina does not sleep well because there is so much noise in her hospital ward.  The sides of the beds make a lot of noise as they are raised and lowered.  They have also had some very sick children in the until with one of them being Frantina.  A baby last night had to be rushed into emergency surgery and then into ICU.

We are hoping that tomorrow, the doctors will take out her IV and urine catheter.  Being able to sit up is allowing her to cough better although she is still congested.

Everyone is going to be exhausted by the time she is discharged and allowed to come back to the apartment and into a more natural routine.  Tomorrow will be my last full day in Santo Domingo.  I hope to leave on the early morning bus to Haiti on Wednesday morning.  I will wait to see how Frantina is doing tomorrow, but those are my plans.

She started having blood in her urine last night and it has gotten worse today.  She is in constant pain and I’m not sure if it is her neck that is hurting or if she has a bladder infection and that is why she has been crying all day.

I spoke to a doctor on the phone tonight.  He speaks English and he’s the doctor on call in the hospital.  He was checking her out to see what he could give her for pain and something to treat the problem with her urine.  She is on pain medication but it is not helping this pain that she has today.

She started formula today after only receiving apple juice since surgery.  The doctor this morning said we could start her on a soft diet but very slowly.  Maybe I’ll send some mashed potatoes tomorrow for her to try and eat.

Please pray that the doctor can find out why she is in so much pain today and why her urine has blood in it.  Pray for her to get some rest tonight.  She needs rest to heal.