Yesterday was the six-month anniversary of the earthquake. It is impossible to estimate how vast the damage of the earthquake was. Six months after the earthquake, the airport is using a corrugated cargo shed as its Arrivals terminal. The real terminal has large cracks running through the concrete and the
re is not a single man or piece of equipment working to repair it. The presidential palace, which we could see out the window, lies vacant and broken, with sight-lines like a Picasso painting. How can you try to estimate the damage when two key pieces of infrastructure like that haven’t been touched in half-a-year? The UN tried to get a list of operational hospitals from the Haitian government and found that fifty percent of the hospitals and clinics on the official list were no longer in existence, or no longer operational. We met a nurse from an Adventist hospital downtown. She said they had been without power for three days. There had been a mix-up in paying the electricity bill so the city shut it off. Because their generator had caught fire a few weeks earlier, no power meant the water pump shut off too. An eighty-bed hospital was without electricity or water in 98-degree heat. The nurse’s room was a bed in one of the hospital rooms, shared with a hospital patient.I share these things to help you know how overwhelming the need feels here. The systems were broken long before the homes were. To be honest, it can be overwhelming if you look at the larger view. A frequent topic of conversation among our team (especially the problem-solving alpha males) was how we wished we could fix the systems, how relatively easy it could be to provide these people with reasonable living arrangements, reliable public services like trash removal (they burn their piles of trash on the street) or clean drinking water (they rely on unpredictable water trucks or underground cisterns which sometimes have trash or waste in them).
But let me paint another picture for you. Adline is a woman of maybe 45. She has five girls and three boys. Their home collapsed in the earthquake, but no one was hurt. The oldest boy, Woodson, 20, makes deliveries for a local shop. Adline does laundry for Partners in Development, hanging it to dry on lines slung over the walls where her new home is being built. When Adline makes the seve
n-minute walk to deliver the clean laundry to PID and pick up the day’s dirty laundry, her six-month old daughter, Essoilinne, and four-year old daughter, Cristina, are cared for by her 6-year old son, Bebe. When her 12-year-old son, Billy, returns from school, he helps prepare their food, usually rice or plantains. Together they play, they laugh, they cry. They live in two tents, both under a tarp that is slung from tree branches and reinforcement bar on top of a nearby unfinished wall. Their eyes are a beautiful mocha brown, their teeth clean and white, their smiles quick and broad. Adline is fond of saying, “God bless you, my friend,” in Creole and is quick with a laugh and smile when she hears, “Amen,” in reply.This is the family whose foundation we built. They are still probably a month or more from having a home, but their hope and joy were palpable, and as we left, we shared the bittersweet tears of friends who part almost as quickly as they met, friends who toiled side-by-side through heat and rain and sweat. We were told by PID’s construction director that he was extremely impressed by our work this week. He thanked us for our strength and our love for the family and the other workers (who found great glee in teaching us salty Creole words instead of the actual names for the people and objects around us). This team from OSLC, most of whom had never met one another six weeks ago, changed the lives of that family.
Let me paint another picture for you. Jean-Claude Alcide squats in a four-man Coleman tent, waving flies off his son, Nicoury. Nicoury has cerebral palsy and will not live more than eight weeks more. He is probably a
bout 10 or 11. Jean-Claude lives with his wife and her mother, with five of his own children, and his two grandchildren. Their mother, his daughter, was killed in the earthquake when their house collapsed. They moved into a tent in the city square, but were forced to re-locate. The government told them they would have a village on a farm. They were put in the corner of a sugar cane field owned by the Barbancourt rum factory. There is no drainage system, no septic. At the entrance to the village is a hog barn. Next to it is a tent the village uses for birthing. There are 2500 people on what must be about 10 acres of land, divided into three sections.One day, as PID nurses walked through the tent village, Jean-Claude cried out to them, “You must help my son!” Nicoury was seizing and he was not breathing. Jean-Claude handed his son to these three white people in scrubs, who immediately rushed him away to the clinic. Jean-Claude didn’t know their names, their affiliation, or the location of their clinic. So desperate was he that he gave his son to complete strangers just because they looked like doctors. The nurses were able to revive and stabilize Nicoury. They returned him to Jean-Claude and his understandably panic-stricken wife the next day. She had been away from the tent when Nicoury was taken and didn’t know where her son was. Since that day, PID has been delivering anti-seizure medicine for Nicoury, as well as medication to Ashley, Jean-Claude’s younger son who has a badly swollen and infected leg, and to Jeanle, the four-year old grandson who has ringworm on his cheek.
On Sunday night, we asked Gale how much it would cost to feed this family of ten in their two small tents for a month. She said about $25-30. Our team is now sponsoring th
e whole family for the entire year at $50 a month to help offset the cost of the medicine. With pride, Jean-Claude arranged his family outside their tent for a family photo. We took the photo and said a prayer with them, thanking God for his endless love and perfect care.Haiti is far too damaged to fix. There is no way to even estimate how many lives were lost in the earthquake. Countless bodies are still in the rubble and you cannot check public records if public records are not kept. If you look at the entire picture, you lock up, you freeze. The damage is too vast, the corruption and dysfunction too crippling. But if you look at Adline and her family, or at Jean-Claude and his, you can see hope, love, and a future.
I feel like I leave this trip with a better sense of why God became human, and what that means. When God looks at humanity, he doesn’t just see our broken system – the unending pattern of sin and failure – he sees faces, lives, stories. He didn’t just die to save humanity, he died to save each human. If I have anything to be thankful for because of this trip, it is that God has shown me how He works here on earth. He does it through relationships. I have been blessed to form some fast, but very strong relationships with about a dozen or more Haitians and Christ’s love has flowed through me to them and through them to me. On returning to the USA and our comfortable daily lives, I pray that each one of us would grow those same relationships with the people around us every day. Grow the relationships and then let Christ’s love and truth flow through them. That’s how the world changes – you change one person’s world at a time.
Thank you all for your prayers, your love, and your support. I hope I get to return the favor sometime – where will you go?
Rob
