As soon as you get of the plane the heat hits you and so does the smell of sewage because the airport is stuck close to the two slums of St Matin and Cite Soleil. There is no sanitation, running water or electricity in either of the slums which are home to about 2.2 million people or there abouts. I suppose it is diffficult to count people when they live in such overcrowded squalor.Here are a few street scenes to give you a flavour of what its like. Not all of PAP is like this only about 99% of it.
A fruit market in the upper class suburb of Petionville. The traders often walk for as much as 10 miles every day carrying their basket of produce on their head.
When I arrived there had been a cock up. I was supposed to be staying in the Catholic Relief Service guest house where I have stayed before (only because there is no Presbyterian one I hasten to add!!). Unfortunately nobody in Concern had booked it so they booked me into the Hotel Kinam
which still had some space. This is Charles who served me my breakfast at 7.00am and then served me my night cap at 10.30pm. It was not a split shift. He has 5 kids who go to school some weeks when he can afford it some weeks he cant . I stayed here for 5 days and watched him every day.
I suppose Charles is luckier that these couple of guys who wait by the side of the road and then when the traffic stops come up to your window with their hand out. I have given before particularly to the children but once your window is open you get inundated. No different really to other developing countries.
I have spent a couple of days working in St Martin among the most resilient and powerless people I have evermet. When you have nothing to do you just sit and hope. These people have retained great dignity in the face of great disadvantage. There is also a class structure in the slum however and some people I met in the lower class, near the canal which acts as a sewer as well as a cemetery had not clothes and they had been stripped of their dignity.
One of the parts of our work is to take gang members and others in the community and if they join the process, we offer them a bit of a peace dividend, usually a small investment to set up a sustainable income for themselves. I was walking through St Martin and heard my name, it was Wallings who was so proud that he now had a motor bike and was acting as a taxi/courier. My fear is for the time when the bike breaks down. Profit margins are slim and I hope he has the possibility to repair it.
All of the work has been constructive and with the 1st phase of St Martin work coming to an end, I have been doing a fair bit of evaluation.
We have prepared an approach which could see us start a project of dialogue in Cite Soleil. And tomorrow - an implementation meeting for our new programme in the morning and in the afternoon, a bit of peace building between two participants in the dialogue process, one is from the baz. They have had a confrontation which could damage the work. One zone is threatening another zone as a result of this personal fallout.
A demonstration that while out work is productive, things are always fragile and we have a long way to go.
And now that I am safe inside the Catholic Relief Service guesthouse, I thought I might close with a photo which demonstrates the type of security that is standard here if you can afford it. An armed guard and high walls with razor wire on top around the compound.
See you soon,
Ian
**remember, we do serious work, but don't take yourself too seriously!**
Is it just me or do we always talk about peace as being something huge? We often think about peace being this worldwide movement in which freedom and happiness rein in all nations. We dream of peace existing in places around the world where entire societies are plagued with war, famine, disease, poverty, and violence. The world is big. So are its problems. Peace seems like this massive, almost dreamlike state that we hope for but deep down have this understanding that it will never really happen. So, in this moment, I just want you to consider taking a step back from all of this. Take a second while you read this to think about your own life. Because it’s important to remember that underneath the World’s problems, behind every mass society, hidden in every unique culture, and every fighting nation…
is the individual.
Amidst all of the chaos that is going on in the world today, it’s easy to forget that we, on the minuscule individual level, are the ones that caused it all in the first place.
How do we expect to have a peaceful world when there is so much conflict going on within our own lives?
I doubt that anyone would disagree with the fact that our lives are filled with things that shouldn’t be and that there is something broken about each one of us. Some of us are blind to it, but there is something about being honest enough and genuine enough to admit that we don’t have it all together. Face it. We’re not perfect, and as much as movies, commercials, and magazines tell us that the perfect life is attainable if we just buy their brand of soap, we will never get to it unless we start digging deeper. How are you doing with that?
Amidst all of the chaos going on in the world, I just want us all to take a second to look into the mirror at ourselves. Who or what are we fighting with in our own personal wars and are we winning that battle? Are we becoming better human beings in the process? What are we at war with everyday in our own lives....?
For some of us, hostilities exist in the form of addiction. An addiction to money.
To drugs.
To alcohol.
To gambling.
To sex.
To vanity.
What ever it is, we do it to escape or cover up the problems in the rest of our lives but deep down we know that it’s what’s really feeding our problems. We’re a slave to it and it’s holding us back from our true potential and becoming the people that we need to be in this world.
Maybe the major conflict is between you and some of the people in your life right now. Some of us exist in broken marriages and relationships where we blame the other person for things that they continue to do wrong to us. We are the victim. They are the ones that need to change. Because of this, we decide to push them away and pretend like nothing’s wrong, when we know in the deepest part of our hearts, that there desperately needs to be a conversation about what is going on. We struggle in our relationships with mothers, fathers, siblings, sons, and daughters because of baggage we carried from the past that continues to weigh us down with hurt and resentment, sometimes lasting for weeks. Months. Years. Some of us struggle on a daily basis with roommates and friends. We tell ourselves that it’s them. They have issues and we will never understand them when, underneath it all, we know that our lack of patience is killing them relationally and the friendship that could be. Some of us are at war with the people around us and live bitter and broken lives because of it. We tell others to be forgiving and reconcile, yet these words have no meaning to us in our own private relationships.
Some of us have issues with giving to others. Maybe you count your blessings that you are financially afloat, yet your close friends tell you that they are struggling to survive, not knowing if they are going to make this month’s rent. You turn a blind eye to that. Maybe you give to the local church or charity and to your friends in need on a regular basis. You have no problem with giving out money but you struggle with the idea of physically giving your time up to volunteer at a hospital, help out the homeless, or pick up trash in the park. Lets be honest here, giving financially is great but it takes little effort and produces little growth. It can act as an easy way out of giving ourselves fully over to causes. You can only give so much, right? Maybe you’re just the opposite. Perhaps giving isn’t the problem… its heart and compassion that you lack. You give both your time and money to all sorts of different causes, yet your heart is numb and to be honest, you could really care less.
My point here is not to accuse you or make you feel guilty in anyway. My point here is this. Every big movement in history started with the individual. We can see it in the lives of people like Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King Jr., Mohandas Gandhi, and Rosa Parks.
These people had their game on.
These people started movements that changed the history of the world and made it look easy.
But I honestly believe that each one of them started this process of true change by looking deep within and beginning the work with themselves. What if the movement of peace is the same way? Maybe the solution to the world’s problems can be found within each of our own lives. Maybe, instead of launching some big governmental campaign, peace treaty, or Starbucks advertising scheme, the thing we really need to look at is what’s on our own hearts. When was the last time you started a movement in your own life? Even just as small as deciding to learn how to love your friends more or spend more time with your family could end up being the one thing that totally wrecks your world as you know it.
What if focusing on the things that need healing in our own lives is the answer to the World’s problems. What would things look like? Something tells me that it would have a rippling effect inadvertently leaking the goodness that comes out of progressive change into the lives of the people around us. Maybe peace would start to make more sense, letting this dreamy unrealistic state of mind become instead the ultimate reality.
So, I’ll end this with some questions that I think we all need to take time to answer.
Look into your own heart.
What’s keeping it from beating?
Where are you bleeding and what area of your life is cut and desperately needs to heal?
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