This week has been a time-warped slumber, the end of a week in Haiti that feels like a year. 

A hushed peace has fallen on us, missionaries who arrived with malaria pills and gifts for the orphanage. We explore plantain jungles with lush plantings of sweet potato vines, beans, avocados, mangos and papayas. Along the way, we pass horses and goats with sharp bones protruding at their hips, tied to trees, no water in sight. We see bone-thin puppies and people living under tarps, boiling milk on open fires. Everywhere there is a lack, a deficit, a need. Yet the puppies wag their tails, and the people never stop singing.

Up on the mountaintop under a mango tree, our translator is turning our attention to something in his hands. A sack of seeds. In his French Creole-thick accent, he tells us how the millet seeds provide nourishment for a starved nation.

“Do you know this seed in America?” We clutch our bags, bow our heads, kick the dirt. No one wants to be the one saying the words. We feed it to our birds.

His eyes are kind. Full of grace. The moment is unbearable.

I cry on the ride down the mountain. I do not lift my camera once to take a single photo of the emerald velvety folds in the hills or the diamonds dancing on the turquoise water. And of course, we sing all the way.

* * *

Today, as I watch the birds from my porch, I remember Haiti. The thwack thwack of women washing clothes in the river with one shared bar of soap. Children with jaundice and fever, no medicine, braiding our hair, singing.

I hear wings beating furiously, two purple finches watching me from the branch of a tulip poplar as I lift the heavy bag, spilling seed onto the railing as I refill empty feeders. I watch them watching me. I remember Haiti—the dignity, the suffering, and the glory of it all. And then I feed the birds.