How can we help them all?

Monday 3/9/15 2:22 AM, I am awake as with most mornings but different.  In another hour it will be the official time to rise and prepare for the 4:30 AM rendezvous at the Lindbergh Terminal.  Lindbergh?  Give me Humphrey! Too many thoughts to return to a sleep, might as well get up.  I think that later today, I will see and maybe hold my first Haitian baby and that only two days earlier and 3200 miles ago I held my first grandbaby, Laurel Elliott. Such a difference between two worlds and two babies loved…. how can we help them all?

 

PAP landing.  The view from 25,000 feet was breathtaking – how can such beauty hold such despair?  Land at an airport much more ordinary than imagined.  It housed real hallways, real AC, real security, clean, well-organized, easy passage. Outside, it was a different story.  We were 15 people with five carts of five or six suitcases each.  Men in uniform of some sort set upon us to help push our carts 50 yards to the waiting TapTap.  It seemed a need not worth filling yet alone buying.  But then it became clear, hire one and he will be your stalwart against the rest.  But even then, desperate men cling to our buggies looking for the least bit of assumed labor in order to earn the least bit of a fee, kind men, sincere men, trying to provide for others.  How can we help them all?

The TapTap designed perhaps for 10 people took 15 plus one driver plus 24 big bags of checked luggage and 15 roller boards.  We crept along a street of nothing more than lanes of rubble and stone.  Two miles and 20 minutes later with the sound of our horn, a gate slid open to welcome us to our home for the week.  We were in a different place greeted by our hosts as if we were long lost family. 

Once moved in, our host, Gates, escorted us by foot through more debris-strewn streets not more than 200 yards away, past hollowed-eyed men, hopeful women and untroubled children to a little oasis of cool water, cold Prestige, and a group of 15 strangers, already now friends.  It is warm but the weather hot.  And we will help…one at a time.

Bill Engler