Haiti

This blog was written and sent to us by a dear friend who is currently in Haiti involved with the relief efforts. She had us both in tears as we read it for the first time. You can all call her H.

The earthquake in Haiti has caused tremendous damage. Sadly, this disaster has killed and injured thousands of people, with even more being left homeless and hungry in a country where even on a good day survival is difficult.

Pray for the people of Haiti. Pray for provision, protection, and for hope during this incredible time of loss.

Isaiah 50:10
"And if you spend yourselves on behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noon day."

At this point in your lives, even those of you who are not avid consumers of news should be very familiar with turning on the TV or opening up a newspaper or magazine and seeing devastation. Wars and conflicts worldwide are documented more than they have ever been before, so it comes as no surprise that you can skim a page of photographs displaying the weak, the suffering, the dying and the dead while listening to an iPod and eating lunch. You read tragic news, but most of you are good at putting the darker side of life out of sight and mind. When it comes to Haiti and the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that has caused mass devastation, people that have any heart should find it hard to ignore.

The disaster in Haiti is yet another reminder that in many ways our suffering is miniscule in comparison to those in the poorest nation in the world. Even those of you who struggle day-to-day to pay bills and eat are in a better position to have opportunities in this life than many of the people of Haiti. The nation needs help, and it’s going to take time. Unfortunately, the death toll continues to increase. The injured need aid in a country where an effective emergency response system is nonexistent, where communication is extremely difficult. They need your prayers.

In much of Port-au-Prince, officials and relief agencies are focused on helping the tens of thousands of people in survivors' camps. But there are still many pockets of the city that have seen little aid, including the neighborhood of Fort National, one of the worst-hit districts in the capital.

There are many streets where every house has fallen. Many weeks after the disaster, people still spend their days searching for the bodies of loved ones.

One afternoon, a cluster of people gathered near a fire crackling in a pit dug into the buckled concrete of a fallen roof. A small man in a floppy hat stands guard near the blaze. "This is my mother," he tells an interpreter. "My mother is being burned here." The man says he finally found his mother's body after digging for several days in the wreckage. He burned her body where she lay, in the ruins of her kitchen. He says he burned the body of his little boy just two days before. He is still searching for the body of a nephew. This is just one man’s story in a place filled with so much human tragedy.

It is a common story from the survivors in Fort National. Some of their loved ones are buried in mass graves. Other bodies are burned, especially if they can't be fully extracted from the rubble.

People fear that the bodies will be eaten by rats or dogs, and many fear that the stench of dead bodies can cause illness. Health officials say that is not true, but many people believe it, and it adds to their anxiety and pain.

A fallen school building is thought to have buried the bodies of nearly 20 children and their teacher, but nobody knows for sure. Many people sleep in a makeshift camp at the foot of the hill, but spend their days next to their fallen houses, looking for loved ones and any possessions they can retrieve. Others take refuge in a sloping yard just a block from the top of the hill. The yard seems overflowing with a few hundred men, women and children, but someone says more than 1,000 people come here to sleep at night. He says residents in the camp are pooling what money they have and buying food at inflated prices from vendors on the street.

There is so much sadness and turmoil and yet in it all we came across a man with graying hair sitting at the upper end of the camp who has not lost his faith. His name is Max Paul, and he's one of the pastors at the Church of G-d in the Poste Marchant area at the bottom of the hill.

His eyes are swollen with fatigue and grief. His wife was killed along with six other people in his house, he says. When asked what he tells his church members when they ask why such things happen, he shakes his head. "It's the will of G-d," he says. "It's the will of G-d. If G-d allows this to happen, it is because we human beings are too wicked." Paul says his faith is stronger than ever. When asked if the disaster calls to mind the biblical story of Job, he gives an emphatic "Yes! G-d has given. G-d has taken away. May the name of the L-rd be blessed."

During the daylight hours, when people of the Fort National area are searching the debris, they don't have much time to speculate on why this happened. But when asked when they'll get a chance to mourn for their loved ones, one man replied: "We cry a lot. Every day. Every single day."

Death, devastation and despair dominate the news coming out of Port-au-Prince, but out of the chaos have also come miraculous stories of survival and hope. G-d is here and helps us to work with courage.

The General Hospital in Port-au-Prince is guarded by American soldiers with dark sunglasses and frighteningly large guns. Most of the buildings are damaged, so the patients lie outside in large white tents, makeshift wards. This is where volunteer surgeons work to save limbs, where the sick and bandaged lie, waiting to heal, and where mothers labor, their legs up in hard metal stirrups, to bring their babies into the world. Under the noontime sun, the tents are torrid. And then there is the oppressive smell of death from the collapsed nursing school, where over 100 nursing students were killed when the building fell.


The hospital, in many ways, is a place of pain and suffering, where people must learn to live with newly missing limbs, where parents sleep and eat and wait for days on end on the floor beside their children’s beds. The blue tent at the top of the hill is for those infected with tuberculosis. And there are also places for those who suffer from the other diseases that regularly plague the poor, like HIV/AIDS and typhoid fever.

Given everything, the hospital is not a place of levity, save for in the pediatric tents, where children continue to color pictures, play and laugh, unaware that because they’re sick, they should be more morose. One day, those in the tents at the top of the hill were serenaded when an unlikely cast of characters spontaneously began to perform. Dustin, an American solider originally from Arkansas, Delphonse, a Haitian man with his forearm bandaged due to an earthquake injury, and Julian, Jeff, Guercin, Gaston and Andre, who either worked at the hospital or were there to visit relatives, began to sing Akon’s Ghetto. Amongst all this sadness and tragedy there are still people willing to spread cheer; many who work endless hours a day. G-d is definitely at work here, but your continued prayers are always needed. He is an amazing G-d and I know that without Him so many of us would have crumbled in all this tragedy. I am thankful that He is my Father and my G-d. We should all be thankful.