LOVE

I had to travel back home to the City of Brotherly Love this week—that's right! Philadelphia. It's been a whirlwind trip, and I'll be back in Haiti before I know it, but I thought a blog entry was appropriate.

Something hopeful: Wendell Pierce and Bridging the Gaps. Pierce is an actor who played Bunk Moreland, a Baltimore detective on HBO's The Wire and currently stars on the show Treme. I was able to attend a talk by him connected to the Bridging the Gaps (BTG) Community Health Internship Program. He's a life-long New Orleans resident, and has been heavily involved in forming the Lake Ponchetrain Community Development Corporation to help rebuild that devastated neighborhood after Hurricane Katrina. He spoke about topics of race, love, transformation and hope, all things I'm greatly interested in. It was great to see a man who is more compelling in real life than the character I've seen him play on TV.

BTG is a summer-time interdisciplinary program that allows students in health-related or "helping" professions (including law) to work in over 297 community-based organizations in the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh areas while attending weekly seminars on topics related to healthcare and advocacy. It's a neat opportunity for many students to escape the confines of rich Philadelphia and enter poor Philadelphia, a truly different world. BTG has been around for over 20 years, and nearly 3,000 students have been able to participate in its work, hopefully carrying on lessons learned into future work to "bridge the gaps" in healthcare provision to the poor.

Something beautiful: Philly's roads! Marvelously-paved roads with multiple lanes! It's so difficult to get around in Port-au-Prince where a 4x4 is required to navigate all of the pot-holes that I'm pretty sure existed even before the quake.

Something stunning: I live in the Hunting Park neighborhood in North Philadelphia, named for the large park that occupies a sizable chunk of the community. Some wonderful transformations have happened there in the last month, facilitated by the United Way. All sorts of new shrubbery and flowers have been planted throughout the park, and a brand new playground has been installed. Hunting Park is a poor community, and the park itself is under-utilized by children because it's considered a dangerous place. To see kids from all different backgrounds in my neighborhood provided a safe place to run, jump, slide and monkey-bar with their parents nearby really touched me. It's something that would be wonderful for the kids of Cite Soleil, who are even more deprived than those in my North Philly home.

Becoming the thing I hate?

It's a tricky thing.

You see countless foreigners in new SUVs sporting obligatory NGO logos prowling the streets of Port-au-Prince. College-aged folks with massive backpacks that look like they mistakenly de-planed on their way to Europe. Church groups on week-long service trips that come to "save" Haiti when the majority religions are already Christian. Others sporting NGO-chic, an often intentional cross between grungy, expensive, and highly practical clothes (Whoa! Your pants have how many pockets?!?). And of course, people who have come to tour the poverty -- to see it and feel it for themselves.

They too often meddle, offend, and patronize.

What's scary is that I see myself in every single one of those stereotypes.

And I hate it.

I'd like to wish that I'm somehow different. I want my motives to be nobler, my questions to be more informed, and my work to be more effective.

Instead, I'm proud when I should be humble and loud when I should be quiet.

So what's the remedy? I only know what I've seen work in my other travels. Learn the language, preferably not the tongue of the elite or formal colonizers. Get out of the office and spend time building relationships rather than updating my facebook status. Be self-aware – if I know what makes me cringe in others' behavior, I should try to avoid doing these things myself. Commit to a place for the long-haul rather than a week at a time and learn the place as best I can. Try to live simply in a principled way, consistently, so that the omnipresent barriers that class and privilege create are minimized or torn down.

I think most important is the constant hard work of choosing to humble oneself, remembering my place in the scheme things. I need to remain faithful to a place, a people and a cause, and hope others – both Haitian and non-Haitian – are doing the same. That way our cumulative efforts can add up to profound change.

And certainly, I must acknowledge a sad fact: no matter how many pockets my pants may boast, it won't improve Haiti.

What should we then do?

A number of people I know have been working hard to deliver a report upon conditions in six of Haiti's internally-displaced persons' camps (called "We've Been Forgotten": Conditions in Haiti's Displacement Camps Eight Months After the Earthquake"). I think you should take a look at it.

It's not that the results of the survey are surprising (Spoiler alert!: Conditions are deplorable), but rather because if you're reading this blog, there's a good chance you're interested in what's happening in Port-au-Prince.

I know it can be difficult to delve into the details of a long report, but I'd encourage you to pick a chapter that focuses on a camp and zero in on the account of one of the surveyed families. It's not too difficult to find news articles with quotations from government officials or aid groups explaining the difficulties in providing aid and helping families resettle. It's another thing to choose to enter into the hardships of our brothers and sisters in the camps.

So after reading, what should we then do? It's hard for me to say. I pass by these camps everyday and don't have the slightest idea how as an individual I can make a difference with problems as seemingly intractable as they are. I can imagine how being at an even greater remove can make it more confounding.

