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.

There are many days in your life when you go through a routine: you get up, stumble through your morning, and get off to work, etc. Friday was not one of those days. I am here in Dominican Republic for the fourth year of Hero Holiday, and yet again, my heart has been touched and my understanding has been challenged. This year I am again taking groups of students out to the local garbage dump, where about 75 people, who are now my friends, work and spend their day trying to eek out a living by gathering the food, collecting the bottles for money, and even finding shoes and clothes. They make less than a dollar a day, and many of them are single parents, supporting many hungry children. It is in this place that we have discovered many profound lessons: we have seen the pain of poverty, felt the hurt of injustice, and experienced the anger that comes when you see your friends hurting and exploited.
As our truck pulled up, my anxious Hero Holidayers’ weren’t quite sure what to expect. We were coming out to help the workers collect bottles so that they can generate more income, but would they accept us? Would we offend them? Would we help them or get in their way? In my mind were different questions: Would it still be the same people there? And if they were, I couldn’t decide whether to just be happy to see them again, or sad that this is where they still were, and in the world in which we find ourselves the answers are not so clear.
This garbage dump is a harsh take on reality at the best of times, and in that place, I met new faces and reunited with familiar ones, and chose to just be glad to be among them and do what I could with what I had. Some people are here because they can’t even survive in Haiti-they literally have nothing but what they are wearing, and to them, they can’t understand why people like us would want to take the time to come to people like them.
But, as I watched these incredible Canadian youth that came with me that day, I was once again in awe of the beauty of compassion and solidarity. They eagerly approached the people and asked them if they could help them collect bottles, and began to spread out through the garbage dump. Through the haze and heat I could see them: side by side with the people, Nikes beside unmatched and torn shoes, gloved hands beside worn and scarred hands, eager smile reaching out to shy, bashful smile…and it was a thing of beauty.
As we later talked about the experience, there were tears and laughter as we recalled how this day helped to shift our focus and cause us to see fulfillment in a different light: the feeling of collecting enough bottles to help a single mom double her income that day, the exhilaration of being able to communicate with someone despite the language barrier, and most of all, the understanding that comes from walking in someone else’s shoes.