sopudep neighborhood

over the last six years while providing aide to haiti, leisa has become close with many community leaders. one of which is a woman named rea. leisa refers to her as "the unofficial mayor of port-au-prince". with that description, i imagined rea to be a politician like business woman. and although she was a very motivated person and a natural leader, when i met her, she was much warmer than i thought she would be. she exudes energy and happiness. she was such a joy to be around. she has a way of making everyone around her feel so special. one of her many responsibilities is running a school in sopudep (a neighborhood in port-au-prince). in between distributing medical supplies to clinics, rea and her friend chener (another favorite of ours) took us around the neighborhood surrounding her school. had we just walked through it on our own, it would have just seemed like piles of rubble. chener knew many people in the neighborhood and told us intimate stories of the families who lived there. this part of our trip changed our lives.

rea and chener had just told leisa that there were still 3 children in the rubble, "here, here and here".

this is chener. he told us the woman that lived here always cooked for everyone in the community.
here is her refrigerator, what's left of her kitchen and home.

a family pet left dead in the rubble.

even without being told where the bodies were, we could always tell because of the smell.
in one area, chener told us that there were still 21 people burried in rubble.

while walking through everything, this man approached grant and held out these two pictures. we grabbed t-paul to help translate. we learned that over the past fourteen years he had been raising his two daughters alone. he told about how they were gifted scholastically; even being on national television for their accomplishments. he owned a boutique that they helped him run, his girls were his life. with tears welling up in his eyes, he pointed to the spot where his daughters were still under thousands of pounds of rubble. his home, his business, his family all gone. in leisa's six years of visiting haiti she said that she had never seen a haitian man cry until this day. as rea helped to comfort him, all of us got emotional. i couldn't stop crying. he expressed the intense feeling of now having nothing else to live for. despite all of this, when he walked away, he said "it was a pleasure to meet you". i will never forget him.