In January of 1977, my family’s home burned to the ground in the middle of the night. I was 10 years old and it was just me and my mother at home that night; my father’s work had taken him away for a few days. Our home was on Wells Creek in Sandy Hook, KY. My father was born and raised there and when his mother passed away, his boyhood home and the land he was raised on was left to him. Sandy Hook had a population of about 600 at the time and our house was on a tiny 1 ½ lane road about 10 miles away from the center of town, which consisted of a school, a post office, a city hall/police station, the one-room public library, and a couple of shops and restaurants. No fire department to speak of – just a few volunteers scattered here and there that would turn out to help any fire department that might be able to respond from a surrounding bigger city.

Have you ever looked back on a situation and realized that if one thing, just one thing, had happened differently, how altered everything after that would have been? It just so happened that because my father was gone, my mother fell asleep on the couch that night and didn’t bother getting up to go into their bedroom…which probably saved our lives. The fire apparently started upstairs and the smoke, after completely engulfing the upstairs, finally began to roll down the staircase into the living room. If she had been in her room, we may never have got out. But my mother did wake up…to a room full of smoke and the sound of the entire second floor completely engulfed in flames. She grabbed the phone and immediately called for help. This was before 911, before automated dispatch, before cell phones or even cordless phones. My mother dialed “0” and waited for an operator to patch her through to the police department. She had to stand in one spot while she spoke because the phone was attached to the wall, while the fire and smoke became thicker and louder, and while I slept curled up in my bed, completely unaware of anything that was going on above me.  She hung up the phone, ran to my bed, shook me awake enough to get me to my feet, wrapped me in a blanket and threw on my slippers, and ushered me out of there.

I don’t remember much. Somehow I must have got from my bed, through the front door of my grandparent’s home that I had known since birth, across the gigantic porch that I loved so much even at that age, down the massively wide stairs that I had played on, lounged on, skipped down, and learned to climb up on all fours as a baby, across the yard and safely into our truck. That I remember well…sitting in the truck with my mother, snow on the ground, the temperature below freezing, clutching the blanket around me, and watching a gigantic fireball that used to be our house. The sight and sound of it all was nothing like I had ever seen, not even in a movie. My mother started the engine and backed a safer distance away from the house, but then she put it in park and we sat there. Eventually I asked her while crying “When are the firemen coming?” And she answered “They’re not.” I didn’t understand. Firemen always came when there was a fire. “We are too far out,” she explained. “The roads are too icy. No one is coming.” At 10 years old, I don’t think I knew what the term “desolate” meant, but I know now that was exactly what I was feeling. No one was coming to help. We were alone.

Then my mother remembered something…her purse with all her money and her checkbook in it. It may be hard for some people to imagine, but there was a time when people bought things with money. You carried it everywhere. In an age before credit cards, cash was king. Mom had just cashed my father’s work check and still had most of it in her purse to use at the grocery store, department store, gas station, post office, etc. She started to climb out of the truck and go back into the house, confident that she would be able to “just run in real quick and be right back out.”  Of course, I screamed and held onto her with a death grip so she finally gave in and stayed with me in the truck. Moments later we both watched as the entire second floor collapsed in on the first. Neither one of us said a word. We sat there, completely alone for the rest of the night. I don’t think my mother really knew where to go or what to do. Every single thing that had ever belonged to our family was being destroyed right in front of us. I believe she was frozen in shock at the prospect of what was happening and what would happen after the sun came up.

After what seemed like hours upon hours, right before dawn, we saw someone speeding toward us. It was our nearest neighbor from a couple of miles away. He had gotten up to milk his cows and saw the glow coming from our direction. He must have talked mom down from her state of shock and after a while convinced her to follow him back home. By the time we pulled away from what used to be our home, the only thing still standing were those stairs leading up to an enormous pile of flaming debris. I remember thinking, as a child would, that my life would never be okay again. How could it ever be okay again?

Not surprisingly, people came out to help as word spread. We stayed with our neighbors for a couple of days, and they rearranged their lives to make room for us. We moved into my other grandmother’s house while we looked for a place of our own and donations of clothes and household items started to come in. I don’t remember everything, but I remember one deep red quilt with little white yarn ties spaced every few inches in a pattern. That became MY quilt. I have no idea from whom or where it came but it was the first item after the fire that I claimed as my own. And I know my parents appreciated the clothes that were given to me by people who had girls my age. I made it out of our house with just my pajamas and my slippers, but within a few days, I had enough clothes with which to begin school again. It took months – years really – to climb out from under our family’s disaster, but we couldn’t have done it without the kindness and support of our friends and neighbors. And these were people that did not have a lot to give in the first place.

