Kids run barefoot behind the truck as it rattles up the road past tin-roofed shanties and drives toward the Wesleyan Mission Station. “That’s the Saline. The poorest of the poor live there,” a missionary explains to the team of nurses riding in the back of the white pickup. Plastic bottles, Styrofoam cartons, and discarded food line the ditches along the unpaved road where pigs and goats munch away. The nurses look on with motherly gazes as they wave to the shoeless, pant-less children.
Each year a hundred or more volunteers, like these nurses, pass through the Wesleyan Mission in Anses-a-Galets, eager to help the people of Haiti. In this, the least developed country in the Western Hemisphere, there is no shortage of need. Teams come to do anything from construction, to accounting, to hospital work, to post-earthquake food distribution. As they give, instead of finding feelings of satisfaction at a job well done, many teams find themselves feeling discouraged that they couldn’t do more.
“It’s just not enough,” Caleb Thompson said to me in a conversation last week. Caleb, a key player in major food distribution efforts, has already helped bring in over 140,000 pounds of supplies to La Gonave. No matter how much he gives out, however, he hears people telling him that they need more. A surgical team that recently visited our hospital had the same impression. Working late into the evening on Sunday and then again all Monday morning before their afternoon flight, the team kept saying, “We wish we had more time. There’s so much more we could do.”
These feelings that the need is too big and the time too short are almost universal among volunteers here. When looking across the Saline at rows of one-room, stick, mud, and block homes, most visitors feel overwhelmed. It is true that there is no way a short-term team will change the life-style of the 80% of the population who live below the poverty line. If taken too far, however, these feelings of helplessness could discourage volunteers from trying to do anything all.
Just because the need cannot be met all at once, does not mean that the need cannot be met at all. In just one year of service here, I have seen teams vaccinate over 800 children, bring thousands of pounds of medical supplies, treat hundreds of patients in the hospital, give thousands of families food for the day, feed 58 orphans for several months, and invest hundreds of hours in education, work projects, and relationships. And though this isn’t enough to put shoes on the feet of all the children in town, each team that comes in walks another step with Haiti in its journey to prosperity.
