It’s the middle of summer. For Haiti H2O, this means we’re busily preparing our next Short-Term Mission (STM) teams to travel to Haiti, from July 18^th thru August 8^th. Vaccinations, passport applications, cross-cultural and language training, prayer and scripture study – it’s all part of getting ready for an experience that transforms the lives of everyone involved. And yet, ever since we first began leading these trips in 1997, no two trips have been the same. (follow our trip on Facebook.)

Want to join in, be part of such an amazing experience? Check it out: http://haitih2o.org/trips/planning-a-trip

According to the UN, only about half of the people in Haiti have easy access to clean water sources, without which they must rely on dirty water for everyday use and expose themselves to water-borne diseases. So, among other projects this summer, we’re working with community leaders in Bassin Caiman to develop plans for water and sanitation systems. We’re of course delighted to help community members enjoy clean water and become less vulnerable to serious illness; we’ve begun referring to our next team as the Haiti H2O Team Bèl Dio (Beautiful Water). Our next monthly update will let you know how this initiative goes!

STM W/ H2O

“It is one thing to read about statistics, and it is another when they’re lying in your arms.” -  Haiti H20 STM participant
LEARN MORE ABOUT HAITI

You may have seen the recent article by journalist John Seabrook about his experience adopting his daughter from Haiti just after the January earthquake.  He provides a thorough reflection on international adoption and how recent events have affected adoption and orphans in Haiti. Also, several individuals and agencies in Pittsburgh were major advocates for adopting Haitian orphans.

(“The Last Babylift: Adopting a child in Haiti” by John Seabrook http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/05/10/100510fa_fact_seabrook )

(See also these articles in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette:

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10015/1028425-455.stm

and

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10055/1038068-455.stm)

GET INVOLVED

Remember, every donation to Haiti H2O is critical to the communities we serve.

• $40 enables a child to attend school, by providing her with books, supplies and a uniform
• $80 feeds a child lunch for an entire school year
• $400 supports a teacher’s salary for one school year
• $800 trains a local student to be a teacher

To donate online, go to http://haitih2o.org/ and click on the “Donate now” button, or mail donations to the following address:

Haiti H2O

1110 Portland Street

Pittsburgh, PA 15206

“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

For more on Haiti H20: http://haitih2o.org or follow us on Facebook.

This was my first time in Haiti since the earthquake. We walked off the plane–not down the steps and across the blazing hot tarmac as on past trips, before the airport was destroyed by the earthquake, but through a jetway, inside an air conditioned building and down the escalator! We were then quickly rerouted to a crowded little van that shuttled us to a nearby hanger, which served as the baggage claim and customs area. We waited, watched and sweated. Garage doors rolled part way up and luggage was scooted under piece by piece.

The broken and fallen buildings were like a bread crumb trail, winding through the streets of Port au Prince and leading to the epicenter at Leogane. Watching the coverage on television, I could imagine that the images were a series of disconnected shots strung together to emphasize the destruction. Driving through the actual streets was much more overwhelming. Yet there were still whole buildings interspersed among the fallen, and life had returned to the sidewalk markets as well. Ladies had set up their little wooden tables piled high with household items for sale. On the ground were little pyramids of oranges, mangos and potatoes. People walked everywhere. Two men cutting a tire apart with a kitchen knife to make gaskets yelled at me for taking their picture. They said I’d make money off the picture and they wanted to be paid. If a picture is worth a thousand bucks, I later thought to myself, I’d pay off Haiti’s odious debt tomorrow.

It was almost as if when you squinted your eyes, it was just another day downtown. But then we’d drive by one of the tent cities that had mushroomed into existence wherever there was an open flat space. Then, even if you squeezed your eyes closed, you couldn’t erase the image emblazoned on your retina. Conditions are bad and they are only going to get worse during the rainy season .

The quake was centered just 15 miles outside of Port au Prince, however the reverberations are still being felt throughout the whole country. Not only was PAP the capital of the country, it was the main artery, everything that came into the country flowed through its port. PAP was the destination of all who had any hopes of higher education, a professional career, or even just a job waiting tables, pumping gas or working in one of the few remaining factories, anything to get beyond subsistence living.

The community of Baissin Caiman is about 100 miles west of PAP. We talked to several people who literally felt the ground tremble, but mercifully the church, school, bread oven and outhouse, which we had helped construct, stood firm. Their economy, however, was shaken. The main occupation of the people in this community of about 7,000 people is to make charcoal, which is sold in the city. After the earthquake, the trucks that came to fill up on charcoal diminished. The engine of Port au Prince had sputtered, and with everyone concentrating on rescue and recovery the demand decreased. Times that were lean before January 12 have become even tighter for rural Haitians.

