Sitting in a Key-West style restaurant in the airport, surrounded by key-lime pie colored walls and benches, a wall of windows showing off the Miami sky, and a Backstreet Boys song flowing from hidden wall speakers, I ordered a fish sandwich.  My stomach had felt bad from the moment I stepped into the airport, as it does every time I returned from Haiti, but I convinced myself it was hunger lingering from the hours and hours since my 6am protein bar. My server brought out my sandwich shockingly quickly, and my heart sank at the plate’s outrageously American portion size. Craving protein, I pulled the giant slab of fish out and ate it on its own, relishing every bite of the fresh (tasting) seafood that’s impossible to find in Michigan. As I ate the last bite, I sighed, full, and sat back. I stared at the plate of food left, a giant toasted bun, two slabs of lettuce the size of my hands, and a tower of French fries, and began to cry. I thought about trying to hide my tears, but instead decided to just let it happen. Better to have someone ask me why I was crying than to pretend nothing was wrong. Better to have someone ask me so that I could tell them about the hundreds of children I have met, played with, loved, and been loved by, than to pretend I hadn’t met them. Better to explain that those precious little ones were starving to death -quite literally- every single day, than to pretend they didn’t exist.

With a heavy heart and full stomach, I continued to cry as I remembered the image of the two brothers we had met in the mountains of La Fond, starving and brittle, providing a haunting caricature of the term “skin and bones.” Pictured twelve and seventeen, the boys had been long ago left in the charge of their sister while their parents were living far away, attempting to start a new life in the city. I stared at my mound of unfinished bread, feeling more and more sick as I tried to calculate how many days this much food would keep alive two boys who could barely finish the two saltine crackers our team tearfully fed them. I am not one to waste food; anyone who knows me knows that. I eat off the floor and out of the trash, I stow away other people’s leftovers and table-bread in my purse at restaurants, and I scold anyone around me whose eyes are bigger than their stomachs; but there I sat with this guilt-mountain on my plate, my heart breaking equally for the starving boys in Haiti and the people in America who can’t see any reason to cry over leftovers.

We warn our volunteers about the frustration they may experience upon returning to the states after a week in Haiti. We give them tips on coping with the excess, the wastefulness, the aloofness, the pettiness. Haiti changes their hearts, some for a week, some forever, and they see their country and the world in a different way after just 7 days. People ask me if I still go through this ‘culture-shock,’ even after having gone to and from Haiti every few weeks for the past three years. Do I just learn to accept America for what it is and Haiti for what it is? Am I able to pass off American Culture as just a different situation, a different place? Am I able to consider that the Haitians ‘don’t know any better’ than their situation? They ask if it’s becomes more normal to go from Haiti back to the US, they ask if it gets easier, if I get used to it, if I grow calloused to it.

The answer is no.

The answer is that it gets worse and worse with each trip back to North America. The answer is I feel physically ill every time my feet touch American soil upon return. The answer is I battle daily with my flesh and my King over the bitterness and anger that rages and grows within me towards the American people. The answer is that despite how much I adore my friends, I find myself less and less able to relate to their lives. The answer is that the country I was raised in very rarely feels like home to me anymore. The answer is that I feel my soul growing more and more feral, barbaric and discontent, and with that comes a great deal of loneliness.

Friends, family, strangers, hear my heart; I am eternally grateful for the freedoms allotted to me having grown up in this country. I believe Christ loves the American people just as much as he loves his children anywhere else. I recognize the enormous blessing it has been to live in a community of people who have supported me and Poured Out.

I was hoping by the end of writing this, I would have a resolutory statement or series of statements, but it seems I do not. For today, I will pray for Yahweh to show me how to love without judgment, how to lead by serving, and how to lean on He who adores the starving and the gluttonous.  For today, I will simply cry over leftovers.