Professional Peer Support & Photos

Children's homemade kites fly high in the Haitian sky

Professional Peer Support 
There is a Canadian School Psychologist visiting the orphanage and volunteering for a couple of weeks.  It is helpful to be able to connect with another therapist and share ideas and perspectives.  During my first year in here Cap-Haitian at times, I felt very professionally isolated.  Participating in on-line play therapy training this year and last through the Family & Play Therapy Center has been a great help.  Still having someone on-site even if only temporarily, who is interacting with the same children and seems to understand what I am doing and acknowledges the challenges I face has been very affirming and energizing.  I realize that having professional support is not a luxury, if I am to do my best work, it is a necassity.  Now, as I am discerning whether or not I will continue to work in Haiti next year, I am wondering if I do, how I can connect with other local mental health professionals for peer support possabilites.

Photos
On Friday evening as I was preparing to mount the convent bicycle to leave the orphanage for the day, I heard bird songs from a cluster of trees behind the orphanage covenant.  Taking my camera out of my backpack, I went to investigate. The plush tree contained five nests and flock of yellow boisterous birds.

  

  















Taking pictures has taught me to notice things (even when my camera is not readilyavalaible) that I previously may have missed.

Rising above an expansive pile of litter, a beautiful flower blooms.
Swimming in puddles of seeming roadside muck, transforming tadpoles.
The once discarded plastic bag blowing through the fields, now a child's treasure, a kite flying high, decorating the sky.

As I write this, I realize these are perfectly appropriate images for the liturgical season of Lent and the quickly approaching feast of Easter.  May I and each of us embrace the radical transformation that God invites us to.  Many blessings!