Many of the students who participate on a Raincatchers trip tell me the most frustrating part of the trip happens when they return home and and try to articulate their experiences to friends and family. The following essays about Haiti, written by Tina Hildreth and Kyle Martin describe how important this work is to them.
Tina Hildreth - The University of Michigan
In the southern mountains of Haiti, a little girl named Maudlin taught me what it was like to be thirsty. I met her on my first trip with Raincatchers in the summer of 2001. The first time I saw her, I noticed that her feet might fit into the tiny Doc Martin shoes I bought at a garage sale six months earlier. Before leaving for the mission trip I scoured thrift stores and bargain racks searching for starving-children sized clothes. I went inside the clinic to fetch the shoes, and upon returning found a mob of small children anxiously waiting for whatever present I might have behind my back. Sadly, her calloused feet wobbled loosely inside the brown leather boots. I gave them to her mother anyways.
Having been to Port-au-Prince with missionary groups twice before, I assumed that this remote plateau fifty miles south of the capital would be the same as the city. When I arrived I was greeted by unexpected red-clay soil and subsistence farming, far from the suffocating squalor of the city, yet similarly gripping. Little Maudlin was barely clad, wearing an oversized t-shirt wrapped around her two-year old shoulders. Her main diet was vegetables and sugar cane, grown by her mother and father in play-house sized stamp of land outside their cornstalk hut. It was here that Mauldin’s family first introduced me to the severity of Haiti’s water crisis. Every morning her six-year old brother Lifwen would leave the house to fetch water for their family. The walk back and forth to the water hole took two hours, making him late to school even though he woke with the roosters at sunrise. At lunch time, Lifwen would again pick up his family’s five-gallon bucket and make the long march to the cistern. When he returned, I watched Maudlin’s petite lips crack at the edge of her mouth as her mother rationed the mucky liquid amongst the family.
Before coming to Seguin I knew the statistics - each
Haitian on average uses three liters of water per day, compared to the average
American’s five hundred liters. I knew that only 45% of the people on the
Seguin Plateau had regular access to water, and of those only .3% had access
to purified water. Upon seeing the “water hole,” the milky brown puddle
with children lined up at its side to fill their large buckets, these percentages
gained identities, and I saw for the first time the face of thirst. While
each person receives enough water for subsistence, the tight supply leaves
only enough water for drinking and cooking, and occasionally there is enough
water to afford a communal bath. If a playing child falls and scrapes himself,
the wound is often not cleaned, as this would consume extra water that is
simply not available.
With little medical care in the area, the infections resulting from unwashed cuts and bruises cause the deaths of thousands of children each year. Haiti’s water crisis is the worst in the world. Here a family’s wealth is measured by the number of containers they own that are capable of carrying water. Intense deforestation across the island, as well as political problems that interfere with the implementation of sanitation systems perpetuate these problems. Often on the margins of the world’s media, Haiti’s struggle to find clean water goes largely unnoticed. The spread of AIDS and political turmoil have drawn all international attention to urban Port-au-Prince, while millions of rural Haitians literally die of thirst. This and other ecological issues are the true plight of Haiti - if left unsolved they will cause final demise of the Haitian people. In the meantime, my prayers stay with Maudlin and her family, and my efforts continue to work toward a solution that will quench the enduring water crisis in Haiti.
Kyle Martin - Michigan State University
This setting is a contradiction - or at least a contradiction of everything that you’ve grown up to know. Here is only clay so red that it stains your clothes, skin and heart (so that when you go home you have a little shard that will stay with you always). Here are only onions, carrots, beets but no grass. There are few trees looming on the high hillsides off in the distance - the distance that you can only see if you climb more hillsides looming closer. Here are children so short at age ten you’d swear they were only five. Here is only concrete to build with. Here is only a sky so blue you would swear the ocean was defying gravity. Here is only escape: no blenders, no tv, no cars. Here is Seguin.
How does it work? It seems too impossible to get these high school and college students from Michigan to Seguin. Where did all the cars disappear too? Where did the tv’s go and the comforters on the beds and the Monday night football? Welcome to Seguin, in Haiti, where they don’t play football on Monday nights. There’s something extreme about just up and leaving your comfortable bed, room and shower and traveling to a country where bugs pester you in your sleep and showers come in a bag. It takes a special sort of person; somebody with a big heart and maybe a slight touch of the insane. It’s the adventure that brings you there. It’s the fact that there isn’t grass on the front lawns of every home. It’s the fact that few homes even have a front lawn. It’s the fact that they need what you can give: Water. Welcome to Seguin, in Haiti, where the water doesn’t flow in pipes in the ground, nor does it come from a local well. In Seguin, water comes from four hours away, in five gallon buckets on a little girl’s head from across the hillsides with the trees. Water… Who would have ever thought that it was such a precious commodity?
It rains almost every day in Seguin. Portland’s got nothing on the town. Every cloud means rain and every rain means a chance - a chance for a change to the way things work. All it takes is a group of high school and college students, some PVC piping, a few zip-ties and a fifty-five gallon barrel enhanced with a simple filtration system and you have a new source of the world’s most precious resource. Instead of being four hours away, water is inside your door. What a change. I still feel it now, egging me on as I write. Welcome to Seguin, in Haiti, where you leave a part of yourself and take a new part home. I remember the sun scorching my eyes as I turned my camera towards the sky. It was a gorgeous silhouette, if only I could get under the glare. Check my exposure. Ocean in the sky. One cloud, perfectly hanging. One Haitian, dignified. Click. I still remember that moment. It imprints itself inside.
The red clay is all you’ll know. Welcome to the Seguin, in Haiti, where the soil doesn’t fade to black. And you’ll go home, eventually, and there will be your room with the comforter on your bed, the warm shower and the TV glowing, and you’ll forget what to do. Home won’t ever be the same. You won’t understand. Why is the TV on? Why is the shower warm? Why can’t I go back to Haiti? Welcome back home, you miss Seguin, in Haiti.
It’s a land of contradiction. You’ll be back home but your heart will be so far away.
