What Makes Someplace Home?

I don't have the perfect answer to that question, but it must have something to do with the security to comfortably embrace imperfection and even feel comforted by it.

Miami International Airport redeemed itself a bit today: I gorged on exquisite Cuban food (Haiti is nice but no culinary destination, for sure) and felt welcomed by a city where I speak the language (that would be Spanish in Miami, still not much English to be found there).

But the real homecoming, as usual, began on the flight from Dallas to Lexington: Our rag-tag group of passengers crammed onto the Embrear commuter jet and most of us nailed our heads on its the low ceiling. The man in front of me couldn't get his seatbelt around his bulbous figure and requested a belt extension piece. To my right, a well-dressed businessman was fighting nausea and explained to the whole cabin why eating that plate of hotwings was a mistake. A young redneck-looking man with impressive diction shouted from the rear into his phone at a woman, peppering his public conversation with innuendo that made the other passengers blush.

And as we descended into Lexington, we buzzed Commonwealth Stadium, its packed stands lit up in the chilly darkness as tiny white players ran some yards.

I smiled at the whole scene and actually teared up. There's no mistaking this place and the twangy accents of its inhabitants. I love it here.


Above: Our normal return-trip routine, recovery.

Tax Dollars at Work?

This is a road in Northwest Haiti, a main road of sorts - not the muddy part, the part under water.

Makes me wonder how we get anything done at all here. If you like camping everyday, this is the place for you.

It's been a great, great trip. I'll be back home in good ol' Kentucky in a few days, though, grateful for smooth pavement and fall colors. More later.

Divergent Paths

Who can know the complexities of a life? Who can really consider the thousands of abstractions that drive someone to joy, pain, love, loss?

What human could be fully understood by our frail minds, especially at first glance? We never have all the facts. Perhaps this is God's intentional design, a design that necessitates the perpetual exercise of grace.

A few images from this week:

The Blues

Recovering from a fever on the northern coast of Haiti. You can do that on a fishing boat, right?

The boy has one year left at best, maybe two.
There's a bulge on his ankle hunting him, creeping up through his body, a slow but tireless predator.
It hurts. It should be cut off.

Do you know what cancer is, the nurse asks his mother. She doesn't.
It's a disease without a cure. We can't save him.
But he can feel better. It should be cut off.

The boy's eyes are wet. What good are one and a half legs in Haiti?
But the pain would be gone. They would be a good two years. Better, at least.
How much is an ankle worth in a land with nothing, to a boy and a mother with nothing?
How much is it worth to live your last days without pain?

It hurts. It should be cut off.

---

I've spent the past couple of days with a visiting surgery team, with docs from America, Canada, and Australia doing beautiful work. I watched a boy have his cancerous leg amputated and a man have his crippled hand fixed. Surely Christ's words were true in every sense: "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick."

Thank God for doctors who are willing to serve the sickest among us, even when the sick cannot pay.

Below: A hand surgery in NWHCM's surgery ward in Saint-Louis du Nord

A First and a Last

It sounded great at first. En route to Haiti, our flight arrived in Miami at around midnight and we figured we'd save our employer a little change by cancelling our hotel room for the night and just sleeping in the terminal, since we'd just be getting back up at 4am to catch our flight to Port-au-Prince.

Seemed like a good plan -- we already had air mattresses, and the occasionally magnanimous folks at American Airlines spotted us a few blankets. But in our naiveté, we didn't account for the shrill, high-amph, numbingly repetitive TSA announcements pulsing from the ceilings...or was it from everywhere? So we tossed and turned for hours in a cavernous and empty ariport, beaten by stern lectures not to leave our baggage unattended, all against the backdrop of a chortling third-shift cleaning crew making jokes in Creole above our beds, clearly with no intent to actually work that evening.

Our misery was marked every 15 minutes by an automated woman proudly announcing the quarter-hours. And in between all those voices, Miami's Mayor Alvarez chimed in from time to time on the loudspeaker, dutifully welcoming us to Miami and thanking us for choosing his airport.

Welcome to Miami, indeed. We were so glad to leave, and crawl into a quiet corner in Haiti where, tonight, we are going to get a great night's sleep.

Good to be back.

Missions, Reportage, and the Secret Lives of Disgruntled Wedding Vendors

There is a whole world working behind the scenes at every wedding in America. Sometimes it looks like this woman.

You'll find her and others on my newly updated website. In particular, the reportage section is completely redone, a fun little project in all my free time (when I should have been sleeping). Check it out here.

But the bigger news is that the new Northwest Haiti Christian Mission website is finally live, the product of hundreds of hours of development work and the cause of a few gray hairs. All told, we're pretty excited about the result. Judge for yourself here.

Erika and I will be back in Haiti in a few weeks for most of October. It's been a long time out and too many hours in front of the computer, so we're excited to get back there (and always humbly grateful for the opportunity to have such an awesome job).

The new NWHCM.org


The new reportage site