Haiti - Overcoming Fear, and Arriving

Haiti was not somewhere I wanted to go, but it was there that God sent me.

Our trip to Haiti was motivated by Pastor Roy Howard's desire to establish a partnership between our Saint Mark church in Rockville, and the wish that myself and others had to put in water filtering systems in a poor community somewhere. Thus, over a period of months Pam, Doug and I had been trained by the Living Waters for the World and prepared (in partnership with the Haiti Outreach Ministry (HOM)) to bring solar panels, electrical pumps, hygiene training and others necessities to L'Eglise Chretien at Terre Noire (also called Blanchard), where HOM maintains a church, school and clinic for hundreds of people in the community.

What images does Haiti conjure up for you? Scary land of kidnappers? Dark land of voodoo? Riding through the city on a battered van on that first night there were crowds of people, flickering shapes on the sidewalks, red glow of braziers, no streetlights, no electricity, smell of fires for light or cooking. Our driver Ronnie drove like a body guard over those cracked and rocky roads, swerving around other traffic to stay close to Pastor Leon's pickup truck carrying our bags just ahead. About half of us white folks in the van were scared to death, as if conjuring scenes from Dawn of the Dead!

Yet when we arrived at Saint Joseph’s Home for Boys in the Petionville area of Port-au-Prince, Brother Michael greeted us in the lobby of his beautiful building and poured us each a glass of cold water. Later I stood on the roof 5 stories high and looked out over the city, heard the music of people partying at a condo building, saw the many houses and concrete huts and occasional lights in the mysterious skyline. I thought to myself: What a strange, marvelous, and troubled country!

In the day Port-au-Prince looked completely different, just people going about their lives, bustling sidewalk markets and so on. Be skeptical of what you read in the papers. They would make you think you’ll be kidnapped the minute you step off the plane. “Gangs control the capital” read one article on 2/21 in the Washington Post. Nonsense. We drove all over and saw no gangs; the only guns were in the hands of UN, police and private security guards to protect the rich.

Intellectually I knew the paper was sensationalizing the situation, but emotionally I was scared. Sure there’s risk, and no one can totally quantify it. As an informational security professional, I knew that until we have personal experience, we tend to over-estimate non-quantifiable risks even if they are very small.

I’m very glad now that I went. It was one of the best weeks of my life and I would recommend a church mission experience in Haiti or another poor country to almost anyone. Please post your comments, keep reading my successive entries, and check the links on this page for references to people, places and sites!