You see, our neighbors were working farmers, carpenters, mechanics and laborers of all sorts but the work was hard and scarce to come by and the economy was pretty bad. Nearly every family we knew was living paycheck to paycheck…barely. This was a community where most people struggled to pay their bills at month’s end. Looking back now, unemployment was high at 9%, gas prices had tripled within five years or so, the economy had bottomed out, and inflation was rampant. And yet our family had what we needed, even without insurance money or any life savings to speak of. We were in need, and the people around us responded.

In 1977, I could have told you exactly who I considered to be my neighbors, and not one of them would have looked any different than me. We all would have gone to the same school, spoke the same language, and worshiped in nearly the same way. Not so much nowadays. In this modern age filled with instant messaging, Facebook, texting, email, and constant cell phone calls, I’ve been amazed at how small the world has become. In my adult life, I have worked where I met and talked with people from dozens of countries spanning nearly all of the continents on a daily basis. I’ve made friends over the years who spoke other languages more fluently than they spoke English. I lived next to people who worshipped in ways I never knew about before. My children see faces and places on TV and the internet that I never saw or knew about until I was an adult. The world seems so much smaller today which, strangely enough, has increased the size of my “neighborhood” tremendously.

That is why I was dumbfounded recently when a casual acquaintance of mine seemed offended that I was going to Haiti to help out with the cholera outbreak there. She kept saying “they” and “them” like the words were sour in her mouth or something. After some polite dancing around by both of us, she finally said what she had been trying to say. “We’ve got our own problems. I think we should fix our stuff first before running around helping all these other people all over the world.” Well then. There it was; the basic foundation of her beliefs. In her mind, America’s borders are sidewalks that give a clean dividing line between “us” and “them.” We will stay on our side of the street and you will stay on your side. We will each take care of our own problems and life as we know it will flourish. It is an amazing concept if you think about it in its simplest form – dividing the world up into small manageable easy-to-handle pieces. If only reality conformed to that concept.

Ask any person with a job, ask any parent, ask any politician about how their day progresses. Some may start off with a to-do list or at least a general sense of the tasks that need to get done by the end of the day. Then ask them how they get done. Does one thing get finished before another is started? Does one item follow another in exact order? Do others only add to your list when they are certain you have completed everything else? And finally, does the list ever get completed? Is there ever an end to the tasks that are needed to complete a job, raise a family, or run a country?

America has her share of problems – homelessness, sickness, bankruptcy, corruption, recession, unemployment, teen suicide, drugs, inflation, a broken justice system, declining education standards, terrorism, politics, human and civil rights issues – I could go on and on. But does this woman think that there will be a day when all of this will be over? Does she think that one glorious day we will all wake up to a neighborhood where everyone’s problems are gone? As any good employee, parent, or leader will tell you, life is made up of putting out several fires at a time, all the time, some small, some life changing.

And what if her definition of neighbor isn’t the same as mine? Should I only consider those physically close to me my neighbors or could I include my whole city? If I include those in my city, what about the county or state, or am I starting to get too broad? If someone in West Virginia needed something would I turn them away and say “Sorry, I’m from Pennsylvania and we have our own problems up here. You’re on your own, kid.” And if I consider my neighborhood to include my city, county, state, and maybe even my entire country (even though all of those places include people who I don’t know and who may be very different from me), is it really such a leap to imagine I could think of people from other countries as my neighbors as well?

I am a nurse. Helping people is what I do. Would anyone question a soldier grabbing his gun during a battle, or a firefighter jumping on the truck when the alarm sounds, or a police officer chasing a criminal? Of course not – it’s what they do, it’s what they’ve trained for, and it’s what they would do even if it weren’t their job. It becomes who you are. I am a nurse and there are sick people in Haiti. End of story. I cannot wait until all our problems are solved to go there any more than our neighbors 33 years ago could have walked away from us because they had their own problems. They housed us when they had no room to spare. They fed us when it was hard enough to feed their own family. They gave us things from their own homes so we could start to build a new one. They took time to comfort us when their own days were filled to capacity with daily tasks just getting by.

I have the time, I have the ability, I have the funds, and I have the vivid memory of a lot of people going out of their way to help us when we needed it. I think the first phrase I would like to learn to speak clearly in Creole will be “Kouman mwen ka ede w frè parèy?”

Translation: “How can I help you, neighbor?”

ed. note:  Allison Fisher is serving in Haiti from January 6 - 13, 2011 with Steve and Nancy James.  She is a member of Royersford Baptist Church, and a nurse at Reading Hospital, Reading, PA.