Haitian woman – Photo Source

Have you read the excellent article from last weeks New Yorker by Jon Lee Anderson? Entitled Neighbors’ Keeper, it’s a piece about Anderson’s experience on the ground in Haiti and his unexpected meeting of the Haitian woman Nadia François. In brief, she was bumped into twice while Anderson was driving around in Port-au-Prince and he came to find out that her and a few others were searching for food and supplies for several hundred other people:

She said that her name was Nadia François and she was from Delmas 75—a neighborhood five miles back up into the hills. She had come down, she said, in representation of some three hundred people there who were in need of help. She handed us a paper with a handwritten message that attested to her mission, signed and stamped by a Protestant pastor. Nadia had led her group down to the airport after hearing that the U.S. military was handing out food.

Aside from the generosity and incredible sacrifice shown by François, this story illustrated to me that a person with a checkered past (François was previously incarcerated in the U.S.) should not be dismissed or considered a hopeless case. I wonder how many more privileged people would be providing for their entire community in such a situation?

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