So I keep thinking I have an idea of what to expect before I go to Haiti, and then something new comes out and my perspective shifts again. Here is the latest thing to really freak me out.
In the absence of any official tracking of women and girls raped, except for a United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM)-led effort just initiated in 10 displaced persons camps in Port-au-Prince, KOFAVIV keeps its own tally. As of March 21, KOFAVIV outreach workers had tracked 230 cases of rapes in 15 camps, or 15.3 incidents per camp. Hundreds of such camps dot the city, their size varying from hundreds to more than 20,000. The ages of those raped in this sample range from 10 to 60, the majority of them teenagers.

Post-earthquake Haiti is plagued by high levels of anxiety and frustration among the population; hundreds of thousands of newly homeless females sleeping on the streets and in tent settlements, many of them alone; disorganized and inadequate policing; and a nonfunctioning justice system. For women and girls, this is a deadly combination.

The danger is compounded by the fact that thousands of prisoners, including convicted rapists, are now at large after escaping from the National Penitentiary. And the majority of police who were trained in gender-based violence were reportedly killed in the quake.

The full story can be found here, at the Huffington Post.

The article then continues with more anecdotes of rapes committed (they are all triggering, and I mean REALLY triggering, more so than I expected) and with accounts of KOFAVIV's (The Commission of Women Victim-to-Victim) attempts to mitigate and intervene in the violence against women and children in the IDP camps.

GVN hasn't talked about this at all, and I don't know what the situation is in the camps in Jacmel, but I imagine it is much the same. Of course, people are now "moving on" from Haiti as a cause, since the earthquake was months ago, which is an eternity in the fast-paced world of media coverage, so I am not sure how much we will hear about the conditions in the camps, aside from in the Huffington Post, which I generally don't care for.

Bonswa!

Today I made some English/French/Haitian notecards, using phrases from this website, recommended by the GVN. When I was in French classes in middle school, I hated making notecards. We had to throw out the cards if we had made errors; crossing things out was not permitted. Writing them took forever and I felt so wasteful if I made an error! We also had to submit them to the teacher, and, with my poor time management skills, this was a weekly nightmare. The tactic works, though, and I used it all through high school and college for Italian, Japanese, and Spanish (though I have forgotten all but the Spanish).

Haitian Creole (or Kreyol) is the most widely spoken creole language on the planet, with roots in French, Taino, and several African languages, as well as Arabic and English. It's written phonetically, which means that some words have the same pronunciation in French and Creole, but are written radically differently. For instance, one says "Bon soir" in French to say "good evening." But in Creole, one says instead, "Bonswa!" To warn of impending danger, a Haitian might say "Atansyon!" while a Frenchman would exclaim, "Attention!" My favorite example of this is the word for yesterday. I looked at the Haitian word for a long time, trying to divine its root: "ye". Then I considered the French word for yesterday, which is spelled "hier". I said it aloud, and then the gears in my mind clicked: ye is very close to a phonetic prononciation for hier!

That's all for today. Orevwa! (Goodbye!)

Questions about Haiti--

I'll be going to Haiti with Global Volunteer Network in May. I will be gone for three weeks, but now that I have received my preparation guide, I see that I will actually be in Jamaica for almost a week total. For my first few days, I will be attending orientation in Montego, and on Day 5, I will fly to Port Au Prince and then travel "overland" to our base camp at Jacmel. It looks like I will have weekends off, and then on the nineteenth day, I will fly back to Montego, debrief and be home on the twenty-first day.

Conditions will be very basic- I'm told that I will be bathing out of a bucket for my two weeks and that I will have to purify my drinking water. I am also going to be buying a mosquito net soon, which is sort of... startling. It's not something I ever thought I would need! Global Health Action posted some photos of the recovery process on their facebook page. This was one of the most interesting to me:


It's a tent, made out of whatever the Haitians could find. Most of the tents are like this, from what I am reading, and the Red Cross says that "more than half of Haiti's 1.3 million earthquake survivors have now been provided with shelter. The Red Cross says it expects most of the victims will have some form of shelter by May 1 to protect them during the upcoming rainy season."

More news as I hear it and more progress is made.

Trip Recap.

Now that I am home and settled again, I can recap my trip and answer a few questions.

