Toby in his room in his friends home in Simonette, Haiti.
This month O Squad is in Haiti partnering with Mission of Hope: Haiti in Titanyen, Haiti. The majority of the ministry has been joining Mission of Hope’s Village Champions in the local villages going door to door teaching basic hygiene and building relationships with the people living there.
One of the villages is named Simonette. This was where my team met a man named Toby. We met Toby on the road where he was sitting by himself, leaning against a locked cinderblock building. We introduced ourselves and he started telling us about himself. He said his name was Listiene but that he went by Toby. He invited us to follow him to the house where he was staying.
It was his friends cinderblock house that he was staying in since he didn’t have a house of his own anymore. He told us how he felt unsafe there and the struggles he was having with the local church trying to get a house of his own to live in. I later found out that people practiced voodoo in the chained and locked room directly across from Toby’s room and that may be one of the reasons he felt unsafe there.
Toby told us a little of his life before the earthquake. He had a son who drowned a few years before the earthquake. After the earthquake hit, Toby had no family left living and he felt like his life was in danger in the town where he was living so he fled with nothing but the clothes on his back and ended up in Simonette where he met the friend who’s house he was living in.
His tiny room was still filled with rubble around the edges, the only ground actually cleared out was where his small mattress lay and space for a rickety wooden table agains one of the walls. His room had no doors, just an opening in the cinderblock walls and it reeked of urine. Toby showed us the few possessions he had. Tattered clothing hung from a rope nailed into the corners of his room. On the table lay a small dented metal bowl, a worn box of matches, a machete, and a piece of sugarcane.
As we prepared to leave, Toby asked us to pray with him, and after we prayed he said I could take one photo of him. You can see the sorrow in his eyes and the worry filled wrinkles on his face.
There wasn’t any way for us to fix Toby’s need for a different place to live or to give him more food. On one hand it was really hard to walk away from him, giving it all over to Jesus, knowing that there was still an unmet need. At the same time though, I was reminded that Jesus sees everything, he knows the hurt that we go through, and he cares. I pray that in every circumstance in Toby’s life that God is working and drawing Toby closer to himself, and that in that there would be hope. Hope that only the love and grace of Christ can provide.
