The Hills Are Alive In Haiti

The word "Haiti" literally means 'high mountain'.  Once you get off the coast, everything around Port-au-Prince is on a steep hillside.  Just imagine San Francisco on steroids.  We'd drive up and down hilly streets.  You couldn't see far because of buildings, but every once in awhile the you've have a clearing into a ravine, and you'd get a glimpse of another world. 

Our little section of Haiti was the neighborhood of Rue Delmas 87.  Rue Delmas is the main road through Delmas, one of the biggest suburbs of Port-au-Prince ('rue' means 'road'; 'Delmas is pronounced 'Dell-MAH').  Most of the side streets are just numbers off the road- so non-major cross streets are just Rue Delmas 1, Rue Delmas 2, Rue Delmas 3, etc.  Since we were on Rue Delmas 87, you know we were at the end of a very long road!  This turned into a neighborhood of patchwork streets, which led down into ravines where the people actually lived. 


View Rte de Delmas in a larger map

A few hundred 25 pound blocks were delivered and stacked up on the street, and it was our job to carry them down into the ravine.  I shot a video, following on of our guys down, which was the most popular video we sent back, called "The Long Walk".

What's a little cement among friends?

Go ahead and make fun of me for huffing and puffing just following him down with a little iPhone camera. (this was shot on the first day, and my French hadn't caught up with me either.) In my defense, I'd been lugging hundreds of blocks up and down all day and was exhausted.  It took us two days to carry all the blocks down. We showed at the building site on the third morning and found an entirely new group of blocks to haul down.  We also had to carry down 94 pound bags of concrete.  Because of the pathway down and how awkward the bags were to carry, you couldn't use two people to carry them or easily hand them off.  I carried 2 or 3 down, but my brother Eddy did 7.

Rochelle (neighbor) and Vanessa's baby

Our project was to rebuild a concrete block house for a widow, whose home, except for one room, had been destroyed in the earthquake.  She lived with her daughter, Vanessa (pronounced vah-NEE-suh), Vanessa's newborn baby, and her two grandsons- all in one room.  The widow's other daughter had been killed in the earthquake, leaving her two grandsons behind.  Vanessa's husband was there one day, but I assumed he worked elsewhere. 

I'll show you the finished project tomorrow!

Classic Kick

I'm famed/mocked for loving to run in the elements.  Every PR (personal record) I've had has been at or below freezing.

Mini-Dwyane Wade In Haiti?

(This week I'm doing stories from my trip to Haiti in July 2010 around the anniversary of the earthquake in Haiti to encourage people to Pray, Donate, Go!)

It was surprising it took so long, but on our last afternoon in Haiti, several of us decided to walk the 100 feet from the part of the Bethel Guest House where we were staying, to the wing of the guest house that had been converted into an impromtu orphanage after the earthquake.

Earlier we had visited the actual orphanage in Carrefour, the poorest section of Port-au-Prince (which is saying something).

You can see in the bottom right sight it is spray-painted with the word 'demolir', which means it is marked to be 'demolished'.  They said it couldn't be repaired, and would take $20,000 just to have it demolished, let alone the cost to rebuild.

Since New Life Link Orphanage no longer had a home, they moved the older kids to another site, and the younger kids and babies were moved to this portion of the Bethel Guest House.  Here is a quick tour:



We had a lot of fun with them.  The kids reminded me of my 3- and 5-year-old girls, because all they wanted to do was climb on me.  I also tried to teach a couple of the older kids my one magic trick, but I'm not sure they ever got it.  One kid in particular, who I called Dwyane Wade for obvious reason, just wanted to hang out with me the whole time.

I didn't have the urge to adopt all of them, but I do support people who are interested in adopting kids, and at least we found a great place where kids could live until they're adopted.  I was told about 50% of the kids were already in the adoption process and waiting to be brought home.  Before the earthquake, adoption requests were about 50% from the US, and 50% from France. After the earthquake, it changed to 95% US, and 5% France.  I don't know that France slacked off, but they did say the US really stepped up!

For a really inspiring story regarding New Life Link, here is the rather harrowing story of a local Nashville man who rushed to save his to-be-adopted daughter after the earthquake.  From that connection, Mike and Brent Gambrell Ministries connected with Bethel Guest House and New Life Link and are now hosting mission teams, helping kids get adopted, and changing peoples lives in the Haiti and US in amazing ways!

Also see www.HDMenHaiti.com

Justin Beiber and the Surprising Music of Haiti

Any time you go to a new place, there are always things that surprise you, and the music I heard in Haiti certainly was one of them.   I'd tried to learn as much as a I could about Haiti before going down there, reading books about Haiti's independence, it's rise from dictatorship in the 1980's, to humanitarian efforts in battling AIDS and TB. For music, I'd gone to iTunes and typed in "Haiti", and gotten some offerings that sounded rather African to my untrained ears.  Since I was in charge of taking video for the trip, I downloaded a couple songs to use as music under photos or video that I'd then put on YouTube for the folks following us back home.  By the time I finished the trip, I realized I hadn't heard any of that type of music while I was down there.

When we got to the neighborhood in Rue Delmas 87 (a suburb of Port-au-Prince), we had to go through a narrow walkway between several houses and then down winding sets of stairs in order to get to the widow's house we were rebuilding.  What was the first song I remember hearing in this foreign land? Near street level a bunch of 3rd and 4th grade girls will hanging out and playing, singing along to a radio blaring "Baby, baby, baby, oh, sweet baby, baby, baby!"  Yes, Justin Bieber-mania had hit Haiti.

 (the girl on the left sang Bieber all day, except when she was working on her English with us.)

We probably carried a couple thousand 25-pound cinder blocks down via our human assembly line.  Even though the steps were higher and therefore harder, I liked being stationed on the area near the blue door.  All day, we'd hear piano playing coming from inside the door.  We figured out it must be a piano teacher's house, since we'd hear simple scales, and then more advanced pieces, and then back to scales, as students from different levels would come in for lessons throughout the day.  It was one of those 'ah-ha' moments.  Even in a disaster-ravaged country like Haiti, people were still able to send their kids to better themselves through music.

The daughter of the woman whose house we were rebuilding was Vanessa (pronounced 'vuh-NIECE-uh).  She often sang solos at her Baptist church, and had a wonderful voice.  We tried singing a few of the songs we knew in French, but it turns out Vanessa and her family and friends didn't know them.  The family and their neighbors didn't really know any songs in English, either.  Vanessa sang a beautiful song in French, which we couldn't understand, but really enjoyed anyway. Finally someone hit upon a song it turns out we all knew, and we sang it together.

This was pretty funny in retrospect- English-speaking Americans and French/Creole-speaking Haitians joining together to sing a Christmas song in Latin in the middle of July.   But in reality, it was amazing- people from different countries and backgrounds and languages coming together to praise the God they share singing In excelsis Deo, "Glory to God in the highest".

COMING UP NEXT: Mauled by a 3-Foot-Tall Dwyane Wade