Blog Over Kill?

No, the above isn’t some kind of evil creature from a planet far, far away. It’s a pair of sickened, blackened, diseased lungs, which got that way by too many years of inhaling smoke, against their will. Pictures of this ilk are sometimes used to try to scare people into stopping unhealthy behavior. But I have it on good authority that these tactics don’t work. Maybe the pictures are too overwhelming or the gruesome consequences are too far in the future to worry about.

So what does all of this have to do with Haiti? One of the main reasons I started this blog was to tell the stories of poor people in Haiti. The details of their lives are largely missing from media and therefore our consciousness. I’ve been on a run of very tragic posts. This being Haiti, the-poorest-country-in-the-western-hemisphere, sad stories beat down the door, especially those involving children. But I don’t want to kill hope along with ignorance. We want things to improve, and for that to happen, we need a lot of people to get involved. I don’t make calls for action in this blog, but my wish is that in reading about how poorly some people are forced to live, you’ll be motivated to do something about it.

So, in view of the possibility that negativity overkill depresses the likelihood of people feeling they can make a difference, in the next few offerings, I’m going to highlight what we like about Haiti—mainly some of these poor people I’ve been writing about. They are survivors—some of the toughest, most resilient people on earth. They have lessons to teach us.

P.S. Oh yeah, I’d stay away from the cigarettes.