There is only so much a human heart can bear before it begins to crack, before it begins to wear at the seams and show through thin in some spots.  Sometimes it is a single shock that breaks it, reverberating through the sinews and tearing it with a sickening twist.  Other times, it is a slow and steady grinding, like the relentless wearing of sandy water upon the rocks in the stream.  Either way, you feel it.  You feel it in the depths of your soul in ways no words will ever be able to describe.  The dark twist of a sympathetic knife from the pit of your stomach to your sternum, leaving your eyes wide and your mind shattered.  My words fail me when I need them most.  I feel like I am trying to use crayons to paint the Mona Lisa, or a leaf rake to shovel water uphill...

Today, I made some shoes for a woman who has only walked once in her life.  I was walking down the hallway on some errand when I was met by one of the orthopedic surgeons.  In his hand he held two shoes, the type you would tie onto the bottom of a cast to make it possible to walk.  He asked me if it would be possible to cut the shoes down, to fit smaller feet.  I examined the shoes, and asked if I could see the patient who needed them, to get a better feeling for her disability.  He had mentioned she had a congenital birth defect that had never been corrected, but nothing could have prepared me for the sight that greeted me when I walked into the room.  In the hospital bed (and she is one of the fortunate long term patients who gets an honest-to-goodness bed) lay a woman with a smiling face and bright eyes, her name was Adnisse.  Her younger sister, Mali, was at her side.  Adnisse was draped with a light sheet, but underneath the sheet I could see the ugly bulky shapes of external straighteners.  The end of the sheet was pulled back to reveal her feet...two twisted and broken clubs.  

Adnisse is 22, though I would have placed her much younger than that.  She was born like this, and for her entire life has known nothing other than the floor.  Her knees are knobby and misshapen from being crawled on her entire life. Her legs are in external straighteners, elaborate braces with screw points that go down to her bones, in an effort to stretch out her knees so that she can walk on them.   

Two days ago, Adnisse walked for the first time.  To visualize what it is like for her to walk, imagine standing up on your feet...but imagine walking on the top of one of your feet, your entire foot inverted.  Then, imagine walking on the side of your other foot, but turn it inward to point at the heel of your first foot.  Her legs themselves were nothing more than sticks, atrophied by 22 years of disuse.  

I stood there, holding these two shoe blanks, looking at this girls feet.  I took some mental notes about what I would need to do, and took the blanks down the hall.  I walked down to the end of the hallway and sat looking out at the tropical rain and thought about this girl.  Adnisse: 22, father killed in the earthquake, mother paralyzed with a stroke, only her little sister to sit by her side and sleep at her feet.  I sat and watched the rain and thought about this...I wept.  This girl, so happy and brave, and drawing the shortest of the short straws in a country of nothing but short straws.  For a while I just sat, my gut twisted by the immense unfairness of everything this girl has been subjected to.  All of this, and I had been chosen to make shoes for her.  

I sat there, staring out at the banana trees and watching the rain as I worked on her shoes.  For the rest of the afternoon I whittled away at the shoes, cutting them apart, tearing out their stitching to break them down to component parts, and then slowly beginning to stitch the new shoes together.  I am not good at sewing, but I wanted this girl to have good shoes, so I worked at it all day.  Once I had resewn the shoes, we padded them very well and took them down to her room.  As we walked in, her sister was toweling down her feet with cool water and trying to rub a cramp out.  They were both happy to see us, and we got to put the shoes on her feet, lift her out of bed to stand on her feet with a walker, and watch her take a few steps into the hallway.  You could see the strain in her face and her body as she struggled to support herself on her walker...a slow painful shuffle down the hall with her new shoes.  She said they made her feet feel better, and that it made her feel more safe than walking with her feet on the bare concrete and tile of the hospital floor.  The shoes still require some modification, but they were a success...I helped a girl take her first steps in shoes of her entire life.

This is a happy story, but I just can't square it up in my head.  So much suffering, so much pain, so much tragedy...and shes trying so hard.  I know I can't fix it, I know I can't make it better, and I know that there are thousands in situations similar to hers.  There is Gregory, the young boy who lives in a tent outside the hospital and whose entire family was killed.  The nine month old baby who was admitted to the hospital weighing only nine pounds and who has a bad skull fracture from a wall collapsing on her.  The mother who can't nurse her children because she is so malnourished.  I know I can't fix it all, but there is something about Adnisse and Mali that just cuts me.  Its like the girl has to carry a bag of rocks, not just any bag, but an enormous bag of really heavy stones.  She must carry her sack of rocks all by herself, and no matter how much I want to help, I can't take so much as one single rock from off her back...I have to stand and watch her struggle under the weight.  I just do what I can to be her cheer leader, sneaking her and her sister food and snack bars, getting her some sheets and fabric so she can sew things, just trying to help and make it a little easier to carry her load.  Its hard to watch, and I know that its nothing compared to what she has to go through.

In other news, I have finally adapted to the heat.  It is to the point where it is almost uncomfortable to be somewhere air conditioned.  Its like living in a swamp, around 100 degrees and 95% humidity, but I think I actually like it.  Its comfortable now.

Today, I also modified a hip implant, one of the internal ones that gets bolted to the bone with a screw that goes down inside the femur...I modified one of those so that it will fit into a child sized person.  I don't think its actually going into a child, but some of the Haitians are very very small, and the adult sized implants are just too big for them.  

Lots going on, lots to do, and never enough time to do it all in.