How Do They Do It?!

By Sarah Lucas
While I am tempted to post a blog similar to my sermon (this past August), one which goes on and on and on…. INSTEAD I am going to make this short, so that I can get back to stretching on the roof (I’m still recovering from “concrete day” yesterday) and you can get back to dealing with Sandy. Basically, I just cannot figure out HOW the vast majority of the Haitian’s are so clean!! I mean, I smell like a week old bag of trash at this point – the end of my fourth day here – and I have access to what passes for a shower here, with soap! I have wood chips plastered to my face, concrete and mud imbedded in my calves, ants crawling out of my clothes (no joke – this was earlier today), rocks sequestered in boots and socks, rivulets of sweat pouring down my limbs, and the left half of my hair is sticking straight up. But when we are careening to and from our work site – Grace Camp - through potholes and opaque streams of every color (depending upon what has been washed further up the creek!) and rubble and metal-stone-plastic shanties and blaring horns and skinny cows and dozens of motorbikes (with 2-4 persons perched atop each!) and broken down everything and metal being cut and carcasses hanging to be butchered and ‘pharmacies on feet’ (women with baskets filled with medicine balanced atop their heads) and the occasional snatches of a brilliant turquoise ocean through the perpetual dust and diesel haze; we have passed elegant young women dressed in pure white moving purposefully on stilettos and the odd group of men and women in sharp, formal suits and gowns! (sorry for that run-on sentence, but it conveys a bit of the atmosphere here!) And even at Grace Camp – those working alongside (and in several instances far beyond) us; they wave farewell at the end of a day with perhaps a few spots of mud and a chalk smear. How do they do it??! A few hand pumps, mires of never-drying mud, trash everywhere, wary livestock and farm fowl roaming about, no fans (AC is not even a question), no wardrobes or dressers, an income of less than $1 US a day per family, etc.. I cannot stay that clean for one day in New York! They have my absolute, awestruck respect.

Anyway, that’s my two-cents.

Sarah