Overwhelmed

By Kandy Sanders

Some of what I've written here is straight from my journal because I want you to get a sense of the raw, unedited emotion I felt at the time. You may be surprised at some of it, but I'm striving here for honesty and not the toned down happy mission trip story that so many of us have told or heard at one time or another.

Walking out of the airport into the overcast day brought unusual sights, smells and sounds which overwhelmed my senses and brought to mind the vague feeling of a being on a movie set. Scanning my surroundings, I quickly became aware that I was certainly not in Alabama anymore. After fighting my way through a sea of people, being herded through the fiasco known as baggage claim, then being attacked by pseudo airport employees, somehow I had expected relief upon exiting the building. What I saw made me wish I had stayed inside. Children dressed in not much more than rags held their little hands through the holes in the chain link fence, hoping to be given something, anything to feed their hungry bellies. The cinder block wall across the street was a canvas for all manner of graffiti, and men leaned heavily on it as if one, the men or the wall, would be unable to stand otherwise. The porters who fancied themselves airport employees were arguing with one another over my bags in a language I did not understand, and I began to feel absolutely helpless and out of control. Once again expecting respite from what seemed like a strange dream, I boarded the bus which would take us to Petite Riviere, our final destination. I was wrong again. The drive through Port-au-Prince was surreal at best, a nightmare at worst. There were people everywhere in the streets, an occasional naked child running this way and that, buildings in shambles, trash piled high on what may have been sidewalks, goats and chickens roaming free, and vehicles everywhere competing for space on the road. When the bus finally reached the outskirts of the city and I thought that surely the worst was behind us, the tent cities came into view. Some were seemingly built on heaps of trash, some on hillsides, others in ditches alongside the road. They stretched as far as I could see and suddenly I was devastated. The emotion of the day began to have its way with me and I was ashamed of the name of that emotion. It was disgust. Absolute, total, outright disgust. I could not fathom why someone would want to come to this God-forsaken place to do anything. How was I going to spend an entire week here?


I did spend a week there and lived to tell about it. There is more to come. God is good!

"Many are the plans in a man's heart, but it is the LORD's purpose that prevails."
Proverbs 19:21