"Life in rural Haiti means a lot of walking, but I get exhausted and out of breath so easily!"
Adeline is a sixteen year old girl from the coastal town of Leogane in a remote part of Haiti. Located 20 miles from the capital Port-au-Prince, Leogane was at the epicenter of the 2010 earthquake. Adeline's mother Valerie died during the earthquake, and so Adeline remembers her mother by her stories. One of Adeline's favorite stories was about her own birth: Valerie often jokingly complained of being more tired during her pregnancy with Adeline than when she was pregnant with Adeline's very energetic twin brothers! Adeline was born six weeks earlier than the local midwife expected, weighing only 4.5 pounds. Valerie said Adeline was so special that she could not bear to part with her, and the midwife suggested that Adeline stay connected to her mother through the umbilical cord so she could get more life-carrying blood for an extra three minutes.
Adeline's family mainly eats a diet with the staple foods of rice, corn, yams, plantains, and beans. Adeline is so sick of the national dish diri kole a pwa (Creole for rice and beans) that she has refused to eat any beans for the next year! Her favorite foods are the tropical fruits growing in the neighborhood: avocados, mangoes, pineapples and coconuts. Her family used to have a small family of goats, but they were lost or killed during the earthquake. Since meat is very expensive, Adeline only eats chicken about once a month and fish once a week. That's fine with her, though, as she really prefers fried goat.
To help support her family, Adeline took over selling small trinkets at the market like her mother used to do. Adeline has to walk two miles to get to an area where many people will be passing by, and she is usually so exhausted and out of breath when she arrives that she has to sit down for a while. Like so many of her neighbors and all of her family, Adeline was very sick during the cholera epidemic that followed the earthquake. This reminded Adeline of the many infections she had as a child, including malaria and hookworm, which was more than her friends had while growing up. After Adeline recovered from cholera, she went to programs to learn about health and sanitation and now wants to work to improve the health of people in Haiti.