Impressions of Haiti

A friend and I just returned from 8 days in Haiti, seeking a place for my church to establish an international missional partnership in the western hemisphere. As the poorest nation in our hemisphere and the second poorest in the entire world ,Haiti was as good a place as any to begin the search, especially since it’s just a couple hundred miles south of the Florida border .

What we found was a land of deep contradictions. It’s an island nation, sharing what was once the Isle of Sante Domingue with the Dominican Republic. While the DR is lush and green, Haiti is brown and burned over. While the DR is the wealthiest Caribbean nation, Haiti is the poorest. Tourists flock to the Dominican year round, while the only foreigners who come to Haiti are relief workers and U.N. election monitors.

Haiti’s mountains seem to go on forever, leading Tracy Kidder to name his famous book about Haiti Mountains Beyond Mountains. But the real mountains in Haiti, the ones the Haitian people must battle day after day after day, are the mountains that lie between them and food, between them and potable water, between them and a job, between them and an education, between them and a healthy, sustainable future.

When we read about a nation in which 90% of the people are unemployed,we tend to picture a people without anything to do, people who are just standing around , waiting for a break or a handout. But Haiti is a land of bustling, non-stop, energetic movement. Every day is a race against time, a race to fetch water, to make your own charcoal, and then search for an old, rusty hubcap in which to heat whatever you successfully scavenged from the trash-lined streets. There’s no time to sit still when diseases like AIDS, TB, and Hepatitis are bearing down on you simply because you happen to live in a nation with no means to collect, much less deal with, its own trash.

The things Haitians do without are almost impossible for us to fathom. Take toilets as an example. In Haiti people urinate and defecate whenever and wherever nature calls, and that’s often in the city streets. I watched school children – boys and girls - squat right in the middle of their schoolyard during recess. And these were the fortunate children, the ones whose parents could afford school, for there is no public education in Haiti. When I hosted my compassion child for lunch at our hotel in Cap Haitian, he used the toilet in my room. When he finished going, he simply closed the lid and started to walk away. I stopped him and gestured for him to flush, but he had no idea what I meant. When I reached around him to flush, he looked frightened and shocked. I opened the lid so he could see what was happening, and he stared in stunned silence. He literally wouldn’t leave the bathroom, transfixed by the swirling water. Even once it stopped, he kept staring down the magic hole, as if he expected his deposit to return.

But there is hope in Haiti. It is the hope of a resilient and tenacious people, and it is the hope of those who partner with them. We met one couple from the States who has created a new kind of composting latrine that actually recycles human and animal waste. They’ve installed 50 of these in northern Haiti so far. We met and worked with a small team of doctors, nurses, and engineers from Portland, Maine who are partnering with existing hospitals and small clinics to help Haitian doctors and nurses identify and achieve their own goals for health care delivery. We visited a center for malnourished children that not only helps feed and nurse these kids back to health, but also trains their mothers , giving them skills and micro loans on their way to self-sufficiency. We even visited an up and coming agricultural school, designed to help young men and women learn to produce crops and livestock in some of the most deforested and barren land in the world.

Who knows what our church will decide to do with the options for partnership we present to them. But I know that I will never forget the faces we saw, the beautiful, black, resilient, and hopeful faces of a people who have been dealt the ultimate in losing hands, short straws, and raw deals. So count your blessings, remember to pray for Haiti, and stay tuned, for God isn’t finished with any of us yet, not here and certainly not in Haiti.