A look into the life of Nancie

Here is a video made by a girl on a trip to the orphanage in Ouanaminthe that I work with.  It tells the story of a girl that I mention in my first post…an eye opening watch.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NgShpBz15Y

A New Hope

I want to follow up the previous post by saying that over the last few days God has given me a freakish hope for Haiti…..I’m telling you, unwarranted hope.  And it’s because His, God’s, strength is made perfect in weakness.  Follow my train of thought:  think of all the destruction, all the madness, all the crying out, all the insanity…the utter helplessness.  If His strength is made PERFECT in weakness, this earthquake is an opportunity for Him to show Himself SO strong, to raise these people up, to bring more beauty out of this than the biggest and best planning meetings by anyone could bring about.  Because God’s energy is fully creative, so even when He destroys, it’s with the ultimate goal of creating, regenerating.  I feel like some major, beautiful restoring and rebuilding is going to take place in Haiti.  I believe God is going to show them favor, look on their spiritual poverty with an outpouring of pure blessing and mercy– and as I’ve told a few of my friends, I feel like they are going to receive many more blessings than we can possibly imagine simply because we’ve never had to imagine them.  We are so self-sufficient, we have our systems and our comfortable culture and our things, but these people, in their having nothing, will embrace the things that matter most, and God is going to meet them there!

So excited, Haiti!  The God of Jacob and Abraham and David and Moses and Israel is your God!  He is the Father to your fatherless, the Comforter of your broken, the Author and Perfecter of your people’s faith!  And He has not forsaken you!

Precious Akiala

Not Forsaken

INTRODUCTION

I want to introduce my blog by saying that I had written the majority of it before the earthquake happened in Haiti.  I was struggling with issues of poverty and parentless children and sickness as a result of a trip through the Dominican Republic and Haiti that I’d taken last week, January 4-8, when I got news of the quake.  It added a whole new angle to the struggle.

I hope you don’t read too much despair into what I wrote.  Honestly, I have a lot of hope.  I process by writing, so it tends to seem negative sometimes, but God has used all of this to build my faith in Him.  I think that this disaster is being used by Him to bring God’s people all over the world together, to stand in the gap for Haiti, to lift them up with prayer and support and encouragement.  I am excited about multiple new beginnings for this country full of people whom God loves so much.

I write through the lens of my faith.  Please read even if you don’t agree.  You have to wrestle in your heart to find answers and your peace with God.  I found them in the light and hope and truth of Jesus Christ.

It’s weird how we find ourselves where we do with the passions we do.  My brother went to Campbell University with a guy named Andy.  Andy has a love for India.  I wanted to go to India.  Andy goes to India all the time.  I went to India with Andy in ’07.  Andy got involved in Haiti because he loves orphans and there are lots of them there.  Andy invited my dad and brothers on an emergency construction trip to Haiti (where the heck is Haiti?) in late Summer ’08 to work on a school building.  I went to Haiti in November ’08.  So did a woman named Martha.  Martha fell in love with Haiti on that trip.  Martha kept going back.  In late December ’09, Martha asked me if I want to go to Haiti the first week of January ’10.  I said yes, I went, and a few days after our return an earthquake spikes the death toll in Haiti up to as many as 500,000 people.

Like I said, the whys don’t always make sense to me.  But if I didn’t believe in a higher purpose in all of this, I wouldn’t have motivation for hope or help or anything else.  But I believe that Haiti is part of God’s story of redeeming mankind and drawing us back to Him.  I believe that we can’t know our own spiritual bankruptcy until a hard situation stares us in the face.  In that way, these children and their liveliness have helped saved my soul.  They have shown me the bigness of God’s heart, shown me what His priorities are.  And they have motivated me to look outside of myself and my own silly priorities.

I hope my experience and the experiences of my team members will open your eyes and spur to you to pray and act, and do whatever it is that God is leading you to do.  I hope you can see these people as sons and daughters of God, our brothers and sisters andchildren and mothers and fathers in Him.

from journal entry on 01/05/10. In Ouanaminthe. "Isaiah 42:16. And I will lead the blind in a way that they do not know, in paths that they have not known I will guide them. I will turn the darkness before them to light, the rough places into level ground. These are the things I do, and I do not forsake them."

