Third World Awareness trips and the organization are quite interesting. There is never a great objective. There is never a project that must be completed. There is never a feeling that we are doing great things for Haiti. There is never an idea that we are vitally important to anyone.
However, beautiful things happen every year, many of them totally unexpected.
What a delicious little mystery!
John Callaghan
And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment.
T. S. Eliot
When people ask where I found the courage to go to Haiti with TWA, I don’t really have more of an answer than a simple shrug of the shoulders. Courage is not what was needed - an open heart and mind was. At the mention of being in Haiti I can immediately be brought back to the sights and sounds of Port au Prince, and my heart begins to hurt. How can one not miss such a beautiful place, filled with such beautiful souls? Being in Haiti, volunteering at the Sisters’ hospice, holding the hands of the dying, meeting the people that we did each day, it didn’t take strength or bravery. However, it took me going to Haiti to realize this. It did not take anything but willingness to be there, and in return I was awarded with kindness, and a feeling inside of me that had never been tapped. I went to Haiti to help, and I returned humbled. Though the situations there may be dire, the children still laugh and play with what little they have, and the people are never short of a smile. I wonder when we lost the ability to simply be thankful for what we have and to make due? Haiti was able to bring such sense to my head. I gave my time to Haiti, and in return I was given so much more. I was given perspective, inspiration, and love - the kind of stuff that can change a life!
Melanie
Haiti – May 2010
Almost 50 and feeling that I have been missing something, I decided to go to Haiti after the quake. I didn’t know how or with whom, but I was going to go. I actually fell upon the TWA group.
To describe the devastation is impossible. But to focus on the people and their spirit is incredible. They are an incredibly devout and proud people. To live so long with almost nothing, amid death, garbage and corruption, you would think they would be beaten down. The most amazing part of my trip was the people. They are clean and dignified, yet poor and resigned. This is their life, they need help, yes, but they are so loving and kind and oh so grateful.
To work in the malnutrition clinic was sad, of course, but also rewarding. Each day was a new adventure. You must leave your Canadian ideas at home, so your heart won’t break. Once you truly realize that life is very different here, unfair and unjust or not, you can begin to really embrace the experience. You can’t focus on the sadness in the life of a child that you are holding; you only have that moment to enjoy.
Going to Haiti has opened up a part of my heart that I wasn’t even aware existed. For the tiny difference that I may have made in Haiti, it could not compare to the change within me.
One Love,
Erin Hooper
Undoing a shirt
Unprepared, unskilled, I had come to the Brother’s Clinic in Cite Pele, Port-au-Prince, to do massage work. The large rooms on two floors of the Clinic were occupied by men and women: some with amputations, others paralyzed by falls from tress or car accidents, a young child dying of HIV-AIDS.
A quiet man, with one leg amputated above the knee, indicated by the expression in his gentle eyes and his gestures that his shoulders and neck hurt. His eyes asked, “Could you help?” I nodded and awkwardly helped him move from his wheelchair into his bed.
Then, the old man in the next bed indicated that he too, wanted a massage. “Un instant”, I murmured, unsure if he understood my high-school French. After working on the shoulders of the gentle-eyed man, I moved to the old man who was now asleep, leaning against the wall. As I struggled to remove his blue hospital shirt and move him into a massage position, I heard a thump on the floor beside me. The one-legged man had just hopped from his bed and standing on his one leg, was helping me undo the shirt of the sleeping man and moving him into a better position for a massage.
I was surprised, stunned actually, by receiving this assistance from the one-legged man. “Who was helping whom? Who was the one with a genuine spirit of giving, of community?” I realized I also was being helped.
Tom Lafrance
Watch a video from our 2011 trip to Haiti below!
If the video doesn’t load, please watch it here.
- Our Constant Companion, Roseann
