Monday, March 9, 2009 - Day 4

I laid on the roof for an hour and slowly watched the sun rise over Port-au-Prince. It was beautiful. In the morning we head to the school at Blanchard (see picture of Blanchard community).

Driving through the streets of Haiti even globalization has reached the country in the form of Texaco, Samsung, Nestle, Coke, Pepis and even tiny shacks labeled "cyber cafe." But satelite tv is sporadic and there is no McDonald's here. Not a good market for Happy Meal purchases. Vendors line the street selling 2nd hand clothes, food, and nick nacs. The roads are poor at best -- full of potholes and random curves (see picture of roads). Clearly money designated for roads didn't go there. Children hold onto the car as we pass. This is not a good sign -- children not in school uniforms during the day -- possibly street children or restaveks. Garbage lines the streets everywhere and you see police with huge guns. I had never seen the United Nations at work before but there was a major UN presence in Cite Soleil (see picture of Cite Soleil). It was intimidating.

At the Blanchard school I made notebooks with the fifth and sixth grade girls. Then we went to the Cite Soleil which is located in the poorest slum in Haiti. I made crosses with the kindergarten class. I was shocked by the gunshoots in the roof of the chuch at the school compound -- signs of violence from the last coup a few years earlier. As we left the school through Cite Soleil, I sat in awe. This was how the poorest of the poor lived -- the poorest slum in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. It consisted of people in tattered clothes living in shacks on trash piles with open sewers. There are no trash collectors here -- large amounts of trash sit out in the open. I was struck when at Cite Soleil a littler girl offered me her snack -- why because I was her friend. It a country where food is a scare commodity -- they were willing to share with me. WOW. How difficult when I have ready access to food and food that the U.S. sends sits on the docks?

We had afternoon prayer with the boys and beforehand we went around in a circle and everyone including the vistors each were given 3 affirmations by the group. I felt self-conscious as it was so uncustomary to life in the U.S. but I realized that this was about building self-esteem among the family. I think of Jesus' reference to the "least of these" in Matthew, the low social status of children in the Bible and how it is similiar here and yet these children are given at least 3 affirmations a day.

My prayer partner Bill shared his story with us after dinner. His father died when he was young and his mother died when he was 6. His sister went to live with one family and he went to live with a friend of his mother's. The woman treated him as an equal to her children for a year before making him her slave. She beat Bill. A nun helped him escape and took him to live at St. Joseph's at age 8 where he grew up. Now he goes to college and manages the home as well as being an advocate to end child slavery. Bill is only 24 -- the same age I am. Bill late helped the family who enslaved him because he explained that you do not repay evil with evil. How many times are we unwilling to forgive smaller things? Bills tells the boys that in life you need discipline or you won't make it anywhere. He thanks God that he's alive and says that in order to be an advocate you need to have Christ in you and you need passion. If you change 1 boy, he will change others. He informs his life by Psalm 91. He also tells us that no matter what people say, that beating children is NOT a part of Haiti's culture and that this mindset needs to be changed.