Diary of a journey: Asheville’s Mission Manna team in Haiti (with ongoing coverage via Twitter)

Posted on by Jeff Fobes

A group of Asheville doctors, nurses and volunteers from Mission Manna are nearing the end of their one-week visit to Haiti, which began on Saturday, Oct. 16. The Mission Manna team travels twice yearly to the same area, to provide ongoing medical assistance to more than 1,000 kids in need in Montrouis and the surrounding mountains.

The team has been blogging about their visit as it unfolds on the Mission Manna website. There’s more also at http://missionmannahaiti.posterous.com/ from team member David Bourne (who is also acting as videographer for the trip).

Follow ongoing Twitter coverage of Mission Manna’s trip in the feed box at the bottom of the post, which is below the diary entries .

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A Mission Manna Diary (excerpts from Twitter & Mission Manna’s website)

Saturday, Oct. 16
2:15 pm: Missing a key player: the pilot.
Hmmm…. They’re showing a movie while we wait for the pilot. Not a good sign.
And now the plane is dripping brown fluid.
Still in Miami, yes. Need to leave in the next hour or they’ll cancel because Port au Prince airport closes at night.
4:03 pm: Leaving now. Apparently. Dark drive to Montrouis in our future.

Arrived Montrouis late last night after dark drive from Port au Prince. Good to be here!

Sunday, Oct. 17

Pouring AK-1000 nutritional supplement for clinic tomorrow.

This child has has kwashiorkor which is severe form of malnutrition. Mission MANNA provided this family with a goat and food from the market as well as AK-1000.

We are setting up our pharmacy depository today. … Each day we pack up a mobile pharmacy for the day.
Sunday, a big tour of Haiti. Rubble, floods, traffic, fish farms, chickens and goats.

Huge UN presence for the Preval visit to Momtrouis today.
Twitter is a bitch down here….
Going to post a few random pics.  http://twitpic.com/2ylhit http://twitpic.com/2ylhvv http://twitpic.com/2yliop http://twitpic.com/2yliw9
Decked out the rentals. http://twitpic.com/2yljsk
Just another day in Haiti. http://twitpic.com/2ylktf
More here: http://missionmannahaiti.posterous.com/


Haitian taxi to an orphanage. Medical care, then soccer match. Final score Haiti 10, USA 3. Next year we will be recruiting soccer players instead of nurses.

PAP is crazy flooded. Water over the hood on small cars. Only one flat tire today, ditto with near miss bus collision. http://twitpic.com/2ylkcx

14-year-old Maggie, posts her impressions of Port au Prince, Haiti. She’s rightly appalled. http://j.mp/dhG41K

Thanks for all the well-wishes. We’re rockin’ it.
A beautiful sunset over the Caribbean and cold Prestige beers to finish it off. I was an overwhelming yet hopeful day. PAP is a tragedy in rubble, tent cities and flooding, but hope in possible agrarian solutions keep the forward momentum.

Monday, Oct. 18

Bonjou, Monday.  http://twitpic.com/2ypdop
Today, most of the group will work the Shada clinic while the rest will go to the mtns to observe and train with the goats. 

Good advice….  http://twitpic.com/2yph2d
Ready to roll.  http://twitpic.com/2yq8zm

The trip to Fond Baptiste,  got off to a beautiful start. The mountains of Haiti are a sanctuary.  http://twitpic.com/2yuemh
Fond Baptiste: trip ran into bad diesel probs halfway up. We could crawl along at about 2 mph.  http://twitpic.com/2yugl0
The threatening rain thought kindly of us and never let loose.  http://twitpic.com/2yuiyu
Greg and Franckel conferring over goat matters.  http://twitpic.com/2yujmb

This is Lucky, Mission Manna’s buck. We’re hoping he lives up to his name…. twitpic.com/2yuk8h
One of the recipient “goat moms” keeping records for us.  http://twitpic.com/2yul31
Franckel and Greg preparing to ear tag the goats.  http://twitpic.com/2yumei
Compression braked down, beat heck out of all, now back making up stories for the rental agency.  http://twitpic.com/2yupar

Tuesday, Oct. 19
Today we are off to the Su Boy clinic and will work on getting a replacement vehicle. One task is looking easier than the other….


