I was disappointed last night when I turned on my favorite network news program — only to see a very sparse amount of coverage on the one-year anniversary of the Haiti earthquake. With nothing more than a 20-second voice-over, the network anchor said, (paraphrasing here):

“It’s been one year since that massive earthquake that killed over 230,000 people in Haiti. One year later, it looks like little has changed. Hundreds of thousands are still living in tent cities … in squalor …”

Wow.

This was one of the worst natural disasters in human history. Millions of people affected. An entire nation shaken. The world captivated. And there was barely a mention on the anniversary. But, I think, perhaps what disappoints me most is the stories they missed. They missed the progress that’s been made. They missed the lives transformed. They missed the Church stepping up and being the Church in Haiti. They missed organizations like Compassion International making a difference. And, perhaps, most importantly, they missed the story of hope.

One year after the quake, they missed hope.

Read the entire post at our site dedicated to Haiti and our work there in the aftermath of the earthquake.

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Download this report which details our work in Haiti beginning in the days following last year’s earthquake to our future rebuilding efforts.

Learn more about our relief, recovery and rebuilding efforts at haiti.compassion.com.

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According to Compassion Haiti’s Disaster Response Coordinator, his country will not perish, but will rise up. It will rise up when the poverty-stricken youth of his country are taught that they can defeat poverty. He should know – he used to be one of them.

The plains of Saintard are a patchwork of plantations, sitting on edge of the Caribbean. Elissaint Jean Jacques grew up under the palm trees of his rural Haitian town, but he also grew up knowing poverty.

Those who have jobs in this area earn about $80 a month working the plantations. Most have no jobs at all. Elissaint grew up knowing he was one of the lucky ones. Other little children in his community got malaria or diarrhea and died young. Other little children dropped out of school young to work with their parents.

But Elissaint’s life was different. He was registered at a Compassion-assisted center at the local church in Saintard. He got treatment when he was sick. He got to stay in school all the way through graduation. Most of all, he learned that though he was born in poverty, poverty could stop with him.

Elissaint was a star student, and after he graduated, he became one of Haiti’s first Leadership Development Program students, a program that provides university education and leadership training to formerly sponsored children.

Elissaint was a star student in the Leadership Development Program as well, and when he graduated with his degree, he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study at the University of California, Davis. In two years, he completed Master’s degrees in Community Development and Agriculture and Resource Economics.

Rather than join the diaspora of Haitians in North America, Elissaint knew he wanted to return to his troubled home to help spread what he knew — that it is possible to defeat poverty.

“Many people have left the country, but those who love Haiti have stayed. That’s why I came back. I decided to put my skills to the benefit of my country. The Bible tells us that those who are given much are asked to give back. I feel this is the will of God for me.”

After gaining some work experience, he was hired at Compassion Haiti in 2005 to manage the interventions program, which includes initiatives such as water, malaria response and community development.

When the earthquake rocked Haiti on Jan. 12, 2010, Compassion Haiti turned to Elissaint, now 37, to step in as the Disaster Response Coordinator. It’s a big job. Compassion Haiti has been implementing more than 20 strategies to respond to the crisis. This includes such activities as distributing food kits immediately after the earthquake, providing shelter materials to the homeless, organizing medical and vaccination clinics, rebuilding church and school buildings, and providing microloans so parents can restart their businesses.

Although the amount of work to be done and the devastation around him is still daunting, Elissaint believes it is possible to overcome.

“It is possible to defeat poverty — poverty is in the mind. When you encourage children that they can overcome poverty, that they have potential, and give them a little help to take off, I think we can defeat poverty.”

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For Elissaint, those aren’t just empty, hopeful words. He has experienced it.

“If you motivate and inspire the youth that they can change their world, we can overcome poverty. Because I was born in it, and I am not poor. It was possible for me to come from peasant parents and complete university studies — if you have this mindset, you can make it.”

