Contributed by Margaret Schramm Horn
“Mwen regrèt ou gen pou doulè.” (I am sorry for your pain.)
It was the chant that greeted the redhead American, Ian, who led our team, as we returned patients from surgery to their family and cots. Ian, an American from Colorado, had been volunteering at the hospital in Jimani, a small town on the Haitian/ Dominican Republic border, since the first evacuations from Port-au-Prince. Creole is the national language of Haiti, but rarely taught or studied outside of Haiti. He mastered (and taught us) that simple but heartfelt sentence in their language, and it created an immediate bond between all of us. In that small phrase, we were able to cross cultural boundaries.
I was thousands of miles away from my corporate life. I had just parted company with my former employer, a casualty of the financial crisis. The timing proved perfect to volunteer as a relief worker in the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake.