Reflections? Memories? PTSD?

The other night, after returning from our mission in Tuscaloosa, as I sat with my wife, watching some really stupid movie, my mind just drifted. As it always seems to after being involved in a new crisis, the thoughts came vividly and intensely.

PTSD? Maybe. If so, I welcome it. I welcome it because it won't let me forget. Forgetting would be unforgivable.

Tonight, I thought about a powerful moment (well, actually, longer than a "moment"), at a food distribution we did about 5 days after the earthquake in Port au Prince, at a "Parc" in Petionville. This encampment had around 9,000 "residents".

As most of our distribution missions, this one started out fairly organized. Lines were orderly, people were grateful for food. As the lines began to flow through, a small cihld came up to me, trying his best to communicate to me that he had been "marked" by our person responsible for ensuring that folks didn't get more than their fair share of the limited rations. Unfortunately, there were always scammers. After a few minutes of insistant tugging at my arm, spewing plaintive Creaole at me (my French sucks, my Creole worse), I grabbed the kid's arm and took him to the front of the line to where our contoller was. She told me, "Yes, I remember this little guy!"

Well, if you could have seen the eyes of that kid! His English was worse than my Creole, but he surely understood THAT acknowledgement!

With that confirmation, recognizing that he had been pushed aside by the "big guys" in the line, I figured I had to work this out. I took him to the head of the food line.

Now, here's this kid - about 7 or 8 years old - determined to get food for his family. What we were handing out was 50lb. bags of rice. Do the math. The term "NFW" comes to mind, right? Imagine your 7 year old kid lugging a 50lb bag of anything around. So, I grabbed a bag of rice, threw it over my shoulder and pointed to the encampment - the kid got the idea. He looked up at me with a smile that will light my life forever, took my hand, and into the enclave we went.

Before we had travelled 10 yards, my life changed forever.

The encampment was - physically speaking - nothing more that a knit-together canopy of plastic tarps, bed sheets, blankets and poles. But, beyond the physical was the real glue of this fabric - hope.

As this boy led me deeper and deeper into this place, I saw, first hand , the desperate attempt of these people - no less human than you, me or your family - to establish a sense of PLACE. Each small living area, a home. Individualism, as best it could be expressed, was evident in every small "house" under this patchwork canopy.

The boy led on...

After the most impactful ten minutes of my mature life, we arrived at this young man's (and MAN he was!) "home". His mother and younger sister, first completely shocked by the sight of
"Le Blanc" carrying this bag of rice to them, came to me with hugs and expressions of thanks. And then there was the boy. He stood before me with the pride of a warrior, looking me dead in the eyes, shaking my hand as well as any man ever has. He didn't shed a tear.

But I did.

Well, there I was, inside this maze of humanity, no freakin' idea as to how to get out. But, as Daniel Boone is quoted to have said, "I've never been lost. I have been a might bewildered for two or three days, but never lost." Inside this mess, all you could see was the canopy and the walls in front of you (note: several UN troops watched me go in...several world press photogs used half their memory cards with pix of me holding hands with that kid...NO ONE followed us in...). I meandered about for a bit, interacting with the people living there. AT NO TIME did I feel in the least bit threatened. I only felt guilty. Guilty for not having the strength to carry 1000 lbs of rice into that compound.

I still feel both the sense of accomplishment for helping that one small man...and the guilt of not being able to do more.

I love PTSD. It is, in my opinion, nothing more than an exhibition of conscious...embrace it.