The work is still large. It won’t happen overnight or even in a year. It will take years for Haiti to come back from this earthquake. But Elissaint isn’t leaving. Compassion Haiti isn’t leaving. And the local churches who implement our programs aren’t leaving. They are raising a generation of children to believe that their life doesn’t have to end with poverty. They are raising a generation who believe that God wants to save and redeem His Haitian children to change their country for His glory.

“For this country to come back to where it was is going to take a lot of years. But when people decide that Haiti will not die, I believe it is possible to come back even better.”

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As you may remember, January 12, 2010, was a very tragic day in the nation of Haiti. Next week will mark the one-year anniversary of a devastating earthquake that took the lives of more than 200,000 people, and I am planning to be present as that precious country memorializes this loss.

Many of you sponsor Haitian children and have been in close contact with us this year as we sought missing children, treated the wounds of injured children, and mourned the deaths of 62 children in the Compassion family.

Haiti is a country very dear to my heart, as I lived there for four years and was, in fact, married right there in Port-au-Prince. I fully expected to live my entire life in ministry to the Haitian people, but that wasn’t God’s plan. Haiti continues, however, to have a very special hold on my heart.

This has been a tragic year for Haiti on many fronts. In a matter of months after January’s earthquake, Haiti endured a hurricane which threatened those already homeless and displaced, a cholera outbreak has taken the lives of thousands more, and recent elections were so filled with corruption that rioting and violence followed them.

These events, combined with a slow and limited response from the international community to Haiti, have left the Haitian people even more angry and frustrated than ever before.

In spite of the billions of dollars promised to help Haiti’s citizens, most of it has not yet been delivered due to many complex reasons. Most of the rubble has not been removed from the city of Port-au-Prince, homes have not yet been rebuilt, and millions continue to live in tents and shanty towns as the anniversary date approaches.

In my opinion, the Haitian people are the most patient and longsuffering people that I have ever known. Haitian churches have been extremely heroic this year and it has been our privilege to serve them as they so bravely minister to fellow Haitians in this cycle of repeated devastation.

And you have never been more generous, as more than $20 million was raised to aid the Haitian people in their time of need. Nearly half of these funds have successfully been spent in rescue and rehabilitation. Our children have largely avoided the cholera epidemic because you have been instrumental in placing 55,000 water filtration systems into their projects and homes.

Not all of our children have escaped that disease, but those affected are in the hundreds and I am aware of only two deaths, in spite of the fact that our children are among the poorest and most vulnerable to such a killer disease.

The remaining funds are being held while the government is establishing building codes and affirming legal ownership of land so that we can permanently rebuild schools, churches and homes of those affected within our programs.

Thank you so much for giving so generously to this crisis. I also want to thank you for your prayers and letters of encouragement to your sponsored children.

Now please pray for me and a small team who will be going into Haiti next week to honor the heroes, mourn the losses and do our best to bring hope for the future of Haiti.

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I think the thing I love most about God’s character is His desire for redemption. He loves creating good out of bad. Bringing life out of death. Restoring hope to completely hopeless situations. In fact, it often seems that His favorite time to redeem is at the very point where redemption seems impossible.

Do you think anyone who knew Saul would have believed he’d be one of the most outspoken Christ-followers in history?

All this thinking about God and His love of redeeming things came from reading the recent cover story for Relevant magazine on the situation in Haiti. It’s long but extremely well written and informative.

No one in their right mind would call the earthquake that hit Haiti a good thing. It was utterly devastating. And yet still there is good.

Because of the earthquake’s destruction, Haiti is now having to start with what feels like a nearly clean slate. The [corrupt and inefficient] government was toppled. The [inadequate] school system was destroyed. Proof of [unjust] land ownership is now virtually impossible. The [enormous and unbridgeable] gap in economic status was decimated, putting government officials in tents next to poor slum-dwellers.

Do you see how, along with hundreds of thousands of lives, injustice and corruption also took a hit?

