Giving, in whatever form- money, time, energy, goods and services- often has payback. It may be a tax deduction, a new opportunity, simple recognition or just a really good feeling. Recently, I discovered an unexpected benefit of volunteering- learning. When the experience is much bigger than you are, the learning curve is steep and the personal payback is huge.
On an evening in February 2006, the light from the TV facing the couch I'm half asleep on reaches me in the shape of a child living in a cage-like iron bed. Others surround her, all disabled and abandoned to a terminal existence on the children's ward of the General Hospital in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. This one shot chills the room, snaps me awake like a whip. I'm on the remote, turning up the sound, straining to catch the stream of words and pictures of a mini documentary by Neil McDonald in the middle of the nightly CBC news. It's about an aid group that rescues these helpless, hurting, little humans, all discarded by overwhelmed parents for whom their child's physical or mental disability is too big a burden and a taboo. Then I'm on the Internet, asking how I can help.
On a hot, humid afternoon in April, just six weeks later, I'm shooting pictures in the brilliant Haitian sunshine, eyes opened wide by the raw destitution which is the capital city, Port-au-Prince. I am now a volunteer with the medical non-profit group, Team Canada Healing Hands, part of Healing Hands for Haiti, an international non-governmental organization specializing in rehabilitation medicine and training programs.
How I got there was easy. Healing Hands for Haiti was welcoming and encouraging. I was ready for this experience and free to embrace it. And I was able to offer my experience and skills to help with their marketing needs. What I saw on my first trip and what I have revisited on subsequent missions is both hard and beautiful to witness. So what have I learned?
Haiti is only six-and-a-half hours from my house in Georgetown- an hour and a half off the coasts of Miami or Cuba. It shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic. Haiti is number 146 of 177 countries on the 2006 United Nations Human Development Index* (Canada is # 4). From the air, the country itself is a beautiful combination of continuous mountains, denuded and brown, but offering views of blue skies, lush valleys, idyllic coastlines, sunny beaches, and azure seascapes.
In disturbing contrast, the texture of populated Haiti is rubble. From the tiny, crowded airport in Port-au-Prince, through its winding, hilly streets that lead our team to the medical compound, everything is either crumbling down or crumbling up- built unfinished of bad cement, rusty rebar and crumpled tin. Half roads, tumbling walls, broken cars, the remnants of westernized civilization in decay, propped up by the remnants of a battered culture. Except for the people- descendants of African slaves and sad histories of perpetual oppression- they are the proud, colourful, busy survivors of the meanest form of existence. Many are not whole, many are not well, but they are the glue holding what's left of their country to the island. And on top of the rubble are the most resilient of all- the children. They wave, you wave; you smile, they smile; they laugh and you try.
On our last mission we revisited a small orphanage on the edge of Port-au-Prince. The woman in front of me is patiently feeding beautiful two-and-a-half-year-old Martine, who has no feet but is otherwise normal and very happy running around in her new prosthetic boots. Healing Hands for Haiti arranged for her operation and rehabilitation. A few nights ago bandits invaded the small one storey, cement block house at night and sexually assaulted this childcare worker. She is at work the next day; not complaining although her pain must be immense.
Around her are 20 or more other children, rescued from the city's General Hospital, the same ones I watched on TV from my couch back home. Each needs special care for one handicap or another- cerebral palsy, clubfoot, Down's syndrome, genetic or birth defects, mental retardation or unknown disabling conditions. All are clean, dressed, fed, looked after and even happy. There are hundreds of privately supported orphanages like this one in Haiti. They form a chain of islands of refuge for Haiti's most desperate.
The Haitian woman sitting beside me is a retired New York City school bus driver, Madame Blaise, founder of the orphanage. She is using her pension to help these kids in her homeland who have no guardians or advocates. We spend a day helping clean up, take stock, look after the children and provide the medical assessments and care we came to deliver. At the end of the day Madame Blaise shows us a "miracle." Proudly she takes us to town for a tour of the orphanage's future home, a recent donation. It's a large, modern, secure building in a better district; it will properly house three times the number of children. Her mothers' helpers will be safe there.
Four nasty visitors to Haiti this summer did a lot of damage. Hurricanes Fay, Gustav, Hannah and Ike killed more than 800 people and left more than 1 million Haitians homeless**. Because the country's reserves are so low and its infrastructure so inadequate, the storms will have set back progress in the country by five years. We will have to go back again and again and keep pitching in for generations. And in Halton Hills we have and we do.
Karen MacKenzie-Stepner is the owner and director of Halton Hills Speech Centre. A busy professional- speech pathologist, businesswoman, wife and mother- MacKenzie-Stepner decided over a cup of coffee and a thoughtful conversation to become a medical volunteer with Team Canada Healing Hands. She is one of four volunteer speech pathologists from our North American organization; Haiti only has one for the whole country of 9.5 million people. Her staff has run two successful fundraisers that helped get our team to Haiti and herself has made four visits to Haiti in two years.
We are grateful for a growing volunteer team and generous support from businesses, the media and our community-all working to make a difference in another world that is really right in our own back yard.
Read The Independent & Free Press and you'll come across the reports of other hometown organizations helping. This year and next, the Georgetown Christian Fellowship has groups digging safe wells in needy villages and is fundraising for, and planning, the construction of a new orphanage, Welcome Home Children's Centre, in the town of Cabaret. And not just today- years ago the Georgetown Rotary Club delivered and managed a dairy herd and breeding project in Haiti.
I'm proud of how our small First World community is able to connect with a small Third World country. In giving to Haitians, we are not just helping strangers in that destitute country, but, by setting an example of what's right to do, we are ultimately helping all disadvantaged and abandoned people everywhere.
For more on Healing Hands for Haiti International visit the website at
www.healinghandsforhaiti.org/
Photos at:
www.flickr.com/photos/ericdoubt/sets/

Sources:
* http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/
** Reuters.com Oct 24, 2008