Little School Girls in Haiti - Embracing the Friday Escape from School. Trip to Port Au Prince Haiti 2017

I recently took a trip to Port Au Prince in Haiti and spent time with some of the children there. I have yet to find some people who are so radiant, so beautiful, and yet suffer so much in their landscape and environmental problems they face on a day to day basis. The luckiest among them in the village we spent time merely can get one of their children through elementary school due to the lack of funds to put their children through that school. If they are beyond lucky, they can get all their kids through elementary school, perhaps secondary if they can find a way... Moreoften than not, though, they are not even able to do such a thing.. Yet even though they survive often on the fruit that hangs from the trees, lacking nutrition, lacking any sort of transport to their schools (walking for miles in groups from their village), highly unable to truly find progression, yet still so beautiful... to provide themselves or 'lift up by their bootstraps' is a mere farce, as they have yet to find shoes for their feet -- and those that they do have are more often than not taken from those who have previously died in their clothes since it is the only way they can get them..

It's a beautiful experience, a sad and yet fulfilling experience to spend time with these children. This was taken at the elementary school, K-7, who just had gotten their first running water and flushing toilets a week or two prior to my visit. An unexplainable fourth dimension of beauty, spirituality, and experience, this is all I hope we can find in this land across the oceans, but sometimes I ponder if having too much just catalyzes the befuddled masses of misdirected hearts, palpating from place to place asking and desiring more, turning our backs on those who need us most, and seeing those who need the subtitles to survive as the 'other' -- disconnected to the lives in which we live... if only we could see how similar we all are, perhaps we could move onward, rather than stepping back.
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