Cheryl Lewis » Cheryl Lewis

There are many things for which I’m grateful while in Haiti.I’m thankful to believe in a loving God, despite all I see. He continues to produce miracles before us each day. Ask me how and I’ll be happy to share.

I’m relieved that I have another world into which I can again step tomorrow, where my children are healthy and have plentiful opportunity to carve out lives of purpose and abundance. Where my mattress is double stacked with a downy cushion and perpetual comfort. Where even my dog has more food than he can eat.

I’m grateful for the Haitian people, who are unlike anyone I’ve ever known. They rise at dawn to sing, despite unspeakable loss, and sweep the leaves that have fallen during the night to the dirt that lines their world. They hand wash their clothing in metal tubs and are always tidy and composed. On Sundays, the women wear heels, despite the challenges of dirt floors and hazardous streets. Women and men alike carry gear and baskets of produce from place to place atop their heads. They are quick to smile.

I’m thankful for Mirdrede, our hostess, who speaks English well and laughs easily and is a reliable anchor in a broken country that is filled with corruption and despair. She is also a volunteer and talented at braiding hair. No one messes with Mirdrede.

I’m grateful for the security guard who walks round our property, rifle slung over his shoulder.

I’m encouraged by the communities who stand behind us at home, making our journey possible through prayer, support and roll-up-your-sleeves-and-create-a-solution-from-afar tenacity. (You know who you are!) Even people none of us have ever met continue to improve Haitian lives and our own daily. It’s not because they’re trained in such things; it’s because they care and choose to dive in.

I’m thankful for Markenley, who reminded me today that even a 10-year-old orphan can teach an old girl new dreams.

I’m awed by the members of my team. We had barely met before coming here and yet already they seem like family to me. No one leaves another behind and all are quick to work and laugh and pray.

Beverly is a pediatrician but, first, she is a wife and mom to seven children – five of whom are adopted. She will dance and skip rope with orphans as quickly as she checks their heartbeats and temperatures. She is fearless, fun-spirited, competitive and wholly impressive. Several years my junior, I want to be her if/when I grow up.

Mark is a burly fella who will climb atop a collapsed building to swing a sledge hammer alongside locals, rather than stand around to wait for an official assignment. Even his past two heart attacks haven’t slowed him down. He loves MREs and prefers flavor over healthy, anyday. He is the guy you’re glad to have beside you when inching down broken roads in the back of an exposed pickup truck near dusk with thousands of hungry, restless survivors eying your bounty.

Debbie adds trinkets and crystals to clothing when home but, here in Haiti, she is anything but fragile. She is quick to communicate and laugh with all who draw near and her determination to learn Creole is earnest. Two days ago, a Haitian who she befriended begged her to take his precious son, who he said was the most important thing in his world, with her to a better life. His wife was crushed in the earthquake. Debbie was crushed by his offer and the sacrifice it contained.

Brad is the big brother that every woman wants. He is fiercely protective – fiercely, fiercely protective – and, with his shaved head and imposing hunting knife slung always from his waist, convincing. As a proud American, he served in Somalia and Desert Storm, then lost his employment in construction, thanks to the failed economy. He has turned to the lawn-care industry to support his precious wife and children. While in Haiti, he has become quite the mobile clinic pharmacist. We also call him our prayer warrior. Mostly, we call him our friend.

Dana wasn’t sure whether she should come on the relief trip. She is rowdy, in her own spiritual way, and confesses everyone says she’s a bit of a wild child. She is the baby of the group and yet her tenacity is fierce. Her son asked her to stay home; her husband assured her he knew she would be in good Hands. She is quick to roll up her sleeves and dive into the dirty work, whether it is helping to change the sagging bandages surrounding a festering wound, holding a soggy-diapered kid or flinging herself into the mix with a bunch of sweaty guys in a makeshift game of soccer.

John walks the talk without having to say a word. He is quiet, but wry and funny. He is always watching, listening, but is slow to judge. His research and advice before our trip even began has gone miles in keeping each of us safe and well. His heart is bottomless. His safari hat is ever-present.

JP is always smiling. Big. Given the opportunity, he generally has two or three kids in his arms. He is not camera shy. He has the patience of Job and plays a mean duct-tape soccer game. He respects women, speaks adoringly of his wife and praises even his female boss. He is genuine.

Howard is our fearless leader. He naturally gravitates to people and is quick with a prayer and welcome. Not your typical preacher, he wears sleeveless tee shirts and shorts, whenever possible – hence, his perpetual farmer’s tan. Networking is his specialty, social media is his hobby and genuinely making a difference, in ways large and small, is his heart. He is good at all of them.

