Job Title: Mother of 215, Interpreter, Nurse, Videographer, Tour Guide Etc.

Yep, I wear MANY different hats here on a daily basis, which makes for a lot of craziness, but also a lot of awesomeness. Here’s my week in a nutshell…

Monday: Work all day in the office and then, for the first time, I brought one of my girls with me on our Monday night town run to San Pedro. It was so much fun! She’s an 11-year old and one of the girls in my casa that’s a lot more under the radar, and she enjoyed to the max. We started out with ice cream and pica pollo and then did the kitchen shopping for the volunteer house. To make a long story short, she was FASCINATED by everything (shows you that our kids don’t get out too much). When the floor-cleaning machine went by, she discreetly was touching the floor afterward to see what it did, she was staring at the person in the produce section as he weighed the fruit, absolutely in awe, and she learned to use a gumball machine for the first time. I love those opportunities to bond with the kids in a one-on-one setting.

Tuesday: My “partner-in-crime” Avriel is gone on a conference in Honduras right now, so I’m filling in for her a bit. One of our current projects is getting 30-hours of video footage of our site for a man who is making a documentary about us. THIRTY HOURS. That’s a lot. So basically, all the kids have seen me this past week through the lens of a camera. It’s rather stuck to my hand. It’s actually been a pretty cool opportunity to get to know some people though as I’ve interviewed lots of the kids and staff now about how they ended up here and their NPH experience. Also, gave a tour to some visitors.

Wednesday: More taping—made it to sewing class and interviewed a few volunteers and a few tías. Volunteer meeting at 4:15. Mass at 5:00. And most importantly, ENGLISH DAY. This is a day Marijo and I had been planning for about a week. I made a bunch of signs and with the kids help, posted them in every building on site. It was a lot of fun! The tías, security workers, farm workers, kids etc. got SO into it! I walked into the special needs house to interview a tía and said “Buenos Días” only to be chastised by all 6 tías there at the moment for speaking in Spanish. It was great!

Thursday: Up by 5:00am and off to Santo Domingo with Michelle for a FULL day. We started off at Immigration Services—renewing visas for the volunteers, and then went over to IKEA to buy provisions for the volunteer kitchen (amazing how happy a few butter knifes and bowls can make a person!) Second half of the day=wake-up call to real life in the DR. We had three of our boys in the hospital, 2 in Santo Domingo, so we decided to make some visits. We only knew the name of one hospital, so our afternoon started off with a goose chase around Santo Domingo in a taxi attempting to find it. We finally got there and start wandering through the hospital, literally. We’re walking through corridor after corridor attempting to find our little boy. No one asked us who we were. As we’re walking through, we got a real glimpse into these hospitals. Dirty, rooms with 15 beds, all records are written out, no computers…We walked by rooms with doors open as kids are getting shots and screaming. We walked by rooms full of kids in entire body bandages, moaning and whimpering. These hospitals are literally MAZES. So confusing.

            Then get this: we finally realize we need to be one hospital over, so we go to the correct hospital. We walk into a run JAM-PACKED of people. Like wall-to-wall, hundreds of people in one room waiting. Overwhelming. We realize we went in the wrong entrance. So we go to the other one. This time, we get stopped, because Michelle is wearing a shirt with little sleeves and apparently that isn’t appropriate. Finally, we convince the guard to let us go up and see our little boy even though visitor hours didn’t start for another hour. This ENTIRE time not one person asked us who we were, what our relationship to the patient was…they didn’t even ask us the LAST NAME of the patient. We found our way to him by only using his first name. And we saw so much—clearly confidentiality isn’t a concern. Yet dress code is apparently quite a big deal.

