Why Haiti, why now?

Exactly four days from now I’ll be on a plane to Haiti, destination – Kobonal Mission.  The closer it gets, the more often people ask me two questions which are both disarmingly hard to answer.  The first is, “are you excited about your trip?” And the second, “what will you guys be doing there.”  While neither of those seem like stumpers, I never feel like I give a very adequate answer to either. So I’ll try to do so here.

Am I excited?  Well …  I’m something! But excited isn’t quite the right word. Anxious probably rings a little truer.  At the very core I’m excited for the experience of meeting new people and getting to know a different culture. I’m excited to be bringing supplies donated by many wonderful people to children that will be both greatly excited and greatly enriched to get them. I’m excited to have a couple of weeks literally away from “it” all (“it” being a busy, modern life).  So, yeah I’m definitely excited.  But orbiting around that are about a hundred small little worries. Am I bringing just the right things for these children? Am I packing the right things for me? Will I be shielded enough from the disease-laden mosquitos? Am I going to be hassled at the airport by armed security using a language that I can barely comprehend much less converse in? Is it going to be safe for my family? Am I in good enough shape spiritually, emotionally, physically for two weeks in another world? The list goes on.  No, none of those are keeping me awake at night, but they’re like a swarm of tiny cataracts that obscure the clarity of what I think I could be feeling.  So, I’m anxious to be there where I can put most of those questions to rest with answers, whatever they may be.

Now for the other good question – what will we do there?  Nominally my family is “helping with the school” there. But I don’t even really know what that means.  The truth is, this trip is really more about “being” than about “doing”.  And so I think it’s probably best explained by answering a different question – why are we going?  For that, let me back up a little bit.

I’ve wanted to go on a trip like this since I was a teenager. It’s just never worked out.  My wife and I had kicked around the idea a couple of years ago but nothing ever presented itself to us and we never took the initiative ourselves. Then this summer my daughter expressed a real, deep interest in seeing other ways that life could be lived.  When I suggested going to an impoverished part of the world to really experience their life and their faith, she was totally in sync with me. That  was the incentive I needed to really move on the idea.

There’s a lot I could say about how things played out and moved from this amorphous idea to an actual plan. But it’s really not all that important.  Suffice to say that our when things started falling into place, they seemed to fit together perfectly.  Details all seemed to work out extremely well which is usually a good indication to me that God’s on board with this thing. The one thing we don’t have – and this is really the crux of the matter – is a real agenda.  Our real goal is just to get to know the place and the people there. We’re just hoping God can use us on this trip.  We’re not sure where it will lead.  Our primary, beginning motivation was not “we want to help the people in Haiti”, it was “we want to know the people in Haiti.” We’ve just tried to kind of build a purpose around that idea so we don’t show up at someone’s hovel with sunglasses and a camera and say “nou isit la!” (here we are!).

So, now can you see why I’m a little anxious!