sorrow, stories, and songs

Before I left MSP I stopped at a cash machine and withdrew $300 for travel expenses during the trip. As we left the airport in Port Au Prince traveling in a steel mesh enclosed truck the level of poverty that the people of this country wrestle with every day became all too evident. The $300 dollars I had stashed in my luggage and in my wallet is nearly equal to a year’s wages for the average Haitian. With an 80% unemployment rate, the story of this island seems bleak and bleaker.

There is garbage strewn everywhere and the best road in Haiti makes the worst road during Minnesota pothole season look like a freshly paved highway. On the side of the road there are people gathering what wood they can find for cooking and the hills are barren and nearly treeless. The collective story is one of many many people on an island with fewer and fewer resources.

The frustration of the social climate is quickly laid to rest though as you meet the children at the Love a Child orphanage. For sure they share the collective story of poverty that inflicts this half of the island, but their personal stories and the way God has interceded through the work of the missionaries here shouts over the top of the island’s darkest days. As I sit here writing, the children are filling the air with songs of joy and praise lifting an alleluia that beckons to the surrounding mountains. Children who lost their mothers during childbirth sing. Children live who were so malnourished that at nine months one weighed only nine pounds. Children who were literally in the grasp of death now find themselves joyfully held in the palm of God’s hand as He writes a different story for their lives.