PORT-AU-PRINCE – The rain came down so hard it woke me up in the night. It’s 5 a.m. and I hear water gurgling in the downspout and splattering on the concrete slab outside my door.

It’s still hot in spite of the rain, so I have my fan with the madly swiveling head still blasting away. I shudder to think of the children from our Dadadou school and the thousands like them who are cuddled together, trying to sleep in leaky tents.

Yesterday, while visiting the school, I marveled at how neat and clean the children were; the girls with intricate braids and perfectly placed hair ribbons; the boys in snow white T-shirts and scrubbed cheeks. How can mothers who live crammed in tiny tents, amid the squalor of a tent city, keep their children so clean, and send them to school looking like they just emerged from cozy homes in an American suburb?

I’ve seen this same phenomena in disaster camps around the world; in the stifling heat of the Darfur desert; the icy mountains of China’s Sichuan province, or reeking, steaming villages in Andre Pradesh, India. Somehow, in spite of horrendous conditions, mothers always seem to get their children cleaned up for school. It is in this commonality that I best see what’s—the same—about all of us. It is through our children that the brotherhood of man best shines through.

My Blackberry just buzzed with an e-mail from Kumar. He landed minutes ago in Santiago, Chile. The airport is closed, with customs operating under large tents. He says passengers are being loaded on buses to be driven to one of five locations in the city. A guy from YWAM is supposed to meet and drive him to Concepcion to connect with Wolfgang and the Humedica medical team. There is a curfew there from midnight until noon every day, which makes for a challenging disaster relief response.

I’m getting ready for my last day here and don’t know how David and I can possibly get to all the places where we have meetings scheduled. There’s a lot to be done on this long road to recovery for Haiti.

Tags: Bill Horan, Caribbean, Chile, Dadadou, Disaster Relief, Earthquake, Education, Haiti, Humedica, OBI, Operation Blessing, Port-au-Prince, Recovery, Relief, School, Tent City, YWAM

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 4th, 2010 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Bill Horan, Caribbean, Disaster Relief, Earthquake, Haiti. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.