As we walked around the community, Pastor Celonde explained that they had received much more damage from the deluge of rain that caused flooding the previous week. We talked to Sainmillia who told us that th

e rain had stripped the clay stucco, leaving exposed woven thatch for the entire wall of her 13-foot by 18-foot hut. The hut doesn’t have a foundation, so water flowed right through her house, smoothing out the clay floor. As I looked up, I saw a termite nest about two feet in diameter built into the thatch roof. “How can people live like this?” This refrain grows louder in my mind with each new sight.

In Les Cayes, Pastor Paul Touloute, another one of our partners, described the affects the earthquake has had on the South, and on his ministry in particular. “Ministering in Haiti has always been a challenge,” he says, “and many people will go to the Pastor for family problems, house problems, health problems, school problems—all kinds of things, and they expect the Pastor to meet all of their needs. Since we have so little resources, it has always been a challenge. What the earthquake has done, it has just made matters worse.”

Our group surveyed a soccer field in Les Cayes, which was home to about 80 tents, all of them filled by people who had left Port au Prince in droves in hopes of reaching some medical attention, which wasn’t easily available in Port au Prince. The flooding then drove them inside Pastor Paul’s church.

Pastor Paul notes that local families have also had to take in many more people – relatives and others fleeing PAP – than their homes are built to handle. “They have to crunch themselves up to accommodate all these people who are from PAP. And since they came with nothing, [the pastor] has to provide food, clothing, all kinds of things.”

“And this is not the worst,” he adds. “Some of them may be in hospitals here, Les Cayes, in City Lumiere, and in Bon Fin. And since they have no one to provide for them, their family has the obligation to borrow money, to do whatever is possible to provide for these people. And when this happens with my parishioners, what do they do? They come to the Pastor. So it has put us, in the church leadership, in a very awkward situation.”

Fortunately, Pastor Celonde and Pastor Paul and other local leaders continue to serve, even if with limited material resources. They’re the ones with the natural capacity to lead here, with the community roots and connections necessary for addressing peoples’ needs. I’m reminded again that as a partner, Haiti H20’s role isn’t to lead these communities, but to come alongside these local leaders and support their work.

“Thank goodness,” Pastor Paul adds, “most of the time we have been able to help. Most of the time we cannot meet the financial, the economic problems, but we can talk to the person and help them see things from a different perspective.”

The immediacy has died down. The fervent fever pitch has subsided. The situation in Haiti isn’t any less severe; it’s just that daily responsibilities crowded their way back into our lives. I had to return to work. The kids needed to finish homework, go to guitar lessons and pack lunches for school.

Then the snowstorm hit. Our neighborhood banded together. We dug out cars, and dropped in chairs. School was cancelled. The kids dug tunnels and we went sledding at the local hill, piling six kids on a single truck inner tube. Inside the house, it was hot chocolate, Wii, coloring, Uno and Sorry.

But the misery in Haiti never leaves my mind. It’s like a sensitive tooth. I try to eat ice cream without it touching that back molar, but I can’t. I cannot ignore the suffering of so many in Haiti – where life was so hard even before the quake.

The novelty of the snow has worn off, the kids have to return to school, the stuff I put on hold is piling up. But all I want to do is turn everything else off and just read about Haiti. Not the articles circulating about how to rebuild or who is to blame. Not scrolling updates or intermittent tweets on my iPhone. But a book that gives me depth, real stories about Haiti. Stories that will remind me of my own experiences there.

I miss Haitian food, pica lese, the spicy shredded cabbage and carrots you pile onto fried plantains. I want to hear again the drip of rain on corrugated tin, feel the absolute fatigue of trying to hold up my end of a conversation in creole. And yet, deep down, I know that I will always be an outsider. And there is more than skin color and language that separate me from the Haitians I know.

I’ve been frustrated by the impossibility of contacting our Haitian friends, by not knowing how well they’re coping with this crisis. News trickles in like water dripping from the icicles growing from the box gutters of our Pittsburgh home. So we have few answers for friends and supporters here who want to know what’s happening.

I’m frustrated with not being there. Like so many other who’ve been touched by events unfolding on the TV, I want to do something. I know at this point I can gather resources to bring with our summer teams, spread the word for the need to be involved long term, and build up a community here to help the Haitians we know.

What an irony it is, our disgust at the city’s lack of a response to the snow, to the need for clear roads. There is no 911 in Haiti – or even a 311 line, like here Pittsburgh. And those mounds of concrete and rubble will not melt in a month.

