Danger Dan in the DR: June 2010

These are my observations and forthcoming reflections after my trip to Haiti with the staff of Mission Emanuel during my stay in the Dominican Republic. We went to Haiti in order to deliver 3000 bottles of water from Mission Emanuel’s water treatment facility in Santo Domingo, along with a variety of food and medical supplies. The supplies went immediately to assist Misión Rescate, a partner with Mission Emanuel which runs a medical clinic, food distribution program, and general relief effort (basically whatever they can give to and do for the Haitians) in Port-au-Prince across from the presidential palace. Sixteen of us rode there in a bus, the back stuffed with supplies so that we all fit very snugly in the front few rows of seats for the nine hours it took to get there. We left Santo Domingo at 4:00am, and in a smaller, faster vehicle it might have taken 6 or 7 hours with God’s mercy and not much traffic. However, with border security/chaos (which actually went really smoothly, considering), crazy traffic, bad roads, and the many large (literal) speed bumps along the way, we finally arrived at our destination at 1:00pm. We unloaded our cargo, met the people who ran the mission and toured its pretty minimal facilities (a large tent for the distribution, and the medical clinic), then packed and handed out food bags to those who came to the medical clinic. Two and a half hours later we were back on the road in a much roomier bus, to arrive back at our hotel and guiltily soft beds at 11:30pm (18 hours of driving). What a day! We’re still processing what we saw.

I should preface my observations and reflections by pointing out that I realize they are severely limited. All I really know is mainly what I saw out of the window a bus and inside the compound where Misión Rescate is, and that isn’t much. It was only one day, I didn’t talk to basically any of the people living there, and I didn’t see nearly everything. But just scratching the surface of this country is almost more than anyone can swallow at once.

Observations and Exposure

Haiti. If I told you that in the DR there was chaos, that there were crowds of people, and that there was poverty, I would be right. Then I could say the exact same about Haiti, and still be right, but you wouldn’t get the whole picture. Because in Haiti (at least at the border and Port-au-Prince where I went), there is more chaos, more and denser crowds of people, crazier traffic (you have no idea how crazy), more trash everywhere, and more widespread and worse poverty. The infrastructure is significantly worse. Many places don’t have running (let alone clean) water, (reliable) electricity, or sanitation. I didn’t see any nice-looking houses, whereas even the DR has areas of decent, clean places to live with some utilities and maybe even a car (maybe you could call it middle class). Rather, just about everywhere we went looked poor, really poor. Almost nothing is clean and sanitary, and nowhere smells particularly pleasant. People line the sometimes narrow streets, selling whatever they have to try and make a little money and feed their families. There are people, lots of them, everywhere. Women walk down the sidewalk carrying huge loads on their heads, children walk to and from school, and many, many others move around doing only they know what – and that may be nothing, as there was 80% unemployment even before the quake. People fish around in the sewer for some unknown treasure that we would probably call trash. The streets are clogged with all kinds of vehicles – car, trucks, motorcycles, and almost none of them look new and clean, like almost every car you see in the US. The kids come home from school in the afternoons and stand by the street talking because they don’t want to or can’t go back to their homes, which are probably tiny and cramped and dirty, no place to spend the afternoon. Oh, and it’s hot, really hot, most all of the time, and humid. Us Americans left the air conditioned bus and immediately started dripping sweat just standing around. I can’t comprehend what it would be like to live just in the heat for all hours of the day and on for years and years. And that’s just the heat. What about the tiny homes (or tents), pollution, lack of food and clean water, disease, insecurity, and sometimes crushing hopelessness of poverty, a lack of options, with nowhere to go and no way to change it?

From what I can tell, almost all of this was the case before January 12^th, when the earthquake hit. The earthquake took the rock bottom of physical poverty in this hemisphere and opened a chasm in it just so Haiti could fall a little further. Now, five months later, most empty spaces in the city (including some streets) are still filled with lines of tents wherein thousands of displaced families live with minimal sanitation, hygiene, or means of leaving any time soon. Small constructions of tarps, some sporting the logo of a relief organization (USAID specifically makes very sure everyone knows what it contributed), and other random materials are a common site, many serving as family homes. Huge piles of rubble still stand on the sides of some streets, while many collapsed buildings look like nothing’s really been moved since they fell, since very little heavy machinery exists to do so. Families still pick through the cinder-block-and-rebar ruins of homes and buildings, looking for something to salvage out of an already-picked-over pile of nothing. The presidential palace looks especially haunting, a specter of ruined grandeur rising above a massive city of tents, seemingly unchanged in five long months. The lofty domes have fallen in on the halls beneath, pillars have crumbled, walls have collapsed, although it’s still much more than a rubble heap. The building would have been haunting even before it collapsed, as one would have been faced with a grandeur and wealth that should never have existed with people in extreme poverty just a quarter mile (and less) away – a mighty reminder of corruption. “Yeah,” I think, “this has got to be the Haitian government’s fault, those greedy, selfish, power-hungry people!” But if I’m honest with myself, this palace is also a reflection of my own corruption. A short plane flight away is my house, in my mind at least as nice as this palace was, the place where I smugly sit comfortably with a world of need around me. How dare I criticize the Haitian government’s corruption, as awful as it truly is! What about mine? Am I exempt from thinking about the plight of these people because I live farther away? Does this give me the right to saunter arrogantly up to Jesus and tell him they’re not my neighbor, or somehow convince myself that I can love people in poverty by ignoring them? My heart knows the answers.

