It rained on her bed.

The director of the hospital Cardinal Leger in Leogane  ( which was the epicenter of the 2010 earthquake) called Relief Team One to see if we could repair her roof. The rainy season has started and every night it rains in her bed!  This is in the new building that was constructed to get her staff and herself out of the tents where they have been living since January last year! 
A team of seven of our best students went down and in three days they reconstructed the whole roof structure over the little chapel and the sisters’ bedrooms.  No funding comes for staff housing; foundations are much more interested in financing schools or hospitals. Yet, without staff, there is no functioning hospital….so the logic escapes me…

Any way my room was in the condemned former hospital. I was given a key to lock myself in, and when the rat decided not to enter the front door ahead of me, I was very pleased.  I have never spent the night in a deserted condemned greatly destroyed hospital before;  a  little gecko joined me in the bathroom where a thoughtful person had filled a 5 gallon bucket for my shower.  Ceilings are broken, partly fallen, equipment and supplies are still there, but everything is covered with dust and abandoned… the operating room is spooky  with only a little bit of equipment yet, some supplies still there , seemingly ready but covered with gravel and dust…everything sealed at a moment in time and deserted… creates a strange feeling.. really eerie !

The good news is that under Ray’s creative energy and guidance, the men and he were able to make a brand new roof. They all slept in the same tents the nuns have recently abandoned and had a taste for what their accommodations have been like. Mosquitoes galore, even after the UN ( gun at the ready, not sure why?) came to spray the grounds…

Where do I come in? Well I speak English and French and therefore am the link between builder and hospital staff…kind of fun!