I am pleased to report that we took two incredibly successful surgical trips to Haiti on April 29 and May 13, 2010.  I am delighted with the results of both trips.

These trips each included two outstanding surgical teams, which I believe to be the best surgical groups in Haiti when we travel there.  We provided orthopedic and general surgery on the trips.  Additionally, on the second trip we added on a clinical effort, with one of our physicians and two Haitian American nurses seeing patients in a tent city clinic in Canapevert (close to Petionville) for two days in partnership with World Hope International. The clinic was well attended, with the team seeing 282 patients in two days.  The conditions they served in were tough, as you can imagine.

On our first trip, we traveled with a dentist and her assistant, and she provided dental services to the poor at the Love A Child mission in Fond Parisien.  We also ministered to the mental health situation in Haiti with Dr Susan Keeley presenting a seminar to roughly 50 pastors on dealing with the trauma from the Earthquake.  The positive benefits of that teaching will be felt for quite some time.  We also assisted St Damien's Pediatric Hospital, who in turn accepted transfers of two of our young patients.  And we distributed 56,000 of the meals that BHSF packaged with Feed My Starving Children during the two trips.

Each trip always has a couple of highlights, but now that we have expanded our efforts into other areas, there are a lot of them.  I will give you just one.  On Friday afternoon, Susan, Becky and I were coming back from visiting St Damien's.  Because the clinic team needed to be picked up, I had our driver drop us by the side of the road to save time, and called for our school bus to pick us up.  We were standing there for maybe 15 minutes, and I could see our bus coming in the distance.  A young man walks up to us and tells me in Creole "I feel bad".  I ask him if he has been to the Hospital at Double Harvest (where we do our surgery) and he says no.  I told him that he could get on the bus and we would go there, and he did. Our docs diagnosed him with a vicious sinus infection that was about to go to his brain.  During the exam, he passed out, and was initially non-responsive.  After they revived him, they gave him IV antibiotics, and the next day he was well enough to be discharged with a week's worth of Cipro.  The docs said that he wouldn't have lived for another 48 hours in the shape he was in.  At discharge he was incredibly happy and thankful to be feeling better.

There isn't a good explanation for why this guy told me that he was sick, as I wasn't wearing scrubs (although I may start).  However, he might have figured that telling a white guy standing on a dirt road how miserable he felt wouldn't be a bad thing.

There are more stories to be told about our surgical patients and the other areas we assisted in.  Overall, these two trips were our best trips to date!

At Living Hope’s mission in St Michel, things are going very well.  Because of the time lost to earthquake school closings, the school year will be extended to July.  Our Habitat for Humanity home building project is going well, with two homes being complete, and several more underway.  We have the funds to complete 14 homes.  Our clinics and churches are all growing, and our food distribution efforts are expanding.  This calendar year we will receive and distribute two million meals in partnership with Feed My Starving Children.

As always, thank you for the support that makes all of this possible, and for your prayers.