Haiti bel anpil
I know some of you have been waiting to hear about the experience in Haiti. Well, I've been back from the Dominican Republic for about two weeks, but it's taken quite a while to sort everything out and find the time to write it on the screen. But here it is, finally, better late than never along with the normal update:
1. In January I took some time to discern where God might be taking me in the next few years of my life regarding my continuation with InnerCHANGE, Venezuela, and missions in general. A couple spiritual retreats of silence and working the earth later, I felt like God was giving me the freedom to decide. That said, I've decided to stay another three years with InnerCHANGE in Caracas, Venezuela after my first term ends this September. Missionary work is all about patience. There still are a lot of lessons, mistakes, and experience that I feel can only be learned with more time. More time is exactly what is needed to see people discipled, structures emerge, and leaders developed. I certainly do feel called more and more to this way of life and ministry, and I want to be as faithful as I can in growing during my time in Caracas.
2. In late January and early February, I spent ten days in the Dominican Republic translating for the aid effort. Through a small grassroots effort comprised of various ministries, we helped supply hospitals, orphanages, refugee camps, and various NGO's. We were able to buy, transport, and ship upwards of $150,000 worth of aid from the DR into Haiti. I was part of the second wave and was able to see the operation close out as many of the big NGO's began to reach many of the earthquake victims that were previously unreachable by the big guys.
3. In Venezuela, we are continuing to visit the local public elementary school in the barrio of San Pablito. Many of the students and families had their lives flipped upside down when a five year old's birthday party ended in a shootout. Many were wounded and five were killed (including the five year old girl). One of the boys innocently killed in the firefight attended sixth grade in the elementary school we are visiting. We have been doing a lot of counseling in the class to which the students are responding well. Please pray for God's healing touch on their lives, that our presence in the school would continue to bless many, and for peace to come to San Pablito.
4. Venezuela is experiencing a huge drought. There have been rotating shortages of water, accompanied with rotating blackouts throughout the whole country. Sadly, Venezuela consumes the most electricity per capita of any South American nation except for Suriname which hosts the EU space port and therefore doesn't count. Add to the mess the fact that recycling, and telling people to throw the trash in a trashcan receive similar looks as discourses about nuclear fusion and teletransportation. In this moment of crisis I'm seizing the opportunity to visit churches to teach about creation care and the practical applications of how to save electricity and water. Please pray that all the connections take place soon and that this message can reach enough people to alleviate the problem.
5. In March, I'll be attending the InnerCHANGE leaders community conference in London. I'm looking forward to this chance to meet up with other leaders in InnerCHANGE and soak up their wisdom. Please pray for safe travels and that God would show me how to lead effectively during this upcoming year.
That's enough for today. As always, there is the blog which gets updated every once and a while. Feel free to send me your prayer requests and updates as I am always so blessed to hear about what's going on in your lives. Plus I always love receiving snail mail. Until then, stay strong, seek the Lord and
Press on for Joy!
Cameron Carter
CCS 16019, (819)
PO Box 025323
Miami, FL 33102-523 USA
"So why is it when I say 'Haiti bel anpil' (Haiti is very beautiful), that the 'anpil' (very/a lot) comes after the 'bel', (beautiful) and when I say 'sa se anpil bois' (there are a lot of trees) the 'anpil' comes before?"
My "professor" of the moment looked at me with his open black face and peaceful eyes, and responded to me in perfect English, "It's just like that". On the way to Fort Liberte, I had barely given any attention to the green landscape rolling by both sides of the converted Daihatsu truck. I was trying my best to resurrect my high school French and conquer as much Creole as I good before we got to our destination. My professor was a young Haitian man named Jean. He works in a local factory six days a week, starting at 6:30 in the morning and ending at 7 at night with a 45 minute break for lunch. Saturday is a half day but he works as a taxi driver on a loaned motorcycle in the afternoon. Since it was Saturday, he jumped up into our convoy and was eager to practice his already excellent English. Besides English, he's fluent in Spanish, French, and of course his native Creole.
