She packed her first 40 pound bag of personal possessions and sent it to Texas for storage with our friends last week. <sniff> More strategic removal of 50 pound bags is in the works.
Today is day one of our 2013 Spring Break week. Oddly, Paige long ago decided this is not a spring break hot spot and worked to save her translating and babysitting money for a ticket to Texas to see her best friend, sister, brother-in-law, and more friends.
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We are all inappropriately dramatic when she leaves here and upsets the balance of our lives. We will begrudgingly put her on the airplane early morning, but only because we know we need to get used to this goodbye stuff.
In May she'll graduate, friends and family will join us in Port au Prince to celebrate her accomplishments. (Join us!) In late June she'll get on an airplane and head out of here to start her new life.
One of the things she'll do is attend a 10-day re-entry seminar for
If you are interested in giving a small gift toward this re-entry seminar, please find the PayPal link (right) to do that. If not interested, no problem at all, but please pray for our girl as she prepares to say goodbye to her home and transition from many years outside of the U.S. - to life as a freshman American college student. Experience and friends with experience all tell us this adjustment can be challenging.
Related:
We spent January getting in touch with the core group of people that help us do our life here by supporting us with dollars and prayers. If we could find them by email, we polled them in order to find out how they would feel about us taking an extended time away from Haiti (five months) in order to support Paige and her transition. (And also in order to take midwifery certifications and dental classes that cannot be taken here in Haiti.)
We were nervous about it as we prepared to ask. We decided that 90% "yes, that is okay with us" was our goal and that if we could get 90% approval we weren't off base to want to do this for and with Paige. Shockingly we had an 100% "yes, go!" response.
That to say, in August we will join Paige in Texas and be with her for her first semester of life in America. She is excited, we are excited. We'll all wrestle with our awkward, lost, uncomfortable, homeless feelings together as an act of solidarity.
We are so grateful our donors have given us the ability to do it. The five youngest kids are beyond excited and "When we are in America" is the most often uttered phrase in this house right now even though it is still several months away. They have not left this island since that time it shook in 2010; that time they left by C-130 military transport aircraft. Isaac thinks he can taste the juicy steak already.
We are hoping to find adoptive parents or someone else with an interest in a middle-term (five month) assignment in Haiti that might like to sub-lease our house. If by chance you know of someone that needs Port au Prince housing for five months we can guarantee that covering our rent will be cheaper than any guesthouse or hotel option around and they'll get to have total privacy and two amazing (but not amazing smelling) Mastiffs - please send them our way.
Most of us are purposefully living in the moment and this time in America is a long way off still. There is much much much to be done in the next five months - we just know that the speed at which time passes is increasingly more insane at every turn. It is possible that the Haiti way of focusing only on the next five to ten minutes is what causes it all to pass by in a giant blur. Sometimes I notice that what I thought was coming back to an email quickly was actually coming back to it a month later. Because of our tendency to lose a month in a blink of the eye, we wanted to share the 'house for rent' news while it could still be considered long range planning for those that might be looking for a temporary place to rent.
And now it is time for Spring Break 2013 to commence.
"I can't wait for tomorrow - even though I'm supposed to live in the moment."
-Noah Livesay
