Haiti Crisis Update #14 from Jimmy Dodd
February 25, 2010 - 08:32:42 PM by Eric Rochester
Big Picture
- There are 415 refugee camps throughout Haiti housing more than half a million people.
- On Sunday morning, I received a video on my phone from Trace Thurlby who is one of the leaders of the Global Orphan Project. The video Trace sent from Haiti was of a Haitian congregation worshipping amidst the rubble and tents in Port-au-Prince. I was reminded that while I had just worshipped with my family in Kansas City, there was passionate worship that same morning in Port-au-Prince.
- The death toll in Haiti is nearing 300,000. While the population of Haiti is just under 10 million, the population of Port-au-Prince was just under one million. Two million people live in Greater Port-au-Prince (PAP and the nearby cities and towns which consider themselves PAP – much like Overland Park is a part of Greater Kansas City). Now imagine a major city in the US losing 15% of its population in a natural disaster. The death toll of Katrina was 2,500 (which includes 750 people who were never found). As devastating as Katrina was, the death toll was less than 1% of the areas devastated by the hurricane. The 9-11 attacks took the lives of 2,595 in the World Trade Center Towers, 1,762 who were residents of New York, a city with a population nearing 9 million. Imagine more than a million deaths in NYC. Imagine half a million deaths in Chicago or 300,000 deaths in Kansas City. Haiti is reeling as a nation because a significant percentage of the population lost their lives in a thirty second span on January 12th.
- “If there is something good that came from this catastrophe, it is that God is taking over Haiti spiritually. I’ve been praying about this for years. At our church alone, 70 people gave their life to Jesus Christ over the last three days.” – Pastor Moise Vaval. There are rumors that Prime Minister of Haiti has become a Christian. A three day national fast was called by President Preval. He asked for the nation to pray during the fast.
- Haiti’s supreme voodoo leader vowed “war” on Wednesday after accusing Evangelicals of attacking a ceremony organized by the voodoo leader intended to honor those killed in last month’s massive earthquake. The conflict on Tuesday in the capital’s sprawling Cite Soleil slum came with religious tensions rising, as masses of Haitians turn to Jesus in the wake of the earthquake that killed more than 200,000. “It will be war — open war,” Max Beauvoir, supreme head of Haitian voodoo, told AFP in an interview at his home and temple outside the capital.
- The aftershocks continue. There have been 5 aftershocks in past 24 hours. Two of them registered 4.7 which is strong enough to wake you up at night. Because of the aftershocks, the majority of Haitians continue to sleep outside under sheets in tent cities. The rainy season is near (April) as it has already rained several times. Haitians are now dealing with mud. The hurricane season begins in June/July.
- Commercial flights in and out of Haiti resumed this week. Floating docs have been installed at the seaport in Port au Prince to facilitate the massive amounts of aid arriving in the country on a daily basis. The main seaport will soon be able to process up to 1,500 containers per day.
- The most urgent priorities for assistance continue to include shelter and sanitation. Debris removal continues and, in fact, many Haitians are now earning money by assisting in the clearing of drains and debris.
- It is amazing to see the body of Christ at work. Engineering Ministries International continues to inspect and repair buildings throughout Port-au-Prince. Each part of the Body of Christ is playing a role in caring for the Haitian people.
- A diverse group of Christian musicians are helping bring relief and comfort to earthquake survivors by contributing their talents to a new album called HERE
Reflections
Ben Homan is the leader of Food for the Hungry. His powerful reflection, grounded in the Gospel of Jesus, is worth the read.
“Lament for Haiti”
By Benjamin K. Homan
Food for the Hungry
February 2010
More than 220,000 people perished.
More than 700,000 people displaced from their homes.
70% of the schools destroyed.
Life disrupted – and changed forever – for millions more.
The Haiti earthquake staggers the mind – and breaks the heart.
I felt torn as I went to Haiti, a tragedy that evoked hard memories of past emergencies. Still, having walked through what I can only call an “open graveyard” in post-tsunami zones and seen terror in the bullet-ridden hospitals of Baghdad, Haiti’s lament summoned. Yet I also knew such calls included searching for elusive words to say in unspeakable situations.
Haiti was no different.
