Rob Beckham, a volunteer with Homes for the Heart, has been working with APJ in the rebuild of the schools in the slums of Port-au-Prince, particularly the slum known as Cite Soleil. He shares with us his recap of his time spent in Haiti.

WARNING: GRAPHIC LANGUAGE

Sometimes in life you are given the opportunity to work with great people. Father Rick Frechette is one of those absolutely great individuals.

And sometimes you find yourself in places you don't normally want to go.

If you have seen images of the slum called Soleil, what you probably haven’t seen are the thousands of innocent children and children that have grown into adults. These people have drawn a losing hand in life's game of chance. They live in a violent world without hope. Their life is, what it is, simply because Cite Soleil and Warf Jeremy is where they were born.

They were born there by chance and are doomed to poverty. You can see the blank desperation and anger in their eyes.

I am home now and I sit down to write in my favorite coffee shop.

Friday, our team of new demolition experts recruited from the gangs of Cite Soleil finished clearing the rubble from one of our schools. I was glad we were able to clear the site. It was dangerous. There were large sections of concrete that we feared would fall on someone. Now, we can put some kids back in school.

Friday evening, I returned to the hospital where I had been sleeping. We were happy because we had accomplished a goal. We were tired, dirty, but full of energy, because we felt some good in contrast to the sheer volumes of agony and desperation that we had been immersed in for the last week. I had a deep gash cut in my left leg from a hole I had stepped in while working. It was wrapped with a bandanna.

Father Rick saw me come in and grabbed my arm. He said, “Rob, the area where you were working today erupted in gunfire and people have been shot. One of the gangs grabbed someone and is holding them hostage."

Now you have to imagine this area we were working in. Helicopters flew over us constantly. Large cargo planes flew overhead as they lined up for landing at the airport. Our generator roared and our cutoff saw was grinding into rebar. It was loud. The backhoe loaded our dump truck and strong gusts of wind blew the dirt in our faces. It was surreal. Occasionally, a U.S. Hummer would drive by full of Marines. A mentally ill woman walks through screaming at us and a young boy begs me for a bite to eat.

I never heard gunfire, though I did see people fighting down the street. But, this was not unusual; each time we freed a metal rebar from the rubble, Haitians rushed in fighting with each other to steal it. The metal was like gold bars falling to the ground. I was in my mental zone trying to clear the school. Hoping no one would get hurt. Those around me spoke in Creole. In some sense, I was now one of the gang members smacking fists with other members.

Rick said, "You can't go back. You need to wait a few days for it to cool down." It was kind of a bummer emotion mixed with adrenaline. I went to the emergency room where I saw Jean a nurse friend of mine. I told her I cut my leg. Then, I looked around and felt an emotional surge. I was thinking about a small gash on my leg. In a daze, I heard Jean telling me, "Sit down, I can see the bone in your leg. Does it hurt? Rob, you need stitches, but we will have to do it later tonight." There were children crying and around me. The room was full of kids with their legs and arms removed. Near me, another doctor was removing a maggot from a child's ear.

I put some gauze on my leg, wrapped my leg with my bandana, and hopped out. There was no room or time for small wounds. I went back to the tent planning to sew myself up and I melted into the other Type A personalities sharing the compound with me.

We decided if we could not work, we should leave and not burden the supplies. I was told I could go to the airport at 6am and catch a military transport to Florida, but we had Ruben with us. Ruben was our translator and he is French. He had been staying in the US. The military would only fly out US citizens. It's good to be American. I could not leave Ruben alone in Haiti, so I talked to Mariavittoria Rava.

Now Toia, is another amazing person:

She is Italian, she is the director of NPH Italia and the Francesca Rava Foundation, she is a successful attorney, she speaks multiple languages and she helps fund the schools I was working on. She told me she was going to Santo Domingo by bus Saturday evening. This could be a 10-hour drive across the island. You can go to the airport there and fly out.

We made the trip in seven hours only slowing for the occasional military roadblock and inspection.

I slept in the Santo Domingo airport Sunday morning and was able to get on a plane for San Juan. By the time I got home I had been traveling for over 24 hours.

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What now? I am home, and circumstances pressed me to leave.

But, there are still hundreds of thousands of people in makeshift tents made from sheets and blankets. There are children with no arms or parents. Haiti is an epic disaster. There are heroes, villains, and victims everywhere. It is truly off the scale. A sense of helplessness envelops you when you come home.

Last Tuesday in the midst of turmoil, I asked Dallas, a doctor friend from Austin, Texas, how his day was. His eyes were swollen with tears and he looked at me holding nothing back and said, "Rob, it was fucking fantastic.”

Now struggling to control his thoughts he spills everything, “Earlier, I worked on a two-month-old baby that was burnt from head to toe. He screamed in agony and I had no painkiller. There was nothing I could do! Later, I was given a bottle of painkiller and a syringe. A few ccs of this stuff will put you out. Now when they scream in agony... I hit them with a shot, but it only temporarily relieves the pain. It is all that I can do."

Words from people here at home sometimes cut into me. Someone says, "They are overpopulated. They need birth control."

The faces in my mind are the eleven year old girls of Soleil that don't know what the color pink is much less what birth control is. They are doomed to be raped because of where they were born.

What I see is utter human failure. During a small aftershock last week I watched a couple of donkeys in a field. They spooked slightly, and then returned to eating grass as if to say, "Whoa, that was different." Then raising their heads chewing on the grass, they looked around and thought, hum, it seems busier today. I wonder why?"

You see the earthquake barely affected the animals. The destruction was in the structures man had built. This misery is our fault. We should strive to never let it happen again. The magnitude of the problem seems, well, we just can't overcome it. There are a million people without homes! It is going to rain any day.

But, we have to try. As humans we must do better.

I have several groups asking me to return. I don't know when or with whom yet, but I have to go back. To know what is happening and to turn my head and ignore Haiti is wrong. I can't lie on my comfortable bed at night and close my eyes knowing what is taking place just 700 miles off the coast of the United States.

- Rob Beckham

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