utah haiti relief is awesome

First of all, THANK YOU so much to all of you who have already ordered some of our little flowers for Haiti! You are all so incredibly sweet and we appreciate your support more than you could possibly know!!! Our plan to cover the world in flowers is off to a great start.

I know somewhere earlier I mentioned that my friend Ty was still actively involved in helping down in Haiti (with Utah Haiti Relief). Well, he is and I wish everyone could see the amazing things that they are continuing to do down there. Oh wait, they can here on my wonderful blog.

Clearly, one of the biggest problems since the earthquake is how to house the approximately one million displaced persons in and around Port-au-Prince. Thanks to incredible world-wide donations, most of these people are now living in giant tent cities. While the tents are definitely better than nothing, the threats of disease, crime, heat, hurricanes, etc. make them extremely dangerous for these large groups of homeless people to live in for much longer.

A few months ago, Ty (and company) went down to initiate the construction of some styrofoam houses in these tent cities. Yes folks, styrofoam houses. These buildings are made entirely out of foam panels, glued together, and then covered in a concrete composite solution. They can withstand winds of up to 150 mph and hold up to 2,000 pounds on top. An amazing alternative to the tents, these foam houses will provide safe shelter that will hold out during hurricane season.

In these photos they were building a four room foam house to be used as a women’s medical clinic/delivery room in Sean Penn’s camp (around 50,000 displaced people are living in tents in Mr. Penn’s camp). As they were building, Haitians were learning how to construct the houses themselves, an awesome skill for them to have.

Each house costs a few thousand dollars to build. A minuscule fraction of the cost of a normal house, but still requires significant investments to create these shelters for large numbers of people. They are working on generating more funds to keep these houses coming. Ty just informed me that they are also coming up with other domed structures that are cheap and fairly simple to construct. I will keep you posted when I get more pictures!

Pretty amazing what a few good people can do when they put everything they have into a really good cause.

If you want to learn more about Utah Haiti Relief, I have a link to their site in my right-hand column. There is also a youtube link to see a video of the construction of the foam houses down in Haiti.

Ty (far left) & Company

Mr. Penn

flowers for our baby

So, as briefly stated in my last post, I am currently working on finishing up my dossier, planning my next trip to Haiti, and, the biggest hurdle, coming up with the funds for the adoption.

I will whole-heartedly admit that I am not, by nature, a good sales-person or fund-raiser. And, for those of you who know me well, I have this somewhat-unfortunate fierce independent streak. But, my family means more to me than my silly pride so we are coming up with all sorts of creative ways to get money together. The adoption will cost around $26,000, so any amount we can raise will help.

London and I decided to make some pretty flower brooches and baby poppy clips to raise some funds for the adoption costs. The peony brooches have magnets on the back so you can attach them to a shirt, bag, head-band, scarf, what-have-you, and the baby poppies have a little baby hair clip on the back. The peony brooches are $10 apiece and the little poppies are $5 (see pics below). If you would like to buy one there is a link on the right-hand side column of my page where you can choose whatever style you want and add it to your cart. :) Please, tell anyone you know who might like to buy one!

The cost of our particular adoption is, shockingly, considered cheap for an international adoption. I remember thinking, going into this, that there is no way an adoption could cost that much. Where does all the money go? There is a link on my chip-in page to my adoption agency that breaks it all down. About one-third to one-half goes to the Haitian government and the rest gets sucked up pretty quickly. Completely ridiculous and the main deterrent for most people wanting to adopt. Hopefully one day they will be better able to streamline these costs for adopting families.

Thank you for all of your support, it means so much more than you could ever know! We love you all. And please feel free to share if any of you have other fundraising ideas (I know some of you are experts).

my stunning sister and her daughter graciously agreed to be my models

peony brooches (gray, white, mustard, or olive)

baby poppies clips (mustard, pink, or white)

documents, documents, documents.

Since my return, I have completed my home study with the help of a wonderful woman named Suzanne Stott (my home study social worker). If you ever have the privilege to meet and chat with her, consider yourself lucky. I am now in the middle of compiling my dossier, a lengthy process full of legalizing, notarizing, and copying documents. Just to give you a taste of the process, lets take my birth certificate. You must obtain 6 certified copies of the original birth certificate, have them all notarized, then send them to the state to have them authenticated, then send them to the Haitian Consulate in Washington D.C. to have them legalized by the Haitian government. Ya, that’s just my birth certificate. And don’t have them notarized in the wrong color pen. You can just go ahead and start all over. Then there are medical exams, psychological exams, letters of recommendation, criminal background checks, legal forms, employment letters, financial statements, passports, visas, immigration forms... (several of which, by the way, have to go through the same process as the birth certificate)!!! A daunting task. But, I am taking it one document at a time and hopefully it shouldn’t take me too long. I am planning on going back down to Haiti in September, that is my goal. I am dying to go back, and absolutely dying to get matched. And I feel strongly (just like I did the first time I went down) that I need to go back down there before being matched. I think I dream about it every night.