My first morning in post-earthquake Port-au-Prince, I glanced at the schedule. To my surprise, my name was listed next to “Staff devotions.” I winced. What would I say? What could I say? All around us was indescribable loss, the crush of debris and even the stench of bodies trapped in the rubble. In the dim morning light, I muttered a simple prayer: “God help me.”
The day before, I saw many of the 337 makeshift camps that contain an estimated 550,000 displaced people. Children roved by themselves. Bed sheets hung loosely as roofs and walls. Desperate stares. Pancaked buildings. Twisted rebar. Rescue crews. And the vacant eyes of survivors. I donned a face mask to fight the terrible odor. A staff member recounted pulling 15 bodies from his collapsed apartment building. “I was 5 minutes from death,” he said, reflecting on how far away he was from his home at the time of the quake. “I arrived home to find the bodies of six sisters huddled in one place; they died together.”
I fumbled through my Bible, hoping for God’s Spirit to speak to my soul and arrived at the Old Testament book of Lamentations – written, scholars believe, by the “weeping prophet,” Jeremiah. “A book about lamenting,” I thought. “That should do.” From my bedside, I devoured all five very hard, grief-filled chapters of Israel’s defeat, devastation, captivity and exile.
Questions streamed through my head. How do you process the intensity of Haiti’s tragedy? How does one understand the huge loss of so many, many people? I read the prophets words, “Your wound is as deep as the sea. Who can heal you?” (Lamentations 2:13). Exactly, I thought.
As I tried to grasp the pain and suffering around me, I clung to three big ideas that gave comfort and hope – notions that I needed for my own sustenance – and that I shared with our staff on that morning. Below I have recorded an updated version of those rough ideas:
Through Lamentations, God invites us to into 1) honesty, 2) relationships and 3) humility.
1. God invites us into HONESTY.
As I read the pages of Lamentations, I was struck with the raw emotions and stark descriptions.
- “My eyes fail from weeping, I am in torment within, my heart is poured out on the ground because my people are destroyed, because children and infants faint in the streets of the city,” Lamentations 2:11
- “…your children…faint from hunger at the head of every street…. Whom have you ever treated like this?” Lamentations 2:19, 20
- “This is why I weep and my eyes overflow with tears. No one is near to comfort me, no one to restore my spirit. My children are destitute because the enemy has prevailed.” Lamentations 1:16
- “You, O LORD, reign forever; your throne endures from generation to generation. Why do you always forget us? Why do you forsake us so long?” Lamentations 5:19-20
As I read these rugged verses in Lamentations along with Psalms of lament, such as Psalm 10, I was struck at the emotional range and space that God’s prophet uses to lead others into lament. Is God really that big and expansive to invite His people to wail, to weep, to complain – and even to, at times, lodge charges of abandonment on heaven’s doorstep? The answer is “yes.”
God invites our honesty. He will meet us on the “holy ground” of our expressed sorrow, our lament, and He is doing this in Haiti. Yet I am convinced, as I read Scripture and understand more of God’s amazing emotional depth, that the path of healing for Haiti must first route itself through grief. Lament cannot be healthily by-passed. God can deal with our brutal emotional expression – and beckons us to come close with all of our hurts. He wants to touch us and heal us at that level.
2. God invites us into RELATIONSHIPS.
Lamentations was not written as a private journal or secret diary. It was inspired and preserved for a collective purpose in the life of God’s people. Indeed, it was written as a community document, in poetic form, that would facilitate a shared historical experience. It builds a lexicon of suffering, a model of how to communicate about epic loss. Yet while the Book of Lamentations at its most basic structural level strings together five poems that key off of Hebrew acrostics, the book trail blazes vulnerability with others and a group sharing of hard emotions. But the prophet does not stop at the transparent exposure of feelings. He also goes down the brave path of confession.
- “My sins have been bound to a yoke….” Lamentations 1:14
- “The Lord is righteous, yet I rebelled against His command,” Lamentations 1:18
- “The crown has fallen from our head. Woe to us, for we have sinned! Because of this our hearts are faint, because of these things our eyes grow dim.” Lamentations 5:16-17
After I shared my thoughts about Lamentations with our staff in Port-au-Prince, I was with one of Food for the Hungry’s trained trauma counselors inside the wreckage of a neighborhood Haitian church. With holes in the ceiling above and crumbling walls, he distributed blank sheets of paper, pencils and crayons to each of these precious Haitian quake survivors. At a crude table, he invited the group to draw pictures of their earthquake experience. Where were they? What do they remember? The group quietly drew – and then they spoke, wept and discussed. The community of quake survivors found a common voice in their drawings – and it allowed them to take an early step toward processing their pain and receiving God’s comfort – in the context of relationships.
