Just Another Great Day!

Another busy day! With Graduation around the corner and with the Volunteers scheduled to leave Haiti shortly afterwards, there is a lot of preparation to be done around here. This morning was spent cleaning and reorganizing the house, so that everything is ready to be used come the fall.

I spent most of my morning cleaning out the kitchen. From all of the cooking from the past year, a lot of the cooking oil has collected in the area surrounding the stoves. My job was to clean up the window panes in that area. Working next to other Volunteers, the morning flew by and before I knew it, it was lunchtime. The music that was playing while we worked also might have contributed to how quickly the time flew!

The afternoon was spent working on smaller projects throughout the house. Some of the time was spent finishing up projects from the morning. Also, many of the Volunteers took this time during the afternoon to pack. I helped out with smaller projects when needed, but also was able to spend some time working on my paper. As a Finance major at PC, I have not yet had to use footnotes when writing a paper. While I have written plenty of papers for Civ, none have required me to do the kind of research necessary to use footnotes. As a result, footnotes are a foreign concept to me, so I spent most of the afternoon figuring out the correct use of such citations – it was definitely a learning experience!

On Monday nights we have labouyl, or porridge, for dinner. We had a few extra bananas in the kitchen, so the cooks for the night were able to add them into the dish as a little treat. As usual it was delicious, but that was not our only surprise at dinner. It was great to have a little something different along with dinner, and it was also a great taste of home.

At evening prayer we had time to reflect on today's Gospel and its meaning in our lives. The Gospel referenced the Beatitudes, which were nice to keep in mind during a hard day of work. During this transition period before Graduation and everyone's departure, it is nice to remind ourselves of the true meaning of our work and to reflect on the time that we have spent here. Life here is very simple, and it has been an eye-opening experience to see the hard-work of those motivated by their faith.

Every day I remind myself how blessed I have been to receive this opportunity to travel to Haiti and see the inner-workings of the Catholic Church abroad! I am so grateful to have been granted a Father Smith Fellowship, and thus the opportunity for this once in a lifetime experience!