On my third morning in Haiti, while interviewing doctors at the hospital in Cange, I fainted.
I didn't faint because of what I saw that morning in the pediatric ward, though many of the cases were heartbreaking. I fainted because I had seen nothing but heartbreak since I got off the airplane in Port-au-Prince.
In Haiti, you cannot say to yourself that the beggars are lazy, not really hungry. Their cheeks are sunken and their eyes bulge. Yes, they are hungry.
When you see children walking barefoot and without pants, you cannot blame it on their parents, who are almost certainly destitute. The people walking along open sewers didn't look poor-but-happy. They looked miserable.
So the excuses that help fend off guilt in America are useless in Haiti. Your conscience is free to keep you awake at night, to remind you, when you eat and drink, that you are taking more than your share, and to tell you that, all along, you should have been doing more.
Many people feel this way when they first see extreme poverty. The difference is in how they respond.
Dr. Joia Mukherjee was an 8-year-old girl when she visited Calcutta and was approached by a beggar whose nose and hand had been eaten away with leprosy. She decided then to become a poor person's doctor.
"I said, "I'm going to make sure nobody ever gets leprosy,"' she said.
Now, at 40, Mukherjee is the medical director of Partners in Health, the organization cofounded by former Hernando County resident Paul Farmer.
She lives several months a year in a dorm room in Cange. She works 16-hour days and makes backbreaking trips to poor countries around the world. When her husband left her, she said, "he told me, "You love poor people more than you love me.' And he was probably right.
"I used to get depressed all the time. Since I started doing this, I'm never depressed," she said.
"The fact that I'm doing this is the reason I can sleep at night."
I left a country dying from too little and returned home to one choking on too much.
On the trip from Haiti to Miami, the airline news channel aired a feature called Trading Up, an approving look at Americans opting for more expensive clothes, cars and appliances.
When I retrieved my car at the airport in Tampa, it was parked next to a Humvee. On the drive back to Brooksville, I noticed, rotting in the trees, oranges that would have been gratefully devoured in Haiti. A week later, thousands of people gathered at the annual rally at the Hernando County Airport in motor coaches that cost more than a new Partners in Health hospital in Haiti.
Even charity seemed beside the point in a country where the homeless boycotted a Thanksgiving meal because it didn't come from Carrabba's. Why not send the money to Haiti, where people need it so much more?
I don't feel quite that way now. I decided I should feel grateful to live in a country with good roads and schools and a functioning social system. Contributions of time and money, and of course taxes, are what keep it that way.
So I don't think it's a shame to live decently; I just think it's a shame that everyone can't.
That doesn't seem so unlikely, now that I realize how little it takes to help in a country as poor as Haiti. You don't have to be as heroic as Mukherjee or Farmer to make a difference. You just have to do less "trading up" and more giving.
One afternoon, I walked up a hill north of Cange with Jean "Ti Jean" Gabriel-Fils, director of the Partners in Health housing program in Haiti.
He introduced me to Marycile Ferdinand and showed me the house where her family, and the family of a close friend, used to live.
It was made of sticks with a roof of palm bark, a type of structure common in rural Haiti but useless except to provide shade.
"They can fool the sun, but not the rain," Gabriel-Fils said.
Ferdinand's new house, which Gabriel-Fils and his crew had built for about $1,500, was smaller than most American garages. But it did have a corrugated metal roof and a concrete floor. And it was big enough to keep nine people clean and dry.
"I used to feel like someone who was living in the mud," Ferdinand said.
"Ti Jean put me in this new house, and I feel like I'm in heaven without dying."
- Dan DeWitt can be reached at 352 754-6116. Send e-mail to dewitt@sptimes.com
