So the plan was to drive out to Fond Parisien from Port au Prince to finally meet our other Haitian son Dukens. We had driven so very,very close to finally arrive at Love A Child compound where everything first began for my husband Paul and son Andy 5 days after the quake when they came down to Haiti to help. The UN had used this compound as a central fly in area for the injured to be treated and also patients off of the USS Hope ship.
Driving around in Port au Prince is kind of like playing in a video game where you travel back to some wore torn, shelled out, surreal landscape. It honestly almost doesn't seem real. You look out the car windows and you feel like you're in a slow motion movie that can't be real,,,,,but it is. And the movie wasn't shot after the quake either. It was filmed way before that. The only difference between before and after the quake is two things. The rubble used to be delapidated, poorly built structures that were made with too much sand in the cinder blocks.The second is all the people who are now missing limbs. EVERYTHING else has never changed. None of it. Still a corrupt government, still extreme poverty, still women washing their clothes in muddy water in the roads after it rains, still the orange hair, still no school for 67% of the children, still no clean water or proper medicines of any kinds what so ever. I also looked at our orphans school books the other day. Last editions were from 1990, pages missing and torn...
So, when we headed out of Port au Prince and almost directly due East it was actually really beautiful. Yes, the people were still just as poor but they weren't packed in like dogs in caged kennels. I have seen animal shelters that are 50 times better than what is here. People have no running water, they must walk many times very far to pump clean water and always carry it back on their heads.
It was the landscape that is simply amazing. Incredibly beautiful mountains surrounding you and lakes as you drive toward Love A Child. Then, up ahead, we notice large billowing smoke but really don't know what we are looking at. Then, we see young men.Many young angry men carrying machetes and long sticks and they are burning tires. They are completely blocking the road up ahead and there are many large trucks blocked behind them coming into Haiti from the Dominican Republic because we are now so close to the border where Fond Parisien is located.
We immediately all realize something is very wrong and we must quickly turn around in the road and get out of there quickly before something much more dangerous occurs. We do find out from one of our Haitian team members that the buring tires are always a sign of the revolts as well as the machetes and long sticks. The TV crew never had time to shoot it even though they tried but I was squished in the very back of the car with my camera and got only one shot of it before we sped back the way we came. The only time I felt truly concerned, was when we turned around and another Haitian guy, Andy and myself all in the way back of the vehicle, saw the men begin to run faster towards us once they realized we were not one of them. They were probably 40 men sprawling the length and depth of the road with one thing on their minds and wouldn't be stopping for much to vent their anger.
Today, when our medical clinic opened for the first time, Bobby Burnette (the head pastor and missionary with his wife Sherry who founded and run Love A Child)later showed up at our new clinic. I had told the others in the car yesterday I wondered if these riots were connected to Love A Child because it was the first day of them building up to 380 homes on property down the road from their main compound for earthquake victims still there. I remember we had 2 team members coming from our church to go for 1 month to help build these structures and they weren't going to necessarily be using all local Haitians to build them. Sure enough, it was a land dispute riot and those same men had gone to Love A Child and burned up a bunch of their equipment that was to be used for just this very purpose.
So, my eyes were opened to just another facet of all the tragedies and also struggles that exist each and every day here in this beautiful but beaten down and destroyed country called Haiti.Will I get there at all to finally meet Dukens in person and give him his gifts? I guess I will just put that one in God's hands now...
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