Over a year later...

A year has passed since I have posted anything. I was not able to go on a Haiti trip with the interns this year as I am no longer able to be an intern. The Obtern-ship is only available for 3 years and since I did it the first 3 years, I was unable to do it again. Fortunately, the church decided to do the first adult age trip to Haiti which I could have gone on, however I had just quit my previous job that spring and was not able to get the finances together to go. Then I learned about this trip.

This trip is a medical mission and I have a full time job which means I was able to get the money together to go. We leave on Friday and I am so pumped to go back to the island. This trip will be the first medical mission that Oakbridge has done and the first medical mission to go to the village of Chadirac. I have very limited medical training, mostly just health classes and what I have learned from the internet but hopefully that won't matter too much as I am going to be an assistant to one of the professionals going down. I will be trying to soak up as much knowledge as possible as I am very confident that this will not be my last medical mission.

I bought a Camelbak backpack on eBay that will be able to carry all of my clothes and stuff for the week so I won't have to check another bag, and I will actually have room to take stuff to the village. I am using my check bag for just medical stuff for the clinic to try and take the load of packing really heavy off of everyone else. A few other people were able to do that too so we were able to take everything we needed down. 

We are 20 in all with a hand full of medical professionals and the rest mostly assistants with some administrative people to make sure everything runs smoothly. We had our last meeting today and I didn't really think about this but a lot of the adults going down have young kids who they are leaving behind. For some of them, this will be the longest they have gone without seeing their kids which must be difficult.  I can tell that a lot of the people are starting to get the pre-trip nerves like every year, especially when most of them haven't gone before. Thinking back to my first trip, I had no idea of what to expect and I'm sure that makes a lot of them nervous. I haven't really expressed this to the first timers yet but the not knowing actually makes the trip more exciting for me, and typically I hate surprises. 

We leave at 7am on Friday and I will be blogging every day of the trip so prepare for the typical hyperbole and slight exaggerations with more pictures hopefully since I am sure looking at a wall of text gets boring.

Here we go...