NEGLECT

As the tropical trees of the Dominican Republic faded beneath clouds and darkness, salty water involuntarily poured out of my eyes.  I tried to keep from heaving too forcefully as I sobbed so the couple beside me on the plane would not be annoyed or distracted from the movie on their personal DVD player.

Just two nights earlier, I was laying down to sleep on the orphanage guest room floor, expressing frustration in my journal because I hadn’t felt much in spite of all that I was experiencing.  My heart didn’t feel like a well of compassion, my feet weren’t motivated to do much else than go with the flow.  The stimuli of this place– Ouanaminthe, Haiti– should illicit more in me, shouldn’t it, God?  That was my frustrated question over and over again.  The smell of fuel and excrement.  The relatively high ratio of handicapped children in a random sampling of children on the street.  The sound of their small voices yelling, “Blanc, blanc!” (essentially, “White person, white person!”)  The sight of their faces lighting into a smile when the silence between us and them was broken by an amicable “Bonjour!”  I went to sleep that night upset that I couldn’t react.  It wasn’t in me.

Now on the plane, wiping snot and tears, my feeling was the opposite.  I was so overwhelmed because my brain was processing a million different things at a thousand miles an hour.  I started wondering about the futures of specific children I’d spent time with at the orphanage.  I wondered if they had a chance.  I found out later that I had a fever, which probably contributed to my overall feeling of unrest.  But I just had to cry.  It seemed as biologically necessary as eating or using the bathroom.

The question changed too.  How does a God characterized by goodness seemingly neglect an entire country?

from journal entry 01/08/10. Somewhere between Puerto Plata and home. "My eyelids are so heavy. God, don't let my trust in You dwindle, or my belief that you are good and love us all unimaginably."

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Lobby of our Santiago/Hotel Casinos. There were two Maseratis out front.

We were supposed to arrive in Ouanaminthe Tuesday morning, January 9 but due to mechanical problems on one of our planes, we didn’t make it until the evening.  The airline also lost almost all of the luggage belonging to the four members of our team traveling from Chicago.  As a pacifier, they put us up in a Casino/Hotel in Santiago the night before.  They gave us meal, drink, and massage vouchers.  We stayed in a warm bed, ate in a restaurant with a relatively full menu with a Carolina game going on in the background.

Heels!

One last dose of good ol’ American culture.

That Tuesday, January 9th, we reached the border between Dajabon, Dominican Republic and Ouanaminthe, Haiti just as as it was closing.  The scene was just as I remembered- trash, dirt, people, and random livestock splattered across the landscape.

Just over the border in Ouanaminthe.

Thank God it wasn’t hot and humid this time.  January is the rainy season, so we traded muggy for muddy on this trip as we walked the mile stretch from the border to the orphanage.  But not before stopping at the immigration office.  There were two men working in the office, about to leave when we arrived.  In angry Creole, the man who was obviously the head honcho told us via our interpreter Daniel that we should pay him overtime.

Immigration Office

We laughed out loud while Head Honcho’s wingman kept a half-serious expression on his face.

This Haitian journey was not the first for most of us on the team. It was my second.  With the vibrance and novelty of a virgin visit gone, things that had once been humorous now just made me angry, things such as our interaction with the man at the immigration office.

My annoyance faded as we continued to walk among streets that had been tucked away in some closet of my memory.  Adults stared at us “blancs” sometimes with suspicion, children with fascination.

Arriving in Ouanaminthe, the evening of 01/05/10

A boy with crooked legs and a broken arm, fastened to a board by strips of cloth, hobbled up to us with a shy smile.  Martha kissed him on the head and we smiled back, trying to show affection in any way other than English words that he couldn’t understand.  This boy stole my heart.  I don’t know what it was about him.  Maybe it was his shameless curiosity or the way that he grinned and followed us with no invitation, so against the norms of our culture.  He walked with us a little way and then fell back into the scenery of the street once again, and my eyes moistened against my will.  I felt helpless, unable to address the problems of every child we encountered.

