Over the past 15 years I’ve traveled to some awful places.

Inner Mongolia where people are so poor they’re living in caves.

Northern Uganda where the average life expectancy is 42 years.

Tribal areas in India where day laborers make 17 cents a day and farmers commit suicide because they can’t raise a $100 dowry to marry their daughter.

Bangladesh where I saw 3 year olds begging in rush hour traffic.

I thought I knew what extreme poverty was.

I was wrong.

My recent trip to Haiti was one of the most depressing and shocking trips I have ever taken. Two hours off the coast of the world’s richest country, 9 million men, women and children are living amidst absolute squalor and desperation.

Starvation is a major problem. Half of the population lives on less than $1 a day. The price of rice has risen more than 80% since December. There were food riots last month that left 7 people dead.

Hunger pains are so severe and prevalent they have a nickname for it.

They call it “Chlorox.” Because it feels like bleach eating away at the insides of your stomach.

To stop the pain, some Haitians have resorted to eating cookies made of mud.  Yes, mud.

Just off the coast of  America, where the leading cause of death is obesity-related cardio disease, where we are literally eating ourselves to death, 8 million people on an island called Haiti are so desperate they are eating cookies made out of mud.

I must say I was not excited about this trip. Haiti is also the kidnapping capital of the Americas. Armed gangs rule half the neighborhoods. The government is weak, the police no where to be seen and U.N. soldiers are far and few in between. But we hired a local security firm and off we went.

First stop, a visit to some local neighborhoods to see how our children and their families live.

Village of God is a slum built on the banks of a dried up river “overflowing” with sewage and rotting garbage. The “houses” were shacks made up of scraps of tin, wood, rusted iron, and cinder blocks.

We passed a steady parade of people carrying plastic water containers back and forth. There was no running water or electricity. Wild pigs foraged all around us. Waste water flowed past our feet. The smells I cannot describe and I cannot forget.

We went to City Soleil, the largest slum in the Western hemisphere.

The police don’t go here, armed gangs control the place, and 300,000 people – most of them children – live under unimaginable circumstances.

Here the shacks are worse than Village of God. We poked our heads in a few of the shacks, walked around for about an hour (that was all that was safe) and shook our heads in disbelief. You would not let your dog or cat sleep in one of these “homes.”

(FYI: the U.S. budget for “Humanitarian Aid” to help feed starving people in the 3rd world is about $30 billion a year. Americans spend about $45 billion every year on cat and dog food.)

In spite of all of this poverty and squalor, as we walked through these slums, we were met with friendly faces and smiling children. We saw, met, joked with, hugged and held hundreds of kids during our neighborhood “walks”. Most of them had no shoes, shirts, etc. Some had no clothes at all.

We showed the kids pictures of themselves which always drew gasps. Most had never seen pictures of themselves. They laughed and giggled like kids everywhere do. Many of them had beautiful smiles and huge personalities. They have no idea what kind of lives lay ahead of them.

The next stop was the General Hospital in Port Au Prince. This just might be the poorest and most miserable hospital in the world. In the bowels of this dreadful place is a dirty door that bears a sign that says, Unit Pour Les Enfant Abandon. (Unit For Abandoned Children.)

It’s where thousands of Haitian babies and kids who are thrown away end up. Having a cleft is just one of many reasons they might end up here. Some are crippled, mentally impaired, autistic, diseased, etc.

Healthy children who end up here disappear quickly as they are stolen and sold to black-market adoption rings that pay up to $20,000 per child. Those who are left, are left to languish for years and years, two to a bed.

There was no laughing or giggling here. Just quiet desperation, an occasional moan, soft crying. 15 minutes was as long as I could take in this room, this “dying room”, before I went outside to get some fresh air.

Some of these kids have been in these cribs for many years with no end in sight.

We visited a cleft clinic sponsored by Smile Train partner Medishare out of Miami. As you imagine, there are very few plastic surgeons in Haiti and few that are focused on helping the poor. Haiti has a Porsche dealership but not one Haitian surgeon – that we could find anyhow – that will provide cleft surgeries.

Thus the need to send in teams of Americans to Haiti. For the short term, anyhow.  Hopefully we will be able to train local Haitian surgeons over time. This group brought over some of Miami’s best surgeons and nurses.

We met many of the children and spoke to their parents. Some had come from far away when they heard news of a free cleft surgery program. All of them were very poor and could never afford this surgery.

We met a woman who epitomized how tragic the situation in Haiti is. Andrea, who looks like she is 65 years old, is actually just 35 years old. She has been waiting all her life for someone to help her. And no one ever did. Well, at least not till a couple weeks ago when we showed up.

We operated on her 30 minutes after I took this picture. Her surgery took about an hour, and it will dramatically improve her life, (or what little she has left of it).

We also met a 40-year old man named Bartholomew.

Like Andrea, he had been waiting all his life for surgery. But when he saw how many children needed surgery. he told the staff he would like to have cleft surgery but not until every single child who needed it received it.

Every child did receive surgery as did selfless Bartholomew.

But imagine if someone had helped Andrea and Bartholomew when they  needed it most.  Imagine if 30 – 40 years ago, someone cared enough to put their arm around a very poor, very frightened little girl or boy and helped them get surgery. They could have gone to school, could have married, could have raised a family.

It would have saved them from 30 years of pain, suffering and heartache.

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