Giving Haiti Real Help
Haiti is a land that “once was.” Occasional patches of concrete through the rubble in the Port-au-Pince streets evidence there must once have been roads. The French-colonial hotels with their wide verandas once must have been quite elegant. And the passenger terminal that welcomed guests flying into the country in days past is long gone—replaced by a concrete-block hangar.
It is as though a 150-foot giant rampaged through Port-au-Prince on a drunken spree with a huge hammer—the teams of 30-50 government employees wielding pick axes, buckets and shovels around town are no match for the rubble he left behind.
More than a million Haitians live in tent cities now—little has been done to rebuild and there is no place else to go.
The structures that imploded on January 12, 2010, are crumbled monuments to those who saved a few dollars by adding extra sand to the concrete and those who condoned the lack of building codes. The schools, markets and homes spared no one, not even those who built them, when they collapsed.
For the past month, as part of the Scientology Haiti Volunteer Minister Relief Team, I’ve been doing what I can to change this, and help the freedom-loving people of Haiti transform their “once was” country into the nation they deserve.
There is wisdom in the maxim of teaching a man to fish rather than feeding him a meal and this is the philosophy of the Scientology Volunteer Ministers program; we help others by giving them knowledge they can use to make their lives better—knowledge that is easily taught, quickly learned, and useful in everyday life.
Ranking high among the skills we teach is a body of knowledge called Scientology assists. Administered to help people recover from illness and injury (once needed first aid has been applied), assists can also relieve loss, trauma and the spiritual factors that contribute to chronic conditions.
A Scientology Volunteer Minister demonstrates a Scientology assist in a seminar in Haiti.
For most of my stay in Haiti I’ve been living (along with Russians, French, Australians, Mexicans and of course Haitians) at the program’s headquarters in Petionville, in the hills above Port-au-Prince, training Haitian Volunteer Ministers. And I have learned so much from the Haitian people I’ve met—their beauty, resilience and optimism despite the ordeals they’ve survived.
While in Haiti, I ventured to Gonaïves with two other Volunteer Ministers. A group from this town had attended a Scientology assist seminar in Port-au-Prince and asked us to bring this technology to their city as they prepare for this year’s hurricane season.
The hundred-mile bus trip begins with…waiting. The bus only leaves Port-au-Prince for Gonaïves when it is full, and we soon learned that “full” means three adults to a seat in an ancient school bus. Our only guarantee of a seat for the three-hour trip was to sit there from 7:10 until 8:40 in the morning while the bus slowly filled up. Once underway there was one hour on an asphalt road. The rest of the way we barreled over concrete, ruts and rock and held our breath as the bus repeatedly swerved into the oncoming traffic lane to dodge stalled trucks.
On arriving in Gonaïves I was struck by its resemblance to the black and white images of ghost towns in old American westerns. Although spared the wrath of the January 12 earthquake, it had never recovered from the tropical storms and hurricanes that decimated the city in 2004 and 2008.
But that impression ended when our seminars began. I was once again struck by the spirit of the Haitian people—the true descendants of those who prevailed against the military might of Napoleon’s France; the only country in recorded history to have formed a free nation from a successful slave revolt—60 years before America’s Emancipation Proclamation.
Continued…