Excellent travel writing reveals a suffering Haiti

By Kurt Armstrong and ChristianWeek | February 12, 2010

I'm sitting in my big soft chair, my computer screen glowing, a bowl of peanuts close at hand. My wife and kids are downstairs, and I'm struggling to write a review of Kent Annan's moving book, Following Jesus Through the Eye of the Needle about his experiences living in Haiti. The morning news said the death toll from Haiti's earthquake could top 200,000. There's a disturbing gap between this review and what I'm hearing on the news.

Annan's book is all about the incongruity between North American comfort and the everyday struggles of the average Haitian. But it's not the heavy-handed social justice treatise or theological argument I was expecting. It's travel writing, and it's very good. He doesn't tell us all about the work he and his wife Shelly do with Beyond Borders, the ministry they're working for. Instead we get the rich details of everyday life—local customs, relationships with neighbours, a broad range of modes of transportation—as they try to build a house.

It's a close-up look at how it all makes Annan feel. He plainly describes his motivation as a mix of divine calling and guilty conscience. He grows more fluent with the language, relishes the joys of the relationships with his neighbours and finds satisfaction of hauling bags of cement uphill to the building site, while constantly feeling guilty for not doing more, not sacrificing enough, not taking solidarity to the extreme. Annan's self-disclosure about his deepest fears and fantasies of revenge is very personal. Heavy stuff.

Annan also finds joy, meaning, hope and love. And he has a great sense of humour about things like the rats that scurry around at night and the horrible things that happen to his gut when he drinks the local water.

It looks very brave and sacrificial to me, but Annan's ongoing guilt is a reminder that no matter what we do, we're still utterly dependent on God's grace.

The quick-to-speak Pat Robertson embarrassed nearly every thoughtful, sensitive Christian when he said Haiti's earthquake was God's judgment for the country's "pact with the devil." It is unfortunate that Robertson, not Kent Annan, gets the big headlines. Because Annan's book reveals a God of compassion and love whose heart is breaking for every suffering man, woman and child in Haiti.