No Life Without the Pain

Family and Friends,

Day 125 of our Haiti Adventure!

This song (or poem) came to me in the middle of the night…


          “No Life Without the Pain”

     Every son and every daughter
          Of the mountain families
               Hauls the wood and ports the water
                    From the age of two or three

     The rocks, familiar friends
          The shrubs and all the trees
               This path leads to the river
                    This path leads to the sea

            No food without the fire
            No drink without the rain
            No love without desire
            No life without the pain

     One girl walks with the others
          Yet she is all alone
               A restavik, a servant
                    Her life is not her own

     One boy does all he can
          To feed his family
               Though twelve he is a man
                    No time to learn to read

            No food without the fire
            No drink without the rain
            No love without desire
            No life without the pain

     Most homes might see the father
          A few nights of the year
               The children are a bother
                    Again he disappears

     He left them with some money
          A bruise or two or three
               And by this time next year
                    Another mouth to feed

            No food without the fire
            No drink without the rain
            No love without desire
            No life without the pain

     Round here the change comes slowly
          There’s fear in the unknown
               But Jesus, too, was lowly
                    And He softens hearts of stone

     There’s beauty in the mountains
          There’s comfort for those who mourn
               There’s wholeness for the broken
                    There’s new hope being born

             No food without the fire
             No drink without the rain
             No love without desire
             No life without the pain


I’ve been thinking about the mountain people a lot lately, especially a pastor up there named Roger. Nothing is easy up there.  Life is really hard, and yet the people resist change like the plague.  It is probably oversimplifying things, but I like to tell people that in Haiti there are at least three distinct cultures. There is the city culture you find in Port-au-Prince, which I personally haven’t experienced very much. Then there is the culture of the villages along the highways (like Ti-Rivier), which seems quite different. Finally, there is the truly rural, mountain culture. These are the people who live far from the roads and the markets, the people described in the poem above.

We interact with mountain people on a regular basis, and Mission Haiti runs three different schools for mountain children. These schools have been very difficult to direct, to put it lightly. We have difficulties insuring the quality and integrity of the work of the directors and teachers, maintaining any kinds of standards for education and attendance, and with many other issues. Pam is in the process of trying to hand over the control of one mountain school to the people of that community, and there are many growing pains in that process.

Then of course there is the poverty, the lack of healthcare, the poor quality of farmland, the broken families, the voodoo influence, the hyper-dogmatic Christianity, and the restavik situation. “Restavik” is the term used here for children who become servants to other families for a variety of reasons. Sometimes poor families send a child or two to another family for the promise of regular food and a chance to go to school. The problem is that those children are often treated poorly, and in some instances it is more like slavery than foster care. Some have estimated that approximately 5% of the total number of children in Haiti are “restavik.”  Pam recently saw more restaviks in the nearby mountain community, and she is taking some steps to try to help them have a better life.

Pastor Roger desperately wants to learn English, and I want to learn some things from him, too. More to the point, I want to learn about his relationship with Christ. He loves God so much that he takes in orphans he finds wandering the mountainside or the nearby city steets of Les Cayes. He gives them a place in his home. He loves Jesus so much he gives everything he has to direct a school up in the middle of nowhere, and He himself doesn’t even have much of an education, or money for that matter. I want to learn how to love like that. I think I need to learn more from him than he from me.

May your adventure include life in the midst of pain...
-The Grimm Family Adventurers