The Children of Haiti are Full of Love

Day #2. We all got up around 4am (it was daylight savings so we gained one hour and we needed it!), to get to the airport by 5:30am. It was very busy at the airport, but we all got checked in and through security on time. The flight from Ft. Lauderdale to Port-au-Prince is only 90 minutes long!! Such a short trip from one of the poorest countries in the world, it is amazing and hard to comprehend. As we got off the plane we were met by 5 men that were playing Haitian music to welcome the people that had arrived from the US. There was a hat to collect money. For a quick second, I actually thought I was at a paradise Caribbean island and we were headed to the beaches for 6 days of sun and fun.
As we got our bags, Patricia Curtis (her and her husband help run the mission) met us and helped us get our bags organized. It was not too much after we left the airport we were hit with the reality that we were back in Haiti and the need was so great that it is hard to get your arms around. There were kids just outside the airport that were asking for us to respond to them and you could see the need of a country that had been through so much. As we jumped into two trucks and drove to the mission who (it is an hour drive from the airport), many people got their first glimpse of the poverty of Haiti.
We drove by many tent cities that were still being utilized eleven months after the earthquake. There is still an estimated 1.5 million still living in tents. The smells that you get when passing these communities is very hard to explain, there is not restrooms, no sewers, no electricity, nothing but tents made out sticks and canvas tops. I think that many of our team had a hard time comprehending the smells, sights and sounds. The other thing that we got to see was some of the impacts from the earthquake. The mission is approximately 50 miles from the epicenter of the earthquake, but the damage was still very visible in homes and buildings that had been knocked down and damaged by the shaking of the ground.
We unloaded our bags and got situated in our rooms and then had some lunch. Patricia talked to the group and filled us in on the do’s and don’ts and she also shared her heart with all the things that they deal with each and every day. She shared her heart on how the need was so great and also how God had provided for them right after the earthquake when the entire country was shut down and no one knew what was going to happen. Patricia took us for a tour of the grounds and showed us the school, medical facility, church, the cross on the top of the hill and other buildings to help the community.
After we were done checking out the mission, we got to go out to the village. This was an unbelievable experience of children, young and old coming up to all of us, holding our hands, having us lift them up and walking with us. Each child would grab a person and cling on to them. When new kids would see us, they would yell “Blan”, which in Creole means white. These children that have nothing, held on to us like we were their best friends. The love that they showed to our group is indescribable. Many of the children were either naked or had a shirt on with no pants. Some of the children have an orange tint to their hair which means that they are not getting the right nutrition. These same kids that have nothing, were showing us a love that is hard to believe based on the conditions that we were seeing.
After we toured the village, a group of us played basketball and Blake, Christian, Lily, and Hannah played soccer with a group of younger boys from the village. The mission built a large soccer field for the children. All the Haitian kids had flip flops or Crocs to play in, no one had tennis shoes. After the sporting activity we all ate dinner and Patricia went through the week’s schedule of building benches, visiting orphanages, feedings, painting, hiking up to see the mountain families and doing a vacation bible school.
As we were eating dinner, a young missionary that is helping out the mission, Carrie Miller, came in a told us a story that one of the young men that we just got to know (Marck), had a cousin that just died that night. His cousin was just 21 years old and was sick and died. Marck’s cousin lived up in the mountains and had gone to the mission’s doctor to get help a few days before and then went back up to his village in the mountain, but it was too late, he was too sick. This is something that the people of Haiti are very used to and in some cases even expect. The average life expectance is only in the 50’s.
A lot of people talked and shared with each other. We had a long day, and had seen so much in one day that many were tired and went to bed.