Streams of Mercy

The 4th annual fund-raising event “Haiti Help and Hope” was held Saturday, August 28th at Rubicon Farm, to raise funds to help Pastor Sidor serve his native home in Haiti by providing a school that teaches 400 students, including 2 meals a day, plus help for several neighboring villages to fight hardships and hunger amidst their helpless situation. As a former teacher, this worthy cause is dear to my heart. Help and hope are gifts this organization brings to Haiti.

With so many causes seeking help, my heart keeps being drawn to Haiti. Another organization, Haiti Fund, Inc, was founded by a dear friend in a former congregation. This friend told me the story of a time when he and his wife were walking on the beach in Haiti and a young mother ran up to them and put her baby in his arms saying, “Please take my baby and give her a life I cannot give her.” He put the child back in the mother’s arms, saying he could not do that, but promised that when he retired, he would come back and help her people. This friend and his wife dedicated a large portion of their retirement years to humanitarian projects in Jamaica and Haiti. They established a Rural Development Program, using a “watershed” approach, planting trees, building concrete ponds and stocking them with fish, and developing water systems.

As has happened again and again in recent months, I learn things I’ve never heard before, and much of this new information is troubling, especially learning that colonial-era debt helped shape Haiti’s poverty and political unrest.

“It seems that Haiti’s chronic status as the Western hemisphere’s poorest nation is due to a litany of afflictions that range from widespread illiteracy, to political corruption, to inadequate infrastructure. But while these would be hard enough for any country to overcome, for more than a century of its existence Haiti carried an additional but little-known millstone, the effects of which are still being felt.

In 1825, barely two decades after winning its independence against all odds, Haiti was forced to begin paying enormous “reparations” to the French slaveholders it had overthrown. Those payments would have been a staggering burden for any fledgling nation, but Haiti wasn’t just any fledgling nation; it was a republic formed and led by blacks who’d risen up against the institution of slavery. As such, Haiti’s independence was viewed as a threat by all slave-owning countries – the United States included – and its very existence rankled racist sensibilities globally. Thus Haiti – tiny, impoverished and all alone in a hostile world – had little choice but to accede to France’s reparation demands, which were delivered to Port-au-Prince by a fleet of heavily armed warships in 1825.

By complying with an ultimatum that amounted to extortion, Haiti gained immunity from French military invasion, relief from political and economic isolation – and a crippling debt that took 122 years to pay off. that debt was finally settled in 1947. But decades of making regular payments had rendered the Haitian government chronically insolvent, helping to create a pervasive climate of instability from which the country still hasn’t recovered.” (Material taken from Wikipedia – External Debt of Haiti)

In this time of working to set things right in so many areas of life, perhaps justice will come for Haiti – and continuing help and hope.

Elizabeth