Not only that, but according to the article, here’s a quick list of the good that has come of the earthquake:

• Immediately following the earthquake, people called on the name of Jesus. Not Voodoo. Not Catholic saints. Not anything or anyone else. They called out to our Savior, Jesus Christ.
• The country held a government-initiated national day of prayer.
• More people are going to church. More people have accepted Christ in the past six months than in the previous two years.
• The new school system that is being rebuilt is aiming to allow for free public education, something that Haiti has never had.
• The government and leadership in Haiti have the opportunity to install leaders with integrity.
• A devastated and poorly functioning capital city was demolished and can now be rebuilt and decentralized.
• The Church in Haiti has the opportunity to prove itself.

It makes me supremely happy to think about how what Satan intended for destruction, God is using for good. When is the dumb devil going to get the fact that it’s over? It was over at the cross.

The devil lost.

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Sunday, April 25 — I moved last week and it has changed my situation and my perspective. Instead of sleeping in a tent beside the main road of Delmas listening to trucks roar up and down the street all night, I go to sleep seeing stars, and awaken to bird calls. Some of the birds are roosters, which start crowing at about 4:30, but other than that it is amazingly quiet here.

Whenever the power is out, usually from the morning until 10 p.m. there are very few lights in the area. Although the houses are a million dollars in size, they are only about $100,000 complete.

People do have mortgages here, but many build with the cash that they save from year to year and pay as they go. They don’t owe the bank interest, but they also have to wait a really long time to move into the house.

My new home is at the top of a steep hill in a very nice subdivision with a guard and pavement, mostly maintained. Some friends I’ve met are letting me stay as a courtesy.

The situation at the top of the hill makes the views incredible, I can see out to the bay to the northwest and out to the border to the east. The most amazing contrast is the 3,000-to 4,000-square-foot mansions in my neighborhood staring into the Internally Displaced Person (IDP) camps where people are sleeping in makeshift homes with U.S. AID tarpaulin sheets draped over flimsy wooden supports.

A new, “well designed” camp with terraced tent sites has just sprung up over the last week and already it is 25 percent full. The U.N. and other non-governmental organizations are trying to make life more tolerable for the hundreds of thousands who have lost everything.

Now that the rains fall three or four times a week, the misery level is increasing. The news that the international community has not forgotten them is comforting, but there is not much hope for the future when all you own is now in an 8-by-15-foot shelter perched on a hillside next to 10,000 of your closest friends.

The main road into our subdivision is paved and connects to one of three roads up to the area called Petionville. Named after the second president of the country, Alexander Petion, it is even higher up and has trees and cooler temperatures in the day and night. The lack of refrigeration makes the big marketplace in Petionville quite pungent during the day and even worse at night.

The traffic through Petionville is horrendous, and after a 90-minute commute home from the office I decided it was time to find an alternative route. There are many footpaths around and I found out that a four-wheel-drive vehicle can make it up and down them.

As I went down one trail yesterday, thinking that I’m the only one crazy enough to do it, a man in another 4×4 honked, telling me to pick up the pace. Apparently everyone wants to bypass the traffic on the main road. I made it to work in 30 minutes, but the new route does place a lot of wear and tear on the car.

During my first year of marriage, my Bible study group went on a four-wheel-drive camping trip over a mining road into Leadville, Colo. That road was built during the heyday of silver mining in the 1880s and is only used by off-road junkies now. My residential shortcut is used every day by very wealthy people, and it is in worse shape than that Colorado road.

I am getting so good at driving “off road” here in the city that I might just have to repeat the trip back home.

After the rain last night cleared the dust and smog out of the air, the sun is dawning over the city with fresh air and a bit lower temperature. As of 7:30, it’s 81 degrees. I’m sure the humidity is at least that high as well. It might be time for a quick nap before church, as earlier in the day I tried to run over to the new U.N. camp to chat with some of the early risers.

A’ bientot.

