All Things in Common

One  of the first days we were on the compound (Saturday morning?), we were taken on a tour of the entire mission property. They have a church, a school, ministry offices, a community clinic, an OBGYN center that actually served as a surgery center for a team from Harvard right after the earthquake, a guest and staff housing area, an ambulance to drive people in to Port au Prince for medical emergencies, a sports program, and a tent city.

While we were there, they hosted a pastors’ conference, a translators’ training, several weddings, baptisms, anniversaries, and more classes than I could keep track of.

A woman walked into the church on Saturday hemorrhaging after attempting to give herself an abortion. The ambulance was broken down, so they put her in the back of one of the vans that had picked us up from the airport and drove her to the hospital in Port Au Prince.

(By Monday they had recruited two of the male leaders on our team and had them hard at work fixing vehicles, the ambulance included!)

Before the pastors’ conference was over, their wives were invited in to go through a mini “shop” of items that had been donated just for them, things that they needed but couldn’t afford on a pastor’s salary.
Tuesday (?) afternoon the police dropped off a body. Someone had died while in the Dominican without any ID, and he needed to be transported to a morgue in the ambulance. 

Thursday evening the police dropped off another man who had a spiral fracture in his lower leg after a motorcycle accident, and the clinic staff – plus one of our male leaders – did what they could for him and sent him in the ambulance to Port Au Prince.

Through all of that, the tent city stuck out to me.

People who lost homes and families in the earthquake are still living in these tents while serving at HCM (the mission). “This is the church of Acts 2.” We were told, “Where it says that the believers had everything in common. If one person gets rice and someone else doesn’t, they share. If there isn’t enough water for everyone, they use less, so that it will go around.”

As a few of us delivered bags of rice there on Tuesday morning and used our few words of Creole to greet faces that were becoming gradually familiar, the quote that kept coming to mind again and again was this:
(paraphrase is my own) “When we live out the things that Christ commanded, capitalism no longer becomes possible and communism no longer becomes necessary.”

This cluster of tents is the Church.

* After the earthquake (and for years prior to), HCM received funds and partnership from an organization called “Joplin Helps Haiti” towards rebuilding a country that had been ravished by a natural disaster. When the tornadoes ravished Joplin, HCM sent funds in the opposite direction. That, my friends, is pretty stinking cool.*

**Anyone who’s been to my internship site in Kenya want to play ‘name those trees’ with that last picture?**