Here, snowbound, we stay inside and sip hot chocolate. Haitians are sleeping outside, under sheets tied to trees. We’ve run to the store to buy milk and bread. I read of doctors who, lacking anesthesia, ran out to a hardware store and bought saws for amputations.

Sometimes the context of our lives overlaps with the lives of others, and this is where we make contact. When you know your neighbor, you want to help. A friend once told me “when it gets personal, it gets compassionate.”

I would ask him in Creole, “Kisa sa ye,” which means, “What is this?”

“Gwo rouche,” he would respond: “big rock.” And then ask “An anglais?”

“Big rock.”

I learned the name for everything I could point at. It was this week that I also started learning Haitian proverbs — the oral wisdom that has been passed down since the days of slavery.

“Mes anpil, shy pa lou.”

“Many hands make the work light”

I thought we had a very successful week. We put up 1,000 cement blocks for the first three-room school building in that community. We Americans like to do things, and we were certainly doing things. Pearl Jam captures this spirit of doing in their latest song, “The Fixer”:

When something’s dark, let me shed a little light on it

When something’s cold, let me put a little fire on it

If something’s old, I wanna put a bit of shine on it

When something’s gone, I wanna fight to get it back again

Later in the week, we met the widow who lived right across from the new school building. Through our interpreters, she told us how she and a few other people had met for years each Sunday under the shade of the tree where we all were sitting. These older members of the community were too worn from a life of hard work and heat to walk the five miles to a neighboring church. So they met together, sang and prayed that some day there would be a church right here in this community.

I can remember my ego deflating, in that instant, like the soccer ball we’d kicked into a thorn bush earlier that day. I thought I’d organized the group and initiated this new project for these people in this poor and forgotten country. But as we sat there listening to the history of this area, I thought, “I am just a tool.”

God was already present in Baissin Caimman. I was just one of the many many people – one of the many tools in this grand project – able to join in the work of establishing a church, a school and a clean water source. But this was also liberating. All my naïve notions of fixing this poor country were aligned with what was already happening.

I know that it is the same God who is working in our lives and the lives of the Haitians. He is the God who has been working to redeem his people. Being orientated with that truth has helped my perspective and built a foundation for us to come along side and work together with the people in that community.

“See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland.” (Isaiah 43:19)

Our organization, Haiti H20, is sending down funds to our Haitian partners who are on the front lines of the increasing need in Haiti. They are in positions of leadership within their communities and able to direct food and water to families and individuals who are being impacted by the earthquake. This church has $1,000 left over from last year’s budget, and even though they need a new roof and face the ongoing needs and challenges of their community, they want to reach out and support the people of Haiti.

In the shadow of millions being raised by national organizations, this may not seem like much. Often, it is our perception of what we don’t have that informs our understanding of wealth. I have heard experts say that for 20 billion dollars, we would be able to provide impoverished people around the world with nutrition, clean water and basic healthcare. Ironically, this is the amount Americans spend on ice-cream per year.

If 92% of the world does not have a car, then if we have a car, we are perceived at least by them as being rich. It doesn’t matter what the condition of the car or the make; if a car sits in front of my house, I am one of the lucky 8% who owns one.

Do I have clean water? RICH! Approximately 800 million people went without food yesterday,and around 300 million of them were children. Do I have food in my home? RICH! If we have WIC to assist with food, RICH! If we have food stamps, RICH! If we have insurance for our homes, RICH! If we have access to health care, RICH! If we have free education for our children…and the list goes on and on.

Here in this church is a community scarred by the loss of several of its own youth, shot dead in gang violence. I experience a community who, by the standards of others, would be considered an impoverished and ghettoed area of Pittsburgh. And yet I discover a community rich in spirit, generosity and love, a congregation bound together by their story who yearn to share what little they have with those who have even less.

I am very grateful for the Hollywood stars and their efforts to organize telethons for Haiti. But after experiencing the generosity of this tattered and torn Pittsburgh community who gave from out of their poverty, I emerge hopeful and encouraged with a new resolve for responding to Haiti.

What I didn’t see were the children and women impacted. I didn’t see the families in pain and chaos from the devastation of lost relationships and hopes. There was a disconnect, an interruption of the backstory to what I was watching on my television screen.

What brought this to mind was my recent scanning of the Internet for new videos and coverage of the earthquakes in Haiti. I see the masses wandering and looking for help. I can even view the stories of the lives impacted. I don’t just see the ruin of buildings; I can hear and view the stories of brokenness of the Haitians on my 17-inch Mac.

