Another post about her trip to Haiti from HFF board member Vivian Croft. You can read more about Vivian’s trip to Haiti here.
My friend Tom once called me a professional volunteer. For almost three years, I have spent quite a bit of time volunteering my efforts, be it fundraising, event planning, marketing and media services, or super sweat-inducing, physical, hard work and manual labor. I care. For no other reason than I feel it.
My heart and soul aches for those who are unable to care for themselves, speak for themselves, make their own decisions, or find help when it is needed. So many people spend much of their time in pain and in search of necessities. I’ve been a part of a few projects over the years that have opened my eyes to the pain that we all share.
Life is filled with pain but the most beautiful and most amazing oppositional force is another thing I have seen in great quantity. And this is why I continue to give. And those with whom I am lucky enough to share my life also give because they, too, have found great joy in finding that opposite of pain. And happiness filled me in Haiti.
Through smiles.
Art.
Celebration.
I was welcomed back to Pittsburgh with great excitement and joy and much concern and eagerness by those interested to hear what I’d seen and most of all, what Jamie and Ali McMutrie are doing now. I don’t want to say, ‘You won’t know if you don’t go,’ but I do think there are many untranslatable components to an experience of this magnitude.
While in Haiti, my role was that of a skilled volunteer, an observer, a student of life who would return home to translate the everyday of two young women working to change one life, one family at a time. Because they feel it. And because who else will.
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