Finding light in the mud and hay

So, barring the massive snowstorm engulfing the northeastern USA, I am heading back to Haiti. I've kind of left it low-key, and even a few of my close friends didn't even know I was going.
Some have wondered why I wanted to go back, especially at this time of year, when there are many more fun things I could be doing in the city. There are several reasons: some pragmatic (like, it's warm! I figure I didn't want to leave December out as a month that I didn't ride on an airplane. They need people on the ground. It'd be good to see my Haitian friends again. I need to see with my own eyes how progress has been made, or not, in the time I've been away), some not. Certainly, in light of various current events, I felt it was much more poignant to spend Christmas (originally I was supposed to be there Christmas Day, but for various reasons that didn't happen) literally in the mud and hay with the same poor, displaced, potentially illegitimate children that our Lord Himself found Himself in when He arrived two thousand years ago, rather than sitting around at feast after feast, gorging myself on my family's abundance. My emotional and spiritual angst cannot compare to the angst that continues, one year after the earthquake.
A Haitian friend of mine that I was chatting with online the night of the election riots told me, in real time, how she could hear the gunfire, and could smell the tires burning in the streets of Port-au-Prince. That clinched it for me. How we could sit back and allow such horridness, such despair to continue just five hours away (just as close as Vancouver is) is inconceivable. To rationalize that this is God's judgement on these people makes me want to vomit.
We are to put feet and wings to the gospel. It is good news. It can change lives. It can change nations. It can transform hearts, people and entire societies. To keep it in our heads or our hearts disinvolves the rest of the body, keeping it an inward-looking faith. And so, off I go again, to try to put hands and feet to my Jesus, and trying to find Him as well in the faces that I will see...