My own natural tendency when I return from disaster zones is to shrink away into private reflection. “Leave me alone,” I sometimes think. Yet withdrawing from relationships is no path for restoration or depth of healing from trauma. God grants relationships as a means of recovery from wounds. “Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn,” (Romans 12:15). We are invited in the community of faith to meet each other across our vast spectrum of both easy and difficult emotions. Of course, this has implications not only for folks who experience suffering, but also those in close proximity. Sometimes, the bystanders of pain must go in pursuit of a friend or loved one who is hurt. No one who is injured should bear the burden alone. “Bear one another’s burdens and thus fulfill the law of Christ,” Galatians 6:2.
As I emerged from post-earthquake Haiti, I dedicated the better part of a day to talk with a friend who is also a pastor and trained counselor. I shared what I saw and experienced in Haiti. I grieved for the man with mangled legs who dragged himself everywhere with his arms. I told of a restless, almost mob-like situation surrounding our distribution of health and hygiene boxes – and I felt graced with the restorative impact that flows from close relationships. One of my prayers for Haiti is that it will become a nation of “wounded healers” who bless and restore each other, in part, through the ability to express loss. In the context of relationships, we can remind people in pain that what Jesus said is true, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest,” Matthew 11:28.
3. God invites us into HUMILITY.
The prophet in the Book of Lamentations, viewing the tragic events for the Hebrews, offers no pat answers or definitive answers as to the “why” question of suffering. He offers no explicit, one-size-fits-all philosophical statements on the problem of pain. To be blunt, the book affirms that suffering perplexes and that we lack God’s full perspective. The Hebrew reader at the time of the book’s writing would likely have been instructed in the Law of Moses and be familiar with Deuteronomy 29:29, “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.” There are realities hidden from view. There are answers we do not have.
In the life of my own family, we have no clear understanding of why my wife has the disease Multiple Sclerosis. My father and my wife’s father both died from the same form of cancer. One lived to age 86; the other did not reach 70 years. Why such different courses for the same diagnosis? We do not know. The complexities of not knowing can be frustrating – yet we are allowed and even invited to struggle, wrestle and dispute. At the end of the day, mysteries and secrets remain – and starkly remind us of human limits. In short, the secret things of this world humble us. I am finite; God is not. And it is perhaps in this recognition of my shortcomings and limited view of reality that I can gain a larger view of the greatness of God. As we learn in Lamentations 3:22-23, “Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” God is great; I am not great. It is a humbling truth to which pain and suffering can bring us.
CONCLUSION
A reflection on lament cannot be complete without acknowledging Jesus’ lament. Recall that desperate moment on the cross as Jesus completed His selfless act of redemption and sacrifice, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). Jesus’ lament, which marks an amazing moment in redemptive history in which He bore the penalty of sin, was likely not in clear view of the writer of the Book of Lamentations or its initial audience. Think of it. The Creator God becomes human, bears our burdens and cries out in lament. Though the prophet Isaiah predicted the Messiah to be a “Man of sorrows” (Isaiah 53:3), the notion then of a suffering Savior was not fully grasped. Yet being a reader of the Book of Lamentations on this side of the cross, I can only stand in greater amazement and worship of God for entering our world of lament, suffering on the cross and truly becoming a “Wonderful Counselor” (Isaiah 9:6) who meets us in our pain and binds up our wounds.
As we pray for Haiti and as we connect with each other through our own lamenting, be reminded that lament also represents an invitation. Lament can be a part of our journey into honesty, relationships and humility. God meets us there in hard, but intimate communion.
Reports:
While there are literally thousands of reports coming out of Haiti, I have included reports from three ministries I personally trust 100%. I would encourage you to financially support these ministries (others are listed at the conclusion of this update). Each ministry presently has field staff in Haiti leading relief assessment teams and delivering life sustaining supplies. Please read these updates to learn about how the Lord is working!
If you are interested in the US government daily report (very interesting reading) click HERE for the most up-to-date situation reports on the disaster that I’ve seen. You’ll have to go into the Haiti earthquake page and then access the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) report. Updated every day.