I thought about a book I’d started reading on the plane to the Dominican Republic by Susie Scott Krabacher, a former Playboy playmate who started many projects to help children in Haiti.  The things she experienced in her Haitian travels made my skin crawl, made my jaw drop, the way children fell victim to corruption from the government on down, or the way voodoo beliefs often blacklisted handicapped children as cursed and undesirable.

Ditch(I think!?) in Ounaminthe

I wondered how simply the boy with the crooked legs could be fixed in the United States.  I wondered if he was viewed as a burden to his family and community.

But we had to keep walking.

Eventually we reached the orphanage.  As the gate opened up to the orphanage yard, shrieks from our team and the children mingled as old friends celebrated their reunion and new friends were made.

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The lead up to this Haiti trip was short.  I decided to go only about three weeks before.  The trip wasn’t on my radar at all before then.  When Martha, the trip organizer and spear header of restorehaiti.org, asked me about going, it was the first I had heard about the trip.  Within 48 hours I had bought a plane ticket.  I packed the same day that I left.  It was a whirlwind.

Our team was comprised of 6 women, two of us from North Carolina, four traveling from Chicago.  Martha, Meredith, Meghan, and Jacki (Martha’s daughter) came from Chicago, while Kristi and I flew from Charlotte.

What kind of picture you get when a Haitian kid runs off with your camera!

I was really excited for this trip because we had three specific arts-focused projects to complete in Ouanaminthe, all with the end goal of giving the kids the opportunity to be directly involved in the process of raising money for their own school.

This was a fact that also annoyed me this trip, how unwarranted and preventable many of the circumstances were that caused plans to be upset in Haiti.  I learned to get over it.  I had to keep reminding myself that cultural norms are just that, things that have arisen and been accepted by people over several years, and that being in Haiti meant abiding social norms.  In this case, that meant understanding that the likelihood of us actually adhering to the schedule Martha had typed up in a word processor back in the States was very slim.

That first evening, we hung out with the kids, sang songs, held their hands, and joined them for devotion.  All thirty-two children packed onto the biggest room of the second floor of the orphanage that was lit by two candles and listened to Pastor Willio teach a lesson from the Bible.  Most of what he said was gibberish to us English speakers, though all of us were relieved when we recognized the names “Shadrach, Meeshack, and Abegnego.”

ALWAYS posing.

When it came time for prayer, everyone bowed their heads, some praying outloud and some in silence.  And the children sang.  To hear children sing like these did is to without a doubt hear what it sounds like when people really sing their hearts out.  Familiar tunes such as “What A Friend We Have in Jesus” echoed off the stone walls.

That night, Kristi, Meredith, and I shared a bed.  Meghan, Martha, and Jacki slept on a the floor in the next room, making due with one sleeping bag under the three of them and one over top since the airline had lost 7 of their 8 bags.  Only Kristi and I had made it with all of our luggage, so we shared our food, clothes, everything.

Sleeping arrangements were not terribly comfortable, and we all spent the whole night wishing we were asleep.

In the dark, a dog was yelping somewhere in the distance.  Someone on the floor below us was coughing.  A rooster started crowing well before the sun came up.  When the sun did begin to come up, while the sky was still Sunrise Blue, the beautiful sound of children singing began.  I wondered if this was how they always started their day or if the singing was spontaneous.  What a way to welcome the day.

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Oftentimes when Americans visit third world countries, they are poised with a strong attitude of “You poor babies!”  When I first visited India, I felt this way.  Quickly, my feelings changed.  I actually began to feel a bit envious of the people there because they don’t have the strong dependence on things that we do.  I was blessed by their vibrance, their resilience, their ignorance of their own poverty.  We do these people a huge disservice when we sweep in to tell them all the reasons they should feel bad for themselves.  In many ways, they are in bondage much less than we are.

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We were supposed to go to the school that day, Wednesday, and teach art lessons.  We were going to instruct the youngest kids to draw their feelings, teach late elementary aged and middle school aged to blend primary colors to make secondary colors, and then teach the older kids how to do contour drawing.

