We are currently living with Ryan's parents and they have been gracious to allow us to invade their personal space. With seven people living in 1400 square feet, it's surprising how everyone seems to fit and find "their own hole", as my niece Eloise liked to say. It really isn't that crowded at all, when I compare it with the way my Haitian friends live. Often, an extended family group of ten or more occupies a two room home. Just recently, I talked with a young man named Makenson who is trying to attend tech school in Port au Prince but having trouble finding housing. He asked a classmate last week if he could live with him in his family home. The friend asked his mother, who replied that they have many people in their house, but he could stay until the end of January. This is very common in Haiti... you don't have to have an empty bedroom or even an empty bed to open your home up to friends in need. Once, when I was working in Seguin, I had to take Nancy, a patient who had just delivered twins, to the hospital because she had post partem heart failure. The hospital gave her a bed, but would not allow her newborn twins to stay with her. So, she asked around and found a friend of a friend (a stranger to her) who lived in a one room house near the hospital. She asked the woman if she and her twin babies could stay with her for a few days and walk back and forth to the hospital to receive her treatments. The woman agreed and hung up a sheet in her house to divide the one room into two, giving this stranger half of her small house for more than a week until she was discharged from the hospital.
We are thankful for our place here with our gracious family. However, as grown adults in our thirties with careers and children of our own, we feel buying a house is an appropriate next step. So, the house hunting has begun. Seeing as we have never done this before, I've been watching a lot of television programs on finding a new house. In most of the programs, the prospective home buyers have a list of 'must-haves' for their new purchase. The most popular must-haves for these North American couples are: lots of closet space, an open floor plan, a spacious yard, an eat-in kitchen with open sight lines into the main living area, an en-suite bathroom off the master bedroom, and at least one bedroom per child. Certainly some of the things on this 'must-have' list are appealing to me as well. But I just can't get the images of my Haitian friends and the way they live out of my head when I hear these lists of 'musts'. Here are some examples:
OPEN FLOOR PLAN
LAUNDRY ROOM ON THE MAIN FLOOR
EAT-IN KITCHEN WITH CLEAR SIGHT LINES TO THE MAIN LIVING AREA
LOTS OF NATURAL LIGHTING
These are just a few examples. Other pictures that run through my mind are of outhouses full of cockroaches, walls made of cornstalks, and homes no bigger than walk-in closets. I don't think I should have ripped tents, outdoor cooking areas, and outhouses on my must-haves list, and I don't think it's wrong for us to be looking for a comfortable and attractive place to live, but I do think that whatever we choose should come with a mortgage that allows us to live below our means, leaving us with money to spare for those in our lives who may have needs. And I hope that wherever we live and whatever the square footage or number of bedrooms, that we are able to follow the example of our Haitian friends and the advice of Scripture in Hebrews 13:2, and remember to extend hospitality when the opportunity arises.
We are going house hunting tomorrow to see what we might find. I pray the Lord can guide us to just the right place. I'll keep you posted.
