I’ve learned more about what Rea had in mind for this trip. I am here along with two other groups of people who have been supporting projects in Haiti. Rea wants to establish credibility among the people who donate for projects and accountablility for those who receive help. It doesn’t feel like a charity thing at all, and I’m sure it could. So far, it’s been a chance for the groups who received aid to show off what they’ve done.

I have much, much more to write and these are more like placeholders for when I have time to reflect, what we did on which day kind of thing.

Yesterday, we went to the women’s literacy group last night, formed in one of the two poorest areas of Petionville, where they showed the tarp they bought so they could hold class even when it rains, the chalk boards, and the benches.

This morning, I went to the “cyber cafe” which sounds commercials, but which is not. rather it’s community internet access for residents of the popular neighborhood of Bel Air. There wasn’t much for me to do while the handled the electrical, and so I went with another group to talk with a former political prisoner. Above his couch: a photo of Che Guevara, Aristide, and a jigsaw puzzle of Pocahantas. I have a lot to think about from that meeting. A lot, a lot.

Then, I went and helped set up the computers, deciding where the wires would go, etc. All those mini-labs at Churchill made me useful.

Later we went to see a woman whose son was imprisioned for 3 years and died in jail. Another person who was jailed during the same neighborhood sweep, where they say every young male in the area was rounded up and jailed, described prison conditions where a room designed for six held so many people that it was impossible to lie, held there for months. It was in these conditions that her son died. The family can’t afford to get the body from the morgue.

The personal issue which I’m confronting. . . the hope thing, how I stand for someone who somehow can go back to the US and get people to realize that neo-libralism is brutal, somehow I can get people to care, or those who care to vote for the right people so things will change, etc. I don’t even know how to explain that I do what I do, but that I am not that person. It’s hard.