Love your neighbor as yourself : 3 Days in Haiti

by Warren Barfield

Mark 12:30-31 (New International Version)
30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. 31 The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these.

I am safely back home with my family after a whirlwind trip to Haiti. I spent three days in Haiti with Food for the Hungry (FH) learning about the immense need there and how I can better help FH meet that need. The goal was to see the work with my own eyes so I could communicate with my audience and inspire them to partner with FH and me.

I prayerfully prepared for this trip, asking God to give me the wisdom to see how I could help these people. I return from my trip asking God to give me the courage and fortitude to act on what I have seen and now know I must do.

First, I cannot begin to quantify the devastation in Haiti. It is overwhelming. What were communities of homes, stores, banks, and offices are now rubble. Imagine your neighborhood leveled. Imagine your grocery store, school, work place, church, and your home all gone. Is there a park near you? Across from my house is a common area where the families in my neighborhood walk their dogs or jog around. The children will play catch or fly a kite. I'm looking out my window as I type this imagining if me, my wife and our fifteen month old little boy, along with all of the families in my neighborhood, had to put up make shift tents of bed sheets and plastic and live in that common area while our homes lay in ruin around us. This is what I saw in Haiti. I saw an entire city of families sleeping on the ground with little to no protection from the intense heat or the rainy season that starts this week. Jesus said we are to love our neighbors as ourselves. I am to love those families in those tents in Haiti as if they were mine, to love those children as if they were my children. As a dad and husband, it is bringing tears to my eyes now as I imagine my wife Megan and my son Montgomery living like that.

With all due respect, I fear Americans cannot grasp what has happened there. God forbid if a disaster like this actually happened in Nashville, and I lost everything, I could take my family to another state and start over. I have family in other states that could take us in during the few months it would take for the front-end loaders, backhoes, wrecking balls and dump trucks to haul off the remains so we could rebuild. In Haiti, they have nowhere to go. They are on an island. Haiti is about the size of Maryland. Next door is the Dominican Republic, which is not much larger, and a different culture and language altogether. It is unlike any disaster we in the States have ever experienced. In Haiti, I watched as men with sledgehammers hacked away at buildings half brought down by the quake, endangering their lives and those that walk the streets around them. In Haiti, I saw men moving mountains of rubble from the collapse of a four-story school building with shovels and wheelbarrows. This will take years. How long will they have to sleep on the ground? Where will they work? What will the children do? No homes, no offices, no stores, no schools. How can we as spoiled Americans who can find something to complain about in every luxury we have begin to grasp what has happened in Haiti? How can we as Christians who spend more money on our church buildings than we do on helping the poor love the Haitians as we love ourselves?

I spent one of my afternoons in Bellevue, La Montagne, Haiti. FH has recognized this mountain community as a place that will not receive the needed attention because of their distance from the city. They are doing what they can to help the least of these. I stood in a tent with about thirty children as we took turns singing songs to one another. Outside of that tent their parents were trying to rebuild their lives. Their church was four walls of sheet metal leaning against a frame of sticks with a plastic tarp for a roof. Their homes were walls of bed sheets and plastic held up by twigs. They were finishing up a stick frame wrapped in plastic around a hole in the ground to replace their bathroom that was destroyed in the quake.

We were asked if we wanted to visit their water source and help bring some water back. We walked for about thirty minutes down a rocky narrow path to a place where about twenty people were trying to fill their buckets from a pipe sticking out of the mountain five feet from the ground. I watched for twenty minutes or so as the water, the amount that would come out of your outdoor water spigot, slowly filled their buckets. They pushed and shoved vying for position to obtain their share of the water produced by this "spigot" that was shared by a community of 600 families. I had passed a little boy on the way down to the water source. He was five years old at the most. I noticed him down at the water source again just sitting off to the side picking up rocks. The realization that he could not compete with the adults pushing and shoving for water broke my heart. He sat there for an hour waiting for a chance to complete his chore. I took his jug to the spigot and filled it for him as well as my bucket. I handed him his water and started my walk back to the children's school tent.

The long walk down the rocky path to the water source was now a longer walk up the mountain in nearly 100-degree weather carrying a four to five gallon bucket of water. As the sweat poured and my legs and arms ached, I starting to cry for that little boy who has to do this everyday. I have five sinks in my house. There, six hundred families share one spigot of contaminated water.

When we got back to the school I sat in the shade next to my bucket of water and tried to catch my breath while processing my experience. After about fifteen minutes, the little boy I had helped made his way by me carrying his jug of water. I pointed him out to an FH worker and was told he had another hour to walk before reaching his home. That five-year-old little boy spent four hours that day doing work that would exhaust any adult I know, to fetch less water than we use when we flush our toilets.

FH is committed to change the future of this little boy and thousands of others like him. I am committed as well. I plan to increase my efforts to find sponsors for children in these areas. In the last two months, I have been able to find sponsors for 350 children in Haiti and other parts of the world. Those 350 children are my sons and daughters. Love your neighbor as yourself. I have thousands more who need help. Love your neighbor as yourself. If it was Montgomery who needed help and had no voice to ask for it himself, I pray someone would speak up on his behalf. Love your neighbor as yourself. I can't physically hand a jug of water to every child who needs it, but I have a voice and an audience, and I will speak up for those who can't speak to you themselves and say, "Love them as much as you love yourself."

There are families who have lost everything and are sleeping on the ground tonight. There is a little boy who is unable to go to school today and learn a way to change his future. He is five-years-old and labors all day in the sun for a little water. If this was your family and your son would you fight for them? Love your neighbor as yourself.