El Shaddai
Here is a report from one of the doctors who served in the Gonaives area:
“… There are many patients needing skin grafts w/wounds to the bone w/ exposed tendons. Lots of delayed care and improperly set fractures that have been casted after the quake. There is a big need for ortho supplies, splinting material, orthopedic OR hardware. Chronic wound care materials are also needed. Antistaph and broad spectrum abx for kids and adults both oral and parenteral. One thing we don’t have that neither hospital in town has is a nebulizer that works. A portable, possibly battery operated, nebulizer w/ meds, hose, chamber and mouthpieces would be great. Injectable steroids and antihistamines also good. The hospital let us use an area all to ourselves that has a hall we placed benches in for triage/waiting. I had an exam room w/ stretcher and table to do procedures. The nurses shared a big room w/ 4 stations. An adjoining room was used to store extra supplies and we used shelves between the two rooms for pharmaceuticals. There is a nursery, delivery ward, and single operating room. The hospital is literally a converted warehouse with makeshift wood frame walls and plastic sheeting dividing the wards and rooms. There is an onsite pharmacy with very limited supplies.”
Adoption Information
More and more people are inquiring into Haitian adoption.
As we have read in the news, Haitian adoptions are presently difficult if not impossible. On January 15, 2010, The Department of State posted a release regarding inquiries from American citizens concerned about the plight of children affected by the earthquake in Haiti. The State Department understands that Americans want to respond to the need of the children in Haiti by opening their homes to the orphans created by this disaster. The State Dept. went on to reiterate that it can be extremely difficult in these circumstances to determine the eligibility of children for inter-country adoption.
Some children in Haiti have been temporarily separated from the parents and other family members, so the focus at this time must be reconnecting families who have been torn apart by this devastating tragedy. It will take time to determine whether children orphaned by the earthquake have surviving family members who may be able to care for them. If it is discovered that a child has been left parentless, they are often taken in by other relatives in the extended family.
During times of crisis, it can also be exceptionally difficult to fulfill the legal requirements for adoption of both the U.S. and the child’s country of origin. This is especially true when civil authority breaks down or temporarily ceases to function. It can also be difficult to gather documents necessary to fulfill the legal requirements of U.S. immigration law.
For those in the process of adopting, due to the devastation in Haiti, it is possible that adoption documentation has been displaced or destroyed, so they are asking parents to remain patient while the necessary information is retrieved and the process can move forward.
One of the most highly recommended adoption agencies is Holt International. Holt’s Haiti program is currently closed to new applications, until they have a better understanding of how the earthquake has affected the Haitian government’s ability to function, including processing adoptions.
Recommended Adoption Agencies working in Haiti:
Mission Trip Information
If you have any interest in traveling to Haiti, now is the time to get your Passport and Shots (Tetanus, Hep A and Hep B series).
For mission trips to Haiti with the Global Orphan Project – click HERE
For mission trips to Haiti with El Shaddai Ministries, contact esmieletter@aol.com
Are you highly skilled in masonry, concrete placement and roofing systems and able to join a construction team? If so please contact us at slanier@pcanet.org and provide a summary of your experience and availability.
Giving Information
HR 4462 law allows an immediate deduction on your 2009 tax return for certain earthquake related charitable contributions.
If you make a 2010 donation to a domestic charity specifically for the relief of victims in the areas affected by the January 12 Haitian earthquake, you may be able to deduct the amount on your 2009 tax return. Here are some requirements:
- The donation must be made after January 11, 2010 and before March 1, 2010.
- The donation must be supported by the general documentation rules – generally a cancelled check, credit card receipt, or telephone bill supporting a text message contribution, and if the donation is either actual cash or $250 or more, you must also have a receipt from the organization.
- The donation can be deducted in either 2009 or 2010 (but not both years).
- You must itemize deductions to be able to deduct charitable contributions.
Highly Recommended Relief Agencies:
Many have asked me to recommend additional ministries working in Haiti. While there is no way I could provide an exhaustive list of ministries doing great work in Haiti, in addition to the five agencies listed above, I can personally recommend the following ministries:
Nazarene Compassionate Ministries
Finally, I am aware that many Catholics prefer to give only to Catholic relief agencies. I recommend:
Cross International Catholic Outreach
Jimmy Dodd
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