HAITI

I know some of you are curious about my recent trip to Haiti. Sue Osborne, my longtime friend and traveling companion is blogging up a storm about it, so rather than be redundant, I'm sending you to her blog here: http://nostalgic-nana.blogspot.com/ to get a good idea of our trip. We shared my camera since Sue forgot her charger, so all the pictures she's posting are "ours".

My trip was all kinds of awesome. A curious observation: there in Haiti, with only sporadic power and water (and never hot running water, my very favorite thing), on a diet of rice and beans, sleeping in bits and fits under a mosquito net -- I was deeply happy every single moment. I don't know if it was the slower pace, the back-to-basics lifestyle, the incredible team of people working so tirelessly and selflessly for the good of others, the lush beauty of the Haitian mountain country, or getting sticky and dirty with soil and varnish and sweat and service every day -- but whatever it was, I experienced it as a gift, precious and unexpected. Misty, a volunteer student midwife from Arizona, summed it up thusly, "This has been a time of healing for me here in Haiti." Though I didn't even know I was so broken, that's exactly how Haiti felt for me.

The guidebook begins, "Haiti will capture your heart" and that, too, proved true. Poor as poor gets, with problems that span centuries, Haiti nonetheless speaks to something real and little acknowledged in our soul, some sense of deep connection -- to the earth and to each other, some inarticulate truth that settles and stays, even here at home, hidden away in our hearts. I know I'm not alone in this experience. I can't even tell how it will show up in my life; it's so foreign to my American mindset. I feel it like a latent disease, and it may in fact manifest as dis-ease, leading to action, or it may simply rest in me forever as a touchstone of truth.

Haiti has my heart, at any rate.