It's easy to fall in love with people of troubled Haiti

By Lois M. Collins
Deseret Morning News
Published: Thursday, March 4, 2004 7:46 a.m. MST
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Four years ago, I had only a vague notion of where Haiti is. I had to look at the globe to make sure I wasn't mixing it up with something else.

These days, as I listen to and read the news stories of what's going on there — stories too much like so many other tales of underdeveloped, economically strapped lands fraught with internal war — I'm seeing individual faces.

I spent a few days there in 2000, a guest of Healing Hands for Haiti as Utah doctors and prosthetists and nurses and their friends built a clinic to bring rehabilitation services to the country, where people who are injured would otherwise stay injured, never reaching the potential that the medicine we take for granted has to offer.

I see Bela, a then-4-year-old girl with a skin-thin frame and haunted eyes. She's hungry, left in an orphanage by her parents, who hope that someone will feed and care for her until they're able to do it. Her hair is beautifully braided with neon bright bands. Her skin is ebony, dusty from the dirty living conditions. She is lovely and sweet, and I wish I could take her home.

I see Dieuferie, now a 20-something college kid who tells me to call him Jeff and says he wants to be a doctor. He works part time in another orphanage, run by a Catholic priest. He was raised there and labors in exchange for a safe place to stay. Before this nightmare, he sent me e-mails at least a couple of times a month, telling me small details of his day and reminding me that the God we share loves me. I get no e-mails now and can only pray that the server has been knocked out; that he is safe.

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I see dozens of mothers who are prematurely aged by their hardscrabble lives. They are no strangers to sorrow. They've buried too many children, stolen by illnesses American medicine cures easily. But their love of their children keeps a flame of hope alive. They get up at 4 a.m. to ride a rickety bus to a clinic miles away where they hear that strangers may offer some help. Though they look bent and frail themselves, like saplings battered in a storm, they carry their disabled children on their backs. And they pray not for healing but for the Americans who have come to heal.

I see Francois, a man with no hands and one leg who has set up a two-room clinic himself in a sorry section of Port-au-Prince. He wants to teach children with disabilities that they have abilities as well.

The garbage is piled hip deep in spots along the streets, and the residents simply walk over it to get where they're going. For decades, the garbage trucks have not run. The internal structure of this country has fallen away at the hands of despotic leaders like Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier, who robbed the country so thoroughly that even mammoth effort has failed to restore it. During an epidemic, I was told (and it's not that hard to believe), so many people died that the government told them to put their dead on the curb to be removed.

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