The Sou Boy pharmacy in action.

On a culinary note, we had bones & rice for dinner last night. That’s not a typo. 


The market in Montrouis: http://twitpic.com/2z0q50
And why we are in the market: we need buckets and bowls for watering the goats.  http://twitpic.com/2z0qoz

The UN is in the house in Montrouis. Why? Who knows.

We’ll have a rental Land Cruiser out here this afternoon. The broken Montero is ready for pick up. The Montero is now squeaky clean…. Mountain trip? What mountain trip…? Onward.

This one is not @MissionManna rated.  http://twitpic.com/2z1vyv

How to say, “But we reserved it first!” in Kreyol…. It’s raining rental cars….
Hopefully, this one is @MissionManna-ready.  http://twitpic.com/2z26xa

This afternoon, we will visit the IDP population at our property in Montrouis, to assess their needs, discuss the future. 

Some of the IDP homes on Mission Manna’s property.

We’re packing akamil like fiends. 
You’ll find the @MissionManna consolidated update here: http://bit.ly/bCTDPf


It’s raining hard in Montrouis. It’s going to be a very wet hike up the mountain with @MissionMANNA tomorrow. No Pwobwem!

Wednesday, Oct. 20
Rain last night was brutal. http://twitpic.com/2z899r
Off for 2 clinics, goats and overnight in mtns. Hoping for smooth sailing, worried about road. http://twitpic.com/2z8a1z
@BourneMedia Hike? Where’s the love for your driver…?
Currency exchange yesterday included hand sanitizer.

Mountain living: This is the westward looking view from Font Baptist, a small rural community where Mission Manna serves.

Thursday, Oct. 21
Safely off the mountain and back in Montrouis. Having lunch with the Benin police dept….

Fake ass blood? http://twitpic.com/2zknkg

Here’s BourneMedia hard at work in Haiti http://twitpic.com/2zkyev


Bought beans and rice using soccer balls as currency in the Fond Baptiste, #Haiti market. http://twitpic.com/2zl0xt

Patients waiting prior to dawn in Fond Baptiste. http://twitpic.com/2zl271

Off to do rounds in Montrouis with Eddy. Lots of #cholera talk in Montrouis.


Ivoire Clinic

Time for a Prestige—on a table gritty with akamil.

 

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The feed below provides the latest news from Mission Manna24 via Twitter. (Note: It does not autorefresh; in order to see any tweets that come in after your Web browser has loaded this page, you’ll have to refresh the page manually.)

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About Jeff Fobes
As a long-time proponent of media for social change, my early activities included coordinating the creation of a small community FM radio station to serve a poor section of St. Louis, Mo. In the 1980s I served as the editor of the "futurist" newsletter of the U.S. Association for the Club of Rome, a professional/academic group with a global focus and a mandate to act locally. During that time, I was impressed by a journalism experiment in Mississippi, in which a newspaper reporter spent a year in a small town covering how global activities impacted local events (e.g., literacy programs in Asia drove up the price of pulpwood; soybean demand in China impacted local soybean prices). Taking a cue from the Mississippi journalism experiment, I offered to help the local Green Party in western North Carolina start its own newspaper, which published under the name Green Line. Eventually the local party turned Green Line over to me, giving Asheville-area readers an independent, locally focused news source that was driven by global concerns. Over the years the monthly grew, until it morphed into the weekly Mountain Xpress in 1994. I've been its publisher since the beginning. Mountain Xpress' mission is to promote grassroots democracy (of any political persuasion) by serving the area's most active, thoughtful readers. Consider Xpress as an experiment to see if such a media operation can promote a healthy, democratic and wise community. In addition to print, today's rapidly evolving Web technosphere offers a grand opportunity to see how an interactive global information network impacts a local community when the network includes a locally focused media outlet whose aim is promote thoughtful citizen activism. Follow me @fobes
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2 thoughts on “Diary of a journey: Asheville’s Mission Manna team in Haiti (with ongoing coverage via Twitter)”

  1. UnaffiliatedVoter

    Somebody needs to ask Bill Clinton where all that Haiti donation money went … ???

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