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June 15, 2010

My View: In Haiti, hope is measured by scoops and blocks

My View Ben Adelman

The looting has ended. The air no longer smells of death. The bodies are buried in a mass grave marked with a huge white cross in the dirt.

But signs of the earthquake are everywhere: In the rubble that towers over the streets of Port-au-Prince. In the tent cities that confront you at every turn. In the minds of the people who lived through those 36 seconds of terror on Jan. 12.

I recently traveled to Haiti with a small group from Sovereign Grace Community Church to help Partners in Development, an Ipswich nonprofit that has worked there for the past two decades. PID operates a medical clinic in a suburban area called Terre Noire, just outside Port-au-Prince. Its mission is to help the country's poorest residents on several fronts — child sponsorship, small business loans, housing construction and medical care. (PID runs similar programs in Guatemala.)

The prospect of bringing hope to the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere had been daunting enough, but now PID is dealing with the aftermath of the earthquake. Not surprisingly, everyone has an earthquake story.

A 17-year-old boy described the split-second decision that likely saved his life. He was sitting in school, by a wall, reading a book he called "Rachel Rich."

He asked me to imagine the wall, slapping the invisible concrete at his side. The shaking started, he said, and he ran. That decision proved wise, because the wall collapsed right where he'd been sitting.

Concrete is heavy and brittle. I didn't understand how heavy until I helped demolish a house near the clinic. The family — a mom, dad and eight kids, including a 4-month-old baby — has been camping in the front yard. The roof was partially collapsed, and the concrete-block walls wobbled at the touch.

Knocking them down was easy — a few taps with a hammer to free them of their supports, then a shove or two to get them rocking. They tumbled with terrifying force, violent and resolute. Choking in the vanishing dust, I tried to imagine what it must have been like for those stuck inside toppling city buildings.

I also wondered what Maxim, the 21-year-old Haitian man leading our demo crew, felt watching concrete tumble again.

It would be easy to view Haiti as a godforsaken hell on earth. You see tin houses stripped together on garbage heaps and find men at the airport clamoring for the chance to carry your suitcase for a fee. You smell the stench of raw sewage and decay. And then there are the hundreds of ill and injured who line up outside the steel gate at PID's clinic by 7 each weekday morning.

If you look at it this way, though, you'll be overwhelmed. So PID doesn't. Instead, the staff focuses on the things they can fix.

CEO Gale Hull, who oversees every operational detail, often gets to help on a personal level, too. Such was the case with a young woman named Daphne.

Once a brilliant student, Daphne lost her eyesight to diabetes and was stashed in her tin home in City Soleil, the worst part of Port-au-Prince, starving, depressed, without treatment. Gale gave her a job bagging vitamins at the clinic. Several days a week, she's picked up and brought there, where she sits in the kitchen counting pills. She's fed and cared for, and she goes home with groceries.

We met a volunteer named Charlie, a Vietnam veteran and retired nurse. Diagnosed with terminal cancer shortly before his trip, Charlie stayed the course, treating hundreds of patients before becoming too sick to work. I found him sitting on the steps one morning smoking a cigarette after helping a baby girl who'd been scalded by hot water.

I'd heard the child's screams as the medical team provided painful first-aid treatment and, shaken, I asked Charlie if she'd be OK. Yes, he said. The baby would fly to Miami for first-class treatment. His thoughts were now with the mother, who was no doubt racked with guilt.

Having neither the skills nor the stomach for medicine, I was glad to be working with cinder blocks and dirt. Though emotionally tame, the construction tasks were daunting.

Three dump-truck loads of rocky fill greeted us outside the rising guest house. The building, on the clinic property, will house future teams so, unlike our group, they won't have to sleep in tents.

The dirt needed to go into the foundation hole to support a concrete floor. Moving it involved using wheelbarrows and shovels.

After several wheelbarrow trips seemed barely to make a dent, the job looked impossible. But we plugged away: One scoop at a time, one trip up the ramp, one dump and back. We worked side-by-side with the Haitian staff, joked, sweated, and learned words in each others' languages. We established a rhythm. After a while the pile didn't look so big anymore. Eventually, it was gone.

The experience serves as a metaphor for the way PID plods along to improve people's lives. Success is measured in shovel scoops, concrete blocks, patient visits and child sponsorships. Blocks become walls, walls become houses, and one at a time, families move out of tin-shack slums and into solid, rural homes. So far, PID has built 40 housing units.

One at a time, Americans sign up to sponsor a child, and young dreams are realized in the form of food, clothing and education. Two-hundred-and-thirty Haitian kids now have sponsors.

One by one, PID vets requests for small-business loans, offering families a chance to earn a living. It has now made more than 500 such loans.

And one at a time, patients — diabetics, those with malaria, sick kids in the arms of worried moms — enter the clinic. They consult with medical professionals who treat them with dignity. PID has recorded more than 22,000 visits and counting.

These efforts won't make the tent cities go away. Thousands will be left starving. Most won't earn a living wage. But for 40 families, 230 children, over 500 businesses and thousands of patients, life has improved.

If you focus on that, you can keep making those numbers grow.

• • •

Ben Adelman, a Boxford resident, is metro editor of The Salem News.

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My View: In Haiti, hope is measured by scoops and blocks
by My View , Ben Adelman , Tue Jun 15, 2010, 10:59 AM EDT
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