I left South Carolina to stay overnight with some friends just outside of Raleigh. Lesley is a colleague of my father's and I met her and her husband Steve while Dad and I were in Hong Kong. They graciously opened their home to me after not having seen me for three years. I arrived after dark and was greeted by Steve and their enthusiastic Australian shepherd, Clancy. Steve and I grabbed dinner and hung out for a bit, chatting and watching hockey, until Lesley's flight came in. Once Lesley was settled, she and I walked Clancy, while she explained the finer points of cricket to me. The next morning, Steve left before I woke up, but Lesley made me coffee and oatmeal, which she referred to as porridge; I found this charming, which I think is compulsory for Americans, to find Australian and British accents and terms endearing.

I headed up to Maryland, trying to take as much time as possible to give my host time to get home from work before I arrived. I assumed I would be early, but I ended up caught in traffic on 270, which ate up an hour. Maryland would be lovely if I could visit there when it wasn't freezing or raining, I think. While I was there, I sat in on the tail end of my host's band practice, visited some friends I know through the convention scene, went bar-hopping in Baltimore, and got far too little sleep. It was a great visit! Some of my friends and I went to the Wharf Rat in Baltimore, which has been a pub in some capacity since the 1700s, and which serves beer from Oliver Breweries- delicious beer!

I also got to visit my friend Huck, who maintains her blog at Sweet Huckleberry. She invited me to have dinner with her neighbors, her partner Banjo Boy, and her, and we shared a delicious meal of black bean burgers with homemade bread and sauteed mushrooms. One of her neighbors is a sex therapist, Dr. Ruthie, and she is hilarious as well as knowledgeable. Huck sent me home with a bag of dried mushrooms and tomato seedlings, which warmed my heart. I am hoping the seedlings will do okay after their semi-traumatic ride home, though. I also got to meet Huck's hens and see the progress she and Banjo Boy have done on their house; it is a cute little Cape Cod that needed a lot of help, but it has come a long way under their dedicated efforts.

The trip home was long, but uneventful, which was a blessing. I listened to podcasts and a long music mix that a friend made up for me. So, overall, quite an excellent trip.

Short teaser from McKenney, VA:

My dad poked at me to update, but I haven't had steady access via my laptop since South Carolina. I will provide a full update once I am returned home, but for now, I will leave this little teaser while I am sipping iced coffee in a truck stop in central Virginia. Soon, yes, I will write about Raleigh, beer in Baltimore, driving all over Maryland, losing and finding my ID in Virginia, and some of the lovely people I had the pleasure of visiting on this trip!

For now, though, I will head back out onto the road. Maybe I will meet up with one of my Atlanta friends in Greenville, SC.

Today I leave for Cary, NC! It's been an awesome couple of days spent paddling around the marsh every day, taking long walks, and avoiding getting completely covered in ticks! Although I haven't gotten sunburned, I did get some sun. I have slightly more tanned calves; the line to which my jeans were rolled up to my knees is clearly visible now. I also tanned slightly around my vaccination bandaids! Those things do NOT come off as early as regular bandaids. I now have two slightly paler circles on my left arm. My inner Star Wars nerd thinks they look like the twin suns of Tatooine. (And if you don't know what that means, please don't worry about it!)

And now I have to leave and wear real clothes that aren't covered in mud again. I'm a little sad, but a little excited to get on the road!

In North Myrtle Beach--

I was just at my family's place in North Myrtle Beach a year ago, but I cannot tell you how happy I am to be here right now. My mother and sister are already here (little sis is on spring break) and one of my aunts lives here these days, so I knew I was going to get some lovely family time.

I pulled up around 5 (the drive took me six hours and some change, which unnerved my mother) and my sister and I immediately decided to drive over to Waites Island after we tossed my suitcase and stuff into the house. We got 100 feet away from the house and ran into some horses who we assumed had escaped. We ended up taking them back to the barn- but I'm pretty sure they were actually let out on purpose. Whoops! Anyway, we went to the island after that. There are more shots after the jump.

"Caring for Your Introvert" from The Atlantic

A friend sent me this and it is too well-written for me not to share it here.
Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate? Who growls or scowls or grunts or winces when accosted with pleasantries by people who are just trying to be nice?

I've recently realized that is why I am exhausted all the time these past two weeks: I am rarely alone and sometimes I just need breathing room. This upcoming roadtrip will be glorious from that standpoint! And this need to be alone is a quality about myself that I am rediscovering now that I do have more leisure time and am more social than before. I write more in my journal for myself, and I think that earning my own approval has become much more important to me than earning that of others.