And then there is my husband, who did not hesitate to jump into Haiti beside me. A tireless worker, Jim thinks on his feet and is a hungry learner. He is fiercely protective of me and devoted to stepping into God’s unfolding Plan. He has the heart of a father and the obedience of a son. He and Howard have seen more of this country and its chaotic bureaucracy, as they have tirelessly fought to free our donated supplies, than the rest of us put together.

Let me say it, again. In one short week, I love our team. I’m a bit of a loner, by nature, and sometimes savor too much my time behind a camera lens or keyboard, but I can genuinely say that I’m the biggest fan of those God tapped to stand alongside me on this wacky, spirit-filled journey to Haiti.

Speaking of crazy, I’m also happy to have a driver who, though hot headed and quick to launch into argument (and has even disappeared on a couple of outings), delivers us in a vehicle so that we don’t have to be one of those trudging in the rubble-strewn gutters and densely peopled edges of ceaseless shacks and tents.

Ah, tents.

Perhaps even more than food and water, I’m grateful to sleep in one that is watertight and sealed from mosquitoes and peering eyes.

Here, there is a sea of tents, and yet there are not nearly enough. For every tent you see, there are 20 makeshift, ramshackle lean-to’s alongside.

When it rains, which it did – heavily, for hours upon hours – last night AGAIN, I’m filled with horror when I think of the masses who are scrambling to find cover for themselves and their wee ones.

The knowledge that Menard, a young girl I met a few days ago, is now struggling with her family and community to hold aloft – for hours on end – the tarps sheltering their limited belongings horrifies me. The weight of the water will otherwise collapse upon them.

The same children who dance around me during the day are scared and miserable when it rains. It is nearly impossible for their parents to keep them well.

Before I came to Haiti, I saw lots of discussions about tents and whether they were truly the best option for families who had lost their homes.

What I have learned is that many Haitians never had houses – even before the earthquake. To give a tent is to give the first home some of them have ever had – and will ever know. It is a gift of dignity and protection and hope.

A tarp will never, ever be the same.

And neither will I.

There is nothing that can prepare you for a third-world orphanage.

The flies. The listless eyes. The snotty noses and chins. The swollen, vacant bellies.

OK, not all of them. Miss Eveline, the director at Notre Dame Orphanage in Carrefour was tired but appeared healthy. But, for most of the women sitting in the filth holding infants in their arms, the heaviness of another day sat upon their shoulders like the slabs of crushing mortar pinning cars across Port au Prince. They are carrying the weight of grief and responsibility and illness and despair.

Their eyes only lit briefly when lollipops left over from my church’s Valentines activity were pulled from the bag. In hopes of securing at least one, a few of the desperate shoved babies toward me, gesturing that each drooping, feeble child would love nothing better than sugar’s kiss upon its malnourished lips.

It was only a small sack of surplus candy and random Happy Meal toys stuffed as an afterthought into a backpack and it caused a churning mass of humanity that literally brought me to my knees.

There are a few things I don’t believe I can ever do well, despite how fiercely I may try. Credibly describing the apocalyptic destruction here is beyond my capability.

Like anyone with CNN, I had seen the images of Haiti’s destroyed presidential palace. On my 50-inch plasma screen at home, it seemed very shocking and larger than life. The tent city footage from Anderson Cooper’s broadcast tore at my heart, because conditions seemed bleak.But.

Just as a snapshot or even 5-minute video doesn’t really convey the grandeur of the Tetons in all their glory, with panoramic accuracy and cool-breeze reality, no picture or word stream will put your hand on the rubble that stretches across every threshold of an entire city.

Stunned is how you feel when you stand by a hospital that was bustling with care for hundreds of patients, up and down the corridors of five stories. When the earth shook the afternoon of January 12 for 45 seconds, five stories crumbled into one and no patient, doctor, nurse, guest or janitor escaped.

More swiftly than the World Trade Center fell, a city descended into dust.

It is not occasional, as after a tornado skips its fickle way across a landscape. You can drive for an hour through winding, potholed streets and know only crazy-kilter chaos, with rooftops skewed vertical where horizontal once made life sensical. Slabs of concrete – that once shaped walls hiding the private normalcy of parents and children playing and couples worrying over bills or making love or arguing or sleeping toward another day – shifted into tombs.

Cars and whatever was inside still lay beneath massive, broken chunks of concrete.

Where there were gutters, now there are sewers, with mounds of trashed garbage and torn jeans and mangled shoes and soggy sheets held erect by a mishmash of sticks to form a haphazard network of extended families.

On block after block after block.

That part is shocking – though not altogether new. I asked our hostess, Mirdrede, last night whether most families lived in houses before the quake. She grew very quiet and her eyes filled with tears as she nearly lost composure for the first time since we’d met.

