Shnaidine in Haiti
It?s amazing the challenges many parents go through to get clubfoot treatment for their child. For most of us, that usually involves a short car ride. For Vonia in Haiti, it meant transporting her daughter Shnaidine by boat from their home on La Gon?ve Island to the main island of Haiti.?
The trip from La Gon?ve Island to the Hope Walks partner clinic in Port-au-Prince is 53-miles by boat. And then she had to catch both car and motorcycle taxis to get from the boat dock to the clinic. Vonia was worried about her daughter because she has seen the effects of clubfoot on her home island. Many children and adults are never treated, likely because of the difficulty and expense getting to the mainland of Haiti.
Even when the weekly appointments were scheduled and she had enough money to afford a boat ride, everything could be thrown off by a storm making the ride too dangerous or the tides not being at the right level. It makes you think twice about the ?simple challenges? of a traffic jam.
At times, Vonia was close to losing all hope, but the encouraging words of the Hope Walks parent advisor pushed her forward. Now that Shnaidine is through the treatment phase and wearing her braces, Vonia thinks back to the times when the sea was raging on their journeys across the canal to the mainland and realizes God was always with them.
