When my sister first suggested that I write down some of my thoughts about the situation in Haiti immediately following the cataclysmic earthquake on the 12th of January, 2010, my first thought was, "It is too soon." I have no idea what I think yet, or maybe I am thinking too many things to make much sense out of them.

In a way I am in emotional shock. Although I am thousands of miles away, safe in my Montana home, watching the devastation come to life on CNN and Facebook, in some ways, this disaster is happening to me. I am watching the place where I grew up, a personal piece of my past, crumble to the ground. I write this, not to make this incident about me, but rather to illustrate why I might have a more unique perspective than the average American who has to look Haiti up on a map. Wait, I mean Google. No one looks anything up on an actual map anymore.As a child of non-denominational, medical missionaries, my brother, sister, and I grew up in Haiti. Although most of my time was spent with my family in a remote village on the north coast, I attended and graduated High School from Quisqueya Christian Academy in Port-au-Prince in 1986. When I see the images of collapsed buildings on the news it is not just scenes of random, nameless, horrific devastation, I see buildings I knew and played in. More importantly, I see images of a people that I know and it dawns on me that, perhaps, what I have to offer, is some small insight into what these people are experiencing. An emotional translation, for lack of a better term. Because, to even approach an understanding of what the Haitian people are going through requires some understanding of who these people are and how they see the world that is coming down around them and, in some cases, on their very heads

I have spent much of the day watching posts on facebook from people who know of specific individuals trapped in buildings in Port-au-Prince, sending desperate messages over the internet to people in the States and other countries as far as Italy who are sometimes able to send other internet messages to work and rescue teams back in Haiti and direct them to victims. Sometimes all they can do is pray and weep. I see the names and the places and the pleas and I wish that there was something more I could do. I feel helpless. After a while, I know that I have to turn off the computer and the television and take a break.

Most of us attempt to understand events like these by mentally placing ourselves in the situation we see and imagining how it would feel to us, what we might think or do if we were there. Then we imagine it must be like that for the people actually experiencing the event. There is nothing wrong with this approach. It is what we call empathy and doing it is an important human skill. The thing to watch out for, however, is doing it and imagining that what you imagine must be exactly like that for the people we see. If most Americans did this with Haitians, they would severely miss the mark. If one wants to approach understanding what the Haitians are going through, one must first understand that they are a beautifully different people. The average Haitian's experience of a disaster like this is very different from the average American's.