five days til Haiti...

I recently met with a friend, Mike Nichols, to get briefed on his experiences in Haiti...he had a lot to say, which you can read something about here. He also gave me a bit of Haitian money - if you look, you can see the Republic of Haiti's White House, or what it looked like before the quake.

It's less than a week now until I get on a plane with eight people for Heart Cry International to spend five days at an orphanage in Port-au-Prince and the next three in the tent village of Sous Savanne, near Leogane, the epicenter of January's quake.

Six months ago I couldn't stop talking to my friends and family about how I dreamed of, wanted to, needed to go to Haiti, as a volunteer, a photographer, anything. I was consumed by it; what it would mean for a country like Haiti to get hit with something so devastating. When John Tully, a former staffer for the Midland Daily News, followed a medical team in Port-au-Prince, I could hardly contain my excitement - I saved the editions the photos ran in, and pored over every cutline. I was insatiable.

Despite my voracious consumption of quake aftermath news and Haiti multimedia across the board since January, I've got little idea what to expect. But I hope with everything I've got that my heart breaks. I want my heart broken so my lens will show it - sometimes you need to be raw to see things, I think.

Heart Cry has been a light in many dark places and they do great things to help people. I hope my work will be worthy of that, and that I can be a light in a dark place that's been calling to me for half a year. I'll be a volunteer as well as a documentarian during the eight days with HCI in Haiti; I don't know how the balance of the two will work out yet, but I'm praying I do it right, and to the very best of my ability.

Here's to getting my heart broken.