I hope you had a great Christmas and your new year is off to a good start! It’s hard for me to believe it’s already 2008: this past year has flown by! I’d like to share a little of what’s been going on in my life. After four long years of nursing school, I graduated in December 2006 and started my new career as an RN at Saddleback Memorial in Laguna Hills last January. It’s truly been a great hospital to work for and a very supportive environment. I still have a lot of learning to do (and I hear that will always be the case), but I feel like I’ve grown by leaps and bounds in the past 12 months. There might be days when I find myself stressed and scrambling to figure out which of 5 pressing issues must be taken care of first, but for the most part I love my job and am grateful that God has placed me on this path and entrusted me with caring for people during difficult times.

A lot of you will know that the reason I’ve gotten involved in nursing is to be able to have a way to meet tangible needs on the mission field. Specifically, Haiti has had a special place in my heart for years. The past year and a half has found me traveling to Haiti on three separate occasions, mostly through Harvest International and mostly doing medical work. This spring doors have opened up for me to be able to go back to Haiti for three months, my longest trip to Haiti thus far! I’ll be staying with a really neat family in a rural village in the mountains of Southern Haiti at a place called Deye Mon (or, “Behind the Mountain”). This family has been in Haiti many years and runs a school, a feeding program, and a Christian radio station in addition to many other projects to reach Haiti for Jesus. I’m planning on being there from March 10th through June 16th and am overall planning on partnering with the ministry out there in a number of ways but will focus on medical things for the most part. As the missionary family are the only Americans for many miles in an area with no medical facilities, villagers are constantly coming to them with ailments of every kind. As a relatively new nurse coming from a modern American hospital, I’m sure I will be stretched and challenged in all kinds of new ways, but I am looking forward to all the learning opportunities and trusting that God will use me, even in the areas I’m weak!

Although God has been doing a lot in this country over the past decades, Haiti is still a place of much spiritual darkness and warfare. In order to do the work God’s called me to do there, I will need a lot of prayer covering, so will you consider praying for me on a regular basis between March and June? I'm hoping to be able to post updates and pictures from time-to-time on this blog in order to keep everyone up to date on what’s going on. Thank you so much for being a part of this with me!
In Him,
Steph