Each year hundreds of thousands of visitors fly or sail to the Caribbean to enjoy the sun and sea. Beyond Borders offers a radical alternative to the typical package vacation to the Caribbean. Instead of being isolated behind resort walls and insulated from the reality most local people live, Beyond Borders takes visitors into the heart of Haiti's reality through its Transformational Travel program.

Most of what outsiders learn of Haiti they learn through news reports that focus almost exclusively on Haiti’s economic and political difficulties. Rarely is Haiti’s rich cultural, spiritual, and natural beauty mentioned. In fact, there is much that we from the wealthy, industrialized world can learn from Haiti and her people. But even we who and are disillusioned with our society’s soulless pursuit of possessions and power can miss what Haiti’s poor have to teach us.

The global gap between rich and poor continues to grow. Today the poorest fifth of the world's population possesses less than 1% of the world's wealth, while the wealthiest fifth owns more than 85%. Over 800 million people are chronically hungry while chronic overeating is the greatest threat to public health in the world's richest nations. This growing disparity is unjust, unsustainable ecologically, and imperils peace locally and globally.

The spiritual price we pay for allowing this to continue is even greater. As we amass more wealth and collect more stuff we don't need, we, the privileged of the world, must harden our hearts, close our eyes, or invent ideologies that absolve us of any responsibility for the welfare of our poorest neighbors. But the question the Apostle John asked is still relevant, "If someone has enough to live on, and yet when seeing another in need shuts up his heart against him, how can it be said that the love of God dwells in him?" (I John 3:16)

The choices people make in privileged societies has a huge influence on the choices available to the masses of poor people who live on the edge of survival in places like Haiti.

Through the Transformational Travel program, Beyond Borders provides privileged people from the global north the rare opportunity to meet face to face with their neighbors of the global south.

Participants travel to Haiti, stay in the homes of poor Haitians, and learn more of their struggle to organize and build a better life for themselves. They interact, through translators, learning about their faith, their struggles and joys. They witness community organizations wrestling against great odds to make a better life for their people. They meet Haitians and expatriates who have spent years working for justice alongside the oppressed.

These encounters are almost always transformative for all involved, including the Haitian communities who receive the visitors. Participants from the north become more aware of the people on the other side of many of the choices they make and become more engaged in the effort to build a more just and equitable world. The Haitian hosts are affirmed for their courage and their struggle is validated. The sense that their voice is not only heard, but can make a difference in how their privileged visitors see the world, is a great encouragement.

Participants may engage in a small service project while in Haiti; but they perform their most important service through their effort to listen to and learn from their Haitian hosts. Along with interacting with their hosts, visiting groups are given time to question, reflect, and begin to re-examine old assumptions. Participants continue to serve after they return home in the response they make to their experience and in the life choices they make that promote local and global justice and peace.

For most groups Beyond Borders organizes a one to three day stay with a rural Haitian family. Most participants say this experience is the highlight of their experience in Haiti, giving them the chance to form warm relationships with the members of their host family.

Here's what some participants and some of their Haitian hosts have said about this experience.

See a schedule of upcoming groups traveling to Haiti that may have availability for other participants.

First Do No Harm: How do groups traveling to Haiti to help sometimes do real harm? Read this essay by David Diggs.

I'd like more information from Beyond Borders about Transformational Travel.