had an experience that you wanted to share, even tell the world about, but you just couldn't write it out? Every time you tried the words would fall all over themselves and go down without the grab and clarity that you felt should be there.
You could do a travelogue. That would be easy. But this experience is so overwhelming, the emotions so raw, and the images so abundant that an orderly flow of words cannot convey them. It's not the place we went to, although that place is pretty bad. It's not the poverty or the smells or the bad roads. It is the children of course. They compel you to tell. To cry out for them.
It's their faces that stick with you. When you meet them and just pay a little attention to them (oh they so love just a little attention), and you know where they came from, and its such a wonder that we can provide a safe house for them and adults to love and care for them, and you can't talk to them cause you don't know their language and they don't know yours, but you see their hope and their love for you and you don't ever want them to go back to the alleys and filthy hovels and abusive situations, and you want them to eat every day, more the once a day, and you don't want them to be sold, you'll do anything to keep them from being sold, and you commit with all your heart to provide for them and educate them and buy them shoes' and keep a roof over their heads and pillows under their heads, and a bed, just a clean bed, and you see so many others who don't have anyone to care for them and abandoned babies on the trash heaps... one must do more....
Half of the population of Haiti is under fifteen years old. Half of the population of Haiti doesn't eat on any given day. Half of the children don't get to go to school every day, and when they go most don't have books or pencils or teachers who are eating every day....
Along the ravines of Port au Prince the poor have made their homes. Building up the mountainsides. In the ravines the garbage piles up and the pigs root and the people do their laundry. The neighborhoods have only people. No electricity or running water. Alleyways teeming with people... orphans... goats... voodoo... Cock fighting... drunkenness... cooking... eating... battery powered televisions gathering a crowd... a little pool of television light... commerce of all kinds but small... the life of the many rooms bursting out into the passage ways.
One ravine neighborhood has a house for orphan children and abandoned children. It's called My Father's House. The children at My Father's House eat every day. It's a wonder! A God expression in the midst of crushing poverty. The Good News of Jesus Christ being lived out and preached to the poor. I am undone with Jesus-love for the children and with gratitude and awe at the goodness of God. But My Father's House is so small....
Nine million people, half of them children, enduring, living with suffering, amazing in their humor and their patience. Haiti calls one back. More than any place I have been, and I have seen many hard places, Haiti stays in your heart and her many children silently beg you to return. Haiti is far too close for me not to return.