In spite of people like Jean whose kindness and education are exemplar, Haiti as a whole gets a bad rap. The country is already infamously known as the poorest in the western hemisphere. The reputation for voodoo along with a super-corrupt government doesn't do the country any favors. This recent earthquake that took the lives of well over 200,000 was a horrific tragedy, but compounded with everything else, Haiti became a worldwide spectacle. The newspaper here published the unedited pictures of the devastation (physical and human) in the days following the earthquake. Everyone in our neighborhood sent their sympathy to the Haitian people and complained about the slow response to get food and water to the people in Port-au-Prince.
Unbenownst to me, just three days after the earthquake hit, a CRM ministry called Communitas based in New Orleans was en route to the small city of Santiago in the Dominican Republic to start getting aid and supplies into Haiti. Working together with the InnerCHANGE Miami team, and missionaries in Haiti working for FIM and Kids Alive, they connected with hospitals, orphanages, and ministries already established in Haiti. These ministries gave the team in Miami a needs list which then would be scrounged up in the DR and quickly sent into Haiti. The supply chain from this little grassroots effort was able to get gasoline, food, and medicine into Port-au-Prince well before the tons of aid stacked up at the airport could reach the tons of people desperately waiting for it outside. While its impossible to have exact numbers, we think this little operation impacted well over 200,000 lives.
I unwittingly got involved in the operation trying to connect a Venezuelan friend to the relief effort. Instead I found myself drafted to do translation on the DR side of things. By the time I arrived in the DR in late January, the effort was in the fourth quarter, as our leader on the ground put it. The aid from the big NGO's was just about to start to be distributed and our work there would be over. None the less, there were still a number of orders to fill.
The team in the DR had made contact with a Dominican hardware salesman named Lorenzo. After meeting up with the team, he offered his services and began sacrificing his own sales to help out with our little operation. He used his connections to look for rice, beans, gas, diesel, sugar, oil, five gallon buckets, anything we had in the order. He would go out, cut deals, buy the goods, and bring them back to load up on trucks that would then be sent out the next morning.
It was a pretty smooth operation, but there were some difficulties in arranging transportation into Haiti. For one thing, Dominican drivers had no desire whatsoever to go to Haiti because they were convinced that the Haitians were going to eat them. Yes, that's right, eat them. I don't live on the island of Hispanola, but that particular fear seems about as irrational as you can get. But then again, I'm sure a lot of the stuff we've lived through here sounds absurd from an outside point of view. Like that one time the woman on the corner took a pot-shot with a shotgun at the witch that had transformed into some sort of bird-like creature that was flying around on everyone's roofs and killing their dogs and then the next morning the woman up the hill woke up wounded in the leg. That probably sounds just as weird. Guess I shouldn't judge.
So if procuring a Dominican driver and truck was hard, getting a Haitian truck and driver across the boarder involved its own specialty of difficulties. When crossing the boarder, the Haitian truck must be first "disinfected" (read superfluous charge for spraying it with water) plus the Haitian driver must have a visa to enter the DR which is nigh impossible to get at best. Plus, with the distances and the conditions of the roads in Haiti, the only way to make it in one day was to have the Haitian driver spend the night in the DR before they headed out bright and early the next morning. A few times the Haitian drivers would spend the night in the hotel where we were based. It must have been quite the experience for them. For some, it was their first time in the DR, first time in an elevator, first time to feel hot water from a shower head, and who knows what all else was new. I'm sure they brought back a plethora of stories to tell their kids from their odyssey. "No really, the door opened and we were in a different place!" I'm sure that sounded just as weird.
For our last shipment, all of us in the operation accompanied the delivery across the border. It was a big shipment that the mayor of the Haitian town of Fort Liberte had requested for all the refugees arriving from Port-au-Prince.
During the three hour trip to the boarder, I had time to revisit all the stories and tidbits I heard about Haiti: an extremely impoverished country, even to the point that there weren't even trees left standing as they had all been chopped down for firewood. Yet the scene across the boarder was not nearly as post apocalyptic as I had been expecting.
The first thing I noticed crossing the boarder was the activity in river that forms the boarder between the two countries. Hundreds of women squatted working clothes and sheets in and out of the water, wringing them out and spreading them to dry in the blistering sun. Their young children ran and splashed through the clear water, cooling themselves from the heat while finding opportune moments to splash their siblings and run about laughing.
