I recently returned from my second trip to Haiti. On last year's trip, I journaled extensively. So extensively, that I didn't finish the journal of that trip until the midway point of this year's trip. I am hoping to post some of those journal entries here in the weeks to come in a "Throwback Thursday" style post so that I can finally finish telling that story, but I'm getting enough questions about this year's trip that I'm wanting to begin to tell that story even though I haven't finished writing about it yet. I'm hoping that by starting to post this year's journal entries that it will encourage me to wrap up the journaling process in less than 12 months. We'll see how that goes. Anyway, here's the first entry from this year's trip.
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
So, here we go again. This trip was a little more last minute for me than last year's as Travis Waltner was slated to go, but as things with the Embrace Tea Campus started to gain some traction, it looked like he would need to bow out. Amy was alright with me going again and it happened to fall immediately after a family vacation to Arizona, so although the turnaround would be fast, it was totally doable.
The team was a mix of folks from our trip last year (Gretchen, Aubrey, Scott, Julie & me), people from the September team (Jenna & Jeff), friends that had been with Mission Haiti before but not with Embrace (Art), and first timers (Tom, Kristen, Cara, Gina, Shawn, & Kayla). Some of these folks I knew well going in and others I was really looking forward to getting to spend some time with so that I could get to know them better. While I was really happy for each person on the team, I was especially happy that Art was able to make it the first week as he was originally supposed to come the next week with a few other guys. Art is a good friend, a bandmate both at Embrace and with Rachelle Hope's band and is also one of the funniest, least predictable, otter personalities I have ever met and he's always a joy to be around. You can always rely on him to inject a good deal of humor into any situation.
When we left Sioux Falls, the weather was nice at about 40 degrees. Since my bags were already packed to overflowing (everyone packs their French press for a missions trip, right?), I opted to leave my jacket home, trusting that Amy would come through with a jacket for me on the other end of the trip if it was needed (and with this year's weather, it would almost certainly be needed).
Flights were fairly uneventful with good conversations all the way through to Miami. Conversation with Shawn was particularly fun since we discovered that we had a lot of favorite bands in common. I knew that he was a musician from the few conversations we had been able to have prior to the trip, but I definitely picked up on some new artists from him and had fun thinking of music that I needed to share with him as well.
Really the only issue we had in Tuesday's travel was when Aubrey wound up in a little bit of a bind because she had been asked to check a bag through from Dallas to Miami. When she went to baggage claim to get the bag and then came back through security, they wouldn't let her through because her bag was too large. I was walking beside Gretchen as the team searched for a gate to camp out at for the night when she received a text from Aubrey telling her about her predicament.
When we found a place to camp out, I immediately unloaded about half of what I had in my backpack in the hope that we could transfer some of her things to my bag and get her through security. We weren't sure whether it would work or not, so I kept only the things I would need if I wound up sleeping on the cold tile floor near the check in counters with Aubs until they opened for ticketing the next morning since there was no way I was letting her stay out there by herself all night. Thankfully, we were allowed through and were able to rejoin the team where the carpeted floor of Gate 25B awaited.
I was able to get about two hours of sleep with the help of my sleep mask, ear plugs, and the blanket I borrowed from my friend Aaron (acquired on a previous trip through Delta airlines). Other than CNN blaring at 100 dBs and a visit from the vacuum brigade of the MIA cleaning corps there was little else to disrupt our sleep. We were at a gate right across from a security checkpoint, so when the TSA shift changed at 4:30 there was enough activity to keep us up for the day.
I grabbed a little breakfast and a lot of coffee as we prepared to board our flight to go on our way.
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