A Crack in the Church
In July 2010, I went to Port-au-Prince, Haiti on a mission trip. It wasn’t my first time being out of the country, but it was like nothing I’ve ever seen before. The earthquake that struck the island was devastating. Everyone knows that, but not everyone remembers. If you haven’t been to a third world country, you can’t understand it.
There was a lot of publicity about the earthquake and many different organizations that were donating food, money, and other necessities to the people of Haiti, but hardly any of those provisions reached the people. They stopped at the government. The government of Haiti has been corrupt for forever, but everything got worse after the earthquake.
Our BCM — Baptist Collegiate Ministries — at Middle Georgia College (now Middle Georgia State University) sent a group of guys out there not even two whole months after the earthquake. The earthquake happened in January and they went in March. My husband was one of 11 guys to go and help some of the families in Haiti whose homes had been destroyed. He has a thousand stories about that trip. One woman tried to get him to marry her so she could come back to the U.S. with him. Another used his sleeping bag as a wall for his makeshift house. They had to sleep on the roof of a building to make sure they weren’t attacked or robbed. The International Mission Board wouldn’t send the guys because they felt it was too dangerous, but they made some connections and went anyway.
Things had improved some before I had the chance to go myself. I went that summer. It wasn’t quite the horror that it was that previous spring. At least at that point the International Mission Board was allowing groups to go, but it was still awful. Buildings crept out over the streets, some pieces held on by razor wire. Many homes’ top floors were still collapsed on top of their ground floor. There were huge sections of people that were still living in tents.
Even before the earthquake there were people living in tents, but that was because they didn’t have resources. Now either they didn’t have resources or they were simply too afraid to return home. Many of them saw what happened to other families in their concrete homes and were too afraid that the roof would cave in on them.
While we were there, we helped clear rubble from one of the houses that had partly collapsed and did mini Vacation Bible Schools for the kids. We had great translators, ate Haitian food, took Navy showers, endured the humidity, and tried to break language and cultural barriers to share the Gospel.
We also went sightseeing. Most of the cities Carrefour and Port-au-Prince consist of harsh, white concrete.
It’s hard to go outside without sunglasses on, but the tourist parts of Haiti are like any other tropical location — green and lush — and the air up in the mountains is cooler and fresher then down in the cities. We went to the marketplace where we were instructed to not touch anything we didn’t want to buy and to keep our backpacks on front of our bodies so we didn’t get pick-pocketed.
The presidential palace was perhaps the strangest to see. It was once a beautiful building, standing tall, and the earthquake decimated it. Below is a before and after picture — a symbol of a government that was already corrupt, now destroyed.
We had to leave the area after observing the palace for just a few minutes, because people were starting to gather around us. When we left, they threw stuff at the truck we were riding on.
We went to another area in Port-au-Prince where almost everything had been leveled by the earthquake. The only thing left standing there was the walls of the cathedral. The cathedral had towers and one had an enormous crack running down the tower. We were in awe, in front of the church, thinking about the symbol it stood for — thinking about how it was the only building left standing in that area and what that meant. It was a symbol of hope — a symbol of salvation, and yet even it had been damaged tremendously. The tower is below. This is what we saw. However, the following picture is from the inside of the cathedral.
While we were standing there, looking up at the tower, there was a man behind us with a baby in his arms. He was speaking to us, but we were instructed not to even look at him. We didn’t know why, but our translators seemed very uncomfortable. We later found out that he was saying the baby was not healthy and needed American doctors. He was begging us to take his baby back to the U.S. with us. I can’t explain my emotion. It has been 6 years, and I still can’t explain the pain that made me feel. I wish I could have taken that baby. If they had told me what he was saying when we were there, I probably would have tried and inevitably been arrested.
I couldn’t talk about it for forever afterwards.
People always ask when you come back from a trip, “What was it like?” and in places like Haiti they ask, “Was it really bad?” And what anyone who’s been on a tough mission trip says is, “Yes, it was bad. This is what we did,” and then goes onto something else about the country — what it looked like, what rules they had to abide by, how horrible the traffic was (only dirt roads with no lines and no traffic lights), what funny things happened, how the climate was different. Then he goes into one of the sort of hard things — something that people may have expected to hear, like how people are living in tents. Never the truly hard stuff. That stuff is too emotionally complicated.
When you can’t figure out how you feel about something, it is impossible to talk to someone else about it until you’ve distanced yourself. It takes different amounts of time for different people and different situations. For me it was 4 years.
I took an Intermediate Poetry writing class. The prompt we had to do was talk about a memory we had — something that stuck with us for some reason or another. I remembered that man and his baby. I wrote this sonnet about it…
“January 2010”
A thousand houses fell in that one night
The shaking woke their world from peaceful sleep.
They kept their eyes from cracks beneath their feet
Their home, their Haiti, fell to crumbling white.
The city Port-au-Prince has lost its lights.
Young bodies rot on every earthy street.
With nothing more than fallen leaves to eat,
Their children sleep in flooded tents each night.
We fly down. We stand before the broken church,
Gray stone rising above the flattened land.
We try to help, and do what we can do,
But what I see there by a burning torch —
A man who holds his baby in his hands
Says, “Christians, take my daughter home with you.”
It’s a little more theatrical than the actual event, but that’s poetry. Anyway, it was the first time I acknowledged that I’d witnessed that.
I was THERE.
I saw the little boys wearing nothing but girls’ underwear because they had nothing else.
I saw the extra fingers on the hands of several children, asking me if it was normal in America.
I saw the wet, soiled rag — thrown over a wastebasket in a bathroom — that was used as toilet paper for a hole in the ground disguised as a toilet.
I saw the collapsed presidential palace.
I saw on the mountain the beauty of what the land used to be before it was stripped of all resources.
I saw the love of that man to his baby, and the sacrifice he was willing to make to give her a better life — a sacrifice that I don’t think I could ever make myself.
I saw hunger. Not the kind of hunger we have in America where the poor people are even overweight, but the kind of hunger that makes you eat dirt to fill your belly.
I saw the eyes of a people that desperately needed hope — that desperately needed God.
I saw the twisted world view of a people who’d been lied to too many times, and graffiti that said, “Help us.”
I saw a crack in the church.
A crack in the American church — a church that forgets in six months what Haiti won’t forget for generations to come. A church that is more worried about what funny Bud-Light commercial they saw on Friday night than a nation that can’t afford to drink water.
I saw a church that watched it all, forgot it all, and decided to go to the Bahamas on a cruise instead of going to Haiti and doing the job God told us to do —
“Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.” (Mark 16:15)
America forgot. God’s people forgot.
I forgot.
There is a crack in our church, and we need to do something about it before we will be able to make a difference in this world. We have a cracked church, structurally unsound. We have a broken church, lacking love, and there is only one person who can make it whole.
