Carrington said that he tries to spend time with the children in Haiti when he’s not working there.

Ted Carrington has changed.

The Warren County native, who’s been doing humanitarian work in Haiti since 2013, said that his experience there has changed not only his personal life but his worldview.

“I was racist,” Carrington said candidly, early in our interview. “I don’t know if you want to say that or not, but I was.” Carrington said that his was a general, recognizable sort of thought bias. “I’d never say anything to anyone. I wouldn’t hurt anyone. But I knew what I felt. Like, I wouldn’t go to this gas station or that place because I knew it had ties with Middle Eastern cultures.”

Carrington said that it wasn’t a specifically motivated bias, but rather a product of having grown up with no exposure to people of another racial or cultural background. Still, said Carrington, it didn’t stop him from recognizing an urge he’d felt since early in his life – a calling to “help people.” For a long time, he said, he didn’t know what that would look like. Self-employed for 15 years in the oil industry and now employed by John Anderson Construction, Carrington said that his ideas of how he might be able to help someone tended to reflect his life and his work. “I was working, I was doing things,” said Carrington. Still he said, doing things did not translate to accomplishing things for him.

“I thought a lot, originally, about going to Africa to help drill water wells.”

But in 2013, Carrington said, his pastor told him that he “really ought to think about going to Haiti.” His pastor had been on several mission trips to Haiti and told Carrington about the poverty there, and the need.

After the 2010 earthquake that ravaged 90 percent of the place where Carrington works in Haiti, the need moving forward was predominantly shelter. When he followed his pastor’s advice and went to Haiti on his first humanitarian trip, he said, he spent time building what were known as “rubble houses.”

The symbolism of these homes is significant. Built with a foundational core of the rubble left from previously collapsed buildings, bound with wire and built into the center of each wall, rubble homes are constructed using the broken remains of the past with the intent of creating new structures that are resilient to future devastation.

The journey from Warren County to Grand Goave, a commune in the Ouest Department, in the southwest of Haiti, isn’t as long or as arduous as one might imagine, but it certainly isn’t easy either, Carrington said. It starts with a plane ride from Pittsburgh to either Miami or Atlanta. From there, another plane carries aid workers to Port-Au-Prince, where they take a two hour “tap tap” ride from the capital into the rural area where the work is to be done.

That first time that he stepped off the plane in Port-Au-Prince though, said Carrington, he was immediately flooded with an experience he’d never had to confront before: being the only white face among a majority of Haitians. For a place that’s 95 percent non-white, it presents an opportunity for those in the majority here at home to experience being a minority instead. “I was standoffish. Nervous,” said Carrington. Leaving the airport, where men – some employed at the airport and others not – clamor for the chance to help travelers with luggage in exchange for money, Carrington said that everyone tends to watch as the “blans” (Haitian Creole for whites) emerge. “You don’t know what it’s like to be a minority,” Carrington said. “It’s heavy. It’s breathtaking. Literally, it will take your breath away. It’s humbling.”

“After a few days on that first trip,” said Carrington, “one of our interpreters could tell that I was uncomfortable. He said to me, ‘brother, what happens when you cut yourself.'” Carrington said that he told the interpreter that, of course, he bleeds. “‘And what color is it,’ he asked me. When I told him ‘red,’ he just smiled and said ‘yeah, me too.'” Carrington said that it hit him hard. “I actually turned around to look,” he said, “because I felt the hand of God, on my heart. I heard him say, ‘this is where you need to be.'”

Such a simple lesson, but one that Carrington said he couldn’t fully appreciate without the experience of directly witnessing the need. In Grand Goave, Carrington said, there is one water well to serve the population, but many of the residents of the region live up to four miles away, meaning that they walk eight hours a day to access an often inconsistent water source. The wells that have been built around Haiti are mostly 30 to 40 years old, and the agencies that drilled them left after doing so, without putting infrastructure in place for the Haitians to maintain or repair them when necessary.

“You can help all you want,” said Carrington, “but without infrastructure it’s no good.” His goal on the past ten trips he’s taken to Haiti, as well as on his upcoming eleventh, the second trip on which his son Trey, who is nine, will accompany him, is to spread “the word of God, shelter, water, and food.” But it’s also, he said, to do what he can to chip away at the main barrier to Haitians being able to care sustain themselves, which is education. “Just teaching them good farming practices, basic hygiene stuff,” Carrington said, are the small things that humanitarians can do in Haiti that don’t require any money or any religious agenda. He said that he’s seen things like a donkey standing in one section of a river, with someone washing a dirtbike downstream and, below that, a mother and her children bathing in the same water.

After that first trip, Carrington said, “I was in a bad way. On the plane, I was very upset,” he said. He kept asking himself the same question: “Why am I so fortunate just because of where I was born? It’s not right,” he said, “that some people should have so much and others so little. We’re all the same.”

Carrington said that the desire for his children, who his wife Wendy only allowed to come along after going with Carrington herself to check out the safety and conditions, is to make sure that they get the exposure he never did.

Carrington said that he’d like to one day buy property in Grand Goave, not as a vacation or a leisure spot, but as a way to both make it easier for himself and others who want to go there to work do so, but also to provide some sort of employment in the form of Haitian caretakers.

Which is something, he said, he already tries to do. He and his family are hoping to adopt one of the boys from the Heart to Heart orphanage in Grand Goave. Until they are able to do that, he said, he sends money to another of the young men who live there to watch out for the boy. “His job is just to watch out for him. Make sure he has food. Make sure he has what he needs. I’ll send $40 and tell him ‘you keep $20 and make sure that he has what he needs with the rest.'” He also brings home the intricate handmade goods from the people in Grand Goave to sell, and sends any money he makes with them back to the community.

“I’ve learned so much more from them than I can ever teach them in return. I can never repay them for what they’ve given me,” said Carrington of the people with whom he’s forged genuine connections in Haiti. “People are not born to hate. We’re taught to hate. Hate is not natural. Love is natural. We learn to hate.”