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Five-thirty comes early most days, but especially on a Sunday morning when you hope to get some extra sleep before church. Not this week, however. I was wide awake at 5. I forced myself to stay in the sack for another 30 minutes despite the rooster’s consistent crowing.

The high-pitched chirp of some baby doves asking for food and the soft cooing of their parents as they brought another tasty morsel to them brought back memories of 30 years ago when I was living in Limbe’ at the hospital where I worked. One of the other missionaries at that time was raising a pair of turtle doves for the eggs.

Calling my tent a sack is an exaggeration of for what I’ve been sleeping in the last three months. My tent living is nothing like what the vast majority of Port-au-Prince residents are living in at the moment.

As you’ve no doubt seen on the news, tent cities are all over town. More than 300 camps are registered in the city and more than 19 of them have 5,000-plus people living in them. The families are crammed together in muddy lots with only a sheet between them and the next family. Privacy is not a word in their vocabulary right now.

We are in the rainy season now, which means we get about an inch of rain on a light night and 3 inches on a heavy night. It rained during the day today for the first time; usually it waits until after dark to dump on us.

I’m located in the parking lot behind the office building Compassion owns and remodeled a few years back. It withstood the earthquake with only superficial damage. The building now stands over the “Haiti Hilton” as my location was christened by Bob Thorp, my earthquake buddy. He and I arrived in Haiti four days after the quake, but he returned to Colorado Springs several weeks ago.

Our parking lot is paved so we don’t have any mud or other problems, and it is close to my office which is just inside the back door. I’m calling this my “hoffice,” because “offome” doesn’t have much of a ring to it. I can’t really call this my home/office because it isn’t much of a home. We’ve discussed other options but until now haven’t found an acceptable solution.

There are a couple of restaurants around the area. One is like a food court in a mall, which is where most people go for fast food. It is a busy place and must make a killing, because fast is not usually used to describe restaurant service here.

The place is great because it has a crepe station, drinks, pizza counter, sub station, hamburger side and ice cream, all in one building. I go sometimes to meet Americans, but there are way more Haitians who go there.

I digress. I started out to describe the beautiful sunrise I got to see as a result of getting up so early. With all the buildings around there is not much sky to actually enjoy, but I decided to go for a run and found a gorgeous pink and yellow sunrise.

Here in Port-au-Prince, the mountains are in the east so they block a lot of the sunrise, but this morning with the clouds from the rain still hanging in the sky there was a great canvas for God to paint in many different hues. It was a great way to start my day, but I was a late starter compared to the local population.

I passed hundreds of people at that hour dressed up, on the way to church. The amazing thing is that everyone is wearing white shirts and ties, nice dresses and heels. You would never guess that they have just walked one or two miles on muddy roads until they get to our main road of Delmas, where the public transportation is constantly coming by to pick them up.

It puts me to shame on so many levels. I’m out of shape and under-dressed, but I’m here and doing my best to help out.

Please keep Haiti in your prayers because it will need lots of help for a long time. We are praying that all the mistakes of previous years are now exposed and that people will be able to learn from them.

Nou va oue’ ou pita (See you later).

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We don’t have accurate information on how many of those living outside are in shelters that can withstand the rainy season, but it’s clear that a large number of them don’t have rainproof materials. The materials most commonly used now for shelter are bedsheets. These provide a bit of privacy as well as protection from the sun, cold and dust, but not from rain and wind.

We are focusing our efforts on addressing temporary and transitional shelter needs by providing tarps as well as materials for transitional shelters. We will not be able to assist everyone in need. We will focus on those who are most in need and who have not received shelter assistance from other organizations.

We are implementing a transitional solution to address shelter needs of the 6,000 most-affected families in our programs. Our solution is based on the recommendations of experts in the field and documentation that provides guidance on transitional shelter.

We will provide waterproof tarps in urban areas, and corrugated metal sheets in the countryside. Transitional shelter is considered much easier to implement in rural rather than urban areas.

