Still processing....

It's been two weeks and one day since Tim and I came back home from our week in Port Au Prince, Haiti, and we still haven't completely made sense of all we experienced there. A 90 minute plane ride from Florida took us to an entirely different world, a world full of striking contrasts. Here are my thoughts, taken from my very brief and quite limited experience of this little bitty country which 8 million people call home. The Haitians are such beautiful, hard working, dignified people -- with such amazing posture! The folks in Port Au Prince, the capital city, live very close together, in such a very hot and humid climate filled with fumes from charcoal and car exhaust and who knows what. Along the streets every day, I saw so many laughing, smiling children, immaculately dressed in ironed and clean, adorable school uniforms -- and yet coming from homes with no electricity or running water in which to iron or wash those uniforms. (How DO they get those uniforms looking so nice?) These happy children come from a world where the norm is spending each day working for that day's bread (or rice and beans). A world where Jesus' instructions/advice to us to live one day at a time -- his advice to "not worry about tomorrow, for today has enough worries of its own" seems to take on a whole new reality to its meaning.

We worry so much about so many little things -- and here were thousands of people, with something real to worry about -- and instead they were just happy to "not be worse". "Not being worse" is actually the translation of their answer to the greeting, "How are you?". The standard answer, as I understand it, is "I'm not worse!" In other words, something worse could have happened to them, but didn't that day, so they respond, "I'm not worse, how are you?".

One thing I remember telling myself in the middle of the week was, "Remember what you are seeing here. Never again think you know a poor person in the United States. You don't. Compared to this, every person in the USA is fabulously wealthy." That may sound like a ridiculous statement to you, but all I mean by that is this. We have so much here -- even when debts are high, bills are numerous, etc., we have such wonderful infrastructure here, such wonderful resources. Public libraries and restrooms, paved roads, safe drinking water. We have food stamps for those needing assistance buying food, we have WIC for baby formula. We have so much. Being poor in Haiti seems instead to be the norm, and I saw very little indigenous infrastructure to support anyone in need of assistance. I was overwhelmed, however, with the amount of assistance that is pouring into Haiti by individual American volunteers and non-profit agencies. There are countless schools, feeding programs, medical aid, orphanages, etc. in existence in Haiti solely because people make the 90 minute flight and come to help. It was inspiring and refreshing to see the vast array of things being accomplished. There is so much good going on there, yet of course so much to be done. I hope we get to return soon. The sadness and pain there is hard to face.....yet it makes me glad for the hope Jesus gave us about Heaven, where one day all His children who suffer here will suffer no more. Won't it be great to be in Heaven one day where there will never again be any more sorrow, sickness, pain, hunger, death, night or poverty? I can't wait.