Whatever it takes

Yesterday we went to a place deep in the bowels of the Mountains in Jacmel Haiti called Bassin Bleu.  It's a series of waterfalls with very deep swimming holes.  We hired a guide to take us down, it's about a ten minute, incredibly strenuos hike.  If you've been to haiti, you know that if you hire one guide, two or three others think they can tag along as well and get paid.  While you want to, you can't.  This can't be sustained and only creates more chaos when the next group of blancs come in.  

But this one man continued with us.  It is kind of awkard.  On one hand you want to be friendly, but on the other hand you don't want him to think that you are using him as a guide making you responsible to pay him.  He was with us for the hour and half we were there.  At one point he came to our guide and they were having a most heated discussion.  It was in Creole, so we could only guess.  But it was between him and our guide.  He had "lost" his wallet.  

While I don't know the entirity of their conversation, I can only guess that he may have been trying to pin this loss on one of us.  Or that he could persuade our guide to get us to sympathize for him and give him some money.  I don't know.  

Well...he conveniently "found" his wallet right before we left.  He didn't look as excited as you'd think if he'd just found his wallet right next to where we were all at.  

When we got back to the car to leave, he brought his young daughter over to us to show us her rare medical condition.  It's heartbreaking.  The lengths that he went to in hopes of some sort of help for his daughter. There was nothing we could have done for her.  Even a little bit of money wouldn't do anything for their situation.  For some people, they would give money to ease their conscience. But in this case it would only make things worse.  You can't do this.  It creates a false hope.  

If you want to help, find an organization that's been in a country a long time.  That works with local people on the best ways to help.  And shows success that what they are doing is working.  

Some people think what this guy did was shady, I call it being creative.  You might say he should go work.  Work for who?     It's not that simple.