Before the Earthquake

Special to the Tribune

HAITI before the Earthquake

I first started going to Haiti on a regular basis in 2002. I was part of a dental team led by Dr. Mike Karr from Granite Falls. I got to see the Capital, Port au Prince, and some of the surrounding areas, from the slums and shanty towns to the walled compounds in the hills belonging to the elite who make up only about 5% of the population.
From the very first moments I was struck by some glaring similarities between this country and another former French colony, Vietnam. The architecture, the colors and even the language have similarities. There is a sense that a huge part of the population lives on the bottom rung of the social ladder, like much of Southeast Asia.
Since that first trip I have been back 9 times. On all of these subsequent trips I have taken my teams through the International airport, to a smaller regional terminal to fly up to the Northwest of Haiti at Port de Paix. PdP is a small sea port, with a harbor, but no docking facility. That is another story. The airstrip is a former road turned into airstrip, still dirt and often used for local travel. Landing and taking off is always an adventure in itself.
This country is so close to the United States and yet so far behind in the basic things we take for granted. A city of two to three million people, PaP has no public water supply, no sewer, no reliable phone service and for a select few only a few hours of electricity per day. No public school system, very little professional medical care and the only means of transportation is by taxi service, known as Tap-Taps.
Travel is hampered by a total lack of traffic controls, large intersections in this city are un-controlled chaos. The entire country is the size of Maryland in land area, the population is clustered mostly in a few scattered cities, with large areas of undeveloped land. The land between cities for the most part has been stripped of all vegetation and top soil. Not the fault of the current residents of Haiti, but the result of hundreds of years of exploitation by their own and foreign governments.
In 2002 there was difficulty in making communication across the city, and impossible to many other parts of the country. By last year (2009), land lines had pretty much been replaced entirely by cell phones. The cell system still is not ideal, but at least contact can be made between the cities most of the time. When I was there last January there seemed to be at least a start of some improvement in the lives of some Haitians. There was not the element of danger that we have seen in the past. We were still careful to guard our possessions.
A couple of years ago we were able to convince a local Baptist school to give us a tour.
I was Baptized in this church a few years ago (first white man in 40 years) so I have some standing in the community to ask. What we found was an extremely crowded, understaffed and unequipped teaching facility where students pay attention to every word and are generally happy to have the opportunity to learn. We have witnessed and heard from parents who go without food so they can afford the $200.00 it takes to send their kids to school for a year. We saw high school classrooms with 40+ students, a piece of chalk and a blackboard, no paper or pencils, no books and no other form of reference materials. A library full of donated books in English, but none in French or Haitian Creole. No cafeteria, just some Haitian ladies selling treats in the playground area between classes.
But in all of this, there is the sense that of anyplace on earth that could experience the very worst of tragedies, these people would survive. The children laugh and play like children anywhere. The parents will do anything to provide whatever they can to see that their children learn and grow. They do this with no jobs, no education and very little hope for any help from anyone. They are clean at the start of every day even though most of their homes have dirt floors and no cooking, washing or showering facilities. They take care of what they have, but by custom will loan anything they possess if someone else needs it more. Their faith is all about Hope and for most believers that is all they will ever have.
My part in all of this is simple. Keep the Haitian people in my daily prayers and talk to everyone I come into contact with about what they can do to help. I have been recruiting people for these trips for several years and now have a core group of construction and medical personnel signing up for two weeks every year.
Our current projects (as soon as we can get our team in) are the children’s care facility at LaPointe, The House of Hope. See: www.houseofhopehaiti.blogspot.com and a Hospital that is under construction in the far west section of Haiti at Passe Catabois. We are in the process of installing a very large solar system to finally be able to provide power for medical equipment upgrades. Our team of 33 was supposed to be there for three weeks from the 16th of January, but of course the Earthquake changed those plans and prevented us from going.

Larry Bailly is mission’s coordinator for Snohomish Community Church. He is also a member of the Snohomish County RESULTS group. He has been taking teams to the Northwest of Haiti for the last 7 years. He can be reached at baillybusbarn@juno.com