Haiti: The Hurt Isn't Over

World Vision videographer Tom Costanza reflects on his time in Haiti a few months ago.

I don’t even know where to start. So I guess I’ll start at the end.

Haiti was the kind of experience that changes your understanding of how desperate people can be and how unselfishly others can respond. By the time I left, I was sure I was different. I was definitely more tired. I weighed less. But I also felt that, mentally, I’d reached some kind of turning point. Whatever it was, I began to feel, more deeply than I had in some time, that all I’d seen and heard—the cries of injured children, the pleas of helpless mothers, the anger of people who’d lost everything—was weighing on me, more than it had since I first started in television news more than 25 years ago.

It wasn’t a breakdown—just a vague feeling of fatigue and sadness. The culmination, maybe, of the last year’s frantic schedule. Since November 2008 I’ve covered stories in Niger, Mozambique, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, American Samoa, New York, Ecuador, Cambodia, Zambia, Ethiopia, and back again to the DR and Haiti. Hunger, poverty, disease, earthquakes, a tsunami … it’s enough to make your head spin. The sick and the lame. The hopeless and the hungry. The dying and the dead.

People often asked me, “How do you do it?” “I don’t know,” I reply. “I just do.” Why do I do it? is what I ask myself. I could be home on the couch, watching HBO. Instead, I’m shooing cockroaches off my pillow, trying to get some sleep before my next cold shower.

Sometimes I think I know why I do it. When I’m feeling noble, I think it’s a calling. At other times, I think it’s just to satisfy my wanderlust—a taste for adventure, a chance to get a few more good stories to tell.

Then I go somewhere like Haiti, where people sleep on the remains of their crumbled houses and children scream in pain. “God help us all,” I think. Then I turn on the camera, and it captures people like Lomene LaGuerre. She was selling things in the marketplace when the quake hit. Now she lives with her three children under a tarp on a basketball court. She cooks what’s left of her food and summons what’s left of her pride. “I was a businesswoman,” she says proudly. “A businesswoman does not go hungry.” A few days later, World Vision brings her more food. Her pride will have to wait a little longer.

Outside the city, near the Haiti/Dominican border, Nicole Muse, a World Vision child sponsor, holds a small boy with a large bandage. She left Haiti several years ago and is now a nurse in Chicago. When she saw the news, she says, she just had to come. Her Creole makes her a valuable asset at this makeshift hospital, where a few words in a mother tongue, from a mother’s tongue, can calm a scared, hurting, and parentless child.

I meet people like these, and I’m reminded that they are why I do it, why we do it: comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. I don’t know who said it first, but I like it. It’s why, when I feel tired and sad, I do lay on the couch and watch HBO. And I recharge my batteries and go out there again. And again. And again.