Haiti is spiraling. The Haitian people have lived under a curse for the entire 200 year history of the nation, and now the country is at the brink of coup d’etat and civil war. I was in Haiti 10 years ago, when the UN peacekeeping forces were there, and the living conditions were unspeakable. I’d been to rural Honduras a year earlier and thought I’d be prepared for Haiti, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. The assault on my senses was overwhelming when our plane landed in Port-au-Prince, and I spent a lot of time the next few nights just weeping on the roof of the mission compound I was at.

New Directions International, based here in Burlington, does amazingly good work in Haiti and elsewhere. Support them.