Tuesday, March 25, 2008

The Color Green


Green's been my favorite color my entire adult life, having supplanted the pink of my tomboy/girly-princess childhood, which remains firmly in second place. My last two cars have been green, my kitchen walls and counters are green, many of my clothes are green. This "Daily Om" message makes me even more happy with my choice. (Photo by Gigi Bate)

Unifier Of Opposites

Green is a combination of the colors yellow and blue, each of which brings its own unique energy to the overall feeling of the color green. Blue exudes calm and peace, while yellow radiates liveliness and high levels of energy. As a marriage between these two very different colors, green is a unifier of opposites, offering both the excitement of yellow and the tranquility of blue. It energizes blue’s passivity and soothes yellow’s intensity, inspiring us to be both active and peaceful at the same time. It is a mainstay of the seasons of spring and summer, thus symbolizing birth and growth.

Green is one of the reasons that spring instigates so much excitement and activity. As a visual harbinger of the end of winter, green stems and leaves shoot up and out from the dark branches of trees and the muddy ground, letting us know that it’s safe for us to come out, too. In this way, green invites us to shed our layers and open ourselves to the outside world, not in a frantic way, but with an easygoing excitement that draws us outside just to sniff the spring air. Unlike almost any other color, green seems to have its own smell, an intoxicating combination of sun and sky—earthy, bright, and clean. In the best-case scenario, it stops us in our tracks and reminds us to appreciate the great experience of simply being alive.

Green balances our energy so that, in looking at it, we feel confident that growth is inevitable. It also gives us the energy to contribute to the process of growth, to nurture ourselves appropriately, without becoming overly attached to our part in the process. Green reminds us to let go and let nature do her work, while at the same time giving us the energy to do our own.


Isn't that cool? I love the Daily Om. http://www.dailyom.com/

Saturday, March 22, 2008

Spiders and Sick Kids











I got back from Haiti a week ago and once again it was a grueling trip with lots of rewards and intense experiences. But before I get into all that -- the desperate needs of that poor messed up country, etc. -- can I get a little shock and awe for waking up to find this freaking monster crawling across my bed last Thursday morning?! I had gotten up before dawn to take a (cold) shower and wash my hair for the first time since we got there. When my flashlight caught that thing, I literally almost passed out. Had it been there while I was sleeping? Did it crawl across me and inspect me during the night? The thought still makes me nauseous.

Evelyn looked it up this week and said it's a Chilean tarantula, and Haiti is about as far north as they roam. I have to honestly admit that the instant I saw that creature a very firm resolution formed in the core of my being. Someone else on our committee can have a turn next year. I am no Paul Farmer. I'll continue working and writing grants for our clean water projects, which I've come to believe are the very most important thing we can do for the village and people of Medor, from right here stateside for the next while. I had to get back in that bed and sleep one more night there -- after inspecting every inch of my room with my flashlight first, of course -- and I barely slept a wink before hiking 2 1/2 hours back down the mountain and driving the rest of the day back to Port au Prince on Friday.

Now a few people have asked me how I had the presence of mind to take these photos anyway. Well I didn't at first. I fled the room like any sensible person, and since everyone was still asleep I went and took my shower. When I came out the spider was gone, which as you can imagine was even worse than if it had still been there. I had to go to an early mass that Pere Leroy had organized as a special treat for us, because getting up at dawn and working all day until dark wasn't fun enough, I guess. When we got back from mass, where I obsessed about how to find and get rid of the monster, it was back hanging out on the side of the bed. I took the photos because for some crazy reason my closest friends and loved ones think I'm prone to exaggeration. I prefer to think I just expereince life a bit more vividly than some people. I knew they would never believe how big this sucker was if I didn't have proof. So I took the pics and then Lori, who grew up on a farm in Iowa and thus is completely impervious to fear of animals of any kind, grabbed it in a plastic trash bag and took it outside. Unfortunatley, the wiley bugger escaped and was NOT in the bag, so we screamed, ran back inside, found it again, Lori grabbed it again, this time really showing it who was boss, and we brought it outside.

Heidi, a yoga and peace-loving Filipino who meditates every morning and has her favorite chants on her I-Pod, but who nonetheless has happily eaten cat, dog, crickets, cockroaches and other bugs, brains, stomach, intestines, frogs, snakes and just about anything in the world that lives, was compassionately saying "Don't kill it!" She also rescued a moth that landed in Mark's soup at dinner one night, dried off its little wings, took it outside and set it free. Did I mention this woman eats anything that crawls, walks, swims or flies?? And I mean anything. Too funny.

