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Showing posts from August, 2011

Economic doom and gloom vs. Haiti

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 Our camp group in Haiti       A couple weeks ago I went to Haiti to visit our Young Life leaders there and help them run camp. When I was leaving the US every headline was about the stock market crashing, how much net worth had been lost in a day, and an awful lot of doom and gloom about the economy—quite depressing stuff----- and then I entered Haiti, a place that is well beyond what our doom and gloom can even imagine. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, with an unemployment rate of over 40% and over 50% of its population living on less than $1.50 per day (the definition of abject poverty); it’s also still trying to recover from a devastating earthquake, flooding, and a cholera epidemic that hit the country in 2011. As you can imagine, much of life in Haiti is focused on trying to get enough resources to just survive.   Our senior leaders in Haiti-- Noyo, Bouzy and Chedrick     Haiti can be a place that seems really bereft of hope—and yet when I