Guest columnist
Step off the plane in Haiti, and the acrid street smell burns your lungs, and the street scenes — skinny kids running after you to beg for money, the sick lying prone on pallets by the road — burn your brain.
I was told once by a young activist that once you’ve been, you never really leave Haiti. You might return home physically, but you don’t leave.
That’s true. I went in 2004 with a medical mission team from the Norwich, Conn., Diocesan Office of Haitian Ministries. I held babies that weighed no more than spiders, made friends with a street kid named Tiba and tucked myself into bed at night overwhelmed at the poverty.
I came home and bled onto the keyboard, but I will go to my grave knowing I didn’t do the story justice. Haiti is so broken that throwing more words onto the heap seems somehow superfluous.
Until he sold it in 2005, Richard Thibadeau ran an industrial direct marketing company he owned with his brother. He grew up in upper-middle-class comfort, and years ago he began volunteering to set an example for his children.
He and his wife had been donors to the Haitian relief efforts of their West Hartford, Conn., church, but he wanted to see for himself.
“I got involved with a large capital campaign at my church and we raised nearly $2 million for repairs and renovations,” Thibadeau said. “I didn’t find any of these efforts to be particularly fulfilling.”
He had been to New Orleans after Katrina, but nothing prepared him for his first trip to Haiti a couple of years ago. The day after he arrived, the crew went to an orphanage suffering with a scabies outbreak. Thibadeau sat outside the building while the orphans ran their hands through his hair and crawled all over him.
Thibadeau went — as did I — knowing the risk of his being little more than well-meaning ballast for the medical professionals who went to suture cuts, give shots and deliver awful news to a populace ground under the wheels of the rest of the economies of the hemisphere.
But it turns out they found a use for him in those chalky streets. Thibadeau got patients to the right doctor or nurse. He stood by ready to help as he could.
Haiti is broken and U.S. policies helped make it so. Thibadeau came home and started a nonprofit group, Medical Aid to Haiti Inc. The first priority is purchasing a durable mobile medical unit staffed with Haitians. He hopes that MATH also will serve as a clearinghouse for local relief efforts.
“There are a number of Hartford groups doing things for Haiti,” Thibadeau said.
He sat through one such nonprofit board meeting where members spent an hour discussing a well they had built, while another parish just sent a water engineer to Haiti and could have answered their questions immediately.
We’re repeating ourselves in Haiti, and not being as effective as we could be.
Susan Campbell is a writer for The Hartford Courant
