Losing Sight

            Well, it’s certainly been my longest week in Haiti. Monday through Thursday the 4 dentists from this week’s team saw over 250 patients. I spent my work week holding crying children, finding elevators and cow-horns (dental terms), and sterilizing hundreds of trays so that the clinic could continue to function. And I got to watch my father do some incredible work, especially with children, revealing to me why he was indeed the best father anyone could have ever hoped for. But more on that another night.

            Tonight I feel like writing about something which appears very frequently in the New Testament. The returning of sight to the blind. It is sung about in songs from “Amazing Grace” to Wilco’s song “Dawned on Me”. But the idea of being blind is something that the seeing world tends to forget about. Besides having four dentists work down here this week we had one optometrist who must have seen 500 Haitians and given them the gift of sight, a truly indescribable gift. My father, the tooth-yanker, truly believes that the work Dr. Tom Macmillan does down here is better than any tooth pull.

            All of the bags of glasses got me thinking. I have seen a lot of blindness in my month down here. Perhaps the first and most apparent case of blindness came when I visited St. Vincent’s, the home for disabled, blind, and deaf children. It was truly an awe-inspiring sight to see the deaf kids leading the blind kids around, showing them to the restroom and to the water fountain.

            The second instance was a much more powerful and moving story:

            One day at the nutrition clinic, a woman came in in hysteria. We quickly saw her and took her to the back to Carmel’s office. The woman, a resident of one of many of Haiti’s tent cities, had recently been left by her husband. He said she had demons, spirits. She was in hysteria because she believed that these spirits were going to take her life and leave her three children completely orphaned in a brutal, harsh world. As it turned out, the woman had epilepsy. Carmel told her that was she was seeing, and what was causing her seizures, was not voodoo spirits but a treatable, common disease. She told her that we could give her medication and that she did not have to worry about dying. This education and realization gave the woman a new vision to her future, of the life she could lead. She smiled and was in near ecstasy upon realizing that her children would indeed still have a mother.

Cannan, a Haitian tent city. Once a deforested hillside and degraded farmland, the area has been transformed into a community in which 8,000 families have relocated after the earthquake. 

            The third instance of blindness was my own. If there is anything I have learned in one month, its that there is island time (where things move very slow) and then there is Haitian time, where things are always 90 minutes late, and usually still have some problem awaiting you upon their outset, thus turning an afternoon errand run into a day-long trek of tire-changing, dehydration, and exhaustion. For a while, I just went with the flow, bringing along a book and headphones everywhere I went in order to cope with the inevitable delays. Luckily, my time here has also allowed me to learn a great deal about the history and culture of this place and why exactly it is the way it has become. And frequently I have stated that Haiti is an elaborate labyrinth in which one door is opened only to reveal four more. But this week, the continual door opening finally pushed me to my breaking point. Perpetuated by the negative energies produced by some others in this week’s group from Myrtle Beach, SC, I grew increasingly angry at the inefficiencies and inadequacies of Haitian culture. I became determined to translate a book about logistics and strategic planning into Creole.

            My anger and frustration boiled over when I vocalized my frustration to the whole group, [——————this sentence has been censored for its possibility to jeopardize good work—————]. And then my dad and Jeanne Fourrier reminded me of not only my story of the epileptic woman, but also all of the incredible miracles and acts of the Lord which these two amazing people, Pere Pierre Henry Fritz Valdema and his loving wife, Carmel, have done for this troubled, struggling nation. And I realized just how blinded I had allowed myself to become by the idea of money, efficiency, success and everything else that has been America’s greatest accomplishment and its utmost delinquency.  I now know, tonight, I must step back and be fully immersed in the culture and just go with the flow. Only then will I have any chance in being able to find exactly which door I want to open and struggle to unlock.