11 PM - Christal Earle’s Blog

This past summer I went to Haiti and I witnessed first hand what paralyzing poverty looks like, what it smells like, and what it even tastes like. In Haiti, my heart was changed and my memory was etched forever with the experience. I met people who were former slaves, who were destitute and who were literally starving. In Haiti, everything took on a new perspective and my trip there helped me to better understand the needs and issues that we deal with in Dominican Republic on Hero Holiday. In Dominican Republic I have many Haitian friends, and they have moved from Haiti in hopes of a better life and in the hope of survival for their children. My Haitian friends have given me a new level to reach for in  faith, hope, and love, and they have shown me that the greatest of these truly is love.  My friend Bernard is one of those people.

Bernard has worked with Absolute as a translator in the Dominican since 2006. He is a Haitian living in DR, and he is one of my truest friends. He has impacted my life in ways he is not even aware of, as he has challenged me to love with compassion and to give unconditionally no matter the cost. Bernard grew up in Haiti, and was very poor. From the time he was 8 until he was 14, Bernard was a “restavek” in a home of a family living in Port-au-Prince. This term is really a Creole euphemism for a child slave. He told me that the people he had to serve were kind to him, but for those 6 years, they allowed him an education in school as long as he washed the car, cleaned the house, took care of the kids and did everything they demanded of him; if he did not, there were severe beatings as a consequence.  His own family couldn’t afford to care for him, so he was ‘loaned’ to this family in exchange for food, school, and many long and relentless days of child labor.

If you met Bernard today, you would never know of those times. Bernard is a man of joy, integrity, honesty, and true compassion. He is a trusted member in his community in DR, and he has become a refuge for many other kids who have experienced what he has walked through. This past summer, Absolute decided to make Bernard the recipient of one of our Hero Holiday projects. Bernard was living in a one room house and was continually taking in young men who had run away from slavery, violence, and who had been orphaned. He has spent the past 4 years volunteering in orphanages and supplementing his own income with translating, as well as sending almost all of his money back to Haiti to support his other brothers and sisters in hopes of keeping them out of slavery and exploitation. Bernard has given many of us a character value to aspire to and we are grateful for his time, his many talents, and most of all, his passion to serve and make a difference.

At the end of August, Vaden and I hosted some people from League Assets on a Hero Holiday in DR. The members of League have become a major sponsor of what we do, and because of them, much of what we do is even possible. As we showed them Bernard’s new house location, we shared with them the plan of what it is to become: Bernard wants to use this space to eventually have a safe house for young men needing some help getting on their feet, perhaps getting an education, and wants it to most of all be a place where they feel dignity, respect and hope for what they can grow into.  However, League Assets saw even more than that: they saw what could become a template for change in communities as they began to create a plan for home ownership for the desperately poor. Because of this inspiration, Bernard’s house has set off a chain of events that is leading to opening the way for more families to get homes through sweat equity, micro-finance, and many other creative and viable economic opportunities.

This home is a tribute to the lives of many people. It is a tribute to Bernard and people like him who have the courage to move past the limitations of poverty and exploitation.  It is a tribute to the many hundreds of Hero Holiday participants who have joined with us and others to become instruments of change and help to write a new history for the people we work with. And most of all, this home is a tribute to hope, because when we have hope, we have the ability to dream, and when we have the ability to dream, we have the ability to see lives changed. Thank you, Bernard. I believe in you, in what you do, and I am proud to be counted among your friends.

Mary Poppins had it together. She could get those little brats to do whatever she wanted, as long as she coated it with what they thought they wanted. She made them speak the truth even when it hurt, and she pushed them to live with integrity, even when the old mean guys are trying to get your penny..Plus, she could fit that 6 foot lamp into a bag that was the size of a laptop. She knew how to get the job done - and teach meaningful life lessons at the same time! But really, if we were to be honest, who wouldn’t want to learn about how to be a better person while sailing across the London sky under an umbrella?

Today I joined our road team as they performed in a school in downtown Toronto. They did a great job (yay!) and we got a great response from the staff and students. I closed the show with my own life story (see my May 2007 post for the whole story) and it was well received…However, after the show, two teachers came up to me and were saying thanks for coming to their school, etc. They told me how they were both weeping as I was sharing my story, and then one of them asked me how I deal with loss. But before I could answer her, she asked me if my story was actually true!

It took me back for a moment, as I didn’t quite know what to say, and then she quickly replaced the question with a statement that was something to the effect of  her just wondering because it would be ok if we made up the story for dramatic effect…

No, I am sorry, but it wouldn’t be ok if we made up the story for dramatic effect. It’s not ok to blur those lines, even if there is an intended good outcome.

One of the topics that we are dealing with this year in our high school presentations is the character value of honesty. The video segments that we are using is from an amazing company called Make You Think, and the statistics that they highlight about honesty are quite disheartening: the average person lies about once every 7 minutes; 51% of high school students admitted to cheating on tests; fake ID’s run rampant.  Am I getting old, or does it seem like there is so much more open acceptance for dishonesty in our culture? People we trust seem to lie to us. National leaders seem to twist the truth. Spin doctors are actually getting paid great salaries for professionally spinning the facts. Vows made are easily broken.  Where is that line where truth is drawn and embraced-even if it isn’t comfortable to face?

All over the word right now, as I type this, we can only imagine some of the pain and anguish: young women murdered because of a hatred for their sex, people dying for their faith, children losing their parents to diseases that could be so easily prevented, families choosing who will eat tonight when the few tablespoons of food are prepared, and we are cheating on mid-terms because we couldn’t be bothered to get help or study a little more and we are lying to save face and try to win the approval of a group of friends that will probably change in a few months anyways…hmmm….I can totally see the equality in that!

There is a verse in the Bible that says let your ‘yes’ be ‘yes’ and your ‘no’ be ‘no’. What would the world look like if you and I chose to actually not assimilate into the relativity of our culture but instead chose to take the high road, to be honest, and to not give any room for interpretation according to what we felt was best for us?  The real face of dishonesty is actually selfishness, because it is about getting my own way, no matter what the cost. No one would like to say that they are selfish, yet we would be willing to stretch the truth or blatently cheat to get our own way, and if it came down to it, we would probably even willingly compromise many things just for our own personal comfort…And sadly, somedays when I examine my own life, I am not much different. I have to continually examine my own motives, thoughts, words, and actions, and sometimes I fall terribly short because I, too, am painfully human.

But I am finding that character is not something that is given to me; it is something that is worked out in me. The only way I can see my character is to have it tested. I want to be someone who is known as being a person of integrity, and who is known as being honest. We all fall short many times, and like you, I am nowhere near where I wish I could say I was- but that isn’t a good enough reason to not try.

And that is the honest truth…