Author: Dr. Michael Johnson

I scraped my plate.  I should have eaten just desert, but I needed a balanced meal.  So, I scraped my plate and stacked it on the other half empty one.  I was not full.  I was not even satisfied.  I just wanted to eat another variety of Buffalo wings, some ribs and top it off with some more sushi before eating something sweet. 

This joy of eating was interrupted by pictures on the overhanging television.  Something about some disaster in some god-forsaken place with some god-forsaken pagan people who deserve the wrath of god because of the evil in their lives.  They deserve what they get!  Their just deserts!  Speaking of desert, the variety was mind boggling.

Fruit salad, ice cream, donuts, bread pudding, brownies and that very essential cherry pie with whipped cream on top were just the beginning.  I left my plate on the table this time.  This is a buffet and they hire people to pick up and clean up after me.  Ain’t God good!

Proverbs 30:8 Remove far from me vanity and lies: give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me:

Proverbs 30:9 Lest I be full, and deny thee, and say, Who is the LORD? or lest I be poor, and steal, and take the name of my God in vain.

Now the real dying starts.  From the red cage we sit in, the ten of us can see there will be some real dying soon.  Americans are not used to riding in the back of a caged truck.  It is not safe.  None of the benches on which we sit have seat belts and the luggage and supplies between our legs are not secured.  One sudden stop, or, tilting the wrong way to avoid an earthquake crater and we could find ourselves in a tangled pile of bottled water and battered bodies.

On the positive side, the cage serves some good purposes.  One is to keep us from falling out and another to keep people from reaching in and getting our goodies (clean water and snack food).  On the downside, it interferes with getting good pictures of these same desperate people and it fails to keep out the dust.  Welcome to Haiti.  Take good pictures.

To define a good picture is easy.  Good pictures will relate how heavy the death toll will be after the 230,000 dead have already been delivered by trucks and then buried by bulldozers in mass graves.  That was the estimated death toll as of my arrival to Haiti in late January.  I happened to be diverted by this disaster as I went home for a few speaking engagements.  Kay strongly advised me that since I was going to cross the Atlantic, it made sense to be diverted from my previous itinerary and see this unfolding disaster.  World Gospel Mission was in agreement with this diversion and encouraged me and Dr. Daniel Tolan to make a survey of possible interventions we could make.  That is why I found myself caged in the back of this truck trying to take good pictures.

World Health Organization expects that once the rains start, the clean water runs out, the septic systems overflow and the tents, sheets and blankets that serve as housing fall down into the mud, the real dying will start. With people living under these conditions, the death toll will indeed rise so, take good pictures.  Some of these people won’t be here.  Malaria, meningitis, malnutrition are the order of the day when things are good.  Keep your camera handy.

Who will die?  The good pictures tell the story.  Take a good shot of that line of people over there.  Many of them will be those we see in that ‘one item only’ line.  You know the kind of line we complain about when someone has the audacity to get in the express line with five items.  Unfortunately, everyone is in the one item only line as it is the only kind of line in town.

This line wraps around the corners of the communities we pass.  Only women and young children are in line.  The men have been kept away by the soldiers.  That is because many of the men will fight for the food and then sell it instead of feeding their families.  One item only is what the women carry away.  They will carry on their heads, a 40 pound bag of meal, or rice, or maybe beans.  It is rationed out by uniformed troops, men and women from many nations and various complexions.

One item only is all they expect.  They are not paying so there is no hurry to get to the cash register.   There is a hurry to get into the next line of one item only.  That one will have water.  Let’s push on.  We have enough pictures.

We arrived at our clinic site just about 3 hours after our departure from Port Au Prince.  The crowds had gathered long before and the doctors and nurses who were just completing their 5 day stay were glad to see us arrive.  They were exhausted, emotionally and physically.  We gave them relief.

They were exhausted.  Imagine how hard it is to talk to anyone about the pain in their chest from the piece of cement that hit them and acknowledge the pain in their heart from knowing their daughters were killed by those same slabs of cement.  An average day was two hundred patients.  A heavy day could be as many as 600.  Many of them were very ill.  Diarrhea, heat stroke, pneumonia and uncontrolled diabetes were the order of the day as the nearest hospital was nearly completely destroyed.  All of them were affected physically or afflicted emotionally and spiritually.

