Wednesday! Hard to believe the week's already half over. Our fearless local leader here, Nathan Lindsey, is now back which is nice cause he's always been a welcome face to return to and you just get this feeling that with him at the helm everything, despite the chaos, will somehow end up all right. He leads morning huddle today. A Time reporter in Afghanistan remarked that one smelled like Camembert cheese after a week without a shower, which is how we all smell this morning in huddle after only a morning without water, it's that humid. Which foreshadows some more odors to come today ...

Wednesday is clubfoot clinic day, which Francel (our local orthopedist here) heads up with Jacques, the cast tech. In the meantime Pat and Pat share the other clinic room, along with Liz, Priya, Tom, Fil, and an interpreter, jammed into a tiny room packed tighter than a Tokyo subway at rush hour. Somehow it all works out and we make our way through a hallway's worth of patients who've all been queued up since 7:30am. As Fil and I inject a knee and thread our way to the sharps container in the back, we're hit by a malodorous ton of bricks wafting from an elbow that the other' Pat's just undressed. After he pulls the pin and cleans the pus and treats it with some silver nitrate things get a little better and we all regain consciousness and return to work. Fil remarks that "every Haitian kid I see is the absolute cutest kid ever ... until I see the next one" and that's totally true.

I stay behind in clinic while the other Pat goes off to the OR to do some surgeries that he added on from Monday's clinic. (Tuesday and Thursday were already booked full before we got here.) In the middle, of course, we take 5 minutes to shove down a plateful of rice and beans. Tom is looking rather cachectic so Priya takes it upon herself to make sure he's well fed by filling his plate with her rice. The food is actually rather good. I wonder if that's because it's nice and salty ... which may explain the juicy cankles we are all now starting to sport after a few days here. Hmm...

After the OR and clinic, Jimmy Decilia (he's from Brooklyn but has lived here in Haiti for the last 5 years) tells us about the nearby orphanage he and Joe McIntyre sponsor. We all walk down to a local market and buy a poop-ton of rice, dry spaghetti, and oil, load it into the back of a tap-tap, and drive about a mile up the road to the orphanage ... well almost to the orphanage. The last 100 yards is an uphill climb up a rocky path that the producers of Survivor must have engineered to weed out the weak, by adding obstacles such as fine slippery gravel and piles of trash. And did I mention we're each carrying a big sack of rice, spaghetti, or a crate of cooking oil? Once we get to the top however it's totally worth it: an orphanage of 15 smiling kids who are just the cutest things and so grateful to have friends to play with, sing with, and pretend kung fu with (yeah, I know, you just gotta play along). Way up here above the rest of Carrefour I can totally see how one would get the impression that the rest of the world has forgotten about you.

After the orphanage we hang out on the rooftop with some sodas enjoying the sunset and watching the moonrise. You can see a little bit of the bay from here and the surrounding countryside. The juxtaposition of the abject poverty and the incredible natural beauty is nothing less than striking. The rooftop's also a good place for the paler ones among us to suntan and for Priya to show off her Yoga moves.

Priya and I remark how people back home think we're being selfless for doing this, but we're really not. Compared to the guys who live down here and are helping out long-term, full-time, like Joe and Jimmy with their orphanage, Nathan and Amy with their hospital, and of course all the other long-term volunteers at Adventist, it's nothing. Moreover we're the ones who benefit - by helping our understanding of the world beyond our own borders, beyond the tiny fraction of us lucky to live a nonsustainable fantasy life at home that some people think is all there is to the real world. As we're walking through the alleys back to the hospital from dinner tonight, Celeste, a Haitian-American nurse down here with us, stops to chat with a fellow who's standing under a lamppost reading. Why? Cause he's a senior in high school studying to get into dental school, and there's no electricity at home.