We will not use tents as part of our solution. Tents are a short-term solution only. Disaster response experience has demonstrated that even high-quality tents generally do not last more than one year.

Tents are considered less waterproof than other alternatives and are difficult to use effectively in high-density areas such as Port-au-Prince. They also cost more than alternative materials, and most can’t be reused so they take away resources from longer-term solutions.

Waterproof tarps and plastic sheeting have been established as an effective, strong and flexible solution when accompanied by appropriate materials to attach them, and they significantly outperform tents in many circumstances. They are recommended by shelter experts as a good solution in Haiti.

Transitional shelters consist of a corrugated metal roof and a simple timber or steel frame. They provide cover for families, and utilize material that can be reused in reconstruction or moved to another site. Haitians already are trying to build such shelters for themselves, and experts recommend supporting those efforts where possible.

We must balance our short-term concerns over inadequate shelter during the rainy season (such as health issues and disease) with the many challenges of providing long-term shelter (such as high costs, land tenure, government and international plans, and the inevitably slow pace and limited scale of permanent housing solutions).

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One possible component of a larger strategic approach includes working with other organizations in Haiti to implement income-generating activities for those who have lost homes, property and the means to provide for themselves.

Beginning in March and continuing every three months, we will begin hosting conferences and workshops for key church leaders in Haiti. We not only want to encourage them, but we also want to challenge them to be a prophetic voice during this time.

Edouard Lassegue, Vice President of the Central America and Caribbean Region says,

“Compassion has earned respect in Haiti and we are uniquely positioned to leverage that respect and the strong relationships we have developed with church leaders. We want to use our credibility to encourage them to be a voice for what is right, for service, for responsibility — that is what is required in a time like this.”

As far as the children themselves, safety is our top priority. Until children and their families can move back into permanent dwellings, protecting them in the tent cities is essential.

“The way these children are exposed and vulnerable is getting a lot of publicity. We are ramping up awareness among our church partners — things to look for and be ready for and ways to prepare the children themselves so they do not fall prey.”

Getting the children back into school is also a key step in returning normalcy to their lives. The Haitian government has set March 1 as a possible day for schools to resume, and we are helping our church partners work toward that goal for as many of the sponsored children as possible.

We are working with Engineering Ministries International (EMI) to assess the buildings of church partners that were damaged by the earthquake. We are committed to their repair, and EMI will help us design new buildings and facilities that are earthquake safe.

Until the buildings can be repaired or built, children may meet in tents. Many of them are still afraid to go into buildings, and our priority is to give them some sense of routine and normalcy.

Our staff in Haiti continues the difficult process of taking a census of each and every registered child who was “significantly affected” by the earthquake. Staff members are back in the office building and doing some regular activities, which has helped them to focus on what needs to be done and not think of the hardship as much.

To assist our staff during the grieving process,

“We are deploying a team of counselors from Haiti and south Florida —Haitian Americans who understand the language and the culture — who can talk with people directly and in groups about what they can expect as they work through this, and how to help their families and beneficiaries. We are aware of the fact that it will be quite awhile for them to get back to where they were.”

As great as their sense of loss is their sense of gratitude for all the support and generosity they have received from around the world.

Please continue to pray for our staff members, that they would be a blessing to others and not lose heart, and that in spite of their own pain, they are bearing fruit and making a difference.

Pray as well for our first church conference the week of March 8. Pray that the church in Haiti raises a banner of direction and hope for the future of the country.

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Food kits are put together in the Dominican Republic and delivered to our Port-au-Prince warehouse via large trucks. In high-risk areas, we use security assistance from the U.S. Army, though at times this draws unwanted attention. As food and relief supplies become more readily available, there will be less of a need for this.

Smaller vehicles from our Haitian church partners come to our Port-au-Prince warehouse to pick up the food kits.

Each food kit gives a family of five one meal a day for two weeks.

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