We crossed the bridge over the river on foot while the Dominican truck carrying the supplies came through a few minutes later. Just across the river, a dispatch of UN peacekeepers from Uruguay took refuge in the shade of a large tree next to the customs and immigration buildings. They had accompanied all of our shipments and were great to work with. They quickly agreed to go with our truck to Fort Liberte. The route wasn't dangerous, but we wanted to have some extra peace-keeping while we unloaded the truck in town. They advised us to wait five minutes until their company got back from escorting another convoy. One hour and five sunburned white guys later, we were off.
In that hour of waiting amidst the bustling border, a young man drove up on a motorcycle and asked in perfect English if we were Americans. I responded affirmatively and we quickly became friends. He kindly started to help me with my miserable Creole, and just before we got into gear, he jumped up into the bed of the passenger truck to go with us. Engrossed in language lessons, small villages and varied landscapes flew by. Haiti is surprisingly green, populated with the typical assortment of tropical flora and crisscrossed by small rivers. We arrived at Fort Liberte which, from what I saw of it, seemed like a very small town. The mayor of the city had asked the missionary there to bring in tons of rice, beans, and other essentials to feed the arriving refugees along with the families that took them in. We pulled up to the warehouse which actually was just a house with a wooden door. Strung high across the dirt street hung a white sheet with the words "Adieu Pouchon" tagged in black. I asked my friend who Pouchon was. "He's a singer that died in the earthquake. He sang Haitian music." Other than the presence of our convoy, there was no other indication that the country to which this town belongs had been touched by a tragedy.
Our small caravan of two white UN jeeps, a small semi, and passenger truck quickly drew the attention of the town. Spectators and hopefuls looking for work flocked to the previously abandoned street. A work crew was quickly organized, the container opened, and the unloading process began.
I kept talking with my new Haitian friend while trying the newly taught greetings on passersby. A young girl of ten stood next to us calmly watching the unloading. My friend asked her a few questions and shared her responses with me. She said her family had been been killed in the earthquake and she had come up to Fort Liberte even though she didn't know anybody. It looked like she hadn't found another family to take her in yet either.
As we stood in sun, my friend made an unsolicited comment about how Haitians really love Americans. I found that a little difficult to buy after so much time in Caracas. But he insisted. He was glad that there were troops from the US and from the UN present. He said things weren't good when they weren't here, but now with them present, things had calmed down. He even went so far as to praise the troops hunting down criminals and escaped prisoners, tying their hands behind their backs and shooting them. "There are a lot of wicked people in Haiti." he ended.
The workers finished unloading the truck. Before packing up to go, a woman came out with a five gallon bucket to glean. Some of the rice bags had leaked and grains of rice along with sugar and dust littered the floor of the semi container. She swept up as much as she could with her hand into the bucket she held. We loaded up and were off.
On the ride back, the sun and wind took their toll and I realized I didn't have enough in me to continue with our informal language lessons. The passing countryside deserved a closer look. Every so often we would pass a child on a donkey, the its sides loaded with cut sugar cane or split wood. Where there were no rivers, someone had come through and dug a number of wells which were topped off with a silver pump and long handle. At almost every pump, some small girl not even half the pump's height jumped gaily up and down, arms extended over her head, barely moving the handle up and down as water filled up various plastic bottles and buckets.
I asked my friend about his family. He's single, with no kids, dating a girl but wants to study at the university first before getting married, and lives with his mom. "And your father?" "He died" "When?" "Right now, in the earthquake." He said it with about as much emotion one might mention they had a tuna fish sandwich for lunch. "I'm sorry to hear that. I'm really sorry." Still no reaction. It made me wonder if I heard him right. He confirmed grim the news after another person on our team asked him about it.
"You see that building?" my friend gestured to a large building built well away from the highway. "That's a hospital. American's built it." We passed another hospital and an orphanage, all in the same style.
"Who built this road that we're on?" I had been told by our team that the road between the DR and Fort Liberte had been built by the Italians. Apparently, the road beyond Fort Liberte and between Port-au-Prince was a nightmare that had not been maintained in years that put drivers and passengers in danger of internal bleeding from the unceasing roughness. "The Americans built this road too." my friend said. "Really? I heard the Italians built it." "No, it was the Americans."
"What do you think, what does Haiti need?" It was a question I was uncomfortable asking, but I knew I needed to ask it. I needed to hear it from a Haitian. "I think . . . roads. Good roads. Water, electricity. If we had those things we would be better."
