Carrie Petersen

The more time I spend in Haiti, the more I understand how difficult life is here, and the less I understand how some people make it through the day.

The organization I work with, Haiti Foundation of Hope, operates in rural villages, where many people live in mud huts with thatched roofs, and where children go without clothes, and where families struggle to find food each day. Not everywhere in Haiti is like this, but this is where many of my experiences have been.

Here are a couple stories to illustrate the difficulties people face:

On the last day of clinic, a family brought their father in to be seen by a doctor. They carried him on a bed, walking for an hour down a hot and dusty road to get here.

Earlier in the week I spoke with a family who has a new house after their old home was destroyed in floods last year. They have a new house, but still no jobs, livestock or garden (they were also lost in the hurricane season).

This afternoon I spoke with a woman who told me she had six children. We talked some more and I learned that she had had nine children, but three had died. (Many mothers share the same story here.)

Later in the day, I walked with the same woman from her home up on the hill to the community well, about a mile away, where she walks to every day to get water for her home. She was carrying the empty 5-gallon bucket in her hand, but on the way home, it would have been filled with water as she carried it on her head back up the hill. Just like the young boy we passed on the road.

So, what’s the good news? That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out this week. Sometimes it’s hard to see. The good news is that we helped about 1,000 patients at the clinic. The good news is that the woman who I walked to the well with has a job cleaning the clinic, which gives her money to send her children to school. People here have a church and community leaders who care about them. And just about everyone who came through our clinic doors this week left with beans and rice. (Medicine does little when you have no food.) Also, the clinic doors don’t close when we leave. There is Haitian staff here to make sure sick people continue to get treated. There is more good news I’m sure … We just have to keep watching for it.

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