Posts Tagged family

Another turning point

Jun 30

Posted by IM in CAPTAINS BLOG | 1 Comment

June 28, 2010. Petit-Goave, Haiti.

“Another turning point, a fork stuck in the road,

Time grabs you by the wrist,

Directs you where to go,

So make the best of this test,

And don’t ask why,

It’s not a question,

But a lesson learned in time.”

–Green Day, “Time of Your Life”

Meyomene And Sky Sharing Cooking Knowledge

Ah, calm seas and a gentle night breeze. Tropical Storm ‘Alex’ made things interesting for us over the last few days.

At the western edge of the bay of Petit-Goave, we were exposed to a 5-6 foot swell rolling straight into the bay, with 35 mile-an-hour winds holding us beam-on to the seas. Misery! Imagine that your house is the head of one of those bobble-head dashboard ornaments. During a break in the weather, we moved the boat under the mountains at the eastern edge of the bay, giving us much needed protection and a good night’s sleep. We are getting ready for the 800-mile transit to our destination in Honduras…fueling, taking on supplies, clearing the decks, lashing down gear, ballasting the boat, and the thousand small things that have to be done to clear Southern Wind for a crossing.

Most importantly, though, we are waiting for a weather window. Tropical waves are continuing to pass over this area. The water between here and Colombia is pretty rough and pushing north across our course to Honduras. Alex is messing up the whole western Caribbean—not a good time to push your luck on the water. Besides readying our boat for sea, we have also used the time to say farewell to our friends here and to catch up on some last minute patients. The farewells are very, very difficult for me—to see people and places that have become important to me grow smaller and smaller until they disappear below the horizon.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Happiness is a deliberate choice

Jun 10

Posted by doctorben in CAPTAINS BLOG | 2 Comments

Showing off their freshly cleaned teeth

Before coming here—my first trip to Haiti—we had done so much reconnaissance (and I have already been to many places in the developing world) that I had a pretty good idea what to expect, but I also knew that there would be many things that would come out of left field and surprise me. From experience, I knew that for the first couple of weeks everything would be new and exciting, and that after a few weeks there would be things about Haiti that were chronically frustrating and upsetting. In this case, corruption in the government, the behavior of many other non-profits that are here, and human greed top the list for things that upset me in Haiti. But this doesn’t discourage me at all—EVERYWHERE I have EVER been, including places I love and would live in or revisit in a second, has things that I don’t like: the traffic in L.A., the lack of mountains in Florida, the cold in Ireland, the rampant HIV in South Africa, government corruption in Mexico, the mosquitos in Botswana. After a few weeks here, yes, of course there are things about Haiti that I don’t like, but I don’t care. No place is perfect, but as much as the challenges to rebuild Haiti seem overwhelming, there are still people here who have not given up, and neither will we.

If I am miserable and unfulfilled in one place, I’ll be miserable and unfulfilled when I go somewhere else, but I am doing what I dreamed of doing, after having (as Sky puts it) “frankensteined together this project that came out of your own head and watched it accomplishing everything you hoped it would and more.” At age 34, I am watching my dream come to life despite naysayers and constant challenges, with many hands reaching out to us to help us along our way. From childhood my dream was to practice this kind of medicine—the kind of medicine I watched my dad practice when he took me on rounds at the hospital as a child, and saw him provide in the homes of his patients and on the side of the road at terrible car accidents in Topanga Canyon where we grew up.

When your life’s dream is being fulfilled before your eyes is very hard to be unhappy and negative. The most common comment we have gotten, hands down, from older people who have met us, is “It is so great that you are doing this now, while you are young. You will never have to look back and have regrets about things you wish you had done and the places you have seen.” And when I look back down the years, hopefully many years from now, I want my halls of time to be lined with the faces of people whose lives I have connected with, however briefly, and in whose lives I left some kind of positive impact.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , , , , , , ,

End of week two in Petit-Goave

May 15

Posted by doctorben in CAPTAINS BLOG | 9 Comments

Family Practice Dr.Clara from Medico del Mundo And I Ultrasounding During The Obstetric Clinic

Well, at the end of our week here in Petit-Goave, it’s time to check how well we are meeting the goals for our project that I first envisioned over two years ago while working long nights in Irish hospitals.

I dreamed of a multi-skilled, highly adaptable relief team aboard a self-sufficient support platform that could use 21st Century medical technology, classical medical diagnostics and adaptability to different needs and resources to create long-term health benefits in developing world communities, making a difference one person at a time. Here we are, many months and many days of hard work later, and with many people who helped make this possible now a part of our story, anchored safely in Petit-Goave, Haiti.

For our first mission destination, I chose a tough location—Haiti: more than 800 miles from where we started, with huge challenges facing its people from every possible direction, a couple months after a huge disaster when people are still living in tents but many aid groups have pulled up stakes and moved on. If we could successfully conduct a mission here, I felt confident we could do it anywhere.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

June 21st, 2009

Jun 21

Posted by doctorben in CAPTAINS BLOG | No Comments

June 21, 2009. Palm Coast, Florida

Waiting for the sun and wishing we had brought coffee!

Waiting for the sun and wishing we had brought coffee!

Today marks the longest day of the year, and for us it surely was! We got up before dawn an piled into our rental jeep to head down to the beach and watch the sunrise over the water—a novelty for those us from the west coast, but we were thwarted by low clouds on the eastern horizon. Still, as we staggered out of the house in the pre-dawn (already in the high 70’s), the sky was a deep purple and shapes of houses and trees loomed out of it suddenly as we drove down the road to the Hammock Dunes beach nearby.

The sand is made of crushed clamshells and is multicolored; when we come here on Sunday afternoons to lie in the sun and recharge our solar batteries for another long week of work in on the boat, we never get fine sand stuck to us, which is nice, but we DO leave the beach with hundreds of little shell shards suction-cupped to us, and they are surprisingly hard to dislodge (since we discover them in our hair, on our backs, and other hard-to-reach places hours after we leave the beach).

Bathing our feet in the golden sun-water of the solstice dawn

Bathing our feet in the golden sun-water of the solstice dawn

We were all too tired to be chatty, and the pre-dawn is never a time for idle conversation—pre-dawn is when the world holds its breath like the audience at a concert, waiting for the first notes of the symphony while the conductor stands with hands raised, waiting to bring the whole orchestra into life. I think I understand why, at an intuitive level, so many religions originated with worship of the sun. The moments before it arrives above the horizon are filled with such expectation and faith (that it will, in fact, come up!) that every sunrise becomes a religious experience.

Today, a third member of my crew independently used the phrase “my previous life” to describe their life before they came here. So far away from the things that are familiar, working on something that is REAL and will leave a lasting mark in many lives around the world, many of the problems that seemed so important when we were immersed in them now seem more remote—and more than remote; they seem much less relevant to our lives and we wonder why we worried so deeply or hurt so badly or got so wrapped up in some drama or other. Our perspectives have changed. We are developing more perspective every day on the things that truly do matter—friends, service, honor, hope, determination, and family, which in the absence of our own relatives has been filled with each other. I still can’t get over how quickly we have all bonded, and it makes me think we just might survive long ocean passages as friends!

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: , , , , , ,

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Flickr
  • YouTube
  • Vimeo