This article originally appeared onTIME.
Alongside our military mentors, our hands and souls touched the bodies of thedying and the dead.
Our doctors tended the injured.
Credit: Monica Schipper/WireImage
Our true sacred duty was to understand the support they may need in their effort.
My months of day-to-day optimism evaporated.
For the first time, it all looked hopeless, reminiscent of the images from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Rather, they were Haitian people themselves.
They cleared tens of thousands of tons of rubble from the streets.
They reopened neighborhoods to commerce.
They facilitated the healing return of its inhabitants from displacement camps.
They rebuilt and retrofitted houses and infrastructure, all the while teaching and learning job skills.
The organizations doctors opened medical clinics, which brought in international investment, both private and public.
Today, the recovery is decades ahead of my wild imaginations most optimistic projection.
The Haitian people offered us a front-row seat to miracles.
And they continue to be ready to bring more, combating the continuing plagues of poverty and environmental degradation.
And there is no disputing the value they add to American society.
Second-generation Haitian Americans earnbachelor degreesat a rate 50% higher thanthe general U.S. population.
Fourteen percent of second-generation Haitian Americans hold a masters degree, Ph.D. or advanced professional degree.
That sum is significantly higher than any nation-state or international agency donates to the country.
On this day, we should be recognizing their grace, courage, loss, hardship and heroism.
We should be mourning those lost to a curable poverty, to avoidable cholera, toHurricane Mathew.
Those standards are not disgraceful enough.
The solution to our current divisiveness does not live in the White House.
An enemy of mankind.
He is indeed an enemy of the state.
