While in Haiti a couple weeks ago, I visited my friend, John, at home. John’s family lives in the cinder block home his mother built just before she died in December. John shares the home with his older sister and her two boys, and with his older brother, a severe diabetic.
The home is unpainted. There are block walls surrounding the narrow city lot. The bathroom is an open hole in the yard behind the house. The kitchen, also in the yard, is a four foot by four foot space where they burn charcoal on the ground under a pot they use to cook rice.
We sat in the yard on plastic chairs as the day drew to a close and John shared his story with me. His brother, suffering the effects of untreated diabetes, no longer can work and sometimes lacks even the will to live. John wishes he could set him up with a small business that would give him a reason to get up in the morning.
I asked him what he had in mind for his brother. Get this. By small business, John meant buying a 55-gallon drum of gasoline and a few plastic quart containers that he would use for dispensing gasoline to the passing motorcycle taxis. John reckons his brother could make enough money selling gasoline by the side of the road to pay for the medical tests and treatments for his diabetes.
While we were talking, John’s nephews, his sister’s sons, came out of the house. The youngest one was crying. Not wailing, just tears and sniffles. I asked John if his nephew was sick or had just gotten in trouble. “No,” John said, “He’s just hungry.” Being the bright, optimistic American that I am, I asked John if there was some reason the little boy had to wait to eat, thinking perhaps mom was cooking and their evening meal just wasn’t ready yet.
John looked me in the eyes and said, with a shrug of his shoulders, “We have no food to give him. There is no food in the house. We haven’t had food for four days.”
John and I had just that very morning fed a meal of rice and beans and chicken to 120 children in a village away from this town where he lives. And in his own home, there was no food. His sister had helped prepare that meal for those children, even when there was no food at home to prepare for her own family.
The market was a short motorcycle ride away. We left immediately to catch the vendors before they began putting away their supplies for the night. We bought a 25-pound bag of American white rice and a gallon of Mazola Corn Oil. We wanted six bags of spaghetti noodles, another staple in the Haitian diet, but I only had $37 left in my wallet, so we had to put the noodles back.
The man in the market accepted the U.S. dollars I gave John. He changed them into Haitian dollars (no doubt making a profit) and gave John a few crumpled, dirty bills in return, along with the rice and the oil. Then, something happened, something I didn’t expect and something that probably would not have happened here. John took the change and put it in his pocket.
Yes, I noticed. I noticed because it seemed odd that he didn’t even offer it back to me. I didn’t want it back and would have given him more if I’d had it, but it struck me as odd in the moment.
A bit later, after we delivered the rice and oil to his sister, among tears and handshakes and too much repeated “Mesis,” John and I walked by the storefront of another friend. There, from a tiny room lit with a single fluorescent bulb, our other friend sells bottled drinks from an old chest freezer turned way down.
John stopped and said, “Come,” and walked into the store. He opened the cooler and asked, “What do you like?” (I love Haitian cola which is a fruit soda like nothing I’ve tasted anywhere else in the world.) John reached into the cooler and brought out a cola, then reached into his pocket, took out the crumpled bills from earlier, and with great pride, paid for my soda. He was beaming at being able to do something for me, something he would not have been able to do otherwise.
It was hot that night, muggy and a bit uncomfortable, but that wasn’t what kept me awake. I lay in bed thinking about what I had seen that day. In the thick stillness of the Haitian night this thought brought tears to my heart: Every day, God in His mercy and grace, sees my need, the things I require to live, and without fanfare or demand, he provides for those needs. Most days, I just take it, not without gratitude, but not with returning the change of praise or thanksgiving either. But once in a while, and perhaps, after this, more often, I use what God has given me to bless him.
Sometimes, having been given so very much, it is good to take what we’ve been given and give back to the Giver. I think I’ll buy God a Haitian cola. I think it will come in a 55-gallon drum. What will you do with what you’ve been given?
Each week a member of the Cook County Ministerium will offer Spiritual Reflections. This week our contributor of The Good News is Pastor Dale McIntire who has served as pastor of the Cornerstone Community Church in Grand Marais since April of 1995.
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