OK, so aside from mutant spiders, we also saw 825 sick children in four days at our makeshift clinic, which we set up on the ground floor of the rectory. The second day we woke up to 200 people below our windows at 5 a.m., lining up to get in. Heidi, who aside from her unashamed relish for kittens and puppies au jus, is an incredibly smart, hardworking, calm and most important, funny, pediatrician, organized everything and had me triage all the kids: name, age and complaint. Mark, who works in computers at USA Today, was the mad scientist pharmacist, and did an amazing job. Lori, a nurse who hasn't practiced in 15 years while raising her kids, got a crash refresher course and could probably head up an E.R. now. Bill manned the door with help from Sister Elita, who whipped the storming hordes into shape with numbered cards and a switch in her hand, bless her heart! It truly would have been chaos without her. We left her all the leftover donated meds we brought for her school kids -- ten 50-pound suitcases that a bunch of helpers carried three hours up the mountain on their heads, many of them barefoot. They hiked way faster than we did, and hauled those huge bags like they were full of cotton balls, it was unbelievable.

I now know many Creole terms for cold, cough, fever, earache, headache, stomach ache, diarreah, chest pain, skin rash, worms and poor appetite, otherwise known as malnutrition. We saw adorable 17-day old twin babies, and a 7-day-old newborn who was perfectly healthy and had no business being around all those sick kids. We saw some very serious cases too, such as a girl with a large lump of what was probably bone cancer growing out of her spine; a boy with stick thin legs bowed by polio; a boy who was blind in one eye and didn't even know it; several cases of pneumonia (including one dehydrated boy with a 105 fever who threw up all over Lori); and a girl (about 10) whose kidneys were failing. We had to tell her poor, bone thin and exhausted father, as he held her in his arms, that he had to carry her to the nearest hospital right away, a seven hour walk. He broke down and sobbed.

The vast majority of the illnesses, however, were caused by dirty water (and not enough food). The colds, coughs and fevers, the skin rashes and infections, the chronic diarreah, the failure of babies to thrive and learn and grow, would all clear up if they only had clean water to drink, cook with and bathe in. Watching the hundreds and hundreds of people wait all day long, just for the opportunity to be seen and touched by a real doctor, I often felt as though we were spitting into the wind. We were helping relieve symptoms, but once their vitamins, skin creams and antibiotics ran out, they would be sick again with the very same problems. Until we get all the water sources in all the farflung chapels cleaned up, these will be chronic problems.

Our driver/translator Monty was great -- a fun, cheerful reggae lover with dreads who laughed his head off as he careered over the bumps and rocks on the crazy Haitian roads while I hung on with white knuckles and slammed on my imaginary passenger-side brakes again and again, blurting out 'Oh no!" and "oh my god!" and "watch out!" over and over very helpfully. Check out his website at http://www.thespiritofhaiti.com.

We parted on a very awkward note, however, after Monty insisted that our rental car -- a brand new SUV with the plastic still on the visors -- took diesel fuel. Mark and I both were sure it took regular gas, as did the Haitian gas station attendants when we stopped to fill up on our way back to the airport Saturday morning. Monty insisted, saying he had driven this car before. So we filled it up with diesel and the car died half a mile later by the side of the road. Pepe, our second driver, dropped off the rest of our group and came back to get us. It was 7 a.m., Avis didn't open until 8, and we had to get through the long security lines and onto our 9 o'clock flight.

I had rented the car with my credit card. Monty was horrified by his mistake and shut down completely. He couldn't apologize and barely said goodbye. I told him I was counting on him to straighten it out, that I didn't want to be charged for the repairs. He was noncommital. So far there's been no charge at all to my Visa card, and Avis is trying to track down what happened. Hopefully it will all be OK. It was sad to end things on such a weird note after the great week we all had together.

The internet was down in Medor so it was fun to return to all the news we'd missed: Elliot Spitzer, Cuban soccer players defecting, Obama and Hillary, etc. Like last time, stepping into Miami airport, so clean and bright, with hot water and good food and news and magazines, was heaven. I admit it, I am so tremendously grateful that through a simple accident of fate, I was born at the top of the heap in the developed world. Besides offering the chance to help people who really need it and experiencing something so different from our own lives, Haiti very quickly puts your own cares and troubles right into perspective. That is its greatest gift of all.