Volunteers from a variety of disciplines in medicine, firefighters and first responders, from all around the globe provided services in tents, under trees, and tarpaulins.  At night these volunteers slept in tents, under mosquito nets, hoping the dogs would scare the rats and the rats would scare the tarantulas.  They shared toilets, took 3 minute cold water showers, and ate unfamiliar foods at inconvenient times, hoping that the next day the crowds would be thinner and with fewer sick people.

Even the Haitians volunteered support by nursing, translating, cooking, and cleaning.  They showed evidence of the emotional strain of a seemingly endless march of people.  To them, it was their own people.  To us as visitors, it was a mass of strangers in need.  Many just wanted to know what to do when the next aftershocks hit.  They awakened many of us at night.  We had the luxury of sleeping in tents.  They slept outside to avoid another slab of concrete.

They asked questions.  What do we do when the rains come, the water runs out, or even more importantly, when the one item lines disappear and the world turns their heads to the next disaster? 

WGM wants to be there to help provide answers for people when the real dying starts.  Will you go there with us?

Call me stupid but, I must have enough to live on.

The phrase ‘to live on’ has taken on a different meaning as my days in Haiti come to a close.  I have watched women drenched in sweat, stand for hours in the hot sun in the ‘one item or less’ line.  Don’t you hate those lines?  They never move fast enough. Neither do these lines.  Thousands of women arrive as early as 6 a.m. and wait for hours for something to take home to feed their families.  They are waiting for their one item of, a bag of rice or beans.  They get water in buckets from another line and carry that home later.  As I recall this scene I step away from my kitchen faucet.  I let the water run so it is cold enough not to need ice cubes that I don’t add ice cubes.  I use that time to choose my favorite glass.

I took care of some of these women as they arrived in the clinic.  They had carried 40 pound bag of food, five to ten gallons of water, on their heads, along crowded uneven and dusty roads.  It may take or seem to take an hour to get back to their homes.  It is not a house.  It is home.  It is made of sheets, blankets, tents and cardboard, and if very fortunate, some donated tarpaulins.  They came to clinic, or were brought there, confused, lethargic, sweating and near death from dehydration and sun stroke.  As I interview them through an interpreter, I ask myself; ‘What do I need to live on?’  I need to narrow that list.  I think the water is cold enough to fill my glass now.

Call me insensitive, but a refrigerator that keeps food just long enough for me to dump in the garbage or feed my dogs is not essential to life. I confess.  If I can recognize the color as original, I will eat it.  Let me narrow my list.  It no longer includes bottled water or that green stuff I just threw out.  The dog would not touch it.

Call me out of touch, but spending for reality T.V. is off of my list of essentials after seeing the reality of people searching the garbage for food hoping to find enough to eat before the dogs, or neighbors get it or before nightfall comes. It is hard to find good garbage to eat in the dark and avoid the rats.

Call me out of step, but it seems that the $17 I recently spent on popcorn, soda and a movie may have been a bit extravagant on my part. How far does 17$ go in Haiti, street sweepers make 4 dollars a day Of course I work hard and I deserve to be entertained and amused.  But a movie about rescuing people who are being devastated by an alien force pales in comparison to helping people who are being decimated by a natural disaster.  I could have actually spent a bit more here helping them, micro-waved a bag, had some Kool-Aid and read a good book.

Call me ridiculous, but now I realize that telling people I have been called to serve about my fears and frustrations does not make sense to them.  They don’t really care to know about the problems I will face retiring because I did not put enough aside for my later years.  They just want to make it through the day.  They have seen too much death, even this week.

Call me stupid but if I can’t go a week or a month to help people, should I be willing to spend a week salary, or even a month’s salary to help someone do it in my stead?

Now you can really call me stupid, insensitive, out of touch, out of step, and ridiculous.  Give a whole week’s or month’s salary to help?  Let me see how bad it really is.  Turn on CNN and get the real story.   Don’t be stupid. After all, you must have enough to live on.

Haiti needs help.  Go, give or send.  That is smart.  That pleases God.