In a similar conversation in the DR at the home of our Dominican hardware salesman, a neighbor of his opined "What Haiti needs is education." In Spanish, the idea behind the word "education" is broader than what we mean in the States. The idea is better captured in the word "upbringing". That is, a person's formation, manners, etiquette, and also partly academic instruction. "The Haitians are so used to receiving aid that all they do is manipulate to get money." the neighbor concluded.
A different day, but the in same theme with some NGO workers serving in Haiti brought out the following "Haiti suffers from donor fatigue. People keep giving, but nothing ever changes. I don't know, maybe it just needs to become a part of the US and be opened to investors that could develop it." I could see the frustration on his face. Years of experience and disappointment had slowly eliminated so many potential possibilities.
Infrastructure, says the Haitian. Upbringing, says the Dominican. Materials economy, says the American.
I had the privilege to hear Oscar Muriu speak at Urbana '06. He gave the knock out talk of the conference. One of the lines in his discourse will always stick with me, not because it was something I completely agreed with at the time, but rather because it was something I didn't understand. He said "When you (Americans/missionaries/NGOs) come to Africa, you want to fix Africa. Well you can't fix Africa." The comment drew riotous applause from a handful in the 22,000+ crowd while the rest of us sat there and wondered what in the world he meant by that.
Perhaps what Oscar says about Africa applies equally in the western hemisphere; we can't fix Haiti. Of course in the short term, Haiti NEEDS the help of the world to recover and mourn the losses from the earthquake. But in the long term, perhaps there isn't quite as much fixing to do as we thought. Yes, Haiti is poor. Yes there are social ills, yes there is a huge spiritual problem. But show me a country that doesn't suffer from poverty, along with social and spiritual ills.
This has been one of the most difficult updates to write because Haiti has forced me reexamine poverty. There are lots of definitions of poverty. I doubt any of them to it justice. In Spanish, the word misery is commonly used to distinguish between extreme poverty and normal poverty, whatever "normal" and "extreme" are. I think that the word misery is useful for me to distinguish the line between economic disadvantage and a way of existence that is an offense to God and humanity. Misery is unjust. Going hungry without recourse is misery. Working extreme hours in dangerous conditions for little to no pay is misery. Living in fear for your own life is misery. Being so economically poor that a family has to sell their own daughter as a prostitute is misery. Being displaced from home and family by war, famine or earthquake is misery. Living empty and depressed every day is misery.
I say these things not because I believe all human beings are entitled to some set of rights, but rather because I believe in the love of God which rightly should flow as love between all His children. Living in misery, propagating misery, and not taking action to end misery are not violations of human rights, rather they are violations of the love of God.
Do the people of Haiti live in misery? The hundreds of thousands that have lost family, friends and home in the earthquake most certainly do. Are the people of Haiti being forced into or kept in misery? That is a difficult question to answer, and I am not an expert to answer it. If you find out, let me know. Although, I can say for certain that spiritually, they are oppressed and miserably so. Does Haiti deserve our pity simply because it has not "progressed" as much as the rest of the world? I would say no. I think technological progress or lack there of is really up to particular individuals and societies at large. If a society really wants to progress, let them do it. If not, respect it. The tricky part comes when a people want to progress but can't. That is a problem that is beyond the scope of this update. For now, I don't know enough to say one way or another if that is the case in Haiti.
We arrived at the boarder and dismounted from the truck. We started our goodbyes before heading toward the bridge. I asked Jean how much I owed him for the lessons. "No no no," he said "but if you ever are in Haiti again and need help with translation let me know." I agreed I would. We shook hands, exchanged our information, and said goodbye.
Practically speaking, I'm sure there are going to be tons of high school missions trips in the following years to go and "rebuild" Haiti. If you find yourself involved in any of these, first understand that Haiti is a mystery. It has confused a lot of people, myself included. At the same time, mysterious tends to be beautiful; be aware that you might actually like the place. Second, please don't go to Haiti as a mom to pity and baby a bunch of competent adults, some of which speak three more languages than you do. Instead, go as their brother and sister, to first be loved and then to love. And finally, I can always get you in contact with Jean if you need someone to translate or Lorenzo if you need some building materials. Until then,
Press on for Joy!
posted by Kelvin @ 2/22/2010 04:20:00 PM
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