Coracle Trust E-Reflections
Beginnings and endings: A comment on Haiti (Week 3)
Tuesday 26 January 2010
I looked again and saw people being ill treated everywhere on earth. They were crying, but no one was there to offer comfort, and those who ill treated them were powerful. I said to myself, 'The dead are better off than the living. But those who have never been born are better off than anyone else, because they have never seen the terrible things that happen on this earth.... Once again I saw that nothing on earth made sense’ (Ecclesiastes 4:1-4)
Nothing on earth makes sense.
The earthquake in Haiti is not understandable and for those suffering in Haiti can there be comfort? Such a violent ending and shaking of lives. This is terrible indeed. But I find comfort in these hard words in Ecclesiastes. Earlier the writer comments, ‘he (God) puts questions in our minds about the past and the future’. We don’t necessarily get answers.
Yet a journalist in the Times newspaper reported:
As night falls in post-apocalyptic Port-au-Prince, the side streets off Boulevard Delmas turn into vast open-air dormitories. The tiny minority with jobs to go to return to their families for makeshift meals cooked, if they are lucky, on propane burners. Then the singing starts – hymns, anthems and chanted prayers fill what was Haiti’s most prosperous suburb, now a war zone without the war.
And back in the central square, surrounded by the sick and homeless, about 50 women stood in one corner, singing in a beautiful Haitian cadence a favourite prayer in a country where a devotion to God always hangs thick in the air.
Jesus, You are great
We praise your name
You make the sky and you miss nothing
All you do is good.
- Tim Reid, The Times, Saturday 16 January
Can we do less than join in their songs and prayers? Stand with them and lift our voices along with theirs. And do all we can to help the living survive. Promise not to forget them again. And hope change will come to their country.
God you are good. Bless Haiti. Save them, comfort them.
There is a tradition in Haiti to create crosses like this one, overlaying personal and community stories on to a cross. In this, a Salvadorean Cross entitled ‘New Creation’ the crucified Christ is overlaid on, and painted within, the story of a community.
Kirsty
