Thoughts From the Field in Haiti
I returned about 24 hours ago from Haiti. I’m trying to sum up my trip…but so many thoughts race through my head. Haiti looks like a war zone, yet the people are trying to be resilient and hopeful. More aid is in dire need and I struggle with the fact that it takes a large disaster to draw attention to the poverty that no person should ever have to live in.
Nothing about the trip went easy. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. The logistics on the ground are confusing – for everyone. Communication is almost non-existent and it was much easier for me to contact the USA than to contact someone else in Haiti. Transportation was difficult and gas has reached $45 USD per gallon.
My team of six landed into Haiti on Thursday. Unfortunately the plane was delayed about 6 hours from the Opa Laka airport and it was dark when we arrived. We were headed to the Carfour area which, while only 10 miles away, was about 2 hours away. The narrow roads fill with people sleeping in them in the night so we were unable to leave the Port-Au-Prince airport. This meant sleeping on the tarmac with non-stop jets. We decided not to spend much time in the building as it was in bad shape, parts filled with water, and smelled bad. A good shake could have knocked it down. Our favorite part of inhaling jet fuel all night was when the Cuban plane turned around and revved its engines covering us with dirt. And while disaster relief is a challenging industry – we must do whatever is necessary to get our goods to the communities that need them.
The next morning we arrived at Grace International. This community holds a boys home, a girls home, a church, a school, and a hospital under construction. It’s about 10 acres that had outer walls and inner walls. The outer walls collapsed in the quake leaving the only open space in the area and the directors of the program quickly began to run a 17,000 person refugee camp.
My experiences in the camp are some I will probably never forgot. When you walk around and see such a large population that lost everything…its hard to bear. Particularly difficult are seeing the babies in this situation as well as the elderly. Most of these families simply have the same pair of clothes on their back and a sheet over their head. Dignity is stripped and desperation is setting in.
Not everything about the trip was heart-wrenching. Certainly the young girls of the orphanage who were behind the inner walls with us were a real joy. I saw little kids in the camp who had empty water bottles on a string as a toy. The resilience of kids to make the best of a bad situation is amazing.
There were certainly heroic moments of the trip. Our paramedic Jason bagged a little baby for 3 ½ hours refusing to give up until he found a hospital that would take this little one. It took him 5 cars (many which broke down) before he finally got to the Comfort, the hospital ship off-shore. Jason did everything to get this baby help and we still hope to hear if he survived.
Some of the more chilling and difficult moments of the trip included hearing gun shots one night from just over the walls and then people screaming. There were moments I thought maybe the people were going to revolt and jump the inner walls into where we were staying. When I inquired in the daylight about what happened I learned about the people going around stealing babies from the camps at night. They are either stealing them for trafficking, to eat and I even heard reports of stealing babies for human sacrifice. The kids in these camps are so very vulnerable.
That same night a man was beating on the gate yelling for a doctor. I was staying in a tent with Dr. Lyons-Jones who quickly got out of the tent to see what was needed. A man carried in a young woman and said she hadn’t moved in some time. Unfortunately, this woman had already died. She was seen in the clinic just two days earlier and it is still unknown why exactly she passed. Since the quake this small community has lost 420 people.
I came to find out this man was her husband and they were married just one month. His wailing is still haunting me and several of us took turns just sitting next to him with our arms around him. There are simply no words. I cried realizing that this man, who lost everything, now lost his wife and now could only go back to the comfort of a dirt floor and sheet around him. I felt sick at how inhumane it seemed that any people should endure such suffering.
I had the opportunity to do some wonderful other things like deliver medical supplies to small communities and partake in a food distribution. We distributed the food at night so as to not create any riots with individuals walking back into their communities with food. It is dire that more food reaches the camp soon in order to avoid major problems.
We had a God moment when we bumped into Medical Teams International who was working at Ford Hospital. They had supplies there that weren’t needed for their community, but were desperately needed in ours. They also had doctors not working as they didn’t have enough patients. When I left it looked as if they were going to come and set up camp at Grace. They looked through our supplies and saw crutches and burst into shouts of joy. They had been amputating legs and people were unable to leave the hospital without crutches. They took several with them so they could get people ambulatory again.
There are so many things I could probably write about. But I was struck by a conversation I had with one young man named Matthew. Matthew was just 22 years old and knew it was my first time to Haiti. He asked what I thought of his country. I told him how nice the people were but how sad I was for the devastation I saw around me. As I talked about the images I saw I began to tear up. Matthew looked at me with a smile and said, “don’t be sad, just pray for us. That’s what you can do, you can pray for us.” Such faith and hope from such a young man.
So I leave you with this thought – pray for Haiti. And as you pray listen to what God might be telling you to do to respond. It’s not about what GCHope can do in Haiti – remember, we can’t do this without YOU. YOU are the ones that must choose to do something or to believe it is someone else’s responsibility to do something. What part is God calling you to play in providing hope to Haiti?
