Haiti, With Love

My Dear Friends,

Some of you have written me today already, on the anniversary of the devastating earthquake in Haiti. I am greatly humbled by your reaching out to me. It feels funny to be the one among my friends who is the holder of that tragedy in Haiti, but I am so honored to hold that place with you. And it is an enormous comfort to me that you care enough for me to not only remember the day…but to send me your love as well.

For those of you who do not know, and I have new friends who do not know me well yet (there is time), I spent a little over three months at the end of 2011 in Haiti, helping an NGO down there build their communications practice. We did much together, but leaving the country was still gut-wrenching because there is still so more much I could have done, and wanted to do. But then, there always will be more to do, and my family needs me too. I hurt today thinking about the lives in Haiti that I still so badly want to work with to bring their country around. The more you know about the country and its struggles the more you come to respect their strength, resilience and desire to thrive against so many challenges. Everything new thing I learned about their history opened up spidering networks of additional information that led to an infinite number of additional questions. But the thing I know with a confidence you can only feel after working with the people in that country, is that it is not only possible that the country can return to self-sustainability and strength…it is the likely outcome. You can’t spend time with them and think otherwise. They will return to their strength, stronger than before the earthquake.

The day I arrived, I was taken on a tour of the camp. Beth Milbourne walked me through our organization’s IDP camp (internally displaced persons camp) and watching her was amazing. She strolled through with a comfort I thought I would never feel (I very soon did though) and she greeted people she had come to know (as I came to do also). As we were leaving the MASH unit style hospital at the top of the camp, the make shift hospital she had directed and worked in for well over a year, a tap tap pulled up with men hanging off the edges of it. The screams of a woman in the back of the public transport made it clear immediately why the men were hanging off the sides. She was in active labor. She was too far along to move her the twenty feet to the maternity part of the hospital, so the doctor on duty climbed into the back of the car and delivered the baby there. Beth beamed as she carried the new born girl from the car to the tent to be cleaned up.  The baby wailed, as they always do.

I had been there just a few hours at that point and I remember thinking to myself that I wanted this wailing baby to have different opportunities than her parents have. I wanted her to become an adult in a world that she could be strong in. This new life was not broken, had not seen tragedy, did not yet have her limitations ingrained on her thinking. I think about that little girl all the time. I am thinking of her today.

I don’t expect any of you to hold a love for Haiti like I do in my heart. I don’t expect you to understand my confidence in the people of that country, given the massive messaging we get this in this country on a regular basis about the hopelessness of their circumstance. But I do hope, because you know me and love me, that today you will open just a tiny part of your heart to the possibility that something beautiful and strong can grow there. Because Haiti needs us to believe in them. They need us to ignore the data and naysayers and see with them what is possible and probable, if they are given just enough to stabilize the ground they stand on.

This afternoon at 4:53pm, I will be stopping everything and dropping into prayer for them. I would be so honored if you would join me.

Much love,

Kim