            So we get to his room, finally, and he’s in the bathroom. This really leaves us wondering if our little boy is going to walk out of the room, because, like I said, we’ve arrived here off of only using his first name. He realizes he has visitors and peeks out of the door: his face LIGHTS up, like a huge grin from ear to ear. Yep, this was definitely worth all the trouble it took us to get there. So he comes out then and we chat for a couple hours in his hospital room. He’s SO precious. We gave him chocolate and the first thing he says is that he’s going to give it to his roommate, a 43-year old man. He said he doesn’t like the meat in his meals at the hospital, because it comes without any bones, so he’s afraid it’s human meat (all meat at the orphanage has the bones with it). He talks about how the first thing he’s gonna do when he gets back is start working again. The nurses come in and see the card I made him. He proudly explains that it’s from Kristen. Overall, it was a GREAT visit. Also, his room was pretty nice esp. compared to what we had just seen. There was air conditioning, the one roommate, it was clean, there was a TV, although no pillow.

            Next stop: a hospital across town to visit another one of our boys who has been in the hospital for over a month at this point. This was another experience. We found him without trouble. But he was sharing a room with about 10 other boys. It smelled bad. It was steaming hot since there was no air conditioning. It was dirty. The other little boys were crying and moaning. No pillow, small amounts of food. Ay dios. Also, these 2 hospitals were the GOOD hospitals. Like we only take our kids to the Santo Domingo hospitals if it’s something serious. Apparently, the hospitals in San Pedro (including one where our 3^rd sick boy was at) are despicable. Hard to imagine.

            Anyways, we get back to NPH around 7:00pm and participate in the goodbye party for the Canadians. More taping. Lots of fun!

Friday: Up and out the door by 7:00 to get to Barrio H3 to do a medical clinic all day. We have a group of visiting doctors from Canada right now, so we went to this nearby barrio where they cancelled classes for the day and turned the school into a clinic. I served as an interpreter the whole day and we brought along 6 of our older kids to help out as well. It was again an eye-opening experience! The 3 classrooms served as a triage/registration room, the doctor’s consult room (we had 4 doctors) and the pharmacy. I was interpreting for one of the pediatricians. Hearing some of the things people believe about their health simply because they are uneducated was crazy. Some people thought you could only have allergies if you have a skin rash and that girls can’t shower during their period, because it will cause them to get sick. And we would weigh the kids as they came in. So many of them had clearly never stepped on a scale before and were either afraid of it or didn’t know how to stand on it. Also, the waiting line was astronomical….it stretched out along the entire length of the school and beyond. We must have seen the whole community: we saw mothers of 16 with 2 kids already, lots of people suffering from injuries from moto accidents, and pretty much everything else. At one point, a 6-year old girl comes in bawling her eyes out. He right foot is covered in blood and glass. She went straight to my doctor and the interpreting began. I then sat with her for an hour as they cleaned and dressed the wound and gave her stitches. I was doing everything in my power to keep her calm and distract her from what was going on as she was getting hysterical. I had my arm around her, was asking her about her family, her favorite color, her pets, her classes at school, everything and anything.  At the end of the day, we’re with one of the last patients, and a boy comes to get me because there’s a lady waiting for me outside. It’s a mom who we had seen earlier in the day with her 4 children. She had a bowl full out honey as a gift for me and the doctor for helping her. Like honey with the honeycomb still attached. Wow! It blew my mind. She had came all the way back with her 3-month old boy, waited outside for quite some time, just to be able to pass off this bowl of honey. Wowowowow.

            We also brought along 6 of our older kids who are decent at English, so it was fun seeing them helping out. One of our 15-year old boys would help me out translating and explain random Dominican vocab or medical beliefs that we didn’t know of. I was definitely proud of him. He wants to be a doctor someday. And then we spent some time at Kiki’s house in the barrio (she works at NPH). Her dog just had 6 babies, so we definitely played and played with those puppies. Anyways, got back around 7:30 and pretty much went to bed.

Now, it’s Saturday, and for the first time in my life, I can agree with my dad that waking up at 7:30 is “sleeping in.” Sounds like we will be doing the medical clinic thing again in Santo Domingo on Monday. I’m pumped, because I may just want to be a medical interpreter when I get back to the states. Ok, time to get myself to the office and play some “catch up”. Movie with my girls at 2:00 this afternoon.