Mary Novaria

Girls in the rain in Torbeck, Haiti Haiti is one of those places that steals your heart and then breaks it over and over again. The country is still trying to claw its way back from the devastating earthquake that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in 2010. Now, nearly seven years later, with tens of thousands of Haitians still living in tents, along comes Hurricane Matthew, the latest in a long string of disasters—both natural and man-made—to befall our hemisphere’s poorest nation. The latest death toll hovers around 900. The collapse of a major bridge has choked off traffic and prevented much-needed supplies from reaching the hinterlands, and there is fear of another cholera epidemic. I’ve been to the south of Haiti twice and have a number of friends who have been many times more than that (under the auspices of the Haitian Episcopal Learning Programs), building schools and hospitals, conducting medical clinics and forging lasting friendships and partnerships w...

A couple of days after the earthquake, a news crew hurried down the street in Port au Prince. The photographer hustled to keep up as the reporter gestured wildly during the live “on-scener” for CNN. As the reporter emotionally described the trash piling up in the streets, women trying to bathe modestly in public, and other deplorable conditions, I thought, "This is his first time in Haiti!" Sadly, and unbeknownst to those who are seeing the Haitian slums for the very first time, these conditions are absolutely not exclusive to post-earthquake Haiti. In many neighborhoods, the streets are always filled with trash. It is quite common to see folks bathing in culverts on the side of the road and in rivers on the edge of town, to see children in t-shirts and no pants begging for food or money. In much of Port au Prince, tiny houses are built into the hills, one on top of another with cinder blocks and corrugated tin roofs. They have window openings but no windows, dirt floors whe...