Carry Water
February 4, 2011 at 5:40 pm
by Mike
When a place is new sometimes it’s so overwhelming that I don’t quite know what to take a picture of, so I take pictures of the biggest things around – buildings – to represent all that’s different about a place. I certainly noticed the buildings when I first arrived here – the shacks and crumbled homes – but as the weeks have passed it has become less shocking, more normal. The buildings are still representative, but there is poverty in symbolism – in fact buildings are vessels that carry lives, the relevant content of a place, and the lives go on whether the buildings are standing or fallen. One can’t look at a broken building and have any clue as to the character of the people within. All I can know is that a broken house or school is probably making daily life more complicated.
I’m thankful that after a couple weeks of being here the broken buildings are becoming more normal to me because it allows me to see past them and to the stories of this place – the good, the bad, the complex stories that make Haiti so incredibly uplifting and heart-wrenching in the exact same moment.
And I’m glad we’re doing something to fix those buildings.
I hope when you watch this video of David you can see the complexity unfolding around him. He’s carrying water to mix into the concrete that will go into the wall of a new school.
