Haiti Again

It's that time of year again. As if Haiti were a season, rolling around every so many months with the steadiness of coming spring, summer, fall, or winter. Rainy season, windy season, Haiti season. 

It has become part of the rhythm of the youth group, just like the other Haiti trips have become a part of the rhythm of the larger body. 

For weeks now, the kids have been asking about applications. For months, they have had the tentative dates scheduled into their calendars. Since we got back, they have been talking about "next time." It's deep in their blood, this leaving and coming back and letting the heart take up residence somewhere far from the body. 

We stand around fires, with the February wind still biting at our backs, and they ask if they did well last year, if they did everything that they could have done. Names fall from their lips like talismans. We sit in the dark, watching half a dozen photos flash by on the screen, and I can feel their excitement, as if their bags were already packed and their passports in hand. 

It's that time of year. 

Just after Haiti has started to fade, started to cease being the answer to every question asked, February rolls around again, and it once again becomes that thing that slips into every conversation.  It's Haiti season. 

For the next four and a half months, we will pray and plan and fundraise and talk until it seems like we must have surely squeezed all of the life out of the trip. Along the way, the team will mold and change, and, somehow, everyone will always know who is going and who is not. 

Because this is important to them, these nine days that have the power to shape their year. 

They'll talk about the hard parts and the beautiful parts, and the two will overlap into a vague sort of sense of what happens next, a pulsing anticipation as they try to sort out what they know is coming. And, it will be good. 

It will be a mess, and they will be a mess, and they will wonder at times why they ever thought that this would be a grand adventure. We'll question the moment that we ever thought we knew what we were doing, taking these kids to Haiti. 

But, in the end, it will be good. As if Haiti were a season, wild and untamed in its predicability, another cycle in this rhythm that is desert life.