Fernweh

“Jacmel for life”… that’s how it feels, at least. Haiti and Jacmel and the people I met there are still in my thoughts every day. I suspect they’ll be in my heart forever. Why am I mentioning this? Several of my fellow GVN volunteers will be going back to Port-au-Prince to join GrassRoots United, a [...]

Anniversary Originally uploaded by Evamaria N One year ago today the earthquake devasted Haiti, an already struggling nation. From October to December I had the privilege of working in volunteer projects run by the Global Volunteer Network GVN, which was an amazing and life-altering experience, as you all know. My brother works for a regional [...]

Following my dad’s suggestion I turned my Haiti blog into a booklet of sorts – he’s not that comfortable reading on the screen, so he wanted something printable. I even added some pics to break up the text. Download: pdf, 1.2mb

One of the best books I read while in Haiti (and I read a lot – probably about 40, something I never manage at home with all those distractions!) was Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder, about Dr. Paul Farmer, the founder of Partners in Health, whose work in Haiti and elsewhere is absolutely astonishing. [...]

[Deutsch unten] 23 December, 4:30pm Yesterday I got home to Switzerland after a week’s vacation in Miami Beach and was welcomed warmly by my family. I am in no way done working through what the last two months mean to me and find talking about it still rather difficult, but hopefully this will change as [...]

[Deutsch unten] 21 December, 7:30pm (on the plane) My week in the luxurious and tourist-y surroundings of Miami Beach was as uneventful as I had hoped. I found myself coping surprisingly well with the radical change from poverty to consumerism (there was a lot of shopping, starting with warm clothes because the weather was considerably [...]

Will be leaving for the airport in a moment and plan on writing a post about my week here in Miami later, but here’s a BBC radio interview with Korina, who I shared a room with for the last month. Her bit starts 44 minutes in and lasts for about 6 minutes.

You can now find all my Haiti photos in my Flickr album. I might add some other people’s photos in time, but these are all of mine.

[Deutsch unten] 17 December, 11:00am So it’s official now: This is my last entry about Haiti. I’m sitting in a Starbucks in Miami Beach right now, only two hours by plane but a world away from Jacmel. I’m here for a week, giving myself some time to adjust to “normal” life and process the last [...]

[Deutsch unten] 6 December, 9:00am Because it was rumoured that there’d be a demonstration because of the botched elections on Monday, we spent the day on lockdown, making children’s tables for Centre Orphanage of the Faith and finally delivering the benches we’d made to Madame Bonite’s feeding program down the road. Some of us still [...]