Linda - This is the kinda reality about these missionaries...

Linda - This is the kinda reality about these missionaries (who are viewed as saviors) that many of brain washed Haitian diaspora just refuse to acknowledge and care to know about.

A few years ago, I confroted a couple (husband & wife) who claimed to spend a lot of time in Haiti doing missionary work. Their main goal to come here in upstate New York to this conference, of course, was to get financial donation from these hard working people to run their mission in Haiti.

Without any exageration, what I heard from this couple and their description of Haiti made me want to vomit.

Everytime I tried to stand up and cut them off with a question, my friend kept pulling me to sit down.

Well, the husband pulled out a picture of a little 2-room house build with clay (mud) somewhere in the country side. They claimed it to the odience to be the "Best" school in the entire country of Haiti.

That was the last straw for me.

I stood up and I told them how offensive and humiliating their description of Haiti was to me and to present the picture of this 2-room shack as the best school in the entire country of Haiti was just plain outrageous, and I don't like it. I thought the couple was going to have a heart attack because they didn't think there were any Haitians in the odience.

It was dead silence in the room so much that I could hear a pen dropped.

I reminded the odience that Haiti, too, is a country just like the United States.

We, Haitians, do realize that our country is poor and that it doesn offer opportunities to its citizens like US has to offer to its citizens.

However, despite of the poverty, Haiti does have college and universities also.

I told the odience that I did all my schooling in Haiti, and I don't remember ever attended any school that looked like the one on the picture.

As we speak, I told the odience, I have nerphews and nieces attending college in Haiti and nothing like the one on the picture.

We met after the meeting and they apologized for their misrepresentation of Haiti, but unfortunatly, the damage was already done.

Ever since, I have devoted my time to pay closer attention to what these people are saying about Haiti as their fundraing efforts, and rebuque them whenever I can. I have been thinking for a longtime about spending some time in Haiti with the sole objective to expose these missionaries and campaign against them using every means necessary to keep them away from Haiti.