Haiti is Personal

Today a friend of ours, Walt, is unaccounted for in Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake. He was doing his own assistance work installing solar panels in rural areas. We haven’t heard from him for 36 hours now. Someone saw him on the street a few minutes for the earthquake, but nothing since then. Knowing someone caught in a disaster keeps the imposing magnitude of a mass tragedy on a human level. Please keep Walt and his family in your prayers.

Forty years ago our family was in Deschapelles, Haiti at the Hospital Albert Schweitzer, about 40 miles outside Port-au-Prince. Mom would give me a buck to rent horse for the day from a guy down the street. I would rent Edgar and ride around the trails with some other kids, stopping at Bazaars for fruit, or a river to water Edgar.

At a village about a mile out of town people would grab hollowed out tree limbs and bamboo shoots, and start jamming a calypso folk improvisation. It didn’t matter that us boys didn’t have a gratuity to offer for the entertainment, the folks just loved playing, and we loved the music.

For all the poverty and crime and disease of Haiti, it hurts to think that they are suffering the plight of a natural catastrophe on top of all else. It becomes more painful when you have seen their eyes and felt the soul that wants to soar like any other; or when you know someone personally caught in the disaster. Please remember the many families suffering in Haiti in your prayers as well.

It isn’t the grandiose number of people hurt that moves the heart; it’s the heart that has come to know the soul of another that makes things real. "If one suffers, all suffers; and if one is honored, all rejoices with it," 1 Corinthians 12:26. We are so interconnected, aren't we?