“No,” she whispered, shaking her head sadly. “It is very difficult in this country.”

The families in the tent community we visited during our mobile-medical service yesterday agree.

“Last night, when the rains came, it was bad,” said Menard, a beautiful girl who speaks English well and drew me aside. “Everyone stood up and reached high above our heads to hold the tarp, so the water wouldn’t collapse on everything we have.”

That “everything” is meager. There are a few tents, and some mattresses – with ragged blankets carefully tucked into place as at home – lined under a great, slanting expanse of white tarp. The dirt aisles are newly swept.

“The rains came through all the cracks and poured onto the beds and our clothes,” said Menard, gesturing toward the sections where the tarps had been pinned to anything tall enough for support. “When it ended, we curled up into tiny balls to try to sleep on the dry spots. If taking pictures will help to share how we are living with others, you are welcome to take them. We need tents.”

She said she was a university student only a few weeks ago, before the earthquake shook all hope to the ground, along with nearly every structure.

“I was studying marketing and PR,” she said. “You can maybe tell from talking to me that I am no idiot. But my family has 11 people and there is only one tent.”

She proudly led me across their encampment, past the old man sleeping on a mattress and around the girl braiding another girl’s hair as she sat on the dirt, holding a jagged piece of mirror for viewing.

Menard was proud, despite the squalor, because she was leading me to meet her mother and sister, who were washing clothes in a bucket.

“If you know anyone who can use help, “said Menard, her broad eyes growing misty, “my mother has not eaten today and there will be no food tonight. You can see I speak English well and I can translate for anyone who needs it. I need to earn food for my family. They need to eat.”

As we spoke, she drew in the curious children who were peering at this stranger welcomed to their inner circle. Soon, they were laughing into the lens of my camera. It thrilled them to see themselves dancing on-screen after each shot.

This is perhaps what has struck me most during our time here. Where I would expect to find grief and anger and fierce hurt, there is laughter and welcome and a quick readiness to return my smile.

On every corner.

There is nothing I can offer to ease their big-picture plight and I’m almost embarrassed to meet their eyes as our van drives past but, every time – almost without fail – when I smile or gently lift my hand in greeting, something in their eyes lights up and they nod a smile in return.

It’s more than I can say sometimes for my own home, where most families have an arsenal of Life’s Greatest Pleasures and abundant cause for relief to have won God’s lottery.

As we sat out a table and a few chairs in Menard’s makeshift neighborhood, so that medical care could begin, a line formed. The two Haitian medical students serving as doctors finally realized that the two of us assigned to help them for the day have no medical background whatsoever.

“Tell us what to do and we will do it,” Brad and I assured them. That is how we became pharmacists.

After each patient’s diagnosis, they would pass along a sheet detailing the pills we should scoop with a spoon into tiny zip baggies. We penned directions for use on strips of tan bandaid tape and, when we ran out of that, Brad simply wrote instructions in ink directly on the bags.

By the end of the day, we had overcome most language barriers and worked out an efficient system, even as the mosquitoes swarmed around us and the relentless line of new patients wanting to catch care while it was parked in their midst.

“It is imperfect,” said our doctor-in-training, shrugging, “but it is what we have.”

He spoke for an entire nation.

 

I lost my Blackberry last night. It was new. As in just-bought-it-on-Friday-because-of-the-trip-to-Haiti new. I wanted something with a better camera and video, so I could share with you. I wanted life’s best, even when I had some clue I would be trekking through life’s worst.And it was wonderful. And I lost it.

And it was upsetting.

Did I mention that I lost it when leaving a pizza place? Yeah, it turns out that our interpreter knew of this place that had just opened before the earthquake and it was doing business, again. We figured we would support the local economy by briefly shaking off the horror we’d witnessed from the safe confines of our van and take a break before crashing in our tents.

The pizza may be the best I’d ever tasted. It beat the protein bars we had for breakfast and lunch. It was better than the scoops of rice I was willing to eat from the plates our Haitian hostess, Mirdrede, set out for us. (I left the salad and peas, at the advice of the health department lady who gave us our trip inoculations. I left the brown beans, for what may seem obvious reasons in a camp with backed-up toilets. But I felt ashamed as I stacked a plate still filled with food in the discard pile.) The cold, bottled Heineken was good, too. All I’d had to drink all day was water I’ve decided to trust through an instant-filter bottle contributed by a caring company to our trip. So far, so good.

Life seemed pretty light again, for the moment, and there was laughter among us as I showed the video of our team in our red HAITI shirts shoving our van up a hill it couldn’t quite top.

And then I lost my phone.

Crisis.