Our plan was to use some of the images on t-shirts and tote bags when we returned to the States.  As it turned out, Wednesday was a holiday and the school was closed, a fact we were not told before we’d made our plans.  So we ended up passing out colorings books, paper, and crayons to the smaller children at the orphanage and told them to draw things that they think are beautiful in their country.

The older kids, under Jacki’s instruction, were taught how to draw portraits.  The whole contour drawing thing didn’t work out, and many of them just traced pages from coloring books, but the art projects in general were a hit, and the drawings that resulted were wonderful.  The room was buzzing with children coloring and drawing.

I was surprised to see how meticulously some of the younger kids kept track of their crayons, using one and putting it back to use another.  It was really exciting, and the kids were very proud of their work.

During the art sessions was the one time I became really giddy with pride seeing what these kids accomplished.

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FUTURES

Before I left for Haiti, I was telling a historian friend of mine about the trip.  “Did you know that Haiti is one of the few countries that is considered a failed state?”  I wasn’t sure what failed state meant, but I knew it didn’t sound good.  Even without a definition, the two words fell like a wrecking ball.  In my limited understanding, a failed state is one that has failed in basic terms of government, provision for its people’s basic needs, the ability to sustain.  Lots of countries have been failed states at one time or another.  The problems with addressing this problem in Haiti, my friend said, is that the people there are completely homogenous.  Troubleshooting ideas that have worked in other countries, such as subdividing the country by ethnic groups and languages, won’t work.  Everyone in Haiti, aside from the higher classes who speak French in addition to Creole, pretty much speaks the same language and is of African descent.  Even with respect to religion, the spread is pretty even throughout– lots of voodoo, Catholicism and Protestantism on the rise, sometimes mixed with voodoo, sometimes not.  But there  isn’t really a way to divide the country in smaller, more easily manageable states.

Everyone on our team agreed that we have a burden to create sustainability for the people we have relationships with in Haiti.  Unfortunately, I am not an agriculturalist or an economist.  I don’t have a bone in my body that isn’t artsy in some way, so when it comes to developing plans for sustainability, I am at a loss.  I know simply know that if you equip people to do things themselves, they can do them for much longer.

Incomplete construction. Unfinished buildings are everywhere in Haiti. People build as they can afford it, adding little bits over periods of months or years.

Other issues enter my mind as far as the future of Haiti goes.  The government is so corrupt and has been for years upon years.  We visited with another orphanage in Ouanaminthe, this one run by Americans, and were discussing some improvement ideas for the community, one of which was a soccer field just over the border as you cross into Haiti.  As people crossed the border, a soccer field and park area would give a different, much more positive impression of Haiti than the landscape of dirt and trash that is there now.  I was shocked as the American from the other orphanage continued to explain to us the stumbling block to the soccer field plan; the government is not keen on increasing outward perceptions of the country because as international opinions of the country go up, international aid goes down.  Better off a landscape of filth paired with lots of charity than an improved community, which might give people the idea that you’re actually starting to stand on your own two feet.

It’s crazy.  How can Haiti ever get out from under the constant oppression of backwards leadership?

And corruption in the government sets the tone for the the whole country.  Stealing and dishonesty is a way of surviving for the people in Haiti since it’s most often impossible to think of any other way.

In the same conversation, we heard about the Levi’s factory in Ouanaminthe, about it’s apparent poor working conditions.  “And do you know what they do with the defective jeans?”  We were told that they don’t give them to their employees.  They burn them.  I don’t know who “they” is so I’m not pointing fingers.  I don’t know if “they” are Haitian factory managers, or white rich guys in the U.S., or a combo of both– maybe they are doing it for quality control to keep from a bunch of defective jeans to be produced on purpose.  Business is not my arena so I won’t speculate.  I just know that I sat there with a pair of Levi’s on my bottom.  Levi’s are almost all I wear.  I wanted to check for a Made in Haiti label.  I wondered if I should hide that little red tab for the remainder of my trip, or more importantly, if I should ever buy a pair again.  That’s the thing about these kinds of trips…they cause you to reconsider and reexamine the most random things about your own life, once thought to be safely removed from the concerns of Creole-speaking people in the Carribbean.