How can I let the introvert in my life know that I support him and respect his choice? First, recognize that it's not a choice. It's not a lifestyle. It's an orientation.

Second, when you see an introvert lost in thought, don't say "What's the matter?" or "Are you all right?"

Third, don't say anything else, either.

For the full article, click here.

Vaccinations; or I am full of dying viruses.

Today I began round one of vaccinations I will need before I go to Haiti. I went to the Emory Travelwell clinic, where I received a huge packet of information and spoke with one of the doctors there. Another patient who is affiliated with Emory is flying down to Haiti on Monday with the University of Miami to work as a nurse, so she sat in on my appointment so that the doctor could be more efficient. She told us about malaria in Haiti: that it's the most dangerous kind and that if we have flu-like symptoms for up to a year after our return, we must immediately go to the doctor and tell them that we were in a high-malaria-risk environment recently. On the CDC's malaria website, there is a section with people's accounts of their experience with malaria. One of the stories in there is about a relief worker who went to Haiti and decided not to take his anti-malarial drugs because of the side effects. He came home, exhibited flu-like symptoms, and ended up being misdiagnosed by his doctor as having the flu. Then he got MUCH worse and spent ten days in the ICU to the tune of $23,000.

This is the point where I realized how incredibly real the situation was. I know it isn't a game, and I know that I have committed myself to something incredibly serious and possibly dangerous, but it didn't seem real until then. I am excited to have this opportunity and to do something that could be important, but I am scared. I am scared of mudslides and malaria and riots. I can only prepare myself so much for these things over the next two months, though, and I refuse to paralyze myself with fear.

I walked out of the clinic with a big yellow folder with information on typhoid fever, rabies, malaria, food preparation, traveler's diarrhea, preventative methods, and prescriptions for cipro and chloroquine (my anti-malarial). I also have three new holes in my arms: I got the seasonal flu and hepatitis A vaccines in my left arm and typhoid fever vaccine in my right. I could actually feel the hep A going through my arm and into my shoulder; the nurse did her best to alleviate the pain and even rubbed my arm and shoulder a bit to keep them from getting too stiff. (I told her that she is a treasure and should teach a class, to which she emphatically replied, "NO.") The flu and typhoid shots were nothing, but now my typhoid arm hurts!

When I return from my road trip, I will be getting round one of my rabies vaccination, a diptheria/tetanus booster, and an H1N1 vaccine!

Oh, also, this was in my packet, and it amused me.

Haiti.

Unless you've been living under a rock, you will have heard that in January, there was a massive earthquake in Haiti. Haiti, which was already the poorest country in the western hemisphere, is utterly devastated and relief workers have been dispatched from all over the world to begin trying to piece the country together again.

I'm a 23-year-old woman who comes from a privileged background and is looking to get her master's in public health, specifically in community health. I felt like I should do something and what I wanted to do was to go to Haiti as a volunteer. However, I was worried about cost and being useless, and in early February, I elected not to go. Except that I couldn't stop thinking about Haiti: I kept reading as much as I could about recovery efforts, about future planning, and about Haiti's history. I speak some French and started to look into learning a bit of Kreyol.

And then I saw pictures of Haiti, taken by employees of Global Health Action, which is based here in Atlanta, and I couldn't stand it anymore. I signed up with Global Volunteer Network, and I leave for Haiti on May 4th. I will be there for three weeks, working either in an orphanage or in an IDP camp in Jacmel. Details to follow, but in the meantime, I am gathering gear and preparing myself as much as possible.

"So... what are you doing?"

I graduated from Emory University this past December, with a bachelor's in anthropology. Since then, someone has asked me what I am doing with my life at least once a week. "Where are you working? Where are you going to grad school?" The answers are, "I'm not. And I don't know yet, I'm waiting to hear back." That said, I'm actually not bumming around; I'm busy all the time. I've taken on this role of surrogate girlfriend/housewife/mother and am ferrying people around, running errands, and generally trying to be helpful. Honestly, I've never been happier, and I realize how lucky I am that I get to live in a house with friends and have my parents support me before I join the real world.

This blog is chronicling what I am doing while I wait and take life as it comes.