IVP - Strangely Dim - Living for Eternity--Haiti Reflections, Part One

Not knowing where to start, I will begin recounting some of the events that occurred on the trip, but I will let this be a free flowing essay, moving without restraint to wherever my thoughts take me. Our first experience as we arrived in Haiti was its airport. No air-conditioning, a packed warehouse-like building with a tin roof. We stepped out into a busy muddy street, immediately surrounded by men desperately trying to do anything for us that could earn them some money. Offering to take our bags, to open the doors to our cars, to clean the windshields, to simply stand beside us in case they were needed for something. Little kids come up to us selling Haitian flags or simply extending their hands out while looking us in the eyes with a face of suffering and hunger. 

 

How broken must God's heart be to see His children in this condition.

We packed into two old white SUV's and began our journey, our first glance at the devastation in the city. We stopped first where a university used to be. One of the Haitian guys who would come with us for some part of the trip had been in this university on January 12, when the earthquake occurred. It was now a pile of rocks, with no signs of the six-story building that once stood there. As he began to tell us about his miraculous experience and survival story (and the not-so-fortunate ones of about 250 of his fellow students), a huge truck arrived behind us. We were told to get out of the way. It came to pick up several bodies that had recently been found. The two yellow bags that were near us were actually full of bodies. That was the shock that put my heart into motion, producing the jungle I described above. I couldn't help but stare at the workers as they figured out a way to get the bodies into the truck. My eyes were fixated on that, as my mind tried to process the story that Kent Annan was translating for our group. 

We got back into our cars, my mouth feeling almost sewed shut (as it would remain for a lot of the trip unfortunately). We continued to drive through the city and out of it. Moving up a steep mountain, where we had to get rid of one of our cars due to its faulty 4-wheel drive. I ended up walking up the rest of the way to the house where we would stay for the night. A beautiful house in my eyes. With a view of the city from a balcony, surrounded by trees, birds, dogs. The guys would sleep in tents outside. The girls in a room with two beds and a mattress. There was no running water, so we would bathe with buckets of water brought up from the nearest water source and we would flush the toilet manually pouring water into it until it all went down. A ragged experience, I thought, not knowing how much more basic of an experience we would get the next couple of nights out in the other side of town with our host families.