So by the title, I am sure you have already guessed it has been a hard week.  This is the first time in my life I have ever had to attend the funeral of a child, and I hope it will be the last.  I’m writing this now on Sunday night because I know I can’t make it through this email in a public internet café tomorrow without losing it. 

So, Wednesday morning we were all in the kitchen making breakfast when we got the news that Raquela, a beautiful girl with big gorgeous eyes and mini braids from the Santa Clara house had passed during the night.  I didn’t think this could be true, as I had seen her the night before at the barbecue party on the basketball court giggling and dancing and playing with the Canadians.  I ran to find the house director to find the news, who said “Yes she died… we don’t know why…. resume your day as normal, go teach in the school and we’ll let you know when we know about the funeral”…. It’s hard to piece together the day that followed… Nikki, Raquela’s house volunteer and my close friend, ran from the house crying and literally has not stopped since.  In the school, the kids ran through the halls yelling “Raquela died! Raquela died!  Did you know that Raquela died?”  Though it’s not anything new or uncommon here, the kids still all deal with death in so many different ways.  The comments in my classroom ranged from:

“We can’t play very much today, we have to be serious because Raquela died”

“Raquela died, so we all get to go in the big yellow school bus on a field trip to the cemetery.”

And when I said she’s in heaven now with God and the angels, Erika (my seven year old with cognitive impairments) responded:

“Heaven - that’s where my mom is too.  She can be with my mom, she will give her hugs”

We prayed a lot and we tried to take things easy, making cards and talking in circle time about how we can help the tias or her teacher.  The first grade teacher stood outside her doorway and sobbed and sobbed.  “She was my student last year and now she’s gone… why does this happen so much in this terrible country?”   How do you resume school as usual and just teach math and vowel sounds when a member of this big NPH family has died?  Soon the school director came and said go home, eat lunch, and come back to the chapel in two hours for the funeral.  My roommate Ross carried in her body and Nikki bathed her and washed her hair.  The tias dressed her in her best clothes and found flowers around the grounds to pin in her hair.  She looked as gorgeous as ever lying in her casket in her little white dress but I couldn’t get too close, it just didn’t seem real.  Samuel from my morning class made her a card, and I took it over to her house, Santa Clara.  I can’t explain the confusion and sorrow of the girls in the house.  The girls ran to me and took me by the hand and showed me her photo on their house bulletin board.  That’s Raquela, my friend, my sister, Princess Raquela… her sister Cristela was hiding in the back of the crowd with big swollen eyes.  Her nine year old sister, who comes to my class in the a.m. for reading support, was the only family member at her funeral.  The tia and I held each other and cried into each others’ shoulders.  I actually feel sick just even rehashing all of this in writing.  The funeral was made up of a large crowd of white t-shirts – black and white are the funeral colors here but mostly white.  The funeral was short – no poems or letters or stories.  Some Canadian high school kids sat behind us and chit chatted in English, mostly complaining about how hot and tired they were, while in the meantime our kids were wailing and crying – two were carried out nearly hyperventilating and one had fainted.  The wailing got louder as the casket was closed and carried out.  We overloaded the big yellow school bus, 3-4 to a seat and many people standing.  My dress was soaked by the time I got in from holding and hugging kids who sobbed uncontrollably into my stomach.  There was not room for everyone, and many kids didn’t want to go, but some were not able to because of Canadian visitors who wanted to go and then wandered around the cemetery taking pictures as if they were on a tour.  The bus must not have gone more than 10-15 miles an hour so it was a really long, silent ride.  Right before we got to the cemetery, the Hurst ran out of gas and was stuck outside the cemetery.  So we all piled out and waited for someone to bring a plastic red container of gas.  Then we made our way down to the grave site where Magali and Lizbeth (who both passed away in the past year) were also buried.  Dave’s co-worker Dioni brought the little rickshaw car full of containers of cement.  And there, the workers and kids poured cement and water, mixing the cement while the older girls sang and everyone else cried.  The graves here are above ground, cemented into a stone slab, which is just what they did after we watched them put in the casket and a drawing/letter from our class, and then cemented the casket in.  And as we continued to cry, the kids helped to wash the cement with a hose and clean the truck.  Every unimaginable job not completed by staff of a funeral home but rather by the kids, workers, and volunteers here amidst their grief.  It is so incredibly different from the $10,000+ ordeals we have in the states.  Then we left the cemetery and it was over.  Less than 8 hours after finding out at breakfast that morning.  Another child gone, and life goes on.

But now the questions, how did she die?  What happened?  How is this fair for this beautiful, bright, and overly affectionate 7 year old to be gone?  How do we help the kids to understand?  And how will her 9 year old sister Cristela ever recover?