But the disconnect is back. Beer, pick-up trucks, cheerleaders, stuffed burritos, Whoppers, Viagra, 4th down, what was Farv thinking! mmmm dollar menu and McD’s, more tough trucks (that they could really use to haul all that rubble in Port-au-Prince)…and “Oh, there it is!”

Text 10 bucks to Haiti. Text American Red Cross. Mission accomplished. Now back to the game.

How to keep this on the front-burner after all the lights shut down and CNN takes leave will be a challenge for many who are interested in relief to Haiti right now. It seems that the best I can do is not to “add” Haiti to the disconnected universe I live in, but rather to cut out the peripheral fluff that secretly whispers sweet nothings into my ear.

Thank you to all who have contributed to the Haiti H2O Earthquake Response Fund. We are preparing a small team who will be leaving for Haiti as soon as the immediate disaster relief has been organized and we can be helpful.

While we are eager to go, our partners on the ground are responding and serving those in need. We have good news from Pastor Celon that his children who were studying at schools of higher education in Port au Prince (PAP) are alive and have returned home.

Our partner Jules Fresnal was in PAP during the earthquake; his home was destroyed, but his immediate family is alive. He remained in PAP until yesterday in an effort to bury some extended family members and to care for their children. He is now in Aquin helping to care for the displaced people from PAP.

We are continuing to raise funds for earthquake response. With your help, we hope to send in our team with plenty of supplies and money so they can empower our partners to continue serving. In the future, we will be accepting donated goods, but for now the best help is a financial contribution.

Thank you again for spreading the word about the needs in Haiti and for your help in the recovery effort.

We have created a Facebook fan page so that we can get news out more effectively. You can become a fan at Haiti H2O Fan. We also have a twitter account @Haitih2o.

Please pray for relief groups as they respond with immediate help, and for groups like Haiti H2O which are committed to a longer-term response to this devastation.  If you would like to support this effort, please contribute our through our web page: http://haitih2o.org/. Thank you.

Have you ever seen the movie Jurassic Park? There’s a scene where Malcolm, the brilliant mathematician who specializes in chaos theory, reacts in horror as he is shown the dinosaurs for the theme park.

“Don’t you see the danger, John, inherent in what you’re doing here?” he asks. “You stood on the shoulders of giants to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you knew what you had, you patented it, packaged it, slapped it on a plastic lunch box, and now you want to sell it.”

Direction is everything, distance is secondary.

We just returned home from Haiti. We certainly covered a lot of distance over the past six days, but I am more encouraged than ever by the direction Haiti H2O is facing.

We have strengthened our ties with the Haitian communities in which we serve. By partnering with and depending on local communities through the leadership of their churches, we see how lasting change can happen. As we visited Bassin Caiman and St. Martin, folks asked us about our families, about churches who have visited in the past, about Luther and Carol Hansley (the missionaries who first introduced us to Haiti) and the Bradbury family (our board president who spent six weeks in Haiti with his family this past summer).

As we slowed down, sat and drank cups of coffee together, we talked about those who have gone before us. And I was reminded of that scene in Jurassic Park.

We are connected by a rich tapestry of people, experiences and a loving God who cares about justice, mercy and right relationships (Micah 6:8). Our trips to Haiti are an integral piece of giving these people a hand up and not a hand out.

In addition to the communities we are presently working with, we visited two new areas. The HCDF (Haitian Christian Development Fund) is located in Fond-des-Blancs, and a 26 year ministry of Jean and Joy Thomas, who worked with John Perkins and The Voice of Calvary. We talked not only about water, forestry and building projects, but about the quality of education once the schools were erected. In Haiti, the default method of teaching is rote memorization. We learned how they trained their teachers to create a new method which encourages independent thinking. For Haiti to dig itself out of the present economic and political abyss, they will need a generation of new thinkers and activism to lead the way.

We visited Plain Matin, a new community we are considering working with. Plain Matin is about two hours north of Les Cayes on very rough road. We saw tell-tale signs of malnutrition, bloated bellies and a red tint to the children’s hair. It is a definite area of need where the pastor receives no salary from the congregation. As we sat in his house talking, we asked about the coffin sitting in the corner. He replied, to our relief, that he makes ends meet by carpentry and was hoping to sell it.

There is so much physical need in Haiti, but the hope of the people that we have been working with for the last 12 years strengthens my own faith in the God who has the hairs on all of our heads numbered (Matthew 10:30).

The work we are doing will take time, and will not be flashy, but if God is in it, we are confident that it will succeed. Thank you for your support as we continue down the path God has set before us