Poverty is about People

This is a wildly superficial and inadequate description of what is really happening in Haiti. I could spend months living there just to get the gist of the physical condition of this country, and then take pages and pages to try and tell you. But then behind this physical façade are layers and layers and layers and layers of facts and truths and subtleties and stories and feelings and thoughts and struggles and conflicts and triumphs and complexities which I couldn’t learn about in years and years. There’s spirit and emotion and mind and soul of every person in this country, and then relationships between them. Only our God is big enough to know all of these things, because he hand crafted every one of these people and is sovereign over ever detail, even the piles of trash on the side of the road, and the drop of sweat or the tear rolling down a child’s face.

Because poverty is about people. I’m reminded of this every time I’m faced with it. People are in poverty, not places. Not countries. A country is just an imaginary shape drawn on a map. It’s God’s children, His creations, fearfully and wonderfully and beautifully made, that experience the pain, suffering, brokenness, and hopelessness of poverty. People are the ones who live in tent cities and sweat and get sick and lose family members in rubble. And their poverty is much more than physical. I can look in many of their eyes to see a hurt and despair that goes much deeper than a lack of food and shelter, not to mention comfort. But people are not just the receivers of this suffering; they are also the primary source of beauty and love and anything Good – anything God – in these places. Surrounded by sin and death, people still bear the image, albeit a sometimes blurry and cracked one, of a glorious God. In these circumstances, people are the ones to still praise God, love others, share, give, welcome, and show a spiritual strength that we can’t touch. People are the receivers of poverty (and also the creators and ignorers of it, like me and the Haitian government), but people are also the main way God shines through in these darkest of places.

Christ Shines Through

If only we have the presence of mind to look, we can still see God and His glory even here. It’s pretty tempting to look at such suffering and ask, “Where is our God, the one who says He loves us?” But to say that would be to ignore all kinds of wonders, big and small, that God is working in Haiti and around the world. This starts with the wonder of salvation. This sounds cliché and cheesy, but if we really understood what God did for all of us when He made a way for our complete salvation and joy, there’s no way we would question His love for us. But then there are all kinds of things beyond that. For one, I was floored by the beauty of much of the countryside of the Dominican Republic and parts of Haiti. The mountains which lay in the middle of the island shared by the two countries are really breathtaking – flat valleys rising steeply to smooth peaks, sometimes moist and forested, sometimes arid and covered in shrubs and cacti. I had no idea such beauty existed there. Even the chaos of the border crossing was contrasted by the calm of the lake right beside it, hills rising on the opposite shore. The city of Port-au-Prince is big, and the problem of poverty even bigger, but the huge mountains rising up around the city still proclaim the glory of a God who is so much bigger – infinite, in fact. On the drive back I glanced back through the bus window to see a beautiful, colorful sunset. Anyone in Port-au-Prince could have seen the same thing, the same beauty. It’s just another reminder that God’s love is universal, indiscriminate, and given to the entire world, just He allows the sun to shine on the entire Earth. Would that we could learn to love like that!

