Why another Blog?

According to Google there are 100 million blogs so why even bother to make another one?

Here’s my reasoning. Just like with all the wealth in the world, the people that need money the most to survive do not have any. So also with the ability to communicate: the poor don’t have a way to do it.

A few weeks back I was in Haiti with a team from Fayetteville North Carolina. I know they must have wondered how it is possible that such suffering, so close to the US, goes largely unnoticed. When you ask me I think it is because there is not enough “news value” in it. Everyone knows that there are a lot of people in the world who are hungry every day. So what’s new? 

New is that I am going to try as much as I can to get in the face of the wealthy world using a blog. Maybe no one will read it, maybe it will get some attention, I hope and pray it will.

The little baby I am holding in this picture was almost 4 months old. She was barely back to her birth weight. Her mommy was sneakily eating food in the feeding center we operate in the village of Kalbasye.  A few minutes later she tried to nurse the baby but I’m sure that her milk was not much more than water. It is a shame that  mothers like her have to feel guilty when they eat some food that was intended for their small children. She did it for her baby. Chances are that in a few weeks when I am going back, hopefully with the good news that we can reopen the feeding centers in 12 more villages, this little baby will have died. I have seen it happen way too many times lately. It makes me mad! But I have to keep my cool. I want to be taken serious for the sake of the lives of all these children and their parents. Emotional people often are not.

We did a survey for a USAID grant. I am not sure if this will get us anywhere but it’s worth trying. We found that in the area where we have or want to reopen our feeding centers, there are almost 30,000 people living in places where we would hesitate to put our dog for the night. Right now,their eyes are focused on the sky waiting for the next hurricane system that might wipe out their shelters. It doesn’t take much, it happens all the time. The grant questions were largely redundant. Questions like: where do these people buy their food in local or regional markets. These people are so poor they will rarely if ever have some money in their lives, leave alone go to the market to buy food. They will have to live of what their little garden grows and that is very limited. Maybe handful of corn every two days.

If only Haiti had something to offer to this world in terms of minerals or oil, but all they have is rock.

Rock, disease, hunger, illiteracy and since the earthquake, large piles of rubble.

But maybe we need to start to see things different. Maybe THEY are what all of us need more than anything else.

In them, maybe God is giving us a last opportunity to really make a difference, to be His Love to them. Maybe THIS is why we have all that we have.

In a few weeks my wife and I hope to become grand parents for the first time. May our little grand daughter grow up in a world that knows its responsibility towards the ones that are in need.