ORPHANS

Pastor Willio has taken 32 children into his care.  Sometimes, the kids are true orphans, have no mother or father alive to take care of them.  Sometimes the parents can’t afford to take care of their kids.  There are multiple scenarios.  Willio has found children eating dirt cakes at the edge of the river and taken them in.

Clintane, who loves the Cupid shuffle.

For the future of orphans in Haiti, there are many possibilities.  One is that they will be rescued by someone kind, brought under the care of a loving guardian, like Pastor Willio.  One is that they will be rescued by an orphanage run by corrupt adults with ulterior motives.  Some children are taken in by families and made slaves.  I don’t know many of the ins and outs of life for orphan children in Haiti, but as terrible as life on the street must be for a child, I can’t imagine that being enslaved is better.

SHAME

One of the teenage girls in Willio’s care was raped while out for a walk one day.  She had left the orphanage when someone covered her eyes with their hands and asked, “Guess who?”  Thinking it was all a game, she started guessing names of other children from the orphanage.  I don’t know the details after that other than the people who covered her eyes weren’t her friends from the orphanage, but a group of guys who then raped her.  “It isn’t talked about here,” Martha explained to us.  Rape just isn’t talked about.  The offenders are off the hook.  The victim feels ashamed.  This girl is very beautiful.  Watching her laugh and dance, I became so angry.  It may not even be safe for her to point out the guys who did this to her even if she worked up the courage.

I’m wondering if women’s counseling would be a valuable service to provide on these trips– not just for girls at the orphanage, but for women in the community in general.

But there I go with my ideas again, my Western ideas.  An American riding in on a white horse in shining armor.  Where is the hope for this country, for any country?

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HOPE

from journal entry on 01/08/10. On a plane to Miami from Puerto Plata. "Haiti, home, helplessness, things out of our hands, Jacob have I loved, Esau have I hated. I don't get it. I need clarity."

He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the alien, giving him food and clothing.-Deut. 10:18

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.- James 1:27

I’ve mentioned voodoo already, but I haven’t mentioned the fact that Haiti was dedicated to Satan, like, officially.  A few hundred years ago, voodoo priests sacrificed a pig and dedicated the country to Satan.  In the 20th century, one of their dictators dedicated the country to Satan.  And it seriously appears as though he has full dominion there, what with all the oppression.

In the process of writing this, I found out about the earthquake in Haiti.  What an addition to the list of problems that this country has.  It reopened a struggle with God that had started on this last trip.

As I’d mentioned before, I’d been so numb the whole trip until the plane ride back, when my head was throbbing and I was a mess of snot and tears.  When I cry, my face and the whites of my eyes get really red, but my irises are green.  So my face looks like a red swollen blob with tiny green spheres floating in it.  I stopped crying, and then started again when I called my parents for the first time upon arriving to the states.  My second niece had been born while I was gone.  I didn’t know why I was crying now– happiness, sadness, relief (my niece, Maia Hope, was born almost a month premature, but healthy and beautiful.)

A few days later I was riding in the car with my dad, an ordained minister, and I just let my doubts air out.  “I’m struggling.  We talk about doing all that we can, but it seems like God isn’t even doing all that He can.”  I don’t remember the exact flow of the conversation after that, and I realize that for people who don’t believe in a spiritual reality that all of this is nonsense.  

These are hard questions, these are questions that I think everyone asks in the grim face of tragedy of any kind, whether it be the death of a family member or the slow, simmering tragedy of a country with a persistent “F” on their proverbial Success-As-A-Country report card.

I thought about the beginning of world according to my faith, about a perfect garden with two perfect people in it nestled in a fertile spot somewhere in Africa.  I thought about innocence, about harmony between God and man and plants and animals.  And I thought about a snake slithering into the entire future of mankind, and how ever since then, the same snake has been slithering around looking for souls to wreck– overseeing the import of hundreds of thousands of Africans to the country we now know as Haiti, leading children to believe that they should somehow feel ashamed when they are taken advantage of.  I thought about how in Haiti, he had been inadvertently given official permission to do so.  Where was God when all of this was unfolding?  I know Jesus Christ came to save the world, but if Jesus was God’s Plan B, God must have little foresight and even less power.