Even in the darkest of places, Christ is still a light, shining through His Body (and almost anything else). Like I said, His glory still flows through His people, and also through His provision. His Glory radiates into the heart of the brokenness through Misión Rescate, where exceptionally faithful people work and work and work without recognition to bring justice and healing and Christ to the Haitians. People like Omi (I think that’s how you spell it) the leader of Misión Rescate in Port-au-Prince, who has been there for months laboring and still had a big smile on her face thanking us when we arrived with our supplies. Misión Rescate has stayed in Port-au-Prince now after so many aid organizations have already pulled out, and hopes to become a long term effort, just as the needs are all very long term. I’ve talked to people who know much more about Misión Rescate than I do (such as one Anna Bolton), and they are amazed by what God is doing through these humble and faithful and compassionate people. They are truly doing God’s work, and His provision is obvious in what they do. For example, they were just about to run out of bottled water the moment we arrived, coincidentally bearing 3,000 bottles of water. At one point God provided 5,000 backpacks and school supplies – they were distributed in a few days. One day a shipment of bottled water came in, but Misión Rescate already had plenty of water to give and use. So, rather than hoarding it for later, Omi called another organization in Port-au-Prince and asked if they needed water. And Misión Rescate is just one big example of God working in Haiti. There are also all the small acts of strength, sacrifice, humility, and compassion that happen within families and friends and communities that are facing enormous hardship. As we see here in the DR, God’s glory doesn’t just exist in the broken places, Christ’s works actually outweigh the negative, as crazy as it seems when you’re there (and as often as we miss it). If we just look, miracles are everywhere. God’s glory remains, sometimes hidden, sometimes subtle, deep within sea of brokenness. Yet the all the sorrow and pain in the world are a just a drop in the ocean that is God’s love.

These hints – or monuments! – of God’s love and faithfulness in the midst of poverty remind me that this is not all there is. If this fleshy, physical life was all there was I think I would just cry all the time and be depressed for the rest of my life because the physical situation in Haiti, when viewed without God, is absolutely hopeless. Fortunately, though, that is not the end of the story. There is another separate reality which is in many ways much more weighty than the tangible one that we see (the one where this is hopeless), although as comfortably fleshy, physical beings we often forget that. And this reality - the spiritual reality - can be saved and transformed and redeemed even as the body suffers and people deal with physical poverty (though the two are connected). It’s not enough to deal with the physical needs; a person’s spiritual needs are really significant – after all, this part is eternal. In the spiritual there is always hope, and that bleeds over into the physical too, when we realize what God can do. And then we have only to remember the promises – the certainties – we have when we consider eternity. Someday this will be no more. No more tent-houses, diseases, pain, broken hearts, anguish, despair. No more decay and death of loved ones in earthquakes. No more sin and evil, and no more poverty. There’s no reason to be hopeless. Our God is big, and no matter what, He will restore and redeem, and His Will would be done even if we tried purposely to thwart it. Our hearts should break for our brothers and sisters sufferings as God’s does, but there’s no need to give into hopelessness in front of such a massive problem. This problem is much bigger than I am, but then again, so is the One who is fighting against it, and He has ultimately already won. Instead of despairing we have to move forward, learning what we can learn, changing what we can change, doing what we can do, praying what we can pray.

Some Things I’ve Learned

I’ll start with the things that I learned. First of all, there are some things which God slaps me in the face with every single time I am faced with extreme poverty. Of course I usually promptly forget again until He knocks me over the head again, but I wanted to write them down, in the hopes that they will eventually remain permanently in my thoughts and life. Remember, these are directed at me primarily, my challenges from God:

· It’s so much worse to live like this (in poverty) than you ever thought. And you can’t imagine spending more than a day or so in their position. What about your whole life? What if you had no AC and shower and college and car to return to?
· God is bigger, MUCH bigger. And Good. Put yourself in perspective, please.
· I’m extremely whiny about extremely minor inconveniences and discomforts. I mean, I complained about the discomfort of the bus ride to Port-au-Prince at one point, at least mentally. I get back to my nice hotel and get mad when the air conditioning was off and my room is a little warm. And, I assure you, I have complained about much smaller and more selfish things. Wow. Really!?
· Like I said, people, living, breathing people, are the ones who are in poverty. Don’t forget that. It’s not a faceless thing.
· You are outrageously comfortable all the time. Like right now, for instance.
· You can’t see this and do nothing, or just do something once. It requires a change in who you are and how you live and what your heart feels.
· Why do you buy so much crap and spend so much time doing nothing? I could write a page on my working out of this problem (still in progress) as it is a more complex one than the question belies at first glance, but each time I am I see poverty I am reminded of its importance.
· God’s heart is for these people. It’s all over the Bible, there’s no way around it. Didn’t you say (over and over) that you wanted that heart?

