The flight from Miami to Port-Au-Prince, Haiti is less than 2 hours. Yet within that short amount of time, one crosses into a different world. A world at polar opposites from the world in which I know. Despite talk of recession, America is still one of the richest and powerful nations on the planet. Yet, just a short 2 hours away, Haiti sits as the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.
I stepped off the plane in Haiti with 300 other people: American relief workers, church groups, and the rich Haitian elite. All 300 of us were tossed into a metal warehouse in the 110 degree humidity cramming our way through customs and scrambling for our luggage. A bus was outside waiting for us, but it sat about 200 yards down the main Haitian gravel highway. It is quite an event to push a luggage cart over a gravel road, with hundreds of Haitians begging for food and money and trying to carry your bags for you, in desperate hopes that you might give them a dollar.
The bus ride from Port-Au-Prince is a short 35 miles, yet somehow it takes close to 2 hours to traverse the pot-holes and the masses of people filling the streets. I had been to Haiti before the earthquake, and I couldn’t imagine how Haiti could get any worse. I didn’t know what to expect. On the drive, I didn’t see any destroyed buildings; didn’t see anything that I had seen on CNN. But what I did see broke my heart: thousands of tents made of scrap wood and blue tarps, now housing nearly 500,000 people. You’d be driving and all of a sudden come across a “tent-city”.
Each tent-city housed thousands of Haitians who were displaced after the earthquake as they fled the destruction in Port-Au-Prince. I couldn’t even count on my fingers and toes how many “tent-cities” I saw. Imagine your entire family living in a make-shift tent. What if my family had to sleep on the rocky soil, inside a tarp, in the blazing heat that encapsulates Haiti year-round? That is no way to live; it’s inhumane, really. But what else can they do? And, what happens when the first storm comes through, as it surely will within the next few months? And heaven forbid, what happens to those tent-cities during the first hurricane? Devastation, again.
As we almost reached the compound, we passed a huge cross on the hillside, signifying the burial of hundreds of thousands of bodies in a mass grave. You can see the piles of dirt which cover thousands of innocent people, who’s bodies were thrown into a dump-truck and emptied into a huge hole in the ground. Bodies treated as rubble, as garbage. Imagine, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, and close friends, just thrown into a hole like a piece of garbage.
As the sun was setting, we got closer to our tiny village called Guiton, where our mission compound sits. Our Haitian friends who picked us up from the airport told us that we had to take a different road to get there. Apparently, 3 days before, there was a man murdered along the normal road we drive, about 2 miles from our compound. So they didn’t want a bus load of “rich, white, Americans” driving through there at night. Needless to say, it was a little difficult to close my eyes and fall asleep that first night, knowing the violence that has escalated since the earthquake.
-Tim
