I’ve been back in the U.S. for a week now; and I’ve been working on this post in my head as I processed through my return from Haiti for nearly that same amount of time.
Coming home was both easy and hard. Easy, because I missed my wife and it was wonderful to see and be with her. Hard, because I hit culture shock head on, fairly early and fairly abruptly. Within an hour of being home, I was looking around my downstairs room, realizing that this one room in my house was easily ten times the size of the tents that families were living in down in Haiti. As I looked through our pantry and saw how we have more food than we are going to eat in a day or even a week, I felt blessed and disoriented and wrestled to make sense of my life in light of the incredible need we saw in Port-au-Prince.
Of course, the fact that Christina and I had a trip to go join my family up in a rented cabin in Big Bear planned for the day after my return didn’t help much either. I struggled with being fully present to my family as we built a snowman, ate from a wide spread of guilty pleasure junk food, and played in the falling snow. My thoughts kept returning to the people I’d been with 48 hours earlier.
Having done other short-term missions trips, I know that these feelings that accompany re-entry are normal; but this time, I feel like I’m wrestling a little harder because I’m not sure I want them to go away. I know intuitively that I need to process through what I experienced, reach some conclusions, and then connect my experience there with my life here. But I fear tying too nice a bow on it. It’s hard enough answering the question, “How was Haiti?” in less than 10 paragraphs. In fact, at one point this last weekend, my dad asked a simple question about whether we knew if aid was actually reaching people, and I took 15 minutes of non-stop talking and story-telling to answer. I guess what I’m feeling and trying to say is that I don’t want my experience to become a sound bite or a quick story that I file away for future anecdotes.
At the same time I’m working on coming to grips with what I’ve been given (in terms of where I live, what I own, the food I eat, etc.) vs. the need I saw. I’m not saying I’ve fully concluded the matter (because I know I’m still processing), but one of the early conclusions I came to is that I need to use what I have: video footage, the technology to edit and tell stories with that footage, and the opportunity to spread those stories online; to help others. Everyone we met might not have the resources to tell their story to people outside their country, but I do; and I need to be faithful with that. So, over the next couple of weeks, you’ll be seeing several videos coming from me featuring our time in Haiti. I’m currently wading through 8 hours of footage to pull together some short vignettes of our experiences and put them online.
If you’re wondering what you can do, there are two very simple, not always easy, answers: Give and Go. The group I went with, Adventures In Missions is offering ways to do both. If you’re interested, click here. I’d encourage you to at least check it out and pray about it. And while you’re at it pray for the people in Haiti who need food, water, and shelter, pray for the Haitian pastors as they lead and shepherd their local communities, and pray for the relief workers on the ground working to bring aid to those in need.