Matt Huntley said he was struck by the abject poverty and the conveniences that he took for granted in the U.S. that were missing from a society located less than 800 miles off U.S. shores.
“I saw things that I knew historically that the ancient Egyptians had that people in modern Haiti didn’t have,” The Carthage High School assistant principal said. “Sewage, I saw sewage running through the streets, it was common. I saw babies that were not hungry but literally starving to death. It was difficult.”
Huntley said a photo, given to him by a student who was on a mission trip to Haiti three years ago, captured the essence of the paradox that is Haiti.
“There is this extreme beauty of the people and the island and the culture, mixed with this extreme poverty,” Huntley said. “That was a house you were looking at, with a dog sniffing through trash.
This is a beautiful picture and it’s the Haiti that made the impact on me.”
A disaster unfolds
That made Huntley an avid and concerned spectator as the disastrous earthquake hit and the aftermath unfolded on television.
He said a magnitude 7 earthquake hitting anywhere will cause tremendous damage and loss of life, but to have that kind of disaster in Haiti, where there are no firefighters, rescue teams or any kind of public sector services, the damage and casualties are going to be magnified.
“Historically I know a lot about Haiti that explains some of the poverty that they have,” Huntley said “It’s not laziness, I hear people around here say it’s because they practice voodoo. Pat Robertson said it was because they made a pact with the devil. To me that’s insane and it just infuriates me that it’s so easy to use urban legends as ways to explain things away when the fact is there are very obvious historical things that happened that have created or helped create the poverty that’s in Haiti.”
Huntley said he’s irritated by how quickly American television reporters started talking about violence in Haiti in the wake of the earthquake.
“I heard Wolf Blitzer interviewing and he was asking what about the violence, what about the looting, and the guy said all of that is being made up, it’s over stated, it’s not happening,” Huntley said. “The people of Haiti are banding together and trying to help one another out. At some point, sure, there are going to be people that fall into that and some of it may be survival skills. But, yeah, the immediate cry of violence and lawlessness and looting, when it was not happening, was a bit irritating.”
A plea
Evan Adams, who was born in Haiti and lived near the decimated capital of Port-au-Prince until he was 10 years old, said the damage he sees on television is overwhelming and hard to comprehend.
“I heard some of it on the news but I really don’t believe it,” Adams said. “The whole time I was thinking it was a miracle that God let some people survive because I think it’s another way he is showing how powerful he is because more people are turning to him right now and praying to him and everybody is in need now.”
He pleaded with people in this country to think about the how lucky we are to live in a land of plenty and to think about the people of Haiti the next time we throw away food.
“Us Americans, we take everything for granted,” Adams said. “Take food and we just think no one needs it. If we eat a sandwich, some people will take the bread and throw it away. In Haiti right now, they need so much that kids are dying and they would eat the bread that we don’t eat.
“I would just like to say that every time you are about to throw away some food, you should think about the dying people and how it would affect someone else if they were to have that bread.
“I heard some kids talking about it, they said what did they ever do for us. I really don’t understand that, when he said that, I said they never did anything for us but what did we ever do for them. Technically we don’t do anything for anyone except ourselves. We just want to help ourselves sometimes and we need to look beyond that and think about others sometimes.”
Editor’s note: This is the second of a two-part story started in Sunday’s Carthage Press about Evan Adams, a native of Haiti who now lives and goes to school in Carthage, and Matt Huntley, CHS assistant principal who, with his wife, adopted a Haitian son.
