Oh, Haiti...

In 2004, I went to Haiti to write a newspaper story about a medical mission team that was preparing to host a clinic there. This recon trip would allow the group to hit the ground running with a medical clinic in a country in desperate need of one.

Medical care in Haiti, at the time, was mostly the responsibility of the patient. If you fell down and broke your leg, you were responsible for getting yourself to a hospital, and bringing all your supplies (pins, bandages) with you. I was scheduled for knee surgery the week I returned. I walked verrry carefully.

I was to travel with Marc-Yves Regis, a poet and writer who at the time was also an award-winning Hartford Courant photographer. Marc-Yves grew up in Haiti. Prior to the trip, I picked his brain. I read everything I could about this hemisphere’s second-oldest democracy. I studied Haitian Kreyol (though I only got to the level where I could carry on a conversation with children younger than 6). I began to call Marc “move chen,” or bad dog, because it’s a fun word to say, “chen.”

I still call him that.

I prepared myself for the worst and within a day after arriving, I realized I wasn’t prepared for anything. Because Marc is a local, we went off the beaten path into places that showed me over and over just how badly U.S. policy has hamstrung the country throughout Haiti’s entire history. I watched children sit patiently while their lunch program began — hungry children, who after they finished their rice carefully licked their fingers to press on the stray grains and bring them up to their mouths so that they might have a little more to eat. I painted the fingernails of a woman dying of AIDS. We sang a hymn together — she in Kreyol, me in choked-up English. I came back to the house where we stayed one evening and found Marc crying on the balcony. That morning, he’d watched a mother leave a child at the doorstep of an orphanage. How could people do that? he asked.

I was about as far from an answer as you can get.

And then I came home to stand in front of my full cupboard. My not-eating the groceries in my house would in no way help the people of Haiti, but as corny as it sounds, I couldn’t shake the notion that I have so much, and they? Well…

I started the newspaper story thus:

In the absence of body fat, the backbone of a malnourished baby simply ends, ridged, at the base of her spine. Without a baby's bottom as a cushion, the tailbone feels like a tiny fingernail lightly pressing into your palm.

Their arms are cobwebs. Their hair is brittle.

But babies must be held, and the sisters at the Missionaries of Charity Children's Hospital haven't the time. Daily, someone drops a baby off at the door. Families believe the sisters will feed and medicate a child when a family cannot. Room must be made -- sometimes by moving two children onto the same, duct-taped crib mattress. Hourly, the sisters juggle limited medicine and make awful choices: Who to treat? Who to let languish?

Activists say once you go to Haiti, you never really leave. When a 2010 earthquake toppled the country, I followed the news slavishly and thought, “How? How can Haitians go on?”

On Saturday, a 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck again. The country is still reeling from the assassination of their president. The earthquake’s awful death toll is rising. A tropical storm is barreling down on the ruins. And any one who has an inkling about Haiti is again thinking, “How? How can they go on?”

I still don’t have answers, but I appreciate that people may want to help. Tennis great Naomi Osaka announced she would donate her earnings from an upcoming tournament to Haiti. CNN has compiled a donation page for charities that are already on the ground. I am a huge fan of Partners in Health, in part because co-founder Paul Farmer has already forgotten more than I’ll never know about the country.

Here are a few other organizations that have good reputations (though if I missed something and am wrong to include one or some of these, please let me know):

Hope for Haiti

Haiti Emergency Relief Fund

Gaskov Clergé Foundation

Bro’s Dough Pizzeria in Hartford

For years, Marc-Yves has run an incredible soccer camp there, and as people dig out and assess the awful damage, childhoods need to continue. You can donate to Marc’s work here.

If you know of other ways to help, feel free to include them in the comments.

My full heart and my limited Kreyol are insufficient to the task, so, with Move Chen’s assurance that the transition is really, really close: “Bondye beni Ayiti kounye a e pou tout tan.”

God bless Haiti. Now and forever.