LBC (“London Broadcasting Company”) Update: I don’t know if I mentioned this earlier, but London and I have a bit of a struggle going on regarding the little person we are going to adopt. She wants a girl, I want a boy. I will admit that usually in a power struggle between the two of us, she wins. But, I’m pretty sure this time I shall prevail. London is slightly more than psyched out of her mind to be getting a brother or sister. What, I guess she is bored of me or something? Every night, she prays for our baby in Haiti. I am excited for myself, and even more excited for her.

I also want to say thank you to everyone for your support in this. I have a truly amazing family and truly amazing friends and know that you have all been put into my life for a reason. I hope I can help you all as much as you have helped me.

my london and her buddy, meep

...and she is a professional hippie hula-hooper

me and L

long ride home, literally.

Night time, dark, foggy, ten people smashed inside an SUV, scary-winding-loooong tiny dirt road, guy who only speaks Creole as our driver, oh, and it’s raining. And the windshield wipers immediately broke upon backing out of Gina’s house. Yeehaw, this is gonna be a fun ride! There was some giant truck in front of us with like 20 people hanging off the back of it (like, hanging as in holding on to the sides of the open cargo door with their legs hanging off). So, the first half of the ride was not only bumpy, but increeeeeddddibly slow. Because we couldn’t see anything (the fog was so thick) we had to go about 5 miles per hour until we got pretty far down the mountain. It probably took us 2 hours to drive up and at least double that on the trip down.

I happened to be sitting in the very back trunk park of the SUV with, I don’t know, 18 other people and we were bouncing all over the place. It was sort of fun at first, like being on the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland. The fun slowly started to wear off after about an hour or so of bumping into each other and the roof. Ok, so this is coming from someone who NEVER gets car-sick. Three shades of green later, I wanted to die. Still, the pleasantness of what had just happened at Gina’s house permeated my mind and nothing could have really brought me down. In fact, I was already dreading leaving.

Four hours and several near-vomits later, we were back at the valley creche, which now oddly felt like home. I think I exited that car before it actually stopped moving. I went in and surveyed my sleeping babies (yes, they are all mine), and then we all decided to sleep up on the roof of the orphanage rather than staying inside since the breeze made it way cooler up there. We dragged mattresses up there on old metal ladders and no one died. I think Ty put on a movie on one of his fancy schmancy techno gadgets (aka: laptop), that nobody watched, and sometime I drifted off. Probably another 3 hours sleep total, and the sun was rising. By the way, roosters apparently have no sense of time in Haiti. They crow all night long. All night long.

Saying goodbye to the kids and the orphanage was no bueno, to put it mildly. I especially felt bad for Tonya, Brian, and Erik, who were leaving their girl and boy there and knew that it would be a long while before they were going to be able to take them home. I was a little relieved that I had not been matched to a particular child on this trip, because leaving would have been so much harder. A few of us went out to try and help unload huge amounts of supplies for Gina’s orphanage, and while we were waiting, it was time for me to leave. Ty flew me out to the airport via helicopter (the only way to travel), and made sure I knew where I was going. I sat around in the tiny one-gate airport and waited, everything in Haiti is done on island-time. We were at least a couple of hours late boarding the plane, and I knew I had a connection in JFK with only a half-hour layover, taking me to my other connection in Las Vegas with an 8-hour layover. All in all a 24 hour journey home, whereupon I would arrive in Salt Lake just in time to drive to my office for a 9:00am hearing at the courthouse. Whatever, I would make it eventually.

All I can say is, poor people sitting next to me on these flights. My trip happened so fast, and I had witnessed all of this horrible destruction, poverty, and sadness for the past few days and I guess I held it all in until the plane ride home. It was all coming out of me in giant crocodile tears. In New York, I looked all around and couldn’t believe how lucky we are here in the USA. Even in the ghettos of Philadelphia (where I served a mission and witnessed some of the poorest sectors of American society), I don’t think the poverty and devastation comes close to that of Haiti. Food, water, shelter, medical care, air conditioning, we have it all at our fingertips. And anyone who thinks the US government is corrupt should go live in Haiti for a while.

After a full day of work, 2 hours straight of hugging my London, and a brilliant long night’s sleep, I already couldn’t wait to go back.

