Transformed by Haiti
I didn’t have much time to prepare myself before I left for Haiti. In fact, I didn’t even realize I was going to Haiti. I thought I was only going to the Dominican Republic. But once we arrived in Santo Domingo, DR’s capital, I was told I’d be resting one day before leaving for Port-au-Prince. And that’s about the time I started dreading my decision to come. I was terrified of what I’d see, do, experience, and wanted to turn around and go home. Or at least just to stay in Santo Domingo and help from there.
Throughout the entire nine-hour bus ride to Port-au-Prince, I was knotted with fear and regret; sure I was getting myself into something that I would regret. I didn’t think I’d be able to help, and that I’d just end up using what little resources were available and wasting everyone’s time. I wasn’t happy about the time length either. A month seemed too short to be worth it and too long for an emergency setting. Everything about the situation just didn’t feel quite right and it was very unsettling.
My time in Haiti was a tightly wound spiral. I started out focusing on the only thing I knew: myself and my own fear and misgivings. I was very concerned with how I’d be able to handle the situation, seeing all the poverty and suffering, knowing that I had no search and rescue training, knew nothing about surgery or medicine, had no contacts in high places to ask for donations.
Then, two days in, I met fifteen-year-old Sandra. She was trapped for eight days in the rubble of her school, already mourned for as though dead and received by her family with such suspicion after she was pulled out, it was as if she were just an illusion. The joy of recognition and the miracle of her survival was enough to open my spiral a little wider.
When we took her to the University of Miami’s tent hospital at the airport to treat her fractured hip, we saw exhausted volunteer doctors, exasperated nurses, and patients staring into space or curled up within themselves. Back at the house, we had forty orphans who were all home when the earthquake hit. They hadn’t even been outside the walls to see the damage on the other side. Their schools had been flattened and they had no family. They had nothing. But, oh, can they sing! When we decided to take the orphaned girls on a field trip, we swung by the airport to sing there. Everyone stopped what they were doing. The smiling doctors and nurses brought out their digital cameras and started filming. The patients became alive with the sound of their own singing, songs that were a part of them. Their spirits were lifted, their cups filled, and my spiral opened a little wider.
When we moved Sandra to a different hospital for therapy, we brought with us some donations we’d received that we couldn’t use, mostly medical equipment. It was exactly what the doctors had run out of the day before, and they offered to trade us some baby diapers and food that they couldn’t use, but we could definitely make use of. As we traded goods and donations with the doctors there, I realized we would have to do things for ourselves. If we waited for the government or some other leading body to take charge, it would be a losing effort. By taking the responsibility and the action into our own hands, we were making the experience our own and finding solutions to seemingly impossible riddles. With that friendship in place, my spiral opened a little bit more.
Later that week, we brought the doctors to the camps we were feeding. We had 8,000 people under our care and needing attention but we couldn’t take them all to the hospital. So we brought the hospital to them. Having the team of doctors in our driveway, performing major surgery under the tarp, and watching them help the people in a way we were unable to, was a small victory as well, and the spiral opened.
Being there on my birthday away from family and friends, away from a celebratory atmosphere, without internet and no way for people to contact me, I was expecting a dismal day. However, I had just the opposite experience. All the sisters congratulated me, they offered the Mass for me in the parish, the girls sang to me, gave me a hand-embroidered cloth and a party with singing, dancing, poems, and general silliness. It was the icing on a more delicious cake than I expected or deserved, and was a reason to celebrate amidst the sadness. My spiral was opened wider yet and stayed wide throughout the rest of the trip.
By the time I had to leave, I was exhausted, but fighting the urge to offer to stay longer. Knowing full well that my mission was over, that I’d come and done all that I could do, nothing more and nothing less, I left with a sense of peace. But with such a love for Haiti’s people that I can’t forget them or their needs, the time we shared, and will continue my mission of loving them even if it has to be long distance. My self-centered spiral had grown so large that I myself disappeared in the infinity of the experiences around me.
Molly Fohn stayed at the Provincial House of the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians, Salesian Sisters in Port-au-Prince for one month. She is volunteer with the volunteer organization VIDES, supported by the Salesian Sisters. The Haiti Province has six houses in the affected area and the Provincial House was the only house that stood. None of the sisters, nor students in the sisters’ schools, were killed by the earthquake because school was not in session. The schools, however, were all destroyed and will need to be rebuilt. Meanwhile, people of the surrounding communities are living on the campuses in tents, and the congregation is struggling to feed and care for about 20,000 people. |
