There are so many reasons not to help.
We all sat up last night, way too late, talking and blogging … I didn’t blog. I am the rebel who waits till the mornings to write. But we sat together in Haiti, bleeding out and frustrated because we want to beat a drum hard enough, loud enough that it would mobilize an army to love and reach and move.
It’s all so complicated—systemic problems that feel too big. And apparent or surface problems you see but you don’t know how to fix for more than a day or a meal. We talked about the disconnect.
How do thousands of children still sit in tents—three years later—when we could nearly throw them what they need?
The disconnect is often that we can’t imagine. So many pieces of our comfy lives would have to be stripped away and all at once to relate.
My job here has been to blog and see and build films so Haiti can tell her own story, with filmmaker Kris Rutherford. Those will come soon … my heart races at the stories you are about to hear. You will fall in love … not with need but with people who feel like friends.
And maybe in our wildest dreams, we won’t feel so disconnected. We’ll feel like grabbing hands with women who feel familiar to dream and build and grow. That’s why we want to tell stories … so this goes from helping people to loving people. And this goes from us looking down to trying to keep up with our noble brave friends.
When people feel familiar … there are no longer excuses as to why we won’t help. We just help because we love them. We help because they are our friends.
We can drop little sparks that light up a country.
Yielding our excess cures our souls while it fuels their lives.
Is this true for you? Is there a big disconnect to women’s lives in Haiti? How could we better connect as friends?
