Last year I spent a couple of months in Costa Rica, in a community near the epicenter of an earthquake from a little over a year before. I’d first visited the community of San Rafael de Vara Blanca in the spring of 2009 with classmates from the School of Leadership and Development at Eastern University. In lieu of a final exam for our Disaster Relief and Mitigation class, we arranged to visit an actual place coping with the effects of a disaster, and I think it’s safe to say we learned more during the course of that week than we would have learned taking a test (in other words: pedagogy matters, teachers!). I chronicled our class’s experiences here, here, here, here, and here.
Our connection with San Rafael was our classmate and friend Tomás, who had lived in the community as a kid. He has since returned with his wife, kids and a small but dedicated team to start the Association for Development through Education to help rebuild the community -- starting with education -- and to prepare community members to be able to respond to future disasters both near and far. Coming out of my experience living between volcanoes in the jungle of Costa Rica with the ADE team, I wrote a piece that was just published in Flourish Magazine. Please read it, add your comments, and pass it on.
With the Haiti earthquake almost a month behind us, it’s natural to feel ready to think about something - anything - else. A lot of us have watched the news, given to organizations we believe in, and in some small sense have perhaps even grieved with our Haitian brothers and sisters in their time of need.
But we all know that it will take years to rebuild Haiti. So how do we ensure that, in our President’s words, Haiti will not be forsaken nor forgotten? For starters, by getting to know the context.
In the week just before the quake, ironically, I read a memoir called Following Jesus Through the Eye of the Needle by Kent Annan, co-founder of Haiti Partners. It had been highly recommended by Andy Crouch, who calls it "an unsparingly honest story of relocation to Haiti that captures the complexities of crossing differences of power, wealth, and culture in hopes of being part of God's work of transformation, without and within. It's funny, gritty, and strangely hopeful—just what a Christian memoir should be."
So when I heard there had been a 7.0 magnitude earthquake with an epicenter near Port-au-Prince, I pictured the shacks on those steep hillsides Annan had described, and I knew they must have been destroyed. I thought of the real people described in the book, and I wondered if any were alive.
In the days that followed, I decided I wanted to learn more. I went to Busboys and Poets and picked up a copy of Mountains Beyond Mountains, which tells the remarkable true story of Paul Farmer, a Harvard doctor who has devoted his life to curing infectious diseases in the world’s most impoverished places - especially Haiti.
Both books are challenging, entertaining, informative, and inspiring, and if you want to learn more about Haiti they may be worth checking out. You might also be interested in this music video from Arcade Fire, a stellar rock band with one Haitian member. This video was filmed on location in Haiti, capturing its vibrancy of life before the devastation. As you watch, consider what it will take for Haitians to once again experience this vibrancy.
A lot has happened since I last wrote so I’ll get right into it with a brief recap. On Wednesday our group split up into two groups. A car-full of us headed into San Jose to meet with the consul from the Canadian embassy in the morning and a doctor from an open-access, private practice that charges patients based on the ability to pay. Both interviews provided us with unique perspectives and helpful information. While we were in San Jose, the rest of the group had a meeting with a representative from the National Emergency Commission, the government agency that rose to the forefront in the days following the earthquake.
Yesterday we stayed in San Rafael. In the morning a smaller group of us taught an art class for all the students in grades one through five. Another group began conducting surveys for a census of every home in the town, while the rest of the team helped to haul the rubble of the Catholic church across the street to where the school will hopefully be rebuilt in the near future.
Today most of the group headed into the provincial capital of Heredia – where we’d met with the mayor earlier in the week – this time for a meeting with the regional director from the ministry of education. Meanwhile, the survey team completed our census (woot woot!) just as it began to rain a little bit.
In very exciting news, as the census team was heading back to the house we came upon a reporter from the largest newspaper in Costa Rica, who after talking with us is now planning to publish the story of Teresa, our amazing cook whose family has still not been paid for the government’s use of their land for the new road through San Rafael after the old one was swept away in the landslide. The reporter is also interested in receiving the report from all of our findings, which might be the biggest and most unexpected answer to prayer we ever could have hoped for.
Currently our entire team has convened at a place renown for the most amazing strawberry milkshakes in the history of the universe (where there also happens to be free internet!). We’re going to do a little shopping this afternoon and will really begin bringing our findings together this evening, our last night at Casa Shalom.
Our connection with San Rafael was our classmate and friend Tomás, who had lived in the community as a kid. He has since returned with his wife, kids and a small but dedicated team to start the Association for Development through Education to help rebuild the community -- starting with education -- and to prepare community members to be able to respond to future disasters both near and far. Coming out of my experience living between volcanoes in the jungle of Costa Rica with the ADE team, I wrote a piece that was just published in Flourish Magazine. Please read it, add your comments, and pass it on.