Thoughts From the Field in Haiti
I returned about 24 hours ago from Haiti. I’m trying to sum up my trip…but so many thoughts race through my head. Haiti looks like a war zone, yet the people are trying to be resilient and hopeful. More aid is in dire need and I struggle with the fact that it takes a large disaster to draw attention to the poverty that no person should ever have to live in.
Nothing about the trip went easy. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. The logistics on the ground are confusing – for everyone. Communication is almost non-existent and it was much easier for me to contact the USA than to contact someone else in Haiti. Transportation was difficult and gas has reached $45 USD per gallon.
My team of six landed into Haiti on Thursday. Unfortunately the plane was delayed about 6 hours from the Opa Laka airport and it was dark when we arrived. We were headed to the Carfour area which, while only 10 miles away, was about 2 hours away. The narrow roads fill with people sleeping in them in the night so we were unable to leave the Port-Au-Prince airport. This meant sleeping on the tarmac with non-stop jets. We decided not to spend much time in the building as it was in bad shape, parts filled with water, and smelled bad. A good shake could have knocked it down. Our favorite part of inhaling jet fuel all night was when the Cuban plane turned around and revved its engines covering us with dirt. And while disaster relief is a challenging industry – we must do whatever is necessary to get our goods to the communities that need them.
The next morning we arrived at Grace International. This community holds a boys home, a girls home, a church, a school, and a hospital under construction. It’s about 10 acres that had outer walls and inner walls. The outer walls collapsed in the quake leaving the only open space in the area and the directors of the program quickly began to run a 17,000 person refugee camp.
My experiences in the camp are some I will probably never forgot. When you walk around and see such a large population that lost everything…its hard to bear. Particularly difficult are seeing the babies in this situation as well as the elderly. Most of these families simply have the same pair of clothes on their back and a sheet over their head. Dignity is stripped and desperation is setting in.
Not everything about the trip was heart-wrenching. Certainly the young girls of the orphanage who were behind the inner walls with us were a real joy. I saw little kids in the camp who had empty water bottles on a string as a toy. The resilience of kids to make the best of a bad situation is amazing.
There were certainly heroic moments of the trip. Our paramedic Jason bagged a little baby for 3 ½ hours refusing to give up until he found a hospital that would take this little one. It took him 5 cars (many which broke down) before he finally got to the Comfort, the hospital ship off-shore. Jason did everything to get this baby help and we still hope to hear if he survived.
Some of the more chilling and difficult moments of the trip included hearing gun shots one night from just over the walls and then people screaming. There were moments I thought maybe the people were going to revolt and jump the inner walls into where we were staying. When I inquired in the daylight about what happened I learned about the people going around stealing babies from the camps at night. They are either stealing them for trafficking, to eat and I even heard reports of stealing babies for human sacrifice. The kids in these camps are so very vulnerable.
That same night a man was beating on the gate yelling for a doctor. I was staying in a tent with Dr. Lyons-Jones who quickly got out of the tent to see what was needed. A man carried in a young woman and said she hadn’t moved in some time. Unfortunately, this woman had already died. She was seen in the clinic just two days earlier and it is still unknown why exactly she passed. Since the quake this small community has lost 420 people.
I came to find out this man was her husband and they were married just one month. His wailing is still haunting me and several of us took turns just sitting next to him with our arms around him. There are simply no words. I cried realizing that this man, who lost everything, now lost his wife and now could only go back to the comfort of a dirt floor and sheet around him. I felt sick at how inhumane it seemed that any people should endure such suffering.
I had the opportunity to do some wonderful other things like deliver medical supplies to small communities and partake in a food distribution. We distributed the food at night so as to not create any riots with individuals walking back into their communities with food. It is dire that more food reaches the camp soon in order to avoid major problems.
We had a God moment when we bumped into Medical Teams International who was working at Ford Hospital. They had supplies there that weren’t needed for their community, but were desperately needed in ours. They also had doctors not working as they didn’t have enough patients. When I left it looked as if they were going to come and set up camp at Grace. They looked through our supplies and saw crutches and burst into shouts of joy. They had been amputating legs and people were unable to leave the hospital without crutches. They took several with them so they could get people ambulatory again.
There are so many things I could probably write about. But I was struck by a conversation I had with one young man named Matthew. Matthew was just 22 years old and knew it was my first time to Haiti. He asked what I thought of his country. I told him how nice the people were but how sad I was for the devastation I saw around me. As I talked about the images I saw I began to tear up. Matthew looked at me with a smile and said, “don’t be sad, just pray for us. That’s what you can do, you can pray for us.” Such faith and hope from such a young man.
So I leave you with this thought – pray for Haiti. And as you pray listen to what God might be telling you to do to respond. It’s not about what GCHope can do in Haiti – remember, we can’t do this without YOU. YOU are the ones that must choose to do something or to believe it is someone else’s responsibility to do something. What part is God calling you to play in providing hope to Haiti?
