Angel Travels Haiti: Part One

Since my last travel journal entry covering my trip to Haiti with our church speakers, I have traveled twice more on similar trips with our priests, pastors and deacons. As always, the “feeding of the 15,000” experiences at our office/warehouse complex were powerful; the boys from our orphanage laying hands and blessing our speakers was an emotional experience, again; dancing with the residents at Food For The Poor’s (FFP’s) Village of the Elderly was a treat; the visit to Marguerite Nassau School, Nutrition Center, Clinic and Skills Training Center was hope-inspiring.

The visit to our Little Children of Jesus Home for children of different capabilities was both challenging and heart-warming and I got to bond with Joshua twice more (the young boy with hydrocephalus of whom I have written before); the inauguration of the fishing village of Leogane was filled with hope and excitement, and they performed a dance symbolizing their time of slavery and their new freedom; and the reflection meetings before or after dinner at the hotel were awesome!

Yet there were certain experiences that were very different, even though most of the places and the people may have been the same. I will go into a little more detail with these.

As we got off the bus in Cité Soleil, guided by Madame Pun, FFP’s executive director in Haiti, we heard very joyful music and chanting from a distance that was getting closer and closer to our location. Children, young men and women, and the elderly alike were chanting in Creole, “Our mother, our mother is “Manmi Pun.” I was pleased to see this vibrant and musical sign of appreciation for a woman who has been working with the poor of Haiti most of her life and who has devoted much of her energy to the poor of Cité Soleil in the last 23 years with FFP.

Of course, if you knew Madame Pun, you would know that this type of public recognition embarrasses her and she did everything she could to get them to stop — but the crowds would not be silenced. Three different newly formed musical groups were also there to welcome us, playing like pros the instruments that we had recently sent for them. Such amazing talent! The scene in its entirety was reminiscent of Palm Sunday and Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem — Madame Pun just needed a donkey to complete the comparison. I considered that those hands that were now holding musical instruments may have been holding guns before and I was comforted by that thought.

We visited our feeding center there and then took a walking tour of the area, witnessing some very depressing things and some very hopeful ones.

A very old lady approached me and explained that she badly needed a new house for herself and her family. Convinced that what you see is more powerful than what you hear, she gently held my hand and led me into her home. It was a wretched shack, made of rusted zinc, dirt floor, no windows for ventilation; it was humid and burning hot in there. Although it was near midday, I looked up and saw an entire constellation of stars — the many, many holes in her roof. That night, back at our hotel, it poured. I had a hard time falling asleep thinking of my aged friend and what she must have been going through — her scant possessions soaked; her floor… a sea of mud.

Still at Cité Soleil, we visited one of the agents to whom FFP entrusts the making of our well-known and ever-popular Banana Bark Cards. This industrious and entrepreneurial gentleman proudly showed us how he had converted his tiny home into an assembly line for the production of these cards. He had 14 people working in there for him, each with their own specialized task. I thought of the parable about the master who had distributed talents to some of his servants — surely this one had not buried his in the ground! It gladdened me to think that 4-5 thousand people make a living (many in this area) by creating these beautiful cards.