The Three of Us by Georgette Jones

Author:Georgette Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2011-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

SIXTEEN

CHURCH WAS IMPORTANT TO ME. I attended Mom’s Baptist church on Sundays if she was home and the Maranatha Church, in West Palm Beach, the rest of the time. Maranatha was Pentecostal, so I ended up calling myself a “Bapticostal.”

I’ve never attended church anywhere that had better playing and singing than Maranatha. They had a full band, with concerts featuring everything from old-time gospel to modern Christian music. I especially liked Amy Grant and Petra, and played their records nonstop.

And it was through the Maranatha Church that I set out on a life-changing trip in 1986. We went on a mission to Haiti for ten days, working with medical teams in several different villages. We’d been briefed and trained, but nothing can prepare you for seeing such poverty and despair for the first time.

Haiti was in troubled times during 1986. The streets were filled with protests against President Jean-Claude Duvalier, “Baby Doc,” as they called him. We were warned against complaining about the officials that would search our bags on arrival, told that they might take items they wanted from our belongings. This was long before 9/11, and Americans had seldom seen tight controls at airports. We were lucky to be treated well when we arrived at the Port-au-Prince airport, and that caused us to let our guard down.

As far as we knew, food and water was our biggest danger. We brought our own food, each of us packing one of our suitcases with nothing but canned goods we planned to eat. We were instructed not only to drink only bottled water, but also never to even brush our teeth with anything else.

Our first stop in Port-au-Prince was the Missionary Home, where we received more information about the village hospitals. On the following day, we went on a tour of the city, and what we saw was stunning. In addition to the obvious destitution throughout Port-au-Prince, there was an all-encompassing air of danger; you knew that the whole city could explode in violence at any time. This seemed at odds with the friendly manner in which we’d been received at the airport.

On the second morning, along with a team of translators, we headed for the jungle in a tap-tap truck, with a long extended bed and benches down each side. The bed and sides were covered in colorful tin cans that had been welded together into a canopy to keep people dry in case of a sudden thunderstorm. We drove for twelve hours before coming to the first village, where the extent of the people’s plight was right in our faces. They had nothing. The soil was no longer good for growing, and they had fished until only the smallest of catches remained. There was no sanitation, and the water was contaminated. There wasn’t even a way to warm food, so we ate the foods we brought cold from the cans.

We quickly got into the routine we would follow at each village for the next week. We set up our medical mini-clinics outdoors.

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