Arriving home late last night after a week volunteering at Bernard Mevs Hospital in Port au Prince, Haiti, and with Thanksgiving just around the corner, it is hard not to appreciate just how fortunate most of us are in this country.
This was my third trip to Port au Prince since April 2010. Almost two years after the earthquake, the city is just as filthy and pedestrians continue to have to carefully step around the rivulets of raw sewage which course their way through the streets. While schools have reopened, not all children attend, and indeed, we cared for an 8 year old who had to work washing cars instead of studying, and was struck down by a car, sustaining multiple skull fractures and brain injury. People seem not to be as thin, though malnutrition, especially of children, remains very widespread.
Although Haiti has mostly fallen off the media's radar, conditions there remain dire. While the reporting we read mostly presents a large picture view (more than 600,000 still living in tents, more than 6,000 dead of cholera in the last year), the stories of individual people are what truly strike a chord.
Mark Curnutte, a veteran journalist for the Cincinnati Enquirer, was always troubled by "the logic behind the attitude that the poor had chosen their condition-or that their condition was God's will" when writing about poverty, prejudice and discrimination in this country. He first visited Haiti with a church group in 1996, returned there again in 2006, 2008, and immediately after the 2010 earthquake. He resolved to tell the story of "people and a place [he] cared about," and to demonstrate how much people living in both societies had in common despite their linguistic, cultural, religious and economic differences.
His new book, A Promise in Haiti: A Reporter's Notes on Families and Daily Lives, is an effort to describe the hardships of life there through the stories of individuals and families whom he grew to know during the course of his visits. By putting identifiable human faces on the abstract suffering borne by millions just a figurative stone's throw from this country's shores, Curnutte transforms it from an abstract concept into something much more easily grasped.
A full review of A Promise in Haiti: A Reporter's Notes on Families and Daily Lives appears in Miller-McCune.com: http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture/review-seeing-haitis-distress-as-people-not-statistics-37725/
