Things that make you say Hmm...

Every day this week has brought with it new adventures and new challenges. Today has proven to be no different. We woke up at 5:40am (that's 4:40am at home and what still feels too early) and went to the local sunrise service. It was an honest to goodness tent revival. It was 6am, the sun wasn't up yet but there were well over 100 people in attendance in a huge circus style tent with tent poles and the whole nine yards. There was a band and a preacher. The entire service was in Creole but it was alive with energy. The entire crowd paced the aisles the entire service singing along or chanting along with the pastor. Individuals paced the entire time only stopping when they felt moved to kneel and pray. The congregation would respond to the preacher with hearty "Hallelujahs". This, by the way, was about the only word I understood in the entire service. I did recognize the song "How Great Is Our God" by the melody but, again, the words were in Creole. Collectively, the energy of each member of the congregation was moving. The conviction of each member was whole hearted and entirely appropriate in the setting. The same behavior, if done by themselves on Nicollet Mall, would draw strong stares.
After returning from church and having a solid breakfast, we began today's work. We went to Grace Village, a compound being built by the Healing Haiti organization. It currently houses about 60 orphans (in Haiti orphans can be either without parents or simple abandoned by their parents). A school is being built that will open in October (when school starts in Haiti) and will be attended by over 200 kids from the orphanage and the surrounding village. They will also be building a facility for local elderly. The average lifespan for a Haitian is 51 years old. There are many people in the area who are now in their seventies, in need of care and who have outlived their children so they have no one to take care of them. Luckily, Healing Haiti sends people out each day to take food and medicine to these people until the facility is built. More on that in a minute. In the meantime, I would like to note that Grace Village is the nicest set of buildings I have seen in my time here. It is painted with bright colors,a playground with swing, slide and other play structures (although this is the "largest playground in Haiti", it is still much smaller than a typical school playground back home), and a breathtaking view of the ocean and the surrounding hills. Today, while we were there, we christened a new talapia farm with 600 fish. These fish will be grown to feed the people of the village but they are also part of an elaborate aquaponic farming system. This week, we have been sharing the mission house with a chemist and hydroponics expert who have come to help bring the project to the finish line after a year of work. The water from the talapia fish tanks is continuously fed into another tank where the fish excrement settles into layers. The heaviest waste is pumped out into a garden as fertilizer, the lighter waste proceeds to the next tank where gases from the water are allowed to escape. Eventually, the water makes its way into a aquaponic garden that will be kept by local villagers so they can grow their own food. My explanation doesn't do it justice in its sophistication or ambition.
Getting back to the elder care, that was our mission for today. We paid a visit to the homes of five different elderly villagers. The conditions of their homes would be considered inhumane at home. It was about 100 degrees here today. Most of the elderly are confined to their beds and they live in one room tents. The tent material is a thick plastic that would be very effective against the rain, but on a day like today, it was apparent that the material is also very good at collecting heat. There were no windows or vents in most of these homes. We had a hard time spending 15-20 minutes in each of these houses, but these people are trapped in these houses without an alternative (until the new housing is built for them at Grace Village). At each house we brought sandwiches, fresh water, apple sauce, sardines and a jar of Carmex(r) Healing Ointment (product placement in a blog entry, where are my scruples?). We massaged the ointment onto the hands, feet, arms and legs of each person we visited. We asked for each person's needs, health concerns and prayer requests and we prayed with them. It was very moving. One woman had suffered a stroke and was not able to move her right arm and was not able to walk. Our group guides who had been here last year said her prayer request last year (right after her stroke) had been that she would die soon. Today, her prayer request was for shoes and the ability to walk again. That's forward progress.

After our elderly visits we got to take a quick break to dip our toes into the ocean at a spot where the water was relatively clean. This was refreshing. As a Minnesotan, it always feels like a shame to be near the ocean but not to be able to dip a toe in the water. Today, I got to go up to my knees.
When our break for levity was over, we went on to visit what is known as The Mass Grave. At this site the bodies of over two hundred thousand unidentified bodies were buried following the earthquake of January 2010. This site was a former mine so there was a large whole here prior to the earthquake. After the earthquake, other government bodies, knowing that Haiti did not have the resources to refrigerate and identify the estimated over 300,000 people who perished, pushed the Haitian government to bury all of the bodies in a mass grave as quickly as possible before disease was spread from the dead bodies. The Haitian government complied. People wrapped their deceased family members in tied up cloths and set them outside of their homes while the government sent dump trucks along to pick them up and haul them to this mining hole to dump them in like waste. The hole is now covered in crushed rocks and marked with a monument and many crosses lining the adjacent hills. The shear magnitude of this mass grave is incomprehensible to me. An estimated 2,800 people died in New York on 9/11. Over 100 times that many people died in Haiti during the earthquake and were buried under the ground I walked on today. This was another part of the trip that will take a while to soak in.
- Jeff Gerst