on the first flight to Haiti in December of 2010, I was staring out my window quietly whispering to myself, its not about you. After a very long day of travel from Hawaii, and an unexpected delay in Fort Lauderdale, our flight arrived at night into this so called dangerous nation. With all of our luggage lost for 7 days and repeated change in plans it proved to be nothing of what I had hoped for or expected. I was angry with myself for not loving it, and angry with God for sending me there with the knowledge I was going back. I fulfilled my 3 month obligation with my team before going home for a month to fundraise for the second part of my Haiti adventure. I’m not sure how I ever convinced myself to return for the school in May but thankfully God had his hand over my decision and I went.
The last 6 months have been by far the most challenging, ridiculous, and rewarding months of my life.
I realize there is probably no series of words that can effectively explain what it is like to live in a house with 80 people, or share a bathroom with 16 girls. What day to day life with a Haitian family with 2 children is like. Or even the emotion of finding nests of spiders hiding in your clothes. But considering most people don’t know, I will try my best.
Lets start at the beginning. If you walked through our gate you would probably find 5-10 Haitian children from the tent city sitting and yelling out various names in the house. If it was at the end of the school, you would see them stealing our shoe laces to make bracelets that they later sold back to us. If you walked over to the gazebo, you might find a few random mattresses laying on the ground, some people talking, and then you would see our pool. Our lovely pool without a pump, filled with algae and growing many insects and baby frogs, was the reason we could save so much money on water. Instead of flushing our toilets the regular way, we utilized the water in our yard just going to waste and hauled buckets to the bathrooms. After walking past that pool (that people jumped in on more than one occasion) you will see our kitchen, wash buckets and a few rooms tucked behind for our married couples. The front door of our house, never closed, is surrounded by dozens of shoes all mismatched sprawled out over the entrance. Downstairs we have 3 couches that somehow started to be a nesting ground for mosquito's, and yet there would probably be a bunch of people sitting on them. The boys rooms are downstairs, but I don’t think any of them sleep in them. Most of them slept in the gazebo or on the roof. If you continued upstairs you would walk right into our classroom, 60-70 chairs either piled up, or set out for class. The girls rooms are also upstairs, but as I said before, not many of them really slept there. Most girls brought out there mattresses into the classroom at night. For a while I left my bed with my mosquito net I just couldn’t let go of, but after outreach I joined all the other girls in the classroom. Every morning breakfast tried to be at 7, and the staff met in the gazebo at 7:30. Class more often then not started right after 8. We spent the morning listening to lectures and the afternoons learning various things. But it was the night time that you really would have to see. 80 people, half international, half Haitian, all worshiping God together was unlike anything I have ever heard. By the end of the 3 months we all knew each others languages to sing Creole and English songs together.
At the end of those months, we divided up into teams to go out into the nations. We had Haitian missionaries in Brazil, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, and Benin west Africa. But more than anything we had Haiti walking out the prophesy that Haiti will be a blessing to the nations, not a curse. When people think Haiti, they think earthquake, they don’t think 1 year old girl from cite sole, the poorest place in the Western Hemisphere going to the Amazon in Brazil to minister to the indigenous people. We got to be a part of the restoration of a nation that has been held captive by the assumptions of richer countries that won’t bother to do anything but send millions of dollars that sit in containers. We shared money we shared food and we shared blessings. We brought in knowledge to people who are thirsty for something more than waiting on a hand out. We came together and trusted that God has a plan for Haiti far greater than anything we could imagine. Literally we put our faith to the test and leaped into His arms believing that He asked us to jump and He will catch us.
Living in that house, sending out missionaries, re-affirming a hope in Haiti are all things we were apart of, but none of those things could have been done without the grace of God. It would be foolish to think that we had any part of this more than just saying yes God you are big, and yes God we will go. It’s incomprehensible that that many people lived together like that and we are all sane, and still love each other. God broke down our walls and rebuilt our foundation in Him. He gave us the privilege to walk out in the love that He so generously shows us.
God has given me the love that he has for Haiti and I wont let go of that. Leaving yesterday was the more difficult thing of that entire 8 months. I can’t explain what it feels like to love people like that. I cried for them, I cried for the homes they had to go back to and mostly I just cried because I was sad. It felt like I had just invested my heart into something that could no longer continue. The truth is that I am only a very tiny part of the change of Haiti and although I love it very much, it’s not my time right now to be there. And as I sat on the plane leaving Haiti last night, I stared out my window and had to repeat to myself, its not about you.
