I won’t tell you it was life-changing. It is far too easy to go back to living my normal, Westernized, previous life in South Carolina. It is much more difficult to change. In fact, I am already back to my normal routine - only to be intermittently interrupted by people asking how the mission trip went. I have not sold all of my things and I am not running to the pulpit to preach about the devastation in Haiti.
But now I have seen it - the children and mothers begging for food, the charity from hundreds of foreign countries being auctioned on the streets. I may not be changed, but I am not the same.
One of the most stunningly tragic parts of the trip was the ride from Port-au-Prince to Yvon. We left early that morning and packed into a very small bus for the ten of us and all of our luggage. As we pulled out of the Methodist guest house compound, it became obvious that I would not be going back to sleep for the four hour ride.
I was jostled by the symphony of honks and brakes and engines revving at the next intersection. I was taken by the sights and the sounds all around me. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. I was sure that the bus driver had purposely gone through a more depressed part of the city in order to “show these North Americans how good they have it.” But as we continued down the maze of streets, I realized that every street was the exact same. All the vibrant colors on the walls of the city were muted by a layer of dust.
There were huge hogs in the drainage canals which were no longer draining anything due to the amount of human and animal waste piled high within them. There was an obvious difference between the women in the streets. In Haiti, if you get pregnant you are kicked out of school. The young women who make it through school and are lucky enough to find a job have a visible sense of independence and pride - something that was very obvious in our translator Angee.
We passed half-complete construction sites from past service projects and empty promises. In many places in Haiti, people will build until they run out of money and cannot build anymore. There is no financing, no hope of asking for a loan for a new house. Many times, houses are left half-finished with long poles of rebar sticking high into the air.
As we continued, I started to understand the language of the car horns - the long drawn out of “I’m coming over” or the short burst to villagers of “don’t cross the street” or the tap-tap of “thank you” after passing. My favorite was the screeching warning to cars as we flew around sharp corners at nearly 80 miles per hour. (There are no speed limits in this part of Haiti.)
The glimpse of the ocean between the crumbling walls helped us forget where we were for a brief second. It is stunningly blue and tranquil outside of the dirt and chaos of the city. Until you see the specks of people fishing - realizing that their labor is not for pleasure but survival.
After about two hours of travel we have become accustomed to the rotting or dead animals on the side of the road. The gusts of sewage washing over you starts to be familiar. The houses became less structurally sound as we moved further and further from the city. They were made out of whatever people could buy, find, or trade - tin, mud, and palm branches.
We slowly passed by a large market that took up almost the entire street. Men reached into the open windows of the van trying to sell us bread, water, and sodas in glass bottles. Others were selling school supplies, diapers, toothpaste, and soap by the box. I felt a fire rising in my chest like heartburn as I realized that relief from foreign countries and missions were not going to people in need but instead being auctioned off to the highest bidder.
We continued down the narrow road and as I thought, “surely we will run out of island soon and drive right into the ocean,” we turned onto a dirt road toward the village of Yvon.
