Crazy Cat Lady: Haiti, Day 8

This morning I got up, got ready, and ate breakfast around 7am. Then at 8am, we walked down to take a tour of the Healing Hands for Haiti Clinic. We are staying on the HHH Compound, and the HHH Clinic is down the hill, on the same property. We took a quick tour and then spoke with the CEO of HHH. At the clinic they do a few things. They work with amputees and can create prosthetics on site and they also do physical therapy. The building was finished last month and is beautiful. The building they had been using previously, collapsed during the earthquake.

Next we got on the bus and headed toward World Vision. They spoke to us about what they are doing in Haiti and the different things they are focusing on. I should write more about them, as they were great, but I am too tired and I don’t have my notes with me. Next we headed to SOS Children’s Village. They are open around the world and have four or five different locations in Haiti. This location (in Port-au-Prince) serves 300 children. Of those, 180 live on site and either or orphans or have parents that cannot take care of them, and 120 come each day for school and/or daycare. When we arrived, we were met by several young girls. They were so adorable. They were really happy to see us and gave us all hugs. We took a tour and saw all the different buildings. They have the day care and a school, homes where the children live, and other buildings. They have 18 homes where the children live. Ten kids live in each home with one ‘mom’. It is a really nice place, but it is still pretty depressing. All these adorable kids running around, starving for attention. The boys loved Greg because of his hairy arms. They kept running off and grabbing their friends to come see his arm hair.

We were met at SOS by a woman who works for UNICEF. She works for their education cluster and rode with us over to a development that the UN helped build. I don’t remember how many people were living in the small wooden homes, but surrounding them were around 30,000 squatters. People that had nowhere to live, and thought that was as good a place as any. They just set up tents and built shelters, but are their illegally. It was crazy. They had a school in the development and we stopped and spoke to the principal. He said their funding for the school runs out next month and they don’t know what to do. The woman from UNICEF told us that the UN was shutting down the education cluster and she was moving on. It was a hard situation. The small homes (or shacks) were built as temporary housing but everyone said that they weren’t really temporary anymore. I mean, where are the people going to move to?

We went back to HHH for a bit before heading off to dinner at the Montana Hotel. It is this super fancy place that is really high up and has an amazing view. It’s where all the rich foreigners look down on all the poor people. At least that is what it seemed like. Here is this posh place, where all the people are wearing suits and dresses, and our great view is of the slums. It had really good, overpriced food, but you basically sat there and felt like a horrible person. We spent more on that meal than many Haitians make in a month. And they are the lucky ones. Minimum wage here is about $5 a day, but many get as low as fifty cents a day. Some probably get even lower.

Sigh. Coming to Haiti makes you feel helpless. Well, it makes me feel helpless and I imagine others on the trip feel the same way. There are so many problems here, so many people suffering, that no one knows where to start. And while there are tons of NGO’s down here trying to make a difference, so many of them are corrupt and taking advantage of the situation. Many NGO’s harm, more than they help. I am trying to keep positive but I honestly don’t know that Haiti will ever be a self-reliant country that isn’t chock full of problems. On that note, I am going to bed. I probably won’t get to post this until the morning. The power keeps shutting off, which means no internet. Anyways… Night.