Her sweet voice was originally what caught my attention as she walked by us on a Port Au Prince street singing Justin Beiber’s “Baby”. In the midst of such destruction and chaos, here 15-year-old Sophia was, plowing forward, taking odd jobs to support herself and her four year old brother and providing them shelter and food. Never could I have guessed that just six months ago she had lost both of her parents, and had been trapped under rubble for three days in the January earthquake that rocked Haiti.
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Meeting Sophia last week made me realize just how blessed my life really is. And while I talk about issues on TV and preach to others to go out and make a difference, lately I’ve been asking myself, what am I really doing to make the world a better place?
I just got back from a three day trip to Haiti with four of my friends to see firsthand the hardship compounded by the devastation from the earthquake, lend a hand where we could, and figure out what we could do on a larger scale going forward.
The trip was nothing short of life changing. I thought I had seen poverty before, but what we saw in Haiti was on a whole different level. In a country of 9 million people, over 1.5 million (that’s 17% of the population!) were displaced by the earthquake, and the widespread damage has not much improved in the last six months.
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Close to one million people are now living in extremely cramped conditions called “tent cities” all over Haiti without basic human needs – shelter, food, clean water, and the ones we take for granted – bathrooms, showers, clothing and beds.
The stalls in the cities reserved for bathing are hotbeds for rape and there are no outhouses so people just go to the bathroom right out in the open next to where they sleep. According to the directors of the tent cities whom we spoke with, there has been no food and water relief from the government and many people are starving. One of many heart breaking moments came when a pregnant woman approached us for food and we had to turn her away because we had passed out all the granola bars and trail mixes we had brought from the States. The look of defeat in her face will stay with me forever.
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