These two videos represent one of our first experiences in Haiti and also one of our last.
I’ll start with our last day in Haiti. In conversations with one of the two Marassa tent communities, we had asked them what needs they had, and one of the answers that came back was that they wanted and needed prayer. So we offered to come back the next morning and spend time praying for the community and individuals from that tent city.
Now I’m going to take you all the way back to our very first day in Haiti. Before we had even crossed the border from the Dominican Republic into Haiti, we visited a field hospital that was caring for people injured in the earthquake. It was there that we met Roody. Previously, I posted a video of him singing Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song”. This is an extended clip featuring some of our conversation with him and showing a bit about our experience at the hospital:
I posted while in Haiti about how we worked to provide aid for a pair of tent communities we encountered. (You can read the original post here.) This video shows you a little bit of what we experienced during our last two days in Haiti:
It seems fitting that I post this video on Palm Sunday, the day that celebrates and remembers Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey while people praised him and sang in the streets.
While in Haiti, we experienced a day of people dancing, singing, parading, and praising Jesus in the streets of Port-au-Prince. Here’s a short video to give you a small glimpse into what that was like:
This is a community we spent some time in while in Haiti that had been displaced from their homes and were now living in tents in a field behind their former neighborhood. One of their main needs is for better tents and tarps. With the rainy season is starting in the next couple of weeks, their current “tents” (essentially sticks and sheets) won’t hold up for very long. For more information on how you can be part of helping Haiti, click here.
Our second day in Haiti also happened to be the second of three national days of prayer and fasting that were happening all across Haiti that weekend. We had no idea that this would be going on when we scheduled and planned the trip.
It was incredible. Everywhere we went in Port-au-Prince, there were people overflowing out of the churches. We visited two gatherings but we must have seen dozens more. The first we visited was being held in a walled-off field and there must have been somewhere around 2,000 people there. The second probably had around 5,000 people. It was being held at a church, but the church couldn’t hold everyone so they had set up in an open courtyard next to the church. The church was actually being used as an overflow area! On top of that, people were crammed into alleyways and side streets all around the gathering.
At both gatherings there was preaching and praying and singing to God for hours upon hours.
On our first day in Haiti, we visited a church/medical clinic that had been caring for injured survivors of the January 12 earthquake. While there, we met a woman named Michelle and heard her heartbreaking story. Her and her husband were some of the very first people we met after we crossed the border from Dominican Republic into Haiti; and through listening to their story and praying with them, the weight of pain, grief, and loss of the earthquake, as well as the hope and resilience of those that survived it, became very real.
On our first day in Haiti, we had the opportunity to meet with a group of pastors that had come together as a group for the first time. This is the story of why:
My wife, Christina, posted some great thoughts on her experience with my Haiti re-entry as well as some really helpful tips on processing through life-changing trips when you’re not the one going.
Before we even crossed the Hatian border, while we were still in Santo Domingo, we had our first encounter with the aftermath of the earthquake. We visited a field hospital and talked with a few of the nurses caring for sick and injured Haitian refugees. It was there, in a tent filled with people brought there after Port-au-Prince collapsed, that we met Roody.
Roody had been working in an office the day of the earthquake. When the shaking started, he got out but then as he ran out, a nearby building fell and landed on him. He was pulled out of the rubble within ten minutes but had suffered fractures in his left leg. He told us how he’d learned English by reading English subtitles while watching MTV.
He offered to sing us a song:
On our second day we drove into and through the center of Port-au-Prince and witnessed the city firsthand:
Watching these two videos back to back can give you a glimpse of our experience in Haiti: destruction, loss, pain, and desperation standing side by side and hand in hand with hope, grace, and resilience.
Today was an incredible day of seeing God at work in big ways within small communities through the interconnected community of social media. But first, some context.
Yesterday we came across a tent city with this group of people, who had not seen any food, water, or medical help since the earthquake happened one month ago:
And we posted this picture on flickr as well as this tweet on twitter. As a result, tens of thousands of people saw and passed on the desperate need in this village.
So we showed up this morning expectant, wanting to see God work a miracle in this community. And a miracle happened, it just wasn’t the one we had expected. You see, no supply trucks rolled up, the U.N. didn’t march in, and Anderson Cooper didn’t come popping out of one of the tents. Instead, we arrived to find things pretty much as we’d left them. But within an hour, things had changed. A group of doctors from Cuba showed up and were vaccinating and giving medical care to the whole community.
Beyond that, the previous night, when we had sent out the call for help, people had given money that eventually totaled $2000 to bring help. A few members of our team took that money and found the only real grocery store in the entire city and bought a truck bed’s worth of rice, beans, cooking oil, and baby formula. During that trip, they also ended up at the airport (where the U.N. and other NGO’s were staging relief efforts) and but by God’s grace, were able to meet with one of the top officials in the relief efforts who then added the two tent cities we had been visiting into their official system for providing relief.
With the food in the bed of the truck, we pulled into the community and saw what God had done in less than 24 hours to bring complete transformation to a community. And God had done it through us. And let’s face it, we’re not really all that special. We’re not the type that regularly meet with the U.N. or influential people within major multi-national relief organizations, but God did an amazing work and brought blessing and life to a community that so desperately needed it. And we got to be first-hand witnesses and participants in the midst of it.