By Sara Dessieux
After spending four and a half months in Oregon, our family arrived back in Haiti a week ago. It is so nice to have a comfortable home here to come back to! My sister, Laura, and her new husband, Wahi, lived here and took care of the place and our dogs while we were gone, but the day we arrived they started staying at their new rental house on the other side of Camp Marie.
We jumped into our new schedule: schoolwork in the morning, then soccer practice and English class in the afternoon. For the seven and a half weeks that we’re here this time, I am teaching a Biblical English class to our most advanced English students. Sometimes, our classes start up gradually with few students and then grow over the following couple weeks, so I was pretty surprised to have seventeen students show up today. They’re eager to purchase, at quite an inexpensive price, the hardback ESV Bibles we brought, and I’m looking forward to interacting with them about the Bible.
Soccer practices started up two weeks ago, so Guesly and the kids jumped into that today. Guesly also put together a pair of soccer goals, set them on the basketball court, and introduced some players to futsal, a soccer game played on a hard, smooth floor with five players on each team. No offense, basketball players, but soccer will always be the game of choice for most people here. We did bring in more basketballs and are eager to have a team come at some point to do more basketball training.
Now to switch gears, if you’ve been following the news, you may know that around 4,600 people made unplanned one-way trips to Haiti in the last week and a half. After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti up until now, Haitian people have been travelling to South America in pursuit of jobs and better lives. Recently, due to several different factors, they started making their way up through Central America and Mexico to the U.S. border. Can you imagine the desperation they must feel to undertake such a long and dangerous trip? Within a matter of days, thousands of them crossed the border into the U.S. in hopes of being accepted as refugees. As of now, 12,400 of them were temporarily released into the U.S. to stay with family members and are expected to have a chance to appear in immigration court and 8,000 of them crossed back into Mexico. The others were put onto chartered planes and returned to Haiti, which has only gotten worse since they left. Some came with their children who have never even been to Haiti.
For many more than 4,600 Haitians, this is absolutely devastating. Haitians working abroad send money back to their families in Haiti. These remittances have accounted for at least one third of Haiti’s economy. Those who stay truly count on those who go. And so, those in Chile and other South American countries, when faced with unemployment due to the economic downturn as a result of Covid-19, left their lives there and sacrificed everything for a chance to get into the U.S. We all know that immigration is a very complicated and controversial issue, but we can still all strive to understand the plight of those trying to enter our borders.
As I battled anxious feelings about our own upcoming trip to Haiti, I could only imagine how many more feelings these Haitian people on the move have. Desperation, fear, stress, hopelessness. For all of them, no matter where they are on their journey. For those being sent back to Haiti, they are returning to a country plagued with such violence, political instability and economic devastation that most people here would say they have never experienced a Haiti this bad in all their life.
So as I packed our suitcases, I said many prayers for these people who were returning to nothing carrying nearly nothing. We aren’t likely to cross paths with any of them in this country of millions, though Wahi, Laura’s husband, has already, but we know they are joining the masses already struggling here. Their difference is they have seen a better life, but then things got bad again.
We always covet your prayers for our family, our staff and the community we serve. We ask that you pray also for the Haitian people - those who have never left this country, those who have travelled far and wide in search of a better life, and those among them who find themselves back in Haiti once again.