Lastly, a word of advice, if you go to Haiti, don’t brush your teeth with the tap water. Duh. I payed for that one for a good three weeks.

fly like an eagle

Dinner = yum. Enough said. Gina and the women helping her are masters of the culinary arts. Platanos (one of my favorite foods ever, fried plantains squished and salted), seasoned chicken, salad with this amazing homemade dressing that was out of this world, and the corn. Oh the corn. I don’t know what she put on that corn, but dang. It was good.

After we ate dinner, Gina took some time to speak to another one of the guys with us, Erik, who is adopting a little baby girl, mostly about where they were in the process, etc. I stood on Gina’s deck and took in the amazing mountain views, and it was starting to get foggy and thunder-y. Is that a word? Ty and somebody (I can’t remember who, sorry to whoever it was, probably Ryan) were starting to fly people back down to the valley orphanage so we wouldn’t have to take the bumpy deadly ride back down the mountain in the car at night. They would only have time for a couple of loads in the helicopter back to the valley creche before it would be too dark and foggy to fly, so they were taking everybody pretty quickly.

I tried to wait until the last load so that I could stay at Gina’s as long as possible. I kept hoping that maybe Gina would say something about me wanting to adopt, but, truthfully I was doubtful that she even remembered that I was interested in adopting. I knew that I was leaving the next day and that after tonight’s dinner I would not likely be seeing Gina again before I left.

Time was ticking. I stuck to my guns and decided not to bring up anything about adopting if Gina didn’t bring it up. The guys came back for the last helicopter trip down to the valley and I started to stand up and thank Gina for the amazing dinner. And the heavens opened. Gina looked at me and said, "you are going home tomorrow, right? How am I going to be able to talk to you if you leave right now?" Easy decision. Hallelujah. And I sat back down. Ty and two of the other girls left in the helicopter and the rest of us stayed. We all talked about politics and Haiti for about an hour and then had dessert (way glad I stayed, it was tasty). Then, Gina pulled up a chair right in front of me and said, ok, lets talk. Tell me about what you are wanting to do. I filled her in a little bit on what had led me to this point (for additional details, please refer back to my first post, "the beginning...") and waited for her response.

Gina informed me again that the Haitian adoption laws say you have to be at least 35 if you are single and that adopting from Haiti was not easy right now. The hilariously generous guys sitting around said they could find somebody for me to marry (nice). But, that really wouldn’t have helped seeing as how if you are married, you have to be married for at least 10 years anyway before you can adopt. Gina went on to say that occasionally there are instances where you can get around the age requirement, but it really helps if you have some kind of medical condition where you aren’t able to have your own children. Bummer - so, now I wanted to be older and/or infertile. Gina still seemed somewhat positive about my chances of adopting though and told me to get all of my paperwork done on my end, and then they would start getting things prepared on their end. We talked for a while on other subjects when it dawned on me, I did have a medical condition that may help me out here.

Sorry if you weren’t planning on reading up on my medical history, but now you get to. It is, after all, an integral part of this little path being laid out for me and London and our soon-to-be new little family member. A little over a year ago, I started having what are called "petit mal seizures." Not like the big limbs flying all over the place as in grand mal seizures. But odd periods where I would kind of blank out and no one knew why. Very strange, as these usually happen in small children, and rarely in adults. So, about a week before Ty initially contacted me, I had a really bad one of these "blank out" periods (aka: seizures). I succumbed to going to the doctor and they ran all sorts of stupid tests on me, and I was ultimately diagnosed with an out-of-nowhere case of adult-onset epilepsy. Weird, I know. But, here’s the great part. Well, for me anyway. My neurologist had informed me (the very day I left for Haiti mind you) that epilepsy is very easily treated with daily medication, but that all anti-seizure medications currently available run a risk of birth defects. Ya, I can see how this would usually be considered a negative. But, not right now! I related this tidbit of information to the table and to Gina and Gina clapped her hands over her head and shouted, there’s your loophole! It was awesome. She seemed genuinely excited, especially for someone who seemed so skeptical in the beginning. Yay for my disability. I don’t believe in coincidences, and, as if I didn’t already KNOW that I was exactly where I was supposed to be, this simply slapped on another layer of cement.

The level of my elation after leaving Gina’s home pretty much can’t be documented in human measurements. Not sure why, I mean I had not been matched with a particular child, there was no guarantee I would qualify, and I certainly knew it was going to be a long and difficult road before ever finalizing the adoption. Not to mention the funds I was going to need to generate. But, I felt totally great. It was going to happen, and Gina the Great was on my side.

me and gina :)