So, at a minimum, I try to enter in. This is a self-centered response, but one that hopefully has outward effects. I want to keep my heart raw to remain empathetic. When I choose to look away time and time again and not burden my mind with the plight of others, I become so self-interested that my ability to love is stifled. So whether it's the suffering of Haitians in a tent city for 8 months or Sudanese in the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya for decades or the newly homeless fellow down the street, I don't want to forget that these are all people of great worth. They deserve so much better than where they find themselves.

So yes—back to the report. It's intended for policy-makers, with recommendations to improve aid distribution in the camps. But if you don't count yourself among them, maybe you could use it as a tool to expand your heart and mind today and to try to remember to do small acts of compassion with great love?

As Gonaives goes, so goes the nation

Gonaives is a city situated straight up Haiti's winding main Route National, several hours outside of Port-au-Prince. We were told it's long been considered a hotbed of political action in Haiti, that from the early days of the slave revolt that led to independence up through today, Gonaives has been at the center of it all.

Which reminds me, you might not know who the "we" is to which I'm referring. Chiefly, I have my lovely wife Katharine by my side. She's a master's student in international development completing an internship with CEC-FOP, a grassroots Haitian NGO doing amazing work with an acronym for a name that still befuddles me. Meanwhile, two of Katharine's classmates are also here with us, Sarah and Gina. It's been wonderful having one foot firmly planted in Cite Soleil for my internship while the other foot dances around Haiti trying to follow Katharine and Co. on daytrips that are a part of their work. I'll share some more about these adventures as time goes on.

Back to the "City of Independence." Instead of giving a blow-by-blow account of my trip to Gonaives and other parts of Haiti (because you don't want to read it and I don't want to write it), I'll try to use this space to occasionally give quick snippets about some of the short excursions or experiences I've had outside of Cite Soleil.

Something ridiculous: Having to spend $540 to rent an SUV for a three-day trip. (Thanks countless NGOs for driving up the rental price . . .) Thankfully the cost was spread around quite a bit. You certainly need a 4x4 though, even though you're traveling on one of the country's main transportation routes.

Something saddening: Seeing how Gonaives is still heavily damaged from floods several years ago. It's been a rough decade, with two major floods caused when hurricanes swept through the region, the most recent in 2008. Why such bad flooding? Gonaives and many of the hills and mountains surrounding it are deforested, a common problem in Haiti. With so little to absorb the water or slow its descent down hill, it inundates the city.

Something humbling: Brizard Valcin is a man wearing many hats. He's a lawyer by day, and a school principal, and head of a credit union, and Sunday school teacher, and a father of three children. We've found this to be the case with many of our hosts in Haiti thus far. By his own account, there are so many needs and many qualified individuals leave Gonaives or Haiti for greener (or more forested) pastures. So many like Brizard step up to do what they can with great humility, while all the while we stand by with mouths agape.

Can you spare a match?

A lamp is a wonderful symbol. Its light can guide one's path through dark places; it uncovers what's hidden; it allows people to gather and community to exist where it might otherwise not.

I'm excited to be working with the LAMP for Haiti Foundation, a non-profit that's chosen to throw its lot in with some of Haiti's poorest urban dwellers in a slum community called Cite Soleil. For the past several years, LAMP's primary mission has been to stand in solidarity with the Haitian poor. To this end, it runs a medical clinic three days a week that provides entirely free care to anyone who comes through its courtyard gates. Also close to its heart is the promotion and protection of human rights, a growing part of its work.

While improving public health in a slum community is a difficult thing, I believe the equally difficult task is protecting rights where respect for the rule of law has been pithily summed up in the Kreyol proverb "Konstitisyon se papye, bayonet se fe." (The Constitution is paper, the bayonet is iron.) All it takes is a quick game of rock, paper, bayonet to figure out that in Haiti the bayonet trumps paper time and time again.

With that said, I'm going to be very hesitant to make diagnoses or prescriptions for "fixing" Haiti in this space. I'm an outsider with a lot of book knowledge and very little experience in such things. Rather, I hope this can be a space where I can share some experiences and thoughts as I learn more about this amazing place.

I'll be working for LAMP for the next several months as a legal intern in their new and exciting human rights office situated right in Cite Soleil. I've already been here three weeks and the fact this is my first post means I've got some serious catching up to do. I hope you might check in from time to time to learn some more about Haiti, LAMP, human rights, public health, international development, and pragmatic solidarity with the poor, marginalized and oppressed. That, plus some recounting of things that have kept me laughing despite the hardship that's omnipresent here.

So thanks for joining me as I refill the oil, put in a new wick, strike a match, and light my lamp -- I hope you'll stick around for a while.