Digging Through the Garbage of Life

There are some things that I don't know how to put into words... so I haven't. I've muddled them around in my mind, massaged them and tried to change the outcome and prayed for what was still to come.

 As I looked out the window of the Toyota on the dirt side streets of Cap Haitien, there was a pile of trash like all the others, black from charcoal and picked through by the pigs and goats looking for a bite to eat. I knew what was there - broken Prestige bottles (a local beer) and empty bottles of Barbancourt Rhum (local rum), some fruit peels and sucret (candy) wrappers from those blancos from the States. There was human waste and animal remains... you don't have to guess, the smells tell you all the same. There are few more familiar sights in Haiti than the garbage heap in every ditch, every corner, every road, but this one was different. I looked and say a young boy, no older than eight searching. At first I momentarily tried to protect my heart by convincing myself he was looking for a soccer ball kicked too far from a friendly game. But there was no game to be had. Or maybe he was searching for an old tire to push down the road with a stick, balancing it as a toy. But, you know as you sit in your safe comfy home with pantries filled with food that these were not his stories. He was searching for food. Looking in a place that even the pigs had left for waste for something to fill the aching hole in his stomach that would not be filled.

 These are things seen in India. These are images for National Geographic, not for my eyes. Even if my camera had been on my lap poised and ready for the shot, my humanity was not ready to look through that lens.

 Days earlier, a family rode into the clinic on a motorcycle, five of them on one bike over a long and bumpy dirt road that barely is. There was a drive and three older children and a mother too sick to sit up on her own. She was in the Clinique Esperance et Vie only an hour before dad called out "Emergency" and all hands flew to his aid. Tiny aneurysms in her eyes diagnosed by dad and the ophthalmologist told the story of years upon years of untreated hypertension leading to high cholesterol that took her life that day in Terrier Rouge. The first life lost in a clinic that serves a community that reaches beyond roads and mountains. A clinic that receives patients that walk an entire day for care. A clinic that built a mobile clinic to go to the outlands of Haiti to find those that couldn't find their way to them. They serve with qualified doctors and nurses, dentist and obstetrics. They have an operating room and a fully operating lab. It truly is the best of the best in northern Haiti. When I se this I think to myself, this can be fixed. It's the basics. We can fix this. Simple medical care years ago would have saved her life. But not everyone has a minute clinic around the corner or Blue Cross Blue Shield to help foot the bill.

 It's the basics. Kids shouldn't be searching for dinner in a pile of waste. There's enough food for everyone, I just don't know how to make it so. Lives should not be lost because basic necessities aren't met.

 Pere Bruno told us last year that wonderful scripture passage that says "If you have faith you can say to this mountain get up and jump into the sea... And it will." My heart, my faith, all of who I am says this is so. So I want to shake my fists and scream at the mountains to move out of the way. I want the Haitian government to figure it out. I so desperately want all of us to think a little less of ourselves and a little more of others. They are our mountains, but I guess we too have to search through the garbage in our own lives to find again the bread of life. And we too need to know that it takes time and faith and heart and God.

 As you can tell, it becomes painfully real in a place such as this. So there are some images that remain engrained in the images in my mind that no even words can explain the horror of such a life lived on the edge of survival. My prayer today is that as hard as it is, as many tears as it takes, whatever garbage I have to dig through... I must remember. Because only then can we start the doing.