Sure, I saw the irony. I felt panicked, because it was my link to my family back home in my safe, real world and to you, my community of loving, supportive, rescue-me-by-just-walking-alongside-me friends. I felt mortified, because it was a $450 phone. Sure, it cost me significantly less as a longtime customer and, yes, even that was broken into four easy payments. And, OK, I was aware that $450 would match the typical annual income of a Haitian family.

But I sure loved that phone.

I suspected that the restaurant couldn’t find it when we called, because those two Haitian guys at the next table had been eying us closely – especially when it was time to pay and wallets surfaced. I had even looked behind us to be certain they hadn’t followed us out. If I had left my phone on the table, I just knew they would’ve scooped it up triumphantly.

I spent the evening feeling dejected. No more blogs to bring you along with us. Gone, the frequent emails to my precious daughter and son.

I was quiet as Mirdrede wove my stringy long hair into tight braids as the ruins of her university lay crushed behind us. I could add little comfort as she shared that she is the oldest child in her family and so she is the one her parents and siblings call for help. It had only been minutes since they had called, crying, to say it was raining in the streets, again, and they would be wet – all nine of them, her parents and sister and brother and his wife and three kids and a cousin – another night. Was there nothing she could do?

But what could she do, she asked me. She had told them of the tent under which we were then sitting and where they could hover. But, in the morning, the few students remaining would again gather to peer toward a different future than the one of which they had dreamed at enrollment. “We Continue,” the banner beside us asserted in Creole. Patients would again stream through the makeshift hospital that now fills the space once devoted to student parking.

Her family would be displaced once more. She is just a volunteer doctor and it is not her space to offer – but she is the first child, and so it falls to her to care for the oldest of her family down to the youngest. She tries now to keep very, very busy, so that she will not think of what life was like before. This is her life now. One moment, one footstep at a time, this. is. her. life.

I assured her that, once we reached our shipping container in the morning, her family would receive the first tent issued. I asked whether they needed food and she shrugged. Of course, there is little to go around, but everyone is getting by somehow.

The same seemed true of the haunting little boy who had sidled up to us earlier when we stood beside our parked van, waiting to gain entry into a safe compound. We were awed by the sight of our U.S. military guys nearby and their massive, air-conditioned tents and satellite dish. We were cheered to see their presence. Then this little kid appeared beside us and extended his open palm. Quickly, gratefully, we passed him a pack of crackers from the box of our cross-country snacks. Here, at last, was someone we could help, even before our official duty began. He tucked it in his pocket and continued to stand there, expectantly. We looked at each other a bit nervously. There were few snacks left in the box – and we didn’t want to begin a frenzy among the homeless Haitians across the street. They were already eying our truck and its tarp-covered mysteries. For us to dig through it for more, before we had unloaded and sorted it in safety, might invite chaos and even danger.

So we tried to gently shoo him away with his cracker reward. He gestured that he was thirsty. Again, we looked at each other. We had all encountered beggars at resort ports before and, in our experience, they won’t stop asking until you stop giving.

What WOULD Jesus do?

My teammate asked me if she should give him the remains of her water bottle, though it had little left. I nodded. He drank it and stood waiting.

For us. The team who had traveled from Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A., through countless canceled flights and obstacles and driven six hours from the Dominican Republic to help the hurting.

He was waiting for us and we were questioning how much we should give.

I wanted to scoop him up and take him with us even as we turned our backs in the hope that he would give up and wander away. I saw our Haitian driver watching and wondered what he was thinking. Probably that we’re full of sh*t with our matching church shirts and flawed, here-to-rescue-but-not-to-deeply-sacrifice hearts. I was grateful when a man with no arm came up and danced and sang after our small gift to him. That felt better. He let us feel good about ourselves. Heck, I even tossed that kid a juice box as we were told we should now enter the compound, where few beyond the wall could enter.

I was safe, again. And benevolent.

P.S. This morning, I was awakened by the same 4:30 alarm that I had set yesterday in Santo Domingo on my brand-spanking-new Blackberry Bold. It was shoved deeply inside a zippered pocket that, even when lit up by my chiming phone, I could not quickly figure out how to reach. Somehow I had missed it last night in my feverish search, before calling T-Mobile to shut down my service. I was finally able to shut it off, but somehow I can’t sleep. It is still pouring rain outside and thousand of families are huddled in feeble huts with walls fashioned from soggy sheets. It. is. their. life. now.

P.S.S. I thought I would write to you of the horrors and ugliness of what we witnessed today – instead, I have shown you my own. May God – and you, who have sent me here to do God’s bidding – forgive me. Rather than patting me on the back and assuring me that I’m still wonderful, please fervently pray with me that He will change me to live like Him. It is the only way our world will ever change.

Last P.S. The day has begun and the skies have cleared. I can tell, because the Haitians are up. Singing.