The River and Time Run On, Ever Onward

February 2019.  The River of Life has been running, flowing onward, inexorably since my last post.  I pause on the bank to reflect...

 I have been spending much time on the island of Haiti.  Learning, teaching, thinking, working, surviving.  The Third World is life at its most basic.  Water (carried on women's heads in re-used 5 gallon buckets--every drop for the house and family); food (rice, beans, some occasional goat meat from the rampant flocks of semi-feral goats); a tin roof over your head; a second-hand T-Shirt from the street market...  

But always a cell phone.  I marvel at how the cell phone has changed the world.  Even the poorest seem to own one.  Even the most remote places have teenagers sitting in hypnotic trances, fixated on their cell phone. Reality is less painful, I suppose, when you can escape it through the screen...  

Yet the desperately poor often seem to find happiness.  A good meal, time with family, the simplest things bring moments of sunlight and joy.  Something the more affluent cultures could learn.

 

We returned to the US for Russ' medical updates at the end of January.  Then 'manifestations'--political riots based on the total frustration of the poor--broke out. And we could not return.  Most missionaries left, some forever.  What does the future hold for this impoverished country?  Held down by its greedy and corrupt government, the dependence of its poor on handouts from hundreds of mission organizations, and total lack of training or industry or jobs.  Only God knows....