Then I remembered what it says in Revelation, that Christ is “the Lamb that was slain from the creation of the world.”  And also what it says in John, that in the beginning was the Word, Jesus, and that the Word was not only with God but WAS God.  Jesus was in the plan from the beginning.  Redemption was in the plan from the beginning.  Which lets me know that from the beginning, man would need rescuing.  Tragedy doesn’t catch God by surprise– from the beginning, He has made a way to save us from it, to save us from ourselves.

This is the only thing that gave me hope, and if you don’t believe in Christ it will seem silly to you.  I well understand that.  I don’t know why God didn’t nip this whole thing in the bud, just stomp out Satan when he was just a chumpy snake in a garden without billions of people to toy with, but I believe even then that a perfect sacrifice had already been made in the form of Christ, before time had even started ticking, in order to atone for and restore all that would be broken.  And until time ends, it won’t make much sense to us.  In the meantime, we’ve been commissioned to serve the “least of these” (Mat. 25:40).

As far as the earthquake, I guess a positive is that people are turning their attention to Haiti because of it.  As terrible as this sounds, I thought the collapsing of the presidential house was an ironic event.  Maybe it is prophetic…I hope the future of corrupt leadership in Haiti will meet its end.  It seriously seems like there’s a spell on Haiti or something.  I hope that too will soon be broken.

…in the shadow of your wings I will take refuge, till the storms of destruction pass by.  I cry out to God Most High, to God who fulfills his purpose for me.- Psalm 57:1b-2

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I went into town that Wednesday with Martha, Jacki, and Meghan.  That was an interesting experience.  We went to the bank, which was surprisingly modern, full of UN soldiers who stared and greeted us in English.  Outside, a few men stopped their motorcycles right beside us, also staring, and revving their engines.  We stopped at a store to buy rice and beans for the kids.  The bags were marked “USAID.  Not to be sold or exchanged.”  Hmmm.

It was fascinating to watch the bustle on the street.  A boy passed with a car made out of an oil bottle with soda bottle caps attached for the wheels.  Another boy wearing underwear, no pants, and a shirt and heavy coat worked pushing a wheelbarrow of coal and furniture.  “I hope he’s working for his family, not as a slave,”  I thought.  “Although I guess the two aren’t mutually exclusive.”  Men across the street laughed at what I assume was us because I heard the word “blanc” a few times.  Little boys and girls walked right up to us, watching us and their countrymen’s reaction to us.  I was glad to see the country like this, humming with a rhythm of productivity, even if there are many issues hidden underneath it all…isn’t that the case anywhere?

Later that day after hanging out at the orphanage for a while we walked to the school building to record the children and adult choirs from the school singing.  What an adventure, stomping through the mud in a veil of light rain with mic stands and a laptop and preamp, hoping nothing was damaged from the moisture.  I was praying that I didn’t contract typhoid since my feet were covered in mud, given little protection by the flip flops I was wearing.  The building was the size of a moderately large two-story American’s house, and anywhere from 800-1000 kids go to school there.

Recording Session

The choirs were as exciting to watch as they were to hear.  The people sang, danced, and clapped with exuberance.  I eventually held the mic stand up off the ground, otherwise the shock from the stomping and clapping would have interfered with the sound of their voices– an arguably good problem to have.

We tromped back to the orphanage through the mud.  That night, we had an opportunity to spend some time with the older kids and Willio.  Willio served as our translator.  Earlier, our team had discussed how we wished we had more opportunities to hear the hearts of these kids, what their dreams and desires are, how we can continue to help them.  One of them wanted to be a nurse, another a pastor.  I was talking to some of the girls (trying to talk…we were teaching each other the names of various body parts in our own language) during a long spill that Willio gave to us in which he shared his vision and his heart, his frustrations.  He leveled with us.  I didn’t catch it all, so I’ll leave it up to the rest of the team to pass on all that he said, but I do remember him talking about how easy it is to look at all the nice stuff we have and to become numb to the needs of others.  “I don’t care about any of it,” he said.  He talked about the temptation to settle for nice big houses, for easy lives.

