Haiti

I was in Haiti in the summer of 2000, nearly a decade ago. I had never seen, and have not seen since, such devastating poverty, although I have been to a number of other places with terrible conditions. It was something straight out of one of those commercials asking you to sponsor children in third world countries: people living in shacks thrown together from cardboard and corrugated tin, drawing drinking water out of the same stream where they bathed and animals defecated. The only animals that thrive there are the goats, because they eat garbage. It's not uncommon to see children with yellow hair above their mahogany skin, because they were too malnourished even before birth for the pigment to develop. Meanwhile, these children with their distended stomachs and huge, hungry eyes wanted to touch my hair; ironically, blond hair is supposedly lucky.

Today I am sitting at my desk, in my office that is bigger than almost every house I saw in Haiti, giving the end of my microwaved beef stew to my dog because I have the luxury of having too much food, and thinking about the earthquake, and about that country that was so hard to love but which I found myself loving anyway.

Other people are thinking about it too, I know - thinking about how things like this can happen to people who have already suffered so much. (On a side note, is it just me, or has the NY Times been talking about religion and faith an awful lot lately?) Most of the people I met in Haiti did believe that their poverty was their punishment for some sin, that the corruption and the machine guns pointed at them on the streets were a sign of God's wrath toward some vast corporate wrongdoing. I don't believe in that angry God, but the pictures of Port-au-Prince in rubble and flames help me understand why they do.

There are all sorts of organizations offering assistance, and plenty of opportunities to help. I've been keeping up with the updates on the RCA website, and my church is sending donations through Reformed Church World Service. Regardless of who you go through, please consider sharing your abundance during Haiti's time of even greater need.

Instead of a poem today, song lyrics: "Haiti" by the Arcade Fire.

Haïti, mon pays,
wounded mother I'll never see.
Ma famille set me free.
Throw my ashes into the sea.

Mes cousins jamais nés
hantent les nuits de Duvalier.
Rien n'arrete nos esprits.
Guns can't kill what soldiers can't see.

In the forest we lie hiding,
unmarked graves where flowers grow.
Hear the soldiers angry yelling,
in the river we will go.

Tous les morts-nés forment une armée,
soon we will reclaim the earth.
All the tears and all the bodies
bring about our second birth.

Haïti, never free,
n'aie pas peur de sonner l'alarme.
Tes enfants sont partis,
In those days their blood was still warm