A few months ago, after an entire day of time wasting, I was about to delete my Facebook account.

Twitter had been binned already, and as I searched for the ‘delete account’ tab, the status of a female friend caught my attention:

“Thinking of Haiti tonight and grateful for simple pleasures in beautiful Vancouver.”

Haiti?

Back in my days of playing with various shamanic practices I’d considered going there to take a look at voodoo. Luckily, some well-intentioned friends put me off with tales of kidnapping, violence and extreme poverty.  Kids were eating mud-cakes to fill their bellies. Did I really want to be subjected to that kind of experience?

Haiti?

My curiosity set me Googling…

I don’t watch TV and only rarely read the newspapers, a choice that comes at times with its own disadvantages.

Therefore, when news of the January 12^th, 7.0 magnitude quake that hit Haiti at 16.53 was being watched by most of the world, I…was doing an ostrich impression.

Four months later, I was watching YouTube videos that showed men, women and children staggering in deep trances, or sitting stunned next to vast piles of rubble (formerly known as homes). They’d just lost everything in their already poverty-stricken world.

What hit me most were the reports of the death tolls: over a quarter of a million people dead, the entire population of British cities such as Plymouth, Wolverhampton or Nottingham.

I make a conscious choice even now not to fully comprehend two hundred and fifty thousand lives gone in so few seconds.

Seconds is all it took for me to write to my Canadian friend on Facebook. “Hey Guin, I’ve just read your post, how can I get involved in helping …?”

“…Sean Penn? What, the actor? You’re joking aren’t you?”

Petionville IDP (Internally Displaced People) Camp is a tent city and home to approximately fifty thousand Haitians.

It’s set up upon what previously was a private golf and country club and has been managed by Hollywood superstar Sean Penn through his own ‘JP Haiti Relief Organisation ’ since the spring.

Arriving to what is little more than a worn out, giant wedding marquee, filled with a random assortment of camping tents, to be met by somebody you’ve seen in some of your favourite movies is… weird.  Then, a moment later you remember where you are, you see all of the incredible work that the man and his team have done, and movies and Hollywood become irrelevant.

Home for fifty thousand plus

I traveled to Haiti as a team member of IMAT (International Medical Assistance Team), a collection of doctors, nurses and paramedics from mostly the USA and Canada.

Having worked in a number of large organizations over the years, I am aware of how challenging it can be for groups of newly introduced professionals to find their rhythm as a team, and to avoid conflict until that rhythm is found.

Maybe it’s the size of the task in Haiti, or maybe it’s that a certain type of person is called to work there, but I was impressed immediately by the abilities of my team mates to hit the ground running and to work in such relaxed synergy together as to give the impression that they had been a team long before that first day.

As the “Psych Guy’” my own intentions for Haiti were, and still are, to offer the most effective methods for assisting with recovery from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

It’s clear that there is a collective trauma being suffered by the Haitians that is often hidden behind a mind-boggling resilience and gratitude for whatever small mercies are offered each day.

I say mind-boggling, because I have no idea how I would get through those days, not if I had suffered the losses and struggles that so many of the people there have and continue to endure.

On day one at JPHRO, my assistant, H, and I took over what had been the dentist tent.

H transformed the sign over the entrance from, ‘Dentist’ to ‘Psycho’. I wasn’t sure which of the titles terrified the Haitians most.

A day or so of watching pained reactions to our Psycho sign was enough for one of the nurses to kindly paint a happy face that remained as the symbol for our work there.

And what work.

In two weeks we assisted nearly two hundred people between us. The most common complaint being that of pain that had no obvious physical source.

A class of symptoms that I actively seek out to assist with.

An effective NLP pattern that I’ve been taught by my mentor John Grinder is called ‘The Healer Within’. It’s a mostly linguistic process for accessing the client’s healing potential at the unconscious level. The process involves talking directly to the unconscious mind, often to stunning effect.

I continue to enjoy the memory of my translator’s face after the first application.

My first client was an old lady who had pain throughout her body from both before and after the quake. Slowly, she hobbled in to our tent on a stick.

NLP is not something that many Haitians are familiar with, so we framed the process for her with the suggestion that the body has an unlimited potential to heal itself. She agreed with this, and then followed the steps of using her pain as a signal for communicating directly to that healing potential.

Ten minutes or so later and she was standing without her stick, unable to find any of the previous symptoms that had existed throughout her body.

This was an event that I am familiar with. However for the old lady and to the surprise of my translator, we had just performed a miracle.

And we repeated such pain-relieving ‘miracles’ hundreds of times. Not I hasten to add, due to our own special powers, but thanks to the genius structure behind the original pattern.

Over the short two week period that I worked in Haiti I was presented with individuals who were expressing symptoms of limb paralysis, blindness, anxiety, pain, depression, panic attacks, rashes, lack of appetite, fear of the dark, trauma from rape/violence/the quake, and even a lady who had crawling sensations all over her body that she assured me was caused by a voodoo curse.

I agreed whole-heartedly that she did indeed have bad spirits all around her and that it was her lucky day, as I had learned counter spells in the Amazon during my time there.

The relief that she expressed after I took her through a cloaked (in a little voodoo terminology) NLP pattern was enough to justify my entire trip.

Before I went, lots of people asked me what the hell I was heading to Haiti for? At times, I was asking myself the same thing.

My answers were pretty vague. “I saw what a friend was doing down there and decided to get involved…” Or, “ I guess I just feel like seeing how I can assist with the skills that I have.”

I once also made the mistake of telling John Grinder that I wanted to go and “help as many people as possible”. His response was one of contempt for my statement and he suggested that I sounded like a pre recorded tape loop.

Only after Haiti did I pretend to understand his response. Ask me now why I am going back to Haiti in the next couple of days and then for much of next year and the simple answer is,

“I am selfish”.

What you give is never as much as what you get

Until Haiti, I had never directly seen so much suffering by so many.

Maybe those neurons in my brain known as mirror neurons got all fired up in response to the suffering. They are the sites in the brains of us primates that are responsible for that rare mammalian emotion known as empathy.

In Haiti, I attempted to give as unconditionally of my skills as I am able.

In return for my efforts, I was filled with a feeling of happiness and aliveness that I have never experienced before.

Ever.

Even as I closed the lid on a cardboard box containing a deceased baby, or listened to yet another teenage girl who had lost both parents and feared being raped. Even when I broke down in tears whilst assisting at the general hospital, throughout it all, I knew that I was somehow privileged to be receiving an experience that was and still is, so life changing, so humbling, and so compelling, that for a moment, I almost dropped my agnostic viewpoint to give thanks to whatever screwed up god was listening.

Almost.

Haiti?

Yeah, it’s the most self-serving place that you could ever visit.

Your intention may be to give and to help restore the place to what we in the west might (one far off day) deem acceptable.

But ultimately, if you go to assist, YOU will end up being the receiver.

It’s you who will be treated by the people as if you are a long lost member of their family.

It’s you who will be hugged by a seemingly endless line of kids that you’ve never met before.

It’s you who will be thanked by old men and women who have nothing to offer after a lifetime of hardship except pure gratitude.

And it’s you who, like me, may find that after Haiti you no longer feel affected by what the economy might do, or how house prices rise or fall, or whether the end of the world is nigh or not.

After all, right now, in Haiti, the apocalypse has already happened.

Reassuringly, in the wake of the four horsemen, Haitians are still laughing, they are still smiling (often the most beautiful of smiles), still loving and it would seem, at every opportunity, still finding small things to be grateful for.

If you’d like to volunteer to help in Haiti or to donate then please visit:

www.imateam.org

www.jphro.org