“But who will take care of the children?” he challenged us.  I went through a brief “It’s A Wonderful Life” scenario in my head– what if Willio had never been born?  I couldn’t imagine the giggles and singing that started before the sun had even come up in the sky not existing in this place, or the children he’d found eating dirt still scavenging, sleeping wherever they could find a night’s safety, or worse.

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“WHO WILL TAKE CARE OF THE CHILDREN?”

Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, to build him up. 3For Christ did not please himself, but as it is written, “The reproaches of those who reproached you fell on me.-Romans 15:2-3

That is what it boils down to.  We do God’s work if we want it done.  That’s the way He set it up, maybe to show us how merciful He feels toward us.  This is by no means a preachy get-off-your-butts blog.  That’s not why I wrote it.  Actually, kind of selfishly, I wrote it to kind of process and just be transparent about my own struggle.  I am trying to figure out what my role is in all of this.  I am a musician, how can I be used by God to help the people here?  Your mission might be just to pray for them, to pray for others who travel there to help them, to pray for children in the world in general, to go– who knows.  That is up to God to show you and up to you to be sensitive to what He shows you.  The last thing you should do is wallow in guilt and confusion.  Just do whatever you can, however small.  It may not be Haiti for you, it might be something local.  It might be an old lady you are meant to encourage, or a homeless shelter, or a number of different things.  I am still trying to sort all of that out.  But I am just seeing the sadness and the implosion of a life focused totally inward, on building its own little kingdom that all turns to dust when life is over.  So, try to figure out what it is you are meant to do.

Our life of poverty is as necessary as the work itself. Only in heaven will we see how much we owe to the poor for helping us to love God better because of them. -Mother Teresa

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01/10/10 "I'm not a fan of humidity. Honestly, more and more I'm not a fan of places that aren't home."

I actually slept Wednesday night.  We were leaving Thursday.  This time I woke up to the buzz of children’s voices, once again, before the sun was even up.  “Geez, they get crankin’ early.”  We heard them coming up the stairs to where we sleep, calling out the simplest names of ours to pronounce, particularly “Jacki!”

Akiala and I.

Waking up was bittersweet, knowing it was our last day.  I am not going to lie, a large part of me was relieved simply because I found it impossible to make sense of life there, it was all so foreign to me.  They were really sad to see us go, which made it harder.  Martha said they take it easier now when she leaves because they know she’s coming back, but that still didn’t prevent some of them from reacting with reticence and even anger as we prepared to go.  Akiala, a little girl who had taken to me, grew more and more sullen as the day went on.  It was a challenge.

Meredith and Kristi oversaw a project where the children decorated white t-shirts with paint pens.  The kids loved this project too– they love art.  They wrote their names and drew pictures on the back.  It’s incredible to see how proud they are of their work whenever they complete a project like this one.

The amazing t-shirts the kids decorated!

Our final project before leaving was to give disposable cameras to the high schoolers at the school, giving similar instructions as the drawing project– capture pictures of things that are beautiful to you, of things that give you hope.  It was a nogo on going to the school again, so we set out with most of the kids from the orphanage and some of their friends from the community.  

I wonder what we must have looked like to the residents of Ouanaminthe who watched us move through the muddy streets,  an amoeba of giddy children with cameras, many wearing custom painted t-shirts, and a few blancs sprinkled in.  Some people were angry and didn’t want us taking pictures at all.  We didn’t go inside the market– people didn’t want us taking pictures there.

One of the teachers at the school there tried to take Martha into the meat market.  The butchers got very angry when they spotted a camera.  The situation got a little crazy as children flooded into the meat market and started taking pictures.  There was some shouting in Creole.  Martha had our interpreter explain that the pictures were for a project that would help build a school, but that we could refrain from taking pictures if they wanted.  That assuaged the butchers somewhat, though no invitation to take pictures was extended.  You don’t want to anger a room full of people with meat cleavers, so we steered clear of the meat market and the market in general after that.

