Water day

After breakfast this morning, we made our way to Cite Soleil for the day. They say Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Cite Soleil is one of the poorest parts of Haiti. It is just outside of Haiti's capitol, Port-au-Prince, and is a collection of shanty towns and tent cities. If you and your family set up the family tent in your backyard, it would be an improvement over the permanent homes of many of the citizens of Cite Soleil.

We started our day with a school tour lead by its administrator, Elder. He says there are currently 450 students enrolled at that school. Each classroom held about 40 students and most relied on the natural light from a small window to provide lighting for the classroom. So most of the classes were quite dark by U.S. standards. The exceptions were two classrooms that were held out on a terrace on the upper level. One item I found noteworthy from the terrace view was a church across the street. On the side of the church was a painting of a white business man with collar and tie with a halo behind his head; it just felt like there might be a message being imposed there.

After the school tour, it was on to water delivery. Healing Haiti has more than a couple dozen water stops and we made it to three of them today with a full water tanker truck at each stop. At each stop, we are greeted by a line of people waiting to get fresh water. These lines are primarily women and children, but there were more men today than there have been in the past. Getting water is apparently deemed to not be man's work. Because this is the school year, the children we are greeted by are either 1.) too young to go to school, 2.) too poor to go to school or 3.) restaveks. There is a lack of public schooling in Haiti so families must rely on paying for private schooling. Private schooling can cost a couple to a few hundred dollars a year per child -- not much by our standards but quite a bit when you don't know where your next meal is coming from. Restaveks are children in a form of societally-approved child-labor/slavery. It's like a less cheery version of Cinderella without the prince, without the music, without the godmother, more work, and a less supportive family structure -- it still has mice, but they don't talk. It is estimated that there are more than 300 thousand restavek children in Haiti.
Upon visiting the shoreline, we find that beach front property is no more desirable now than it was at my last trip. There are pigs wallowing in filth. Waste (human and animal as well as trash) saturates the entire coastline along Cite Soleil. It is here that people come to go to the bathroom. It is here where people leave there dead to waste away. It is here where the children join us in song. There is a bite to hearing the children happily sing "God is so good. He's so good" with this backdrop. Those that we encountered truly appreciate all that they have which by our standards is nothing. From our perspective, it's much more of why would God put these people in this situation. Upon reflection tonight, we turned to John 3 and the story of Jesus and the blind man. Jesus says that the man is blind not by any sin of his own or his parents; he is blind so that the works of God might be displayed in him. Focusing through this lens rings true because God is much more evident here in Haiti where there is nothing than He is is at home where we have so much but want so much more.