One Respe

Early in the evening on January 12th my wife and I watched with sheer horror over the devastation brought by earthquake to Haiti. Haiti is a country near and dear to our hearts, experiences, and minds. We were fortunate enough to have spent time in Port-au-Prince years ago, and while our time there was relatively brief we are humbled and blessed to have learned much in our travels. If you've ever spent anytime with anyone from Haiti you will have come to experience grace and strength first hand. As we watched the reports we knew that this earthquake was a crisis of epic proportions.

I lack the words to describe what this event means to the world, instead I will borrow these, as they say it all:

Haiti

In Haiti you throw a blank page into the air and words leap onto it.
There are so many stories to tell, so many haunted spirits who cry out for ears willing to listen.

Each generation has written a chapter in a never finished book. One chapter runs into another, tied like knots on a thread that has been dipped in the blood of generations. Each generation is akin to brave predecessors: the slave leader Boukman; Toussaint, Dessalines, and Christope – men who made a nation; Charlemagne Peralte who fought the American occupation; the African slaves who bore the seeds of independence. They are all there on the thread, stained by the courage and deceit of many events.

Haiti was declared the first black republic in the world, but to say it is not enough. It must be scrawled across some wall in the blood it cost.

The world forgets Haiti because Haiti has not participated in the world for some time. For years it was shunned because of the violence and massacre that accompanied its hard-won independence. In more recent times, it has not participated in the world because that might mean changes and there are people, Haitians and others, whose interests have been served perfectly well by the status quo.

So Haiti comes and goes out of mind like some mystery island written about in dark books until some news of violence there splashes across front pages. But for those who know it, Haiti remains ever-etched across the mind and heart. It haunts and bewilders and refuses to let lives go on without it. No one owns Haiti, it owns you and you become the blank page across which Haiti scrawls its beautiful and tragic epitaph.