The real reason we didn't make it back to the Good Shepherd School in Cite Soleil

One of the things I was most looking forward to in heading to Haiti this year was a return trip to The Good Shepherd School in Simon Pelé.

Arguably the poorest neighborhood in Port-Au-Prince (which puts it in the running for one of the most economically depressed places in the world), Simon Pelé is nonetheless full of gracious, inviting and beautiful people. Especially the children, some of whom attend The Good Shepherd School.

But just hours before we arrived in Port-Au-Prince, this happened.

A massacre by gangs from Cité Soleil over the weekend left at least 25 dead and dozens others injured according to residents of the small district of Simon Pelé where bullet flew at about 8 PM Friday November 2.

Needless to say, we were not allowed to work in the neighborhood this year. (I wrote a little about this after our first day, but I didn’t get the full story until later in the week.)

I grieved that we wouldn’t be seeing Michael and Joonie, two little boys who stole our hearts during our 2011 trip.

And I grieve still today, knowing Michael, Joonie and the hundreds of other children living in Simon Pelé not only have to deal with the day-to-day realities of living in abject poverty, but also with the specter of gang violence looming over their heads.

I’ll leave you with a quick story.

The Good Shepherd School is surrounded on all sides by a cinderblock wall roughly 10-feet high. And all around that wall are small one-room shacks—hundreds of them—packed into small spaces. None of them have running water. This is the neighborhood of Simon Pele.

In the absence of ladders, the wall around the school served as a base of operations as we worked to repair classrooms damaged by the 2010 earthquake. We used it as a perch from which to sit and stand while removing USAID tarps (thousands of which are still in use nearly three years on) and replacing them with permanent tin roofs.

One afternoon, while hammering away, I heard a woman singing inside one of the huts on the other side of the wall. I stopped to listen as she emerged from her home and began washing clothes in a basin, singing all the while. She did not know I was there on that wall, several feet above her, listening to her beautiful voice drown out the incessant cacophony of car horns, roosters crowing, dogs barking.

Then she looked up, and our eyes met.

"Bonjou," she said.

"Alo," I said.

The world around her was full of smoke and dust, her home a faded USAID tarp held up by little more than sticks.

She smiled—and continued to sing.