These are just a few things that run through my brain when I am faced with poverty, and there are of course many more lessons that God might have faced me with. These were the things that really hit me this time, though. It may seem like many of these realizations are pretty harsh, but I refuse to believe that I am somehow being too hard on myself. My sin is still really big, and it needs to be constantly exposed and brought to my attention or it will never be healed during this life. Each time I am faced with poverty like this, my self-righteousness is challenged, as is my idea of justice and my complacency. And it’s good to be shaken up. In fact, I don’t think it happens to us enough, and we start feeling like we’re doing fine on our own, like we don’t need God that much, and like our sin really isn’t too bad. We have distanced ourselves from most anything that might force us to reevaluate, to honestly examine our lives and start to realize problems and change some of them.

For me, seeing this kind of thing not only exposes my issues, it also forces me to action, as one would expect. It makes me want to do something big to help people in poverty, and not just people in Haiti. It always does. This time through, however, I was most struck by the realization that an appropriate response is not just action. It isn’t just giving more money or raising awareness for poverty, though those are certainly good and necessary, and I will be doing more of those things. No, I now know that poverty (and God) merits a bigger response – not in size, but in life change. It requires from me both a heart change and a lifestyle change, not just one-time or even a single continued action. My heart change includes the internalization of the things I mentioned above: humility before such a great God, continued realization of the poverty around me and my own luxurious life in comparison, and simply a migration toward the mindset Christ had toward the poor. Heart change then goes hand in hand with lifestyle change – both must be focused on, as the spiritual and physical change together and neither can be neglected. Simple action will not change my heart, just as an overspiritualized lesson may remain stuck in the brain, not bringing any action. As my heart changes, my life should too, and vice versa. This might come in the form of complaining less (in my head as well), being a cheerful servant, and not buying things that I do not need. I have journaled a lot about this idea of heart and lifestyle change in the face of poverty and the gospel, which I may eventually type up for you to see.

Not About Me

As you can see, I actually have a tendency to focus inward in the face of such things – how I am going to change, or what I am going to do. Not that these things aren’t important, but sometimes I have to step back and realize this is not about me. To see this and just make it about me is absolutely ridiculous. This is about God and about these people. This is no spiritual exercise just so I can be more holy. It’s an opportunity for God to be worshipped and glorified, and for justice to be brought to people in poverty. I am nothing, just a tool in this great endeavor. If my heart changes, God molded it. If I give money, God provided it. If I love people, it’s because God is the source of all love. And I don’t want to forget the Haitian people in my own personal crusade for action and change, even if it’s for a good cause. I want my world to get bigger because of what I have seen, rather than having looked out just to reenter my single-person tiny reality.

I feel like the best way to respond is to think about how God sees people, particularly people in poverty. First off, God loves people. He knows every quirk and every detail of every person, and He still loves us completely. His heart breaks for their sin and poverty of body and soul, and our poverty in ignoring it. He never stops thinking about a single one of his creations – otherwise we would cease to exist. And so I wonder: Can this love flow through us? Will we let it?

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Well, that was exceptionally long. If you read all that I commend you and thank you. If you learned anything or realized anything, please just use it to give glory to God, and not to me. The last thing I want to say is that people must keep noticing Haiti (and the extreme poverty elsewhere in the world). It’s never over, even though the media seems to have short term memory loss on these kinds of things when more “exciting” and “newsworthy” things come up. The one and only thing that is done is Christ dying on the cross – so we should work really hard to show this to people especially, because this is the only source of real, lasting freedom from the oppression of poverty. And we must remember that Jesus is the savior here, and he can save anything. We are just tools. We don’t do the saving – He does.

If you want to be a tool for God in this, I would first ask you to pray. Please, pray a lot. For people in poverty, for Haitians, for anyone helping the Haitians (like Misión Rescate and Mission Emanuel), for God’s restoration and salvation to come quickly into these darkest of places. If you want to give financially, I would recommend giving to Compassion International, which works in amazing ways to reduce poverty everywhere. They were in Haiti long before the earthquake happened, and will remain in Haiti long after relief organizations have all gone. You can sponsor a child from almost anywhere in the world, sponsor a Child Survival program, or give specifically to one of their other programs, including Haiti relief. https://www.compassion.com/contribution/default.htm

I will also check to see if there is any way to give to Misión Rescate, possibly indirectly through Mission Emanuel. If you just want to help with poverty, you can also give to Hands and Feet Ministries (handsandfeet.com), Mission Emanuel (missionemanuel.org), or Healing Waters International (https://www.compassion.com/contribution/default.htm), all of which I have experience with and all of which do wonderful things.

Thanks for reading! I’ll post again soon with details from the Dominican Republic and maybe some other thoughts.

Danger Dan in the DR

Saturday, June 12, 2010

Haiti Pictures

Thursday, June 10, 2010

HAITI: Memories and Reflections (the Epic)

Introduction and Status two weeks in