Enlarge Volunteers and workers with Students Helping Honduras work to get their bus out of the mud in early

Posted: January 15th, 2010 Andria Krewson

If you’re on a bus that gets stuck in the mud, everyone has to get out and push.

My daughter brought that lesson back from her trip to Honduras in early January. It was one of many lessons she brought back, but it struck me as the most universal.

She has now been twice, to Villa Soleada, a place supported by Students Helping Honduras, a young growing nonprofit focusing on a particular village.

Four days after her first visit last spring, a 7.1-magnitude earthquake hit off the Honduran coast, knocking out the bridge that just days before had returned her to the San Pedro Sula airport.

But she wanted to go back. She bought her plane ticket in September, for a January trip, and brought it up whenever someone questioned her wisdom.

“Sorry, I have my plane ticket,” she’d say. You’re not stopping me, in other words.

Some people in my family couldn’t understand why she was so intent, beyond the willfulness that a 19-year-old child of mine can exhibit. The U.S. economy has left plenty of charity work to do at home, they said.

Sometimes I agreed with them.

But as a devastating earthquake hit in Haiti on Tuesday, I recalled a trip I took to that tragic country.

I visited Port au Prince with my mother. She had a business trip representing an airline; I had a couple of years of high-school French. We saw the poverty, but also lush tropical luxury, vibrant local art and charming storytellers.

Poverty isn’t abstract in Haiti: It surrounds you in a seething crowd if you travel by car through the slums, hands outstretched. My visit was before the AIDS epidemic, the deforestation of mountainsides and the devastation of hurricanes. But that entrenched poverty made the people sitting ducks in an earthquake.

As I think of those outstretched hands many years ago, I understand better my daughter’s stubborn intent to go back to Honduras.

What affects Honduras, or Haiti, affects us all.

The idea isn’t just a first-world guilt trip, or a religion-centered idea of helping the poor, or some “enlightened self-interest” idea that safe and prosperous neighbors mean a safe and prosperous United States.

We’re on the same bus.

And if you’re on a bus that gets stuck in the mud, everyone has to get out and push.

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