Trip to Haiti reinforces minister's resolve to help

The Rev. Janet Macgregor-Williams is the pastor of the West Milford Presbyterian Church. In May, she spent a week in Haiti, working at an orphanage called Project Hope. Macgregor-WIlliams says that as hurricane season begins, Haiti still needs help. Here are her reflections on her recent trip. Flying into Port Au Prince, you could see tent cities everywhere. The landscape was dotted with blue and white tents, thousands upon thousands of tents. As our driver took us away from the airport, we drove past crumpled buildings, saw piles of brick and crumbled cement in the road and by the roadside. Even our driver, Jean-Gari, a very well-dressed and well-spoken Haitian who knew some English as well as Creole and French, mentioned that his house was damaged and he is living in a tent. I looked at him in his clean white shirt and wondered how he managed, with no running water, dirt and dust everywhere, all the while living in a tent. Everywhere we turned there was destruction and poverty. We drove for over six hours down the coast of Haiti, from Port Au Prince to Les Caye, all of about 90 miles. The first two thirds of the drive took us past the epi-center of the quake, a stop at an orphanage that lost everything and another stop at a school. Let me detour for a moment and say that the word “orphanage” is a misnomer for us. We think of it as a place for children waiting for adoption. In Haiti, these are shelters for homeless children—abandoned by parents, trying to make their living on their own. They are brought to the orphanage by social services or by parents who can no longer support their children. They are not children waiting to be adopted. Then as we moved further south we saw less destruction, but still the poverty, with people living in small shacks with little to support them. We had moved beyond the earthquake into what I would call the aftershock. For though the quake was felt in Les Caye, little was destroyed. But the impact was still felt in the 250 extra children taken into Project Hope—or Proje Espwa, the orphanage that I went to stay at. Or in the extra family members that would show up at a distant relatives door, looking for shelter, as they had walked all the way from the north after their house was destroyed. The impact was felt as all of the food and assistance supplies were sent north and there was a lack of resources in the south. And the impact was felt in the rise of prices, all the while the numbers of people who were poor and had no means to support themselves grew. I was fortunate to stay in a nice guest house with running water and good food, but so many were not. We had a week of drenching rain and the road became a river, and I wondered how those in tents to the north were surviving. Fortunately, when I returned to the airport I found out that they had not had as much rain, but hurricane season is coming.