Life in Haiti

Last Friday morning I woke up in our beach house in my bed with my balinese bedspread, made my favourite coffee and had vegemite on toast with my best friend and my family before I left Australia. It was a long trip here to Haiti and I got a little more nervous each flight I took, even though I was so excited to come. 

This Friday morning I woke up in a tent on the roof of our house in Port-au--Prince, Haiti. I'll eat cornflakes with the 90 other people that live here. Tonight I'll haul some water out of a well to take a bucket shower which is good because it'll be hot hot hot again today.

Just down the road from the house we are staying in, is a tent city, a place where heaps of people live because their homes were destroyed in the earthquake OR they never had a home before the earthquake so they have moved here.

They have little to nothing except for community. Speaking to long-termers here who have said they are working with people in the tent cities to try and get them into housing projects, but they don't want to leave because they have now made safe little communities in some of the most unsafe places to live.

I know that I have seen poverty before, but I hope I never become numb to it. I hope I can never walk past a kid, obviously malnurished, obviously neglected, with open sores all over their body and simply say "oh...this is just how it is. this is just poverty." So I don't mind that sometimes I'l have tears just running down my face, mixed in with the sweat and the dust because this is still not how it is supposed to be. 

We have spent this first week working with a school run here by Youth With a Mission, teaching on how to build a water catchment tank and various other water purification techniques. It's so important that this is taught and we don't just come in, thinkin we are rockstars, put in a bunch of tanks & then when it breaks and we are not here, everyone just goes back to the old dirty water. We have been working on a tank just up the road as well. It's hard hot work but also really funny because lots of kids swarm around and we want them to be involved in helping (what better way to spend your never ever summer holidays huh?) 

The kids. Get ya every time. They flock around the gates just waiting for one of us to come out and play. Two of the boys, Macinson & Juan live in an abandoned house across the street and they show up every day. Who knows where their dad is and there mum is gone 90% of the time as well ...... I know lots of cuddles and piggy back rides and tickles won't change their circumstances but the delight in their eyes when they spend time with any of us is somethin else. I just keep lookin at them everyday, wondering what they could be ... if they didn't live in an abandoned house, in the capital of Haiti with no one lookin after them.

So I just saw that my mumma emailed you all about the orphanage we have discovered. We will headed there to hang out with the kids and see what we can do right now in the next few days and I will share this with you as soon as I can. I understand that poverty excists everywhere. And I understand you can't fix everything and everyone. But surely we can start somewhere right? The circumstances that these kids are living in are something else... 

Thanks for prayin, thinkin of me, kind words ... all that. Life here is crazy but it's worth it.

Lots of stinky Haitian love