Haiti, a tropic country roughly a two-hour flight from Miami, is known for its poverty, political instability, and massive deforestation. Malaria, dengue fever, typhoid fever and parasitical infections are just a few of the health concerns I would face upon setting foot in the once beautiful Caribbean island.
Despite the rampant poverty and shocking rape of the landscape, beauty still clings precariously on in small glimpses here and there. The ocean, polluted in places and used as a waste refuge in others, still laps crystal clear on pebble beaches behind the shanties and broken-down cars. The mountains strive valiantly to cover their naked clay with bits of green foliage. As you wind through the pothole-ridden streets of the city into the mountains, the Caribbean sun kisses all it touches with warmth and light.
This will be my second trip to Haiti, having first experienced the troubled island in 2005. I traveled with the NPO organization RainCatchers, whose primary goal is providing clean drinking water for the people of Haiti.
As shocking and alien as the landscape can be, it is always the people of Haiti, in the midst of their unbelievable poverty, who wrench my heart. Driving through the streets I would see children, naked, lying in heaps of raw sewage with pigs three times their size milling about them. An old woman struggled to carry a basket on her head, her body bent and broken from years of hard labor. I saw an old blind man on his doorstep, his arms outstretched, waiting, waiting.
I wish I could close my eyes but I can’t. It's too late now. I've seen how they live and how they die. And just as my eyes stared transfixed that day on the bus in Port au Prince, I can't turn my mind away from it now.
My first trip to Haiti came swift on the heels of my father's sudden death and the end of a three-year relationship. So to be bombarded with such loss and suffering within a season was almost more than I could bear. I confess to my shame my first reaction when presented with such suffering, both in my life and in the world around me, was to look at God and ask “why?” I just couldn't grasp how a loving and just God resonated with a world full of suffering.
It was not until the last day of this year's trip to Haiti that I heard verbalized what I somehow knew all along. Teresa Murphy, a resident doctor and dentist in Seguin, Haiti, told me this after my devotion on our final night in Haiti: "When we see suffering all around us, we must resist the temptation to shake our fist at God, or doubt His reality or love. Instead we must look to ourselves and ask God: What can we do? Use us to end this suffering."
So that is what I've tried my best to do since I've returned. I know there will always be suffering as long as we live in a fallen world, but if we as Christians respond to the suffering as God would, I think a drastic change would occur in this world. If we answer the plights of others, without judgment, without reserve, but with compassion, with open hearts and with willing hands, I truly believe suffering due to hunger, malnourishment, disease and poverty would cease to exist in this world.
I know this is an almost childishly simple concept, but I still think it's something I need to exercise more in my day-to-day life. Poverty and suffering are around us everywhere, not just in third-world countries. There is poverty in our own hometowns, believe it or not. So for me these days, I’m resisting the urge to become overwhelmed when presented with suffering and loss, and simply looking to God and asking Him to use me.
~Kimberly Hall
Kimberly Hall has traveled to Haiti with RainCatchers since 2005.
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