Kids took pictures of all kinds of things and would point out things for us to take pictures of as well– wild scraggly dogs, piles of mud and trash, groups of barely clothed children, the ground, ears and faces.  The photography project was a huge hit.  The kids loved having their very own camera.  Martha took the cameras to Chicago to be developed, and the best pictures will be put into a traveling gallery to raise money and awareness.  I love the project ideas that she came up with for this trip– how amazing is it that these kids get to raise money for their own school using their own talents, their own work?  Without hoaky fundraising catalogues?!

I haven’t outlined every little thing that we did while we were there, simply because I don’t remember it all clearly and there’s too much to tell.  That last day, Martha filmed a video to promote a marathon she’s organizing in Ouanaminthe for January 2011.  This woman’s heart for Haiti is bigger than Alaska, and you really should check out her blog, www.restorehaiti.org.

Gamanuel.

We passed out candy and raisins to the kids in the community, and just spent those last precious hours with the kids in the orphanage.

Gamanuel is a boy who had walked back the orphanage with me after the photography project.  I put my arm around him and just smiled a lot, held him close, since there wasn’t much I could say that he would understand.  I made dog and cat noises and he copied me.  I was very, very sad to say goodbye to him.  He has one of the most beautiful smiles I’ve ever seen on a human being.

As we started bringing our bags down, I heard drums.  There was a drumming/singing/dancing party going on downstairs.  We were grateful for the celebratory goodbye environment.  “Can we request a goodbye party from now on!?”  Akiala was like my shadow, holding my hand, straight-faced.  I can’t handle that, that sad expression.  I react by not reacting, and then later it all comes pouring out and I just fall apart.  I gave her a kiss and said goodbye, gave Gamanuel a kiss, wanting to reassure them that they were loved by all of us who came to see them, but more importantly by a God who never leaves.

We loaded up onto Willio’s truck and drove back to the border.  Within an hour, we were back into the relative bliss of a second world country.  Within four hours we were at a resort in the Dominican Republic for debriefing and a night of rest before getting our plane back to the States.  “Unbelievable,” we thought as we looked at the water and the sand and the tourists, “that just a few hours away is a land of struggle and poverty.”

I was grateful for the amenities I’d forgotten to appreciate, but sad for the children who wouldn’t have a chance to experience them.

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from journal entry on 01/08/10. On a plane to Miami from Puerto Plata.

QUAKE

When I finally made it back to Wilmington, away from the rest of my team, after much flying and driving and thinking, I was still struggling over what my role is and how God was working in this country.  I was processing all of this when I heard about the quake– I didn’t even know a quake had hit Haiti, but Martha had texted me and said three of the kids at the orphanage had fallen down the stairs.  “That’s random,” I thought.  Then I found out it was because they were on the stairs when the quake hit.  Thankfully the kids weren’t critically injured.  Still, please remember them in your prayers (Stevenson, Junior, and Chevette are their names).  Two of Willio’s sisters and his father were killed.  His brother is in danger.

As the death toll rises and every time I am out and public and see a new headline with a picture of a devastated Haitin on the front, or turn on the radio and hear another news report, I’m reminded of that flight when I fell apart.  I have had to reach a point of peace with God over this thing, and only you can do that.  Nobody can do it for you.  This natural disaster is horrific, but thankfully it’s causing the world to pay attention to a little Caribbean country that many people had never given much thought toward.  For this, I am grateful.  I am grateful because I feel like maybe this could spark a huge rebuilding in Haiti– physically and even spiritually for these people.  I pray that in the world’s response to their tragedy, they would be reminded that the world hasn’t forgotten them and neither has God.

As we continue to pray for these people, I would encourage you to find out if God wants you to be involved and how.  And in the meantime, check out these sites for more information on our trip.

Thanks for reading.

-Glo

more info:

read “Angels of A Lower Flight” by Susie Scott Krabacher

for more pictures, see my flickr– http://www.flickr.com/photos/46610805@N03/sets/

restorehaiti.org

tyromavin.com

cia.gov (search Haiti for facts)

Akiala and Gamanuel.