January's Great Experiment: Live the Life You've Been Given
Sunday, January 17, 2010 at 10:10PM In the past 10 years I have had the good fortune to visit many unfortunate places. The last time I counted them up, I think I was at about 32.
I am an optimist deep down and through and through. It’s not that I don’t know how to be negative - I can be as blue and desperate as a pimply faced teenager without a prom date, but somehow even in the deepest of pits I continue to get the occasional provocative jab of hope.
On these travels to these war-torn, conflict-ridden, unstable, and impoverished destinations and everywhere I have been, I have always come across hope. Well, almost everywhere. There are two countries that are remarkably similar despite the ocean that separates them. As I stood on the dock in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo watching a crew of men moving supplies from a large truck to the tin-can-rust-bucket ferry below I could not shake the feeling of deja-vu. These men were not ordinary men. They were being treated like, and acting like slaves. In the human chain of 40 men there was a hierarchy - those that worked and those that watched and made you work. In this melee of slick dirty thin brown skinned men, my clean bright blonde hair was a distraction that drew many sideways glances, which occasionally earned the workers discipline from the management. There was little life behind the eyes of those men. In all of my life experience, I had only observed a place as joyless one other time.
That place was Haiti.
I have only been to Haiti once and it was only for a brief time in the late spring of 2005. I was there as part of a team completing some surveys and reports on the region. We spent much of our week getting to know all of the pockets that make up Port-au-Prince - we saw what we could of the dangerous suburb of Cite-de-Soleil, and the local landmarks like the Presidential Palace. We sought ground truth through meetings with aid workers and met some amazing people at the UN Headquarters. We stayed in the nicest hotel in the city - I shared my room with a number of cockroaches who liked to hang out in the shower. On our last evening there, our team was invited to a house party in Petionville. The road to our host’s place was twisty and turny and poorly lit. We passed a large crowd gathered in what looked like a washed out sports field - they were there to watch dogs fight one another. This was a local past time. Our host’s home was a mansion by most country’s standards. It was large and spacious and immaculately decorated with dark woods and fine colourful tile. It was difficult to reconcile the beauty of the home with the desperation of the crowded inner city 15 kms downhill.
There were very few Haitians living in Petionville.
I could not reconcile that with the image of the naked woman I saw bathing in a puddle in the middle of a crowded street around Cite-de-Soleil earlier that same day. I could not reconcile it with the stench of human life that pervaded the city, entirely made up of slums. Corrugated steel. Shanty shacks. Six foot by ten foot by four foot, some stacked one atop the other. Despite the majestic homes of Petionville, there simply was nothing nice about Haiti.
And the faces of the Haitians were remarkably absent of joy.
There were people everywhere in the city. A dense population in an exceptionally small space with very little to do. There was no meaningful work in the city. For the men aged 18 and over, there was an 89% unemployment rate. Many Haitians spent much of their day in line. In line for aid. In line for work. In line at an Embassy. In line for a way out.
They were surviving. But only just.
Haiti has endured a remarkably long history of poverty and instability, and while the earthquake has left them in a state of extreme devastation, it will most certainly act as a catalyst to bring about some form of order and some form of meaningful aid delivery to the country. It is both not a blessing and a blessing. But this is not the first time they’ve received this type of mass injection of support and aid, and I wonder if, after all is said and done, the world will find a way to continue to support Haiti … to help it find some traction to right itself.
Both then and now I have caught myself wrestling with a tension that I have come to call affluence guilt. In the international arena, I am a country of origin lottery winner. I have worked hard and I live well - I want many things, but if I never again got anything new, I would probably still do too well to be described as “just getting by”. The fact that my soul found its way into this body, this life, this country … well that is part mystery, part divine intervention, part good choices, and part luck. In Canada we too have poverty - I see it frequently in my work as a law student at a local community legal clinic - we even have extreme poverty, but with our health and social welfare systems and stable (albeit sometimes kooky) government, our poorest still have a chance for hope to find them.
Many of us are asking ourselves - what can we do to help Haiti? And after much reflection, I can honestly say that I don’t know what individuals can do to provide meaningful help, beyond continued financial giving where we can for as long as we can.
Beyond financial support, the best I can do is to do as the Haitians do by living the life I’ve been given. Appreciating my good fortune. Checking my complacency. Reminding myself to take nothing for granted. Despite the magnitude of destruction, they continue to move, they continue to breathe, they continue to survive.
They continue.
And so must we. Let’s not forget Haiti. I challenge you to mark your calendar - one year from today you should donate to Haiti again.
I will. Will you?
The above post was written for the Great Experiment. Click here to read more great posts from a community of bloggers who have been gathering monthly on The Girl Who, and vote for the one you like best in the comments section. This month we are going for the glory only - ALL funds raised will be donated. Through Monica’s website, you can give to fundraising efforts in support of Haiti Or you can click on one of the links to my favourite three charities below. Thanks for reading.
Norma Jean Barrett