(update, Tuesday 1.25.10 - 7.45 a.m.)

I spent an hour and a half with Mona last night in Greenwich. Seeing her gave me great relief and tremendous sadness. She is exhausted and still in shock. In the past two weeks she has labored non-stop to care for the people in the community. She and her cousins had the relative luxury of sleeping in the Isuzu while most others slept on the street. She was so grateful when Jean-Elie & our medical team arrived.

I have seen some pictures and they are quite horrific. The School is badly damaged and the Haitian engineer is to show us a proposal for rebuilding today or tomorrow. However, we still need to decide whether a new, steel building would be the best choice, although considerably more expensive.

Danelie is fine, though tired, and reports that the entire community (for 8-10 miles) knows about our clinic. Dr. Reed, Ann Giuli, Dave Desmarais, and our Haitian nurses continue to see 135-165 people a day. The storys! some heart warming. Consider the cleanly dressed family who lives in the street under a tarp sitting on their kitchen chairs, the Mom painting the finger nails of her daughter in the most normal way.

             Dr. David Reed

I was "on the road" for most of yesterday afternoon. First at St. Luke's, Darien with their outreach committee. I asked, on behalf of École le Bon Samaritain, for major support in the medical relief effort and then for a long-term commitment to help rebuild the School, fund it for five years, and participate in it life by sending volunteers to help teach English.

Next, Gia Card, our Travel Coordinator and I met and ironed out some specific procedures for volunteers and their travel. We continue to hope that most volunteers will pay for their own travel but we do have alternative funding when necessary. We continue to be extremely grateful to JetBlue for their extraordinary generosity and helpfulness.

I also spent an hour with Connie Boll, a woman who had lived in Haiti and knows the people well. She is very interested in the plight of our children and their families. I couldn't give her good answers about where ours are, how many survived, and what we are doing for them. Her concern, however, brought out her check book and she wrote a check to École le Bon Samaritain for $10,000 to be used for the care and feeding of our children and their families.Thank you Connie! So, that's what we'll do. We will ship rice, beans, and cooking oil in as soon as we can an begin a food program. By the way, when I saw Mona later, she assured me that she had been feeding as many children and families as she could, sometimes 35 or 40. That is just Mona's way, always so giving, so compassionate. Now we will be able to feed more people for several months.