Running the Race

Haiti was a difficult place before the earthquake. In November I wrote a post about emergencies, trying to encourage people to give to the Heartline Runners, who were doing a marathon to raise money to buy an ambulance for the birthing center at Heartline Ministries. Not all of the Haiti runners had even returned home by the time the earthquake happened.

Everything I said then about emergencies, about how your regular ways of figuring things out fall apart in a time of crisis, is a million times more true now. Heartline Ministries is now an earthquake relief clinic. (At that link you will find links to many of the people updating on the situation.) I have been sending many of my La Leche League contacts to Heartline when they are looking for an organization to donate to, since Heartline has been doing so much great work with pregnant women and new moms for a long time.

Tara, one of the Heartline Runners and a friend of mine, gave an interview to EndurancePlanet.com about running and living in Haiti and life since the earthquake. It is well worth listening to. She talks in it about going running for the first time after the world fell apart and here you can read what she wrote about that. (Tara is the real deal. She has been blogging for a long time, being very open and vulnerable about the struggles of living in Haiti. She loves Haiti and you can hear it in her voice as she talks in the interview.)

The interview makes a comparison between what Tara and Haiti are living through right now and a race; in a race you have to focus on the next step and not think about what comes after that. I think those of us who live in Haiti thought we were living like that all along, but it turns out that we had dreams and plans for the future, and now all of that is uncertain. All we can do is the next thing in front of us.

For me, today, that is American laundry. Things fall apart, but people still need to wear clean clothes if possible.