A Baby Ripped Out His Heart

"When we took off from Port Au Prince we had been deeply immersed in the Haitian culture and the appalling poverty, crying, starving orphans, and near complete hopelessness. The day before leaving to come back to the States I spent a portion of the day at Mother Theresa's Orphanage with Beth and Chris just holding babies, changing diapers and playing with the toddlers. One baby ripped my heart out and kept a piece for herself. A piece I was glad to leave behind. She was maybe 1 year old and so frail and so beautiful with one small earring in her left ear.
Jon Lacore
http://www.jdlacore.net/

On Thanksgiving my blog entry here dealt with how we take so much for granted as Americans. It is almost impossible to convey this in just a few words. Images and stories and, best yet, a period of time spent in the presence of Third World poverty will all conspire to break your heart if you allow it.

We have all had glimpses of it. We all know there is need out there, that there are people hurting in ways we can't even fathom. But because we do not know how to react to it we tend to shut it out.

What prompted my Thanksgiving day entry was seeing a presentation of images from Haiti's Cite Soleil, an impoverished section of Haiti on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. Jon Lacore, the son of some friends of ours, had just returned from a nine day trip to The Haiti Orphan’s Project and shared some of what he had seen and experienced there. (http://www.haitiorphansproject.org/)

Thursday of this week I followed up by having lunch with Jon who said, "After seeing Haiti I have decided to focus much more of my attention on that country due to it’s extreme poverty unlike anything I have seen before."

The twenty-five year old has seen a lot in his short life. At thirteen he was involved in a summer mission trip to Pakistan, followed by shorter but similar trips to Nicaragua and Trinidad. As a medic in the U.S. armed forces he spent nine months in Bosnia, and most recently 16 months in Iraq where, among other things, he served as a medic responsible for providing emergency medical treatment for the base, clinical duties for the soldiers and civilians on base, and aid at the trauma center for mass casualty incidents.

Even with this background, nothing had quite prepared him for what he experienced in Haiti.