Day 228.

Today, I...

saw what happens when your bus breaks down. You file out the front, the driver gives you back your change, and you wait until the next bus comes. Then you ride a bus that's twice as full as it should be and arrive at your destination roughly 30 minutes late.

missed school.

realized I am going to miss the incredible wisdom that comes out of 13-year-old mouths. I gave my girls an essay prompt in typing class, asking them to write what they would do if they had a billion dollars. Everyone immediately wrote how they would build a house for their parents, "to get them out of this place." Many wrote about adopting every black baby in Haiti, creating homeless shelters, constructing institutions for alcoholics and drugs addicts, and of course -- if there was any left over -- buying shoes and clothes and plane tickets to Paris. One student turned to me and said, "Hannah, I think the reason God doesn't give us all this money is because then we'd be so caught up in doing all of these things that we'd forget about Him. I think maybe it's better if we just stay poor like we are now." How am I supposed to leave this place four weeks from today?

learned from Karen, one of my girls who has a one-year-old girl of her own, that no public hospital offers epidurals. She and I went to visit Nazareth, my star math student who is currently starting her 41st week of pregnancy. When I (with a shocked face) asked Karen why on earth this country expects its (mostly) young mothers to withstand such pain, she looked at me almost incredulously and said, "Do you know how much those things cost?"

smiled as I heard this mantra throughout my math class, "Por Tanya...por Suyen...por Jeremy..." Two of my five students have children and another is about to pop. As the sun blazed through the windows of the Refuge, threatening to burn every ounce of concentration, my student-mothers kept repeating why they were there: "For Tanya...for Suyen...for Jeremy..." These are the names of their children.

- Hannah