As with the other two kids who died here, there was no autopsy.  The answer was simple – “she just died.”  She, like many kids here, had AIDS, so there was an easy blame.  But since we had 41 Canadian doctor/medical staff here who were by her side through the whole thing, things were much more complicated this time.  They have made themselves loudly clear; the cause of death was not her AIDS.  The cause of death was neglect.  The Canadians will say over and over again, she didn’t have to die.  Her death, like the majority of deaths here in the DR, was preventable.  She went into MUSA, the public hospital I have described in past emails, the Canadian doctors ordered to have a tube put into her lung and an IV put in.  They didn’t have an IV available so they put her in a waiting room.  She died a few hours later.  She died because immediate action was not taken.  So now what?  These things happen in the DR all the time.  We are in a developing country where the systems – education, healthcare, business, etc. – are simply, for lack of a better word, subpar.  People are angry, hurt, devastated, but we are not in the states.  We can’t file a law suit.  We can’t fix it.  We can’t bring her back.  The kids don’t ask for an answer.  They are sad, but they are used to it.  Almost all of them have lost one, if not both, of their parents and many siblings.  People here die of simple illnesses and accidents that would be easily treated and taken care of in the states.  But it feels like because she’s one of our kids – an NPH kid who we know and love – it should be different.  But should it?   The people in Haiti have it even worse.  How is this fair?  White people with money come and go from the country all the time, but it is still left the same – AIDS, poverty, death, suffering – how can people drive by in their tour buses and happily sit in their resorts sipping pina coladas, leaving without giving a second thought to those people dying right outside the walls?  Not to say that I don’t appreciate the tourists who do feed the economy, but the injustice and inequity that exist in our world just sometimes blows my mind.

And where do we go from here?  I know my emails are usually happy go lucky with fun stories, but the truth is that sometimes it’s just really hard.  Sometimes it hurts too much.  Sometimes I hate it and sometimes the culture makes me want to scream.  What do I do with her nine year old sister who will now be coming to my classroom much more (as I invited her to).  I gave her a new stuffed animal and lots of hugs, but what now?  How can I understand when I have a living sister, just two years younger than me, the same as Cristela and Raquela, who I have barely spoken to in nearly a year over one misunderstood phone call.  How does this make sense?  But life here has resumed as normal.  The activities resume, but the tias cry and cry, saying “Can’t they see we’re mourning – that we lost a child we love?”  And now my heart jumps or my stomach sinks when other kids get sick.  One of the girls from my house who has AIDS had a fever that spiked Friday during the night and went to MUSA.  Though it seems selfish to compare, I can’t help but think, what if this happens with one of my Santa Ana girls?  Or one of the kids in my class?  Could I handle it?

So definitely this week, the child who needs prayer is Cristela.  Let me know if you will pray for Cristela.  And for Nikki the volunteer too.  She also worked with Lizbeth who died in December, and is beyond heartbroken.  She has gone days without eating and cries non-stop. 

In positive news, I do have an exceptionally wonderful visitor, Valeria, from Italy who is helping in my classroom.  She has been by my side this past week and has quickly become a close friend.  She came as one of the gazillion Italians who was on her way to Haiti and simply passing through, but then they decided not to let her go there for whatever reason, and because they didn’t know where to put her for 2 weeks, they asked if she could hang with me.  I was a bit worried she might be like some of the visitors who are afraid of my kids or don’t know how to interact with them, but she has been as far opposite as possible.  She is creative and patient and fun and just plain awesome.  Lately I have had a hard time with the school here, missing my colleagues in Owosso, and she has been a complete answer to prayers – a total angel.  She also helps in Santa Ana with my pre-teen girls so she has gotten an inside peek at my life here, sat by and listened, inspired and encouraged me, and become a friend very quickly.  I will be very sad when she goes back to Italy next week.  She was there with me today, proud too with tears in her eyes as my girls were baptized and had their first communions in the church at NPH in their frilly white dresses, lacy socks, and shiny white shoes.  They were beautiful, and I got tons of pictures.

As you know, I could share a million more stories of all the things that happen in a week here, but will let you go now.  Please keep praying for everyone here.  We really need it right now.  Also, pray for Haiti.  I just heard tonight from my roommate who's just back that violence has broken out there again and that Father Phil (the director of NPH there) found the decapitated head of a nun on a pole there.  I don't know if she was involved in NPH there or not, but crazy stuff, and so unfair when it happens to the people who are just there trying to help.  Pray, pray, pray...

Love, peace, and prayers to all,

Kristin     

Roommate Nicki and beautiful angel Raquela