Fog

If you look over my shoulder on a clear day, you'd see the Port of Port-au-Prince and a mountain range beyond that.  Today, whether it is pollution or cloud, there is a fog blocking the view.  I thought showing that would give a visual for thoughts and emotions which have been swirling inside of me over the last few weeks as my heart has been drawn toward and saddened by too many pervasive realities of Haiti.

The other night we had friends over and they asked the question, "So, how are things going?"  It is a reasonable question, in fact it is the question I am asked the most by friends and family back home.   At first the answer was simply, "hot" as we adjusted to a daytime heat-index averaging 45 degrees celsius (about a billion fahrenhuit) and the experience of drinking 4-6 32oz bottles of water and feeling it convert into just as much sweat in seconds as the heat drew it from our bodies.  Then, as we began our linguistic transition, we stopped saying "hot" and started saying "cho" (the Haitan Creole simplified version of the French "chaud" meaning "hot").

As we continued to adjust to being here, each adjustment framed our answer to "How are things going?"  We'd say, "We learned to drive this week and figured out how to get to the grocery store" or "We are getting settled into work and volunteer roles."  In other words, each response to the "How are you doing?" question was able to uncover some small level of success and we were able to answer with something positive.

But there I sat on Friday night, the question, "How are things going?" was hanging in the air.  I didn't have a "new thing" I had learned that day or that week to frame my positive response.  In fact, thought, I had learned a new thing, and it wasn't positive.  It was a learning that is coming (I say, "is coming" because I am still working it out) as a result of what actor Sean Penn has said about Haiti, that "Haiti gets a hold of you."  Haiti, in all its adorable frustration, was getting a hold of me.  So I knew how I had to respond to my friends.

"How are things going?  Things are pretty hard.  Things are frustrating.  Haiti makes me sad."  There, I had said it.  I had boarded the plane in Toronto two months ago with loads of hope and idealism; now, I felt it was all unpacked and messy, transformed to frustration, hanging in the conversation.  Graciously, our friends helped me unpack the ways in which Haiti makes me sad.  It wasn't so much that I was complaining about Haiti, or expressing regret about having come here.  I was that, perhaps because Haiti is beginning to "get a hold of me" that Haiti was making me grieve.

In an effort to help you enter this fog of conflicted hopes and emotions, I will describe some things that are broken about Haiti.  In doing so, I may sound like I am complaining or being critical.  I am not.  I am mourning.  I mourn the effects of generations of poverty, tragedy, injustice, and a disempowered people striving to eek out an identity while being regularly emasculated by the world's wealth flooding them in a shower of pity.  I mourn the brutally low expectations that hang over this city like the fog that clouds out the mountains and the sea.  I mourn the simplistic reduction of relationships between NGOs and local community leaders that devolve into discussions about money.  I mourn the fog itself, that as much as I can name what is broken, "solutions" are, at best, obscure.

First, Haiti is poor economically.  "Poorest country in the Western Hemisphere" was a title thrown around before the January 12, 2010 earthquake that snuffed out 230,000 fathers, mothers, and children.  The annual GDP amounts to just $2 a day per person.  For the 30% who are employed, a minimum wage hovering around $5 a day sets them well ahead of the average, yet at a daily rate any Canadian high school kid wouldn't accept for 30 minutes of flipping burgers.  But these are just numbers.  I mourn the poverty represented by the tarp covered homes I see in my neighborhood, by the naked children I see playing in the provinces, by the grown man I see sitting in a pile of gravel all day crushing rocks with a hammer as a meager way to put food on the table, assuming he has a table.
Second, I mourn the way Haiti's impoverished economic reality has created a host of welfare-state reflexes among those who would be leaders.  The other day I was sitting at an outdoor restaurant sharing lunch with the pastor of the congregation we have been attending services at.  As I finished my meal, I noticed a boy, couldn't have been more than 7 years old.  He had saucer eyes that locked onto mine as his little hand extended, palm up, begging for money.  He wasn't the first child I had seen trying to eke out a living, but his face was hauntingly familiar, as was the posture of his palm.  I had seen that face before, on ministry leaders here, willing to reduce their relationship to Christian Reformed World Missions to an exchange of dollars, to filling their outstretched palm.  Don't get me wrong, some of the things World Missions is doing are vital and encouraging, but the economic disparities between Haiti and Canada/USA are a set-up for our being viewed as benefactors even if our title is "ministry partner."

Third, I mourn the way the chaos and economic disparities create conditions where isolation from community is the norm because it is safer.  Around our property here, we have an eight foot tall stone wall with broken glass on top and then a row of barbed wire above that yet.  We have two guard dogs.  We have not, and likely will not, have occasion to walk down our street.  I have no idea who is living across the street from me and don't expect to find out.  I do know both of my neighbours on either side of me, but in the six weeks we have been in this home, we have only had occasion to even see each other less times than can be counted on one hand.  Evenings, though peaceful, are spent locked into our homes, away from our neighbours, relationally disconnected from being able to foster community.  Beyond that, even those we do see regularly -- our house staff -- are forced by their circumstances to not only see us as employers but as potential benefactors, stripping away the likelihood of true community.

One author I have read since getting here suggests that things will never change, that because "poverty is Haiti's most lucrative export," they have an economic incentive to remain impoverished and with their hand out, either to the international community or to the flesh-and-blood visitors who bring in 20% of what is spent in this country in their pocket change.  It saddens me to think that the broken reality I long to see healed has a self-pertpetuating incentive to remain as it is.

For some, all this fog provides just enough incentive to diagnose that "nothing can be done" except to book a ticket home.  For others, these griefs draw them in like the wounds of a puppy lure a child into taking him home.  For me, today, the fog simply tells me where I am.  With you, on mission, in Haiti.
All this makes me wonder about the fog Jesus had when he was growing up.  Luke 2:52 tells me that Jesus "grew" and therefore wasn't fully developed or fully knowledgable right out of the gate.  He "grew in wisdom and in stature and in favour with God and people."  As he came knowing himself to be the Son of God sent to save the world, he entered into the fog of joining the mass of humanity, and not everything was clear to him from the get-go.  He knew our poverty in every way and the chaos and isolation it created.  And yet he came, on mission, into the fog of the world, for us.

Tomorrow morning, I plan to allow Haiti to, just a little more, "get a hold of me."  I plan to take up my fog, and follow him.

thanks, again, for listening.