I just arrived back in my apartment after a 10-day trip with the Northwest Haiti Christian Mission, serving in the poorest zone of the poorest country (economically) in the world. (Details of the trip are still available here.) While I have plenty of pictures to share and a number of incredible stories to tell, I want to first write about the very end of the trip while the emotions are still fresh.

Under most normal circumstances, when I fly back to New York City and see the skyline, I get a sense of relief and I feel that I am arriving home. Indeed, I usually can’t help but stare out the window and watch the buildings in Manhattan smoothly glide past below me. I often imagine hopping into a cab and then resuming my day-to-day life at home, church, and work. I like routine, and coming back to New York is essentially a return to just that. This evening, however, I felt something very different altogether; it was a strange combination of anger, frustration, and sadness.

When I peered out of my window tonight, I saw the skyline all lit up and I felt my blood pressure rise and my fists clenching. I was thinking about the injustice of how buildings in New York keep their lights on while most of the Haitians I met live in darkness at night. I was thinking about how those buildings have clean running water conveniently available at all hours of the day while that is a luxury in Haiti. I was thinking about how I was about to spend $40 or $50 on cab fare and dinner, and how much of an impact my evening’s worth of expenditure would make to the families I had left behind. I was thinking about how I was planning to spend hours upon hours at the gym over the next few days helping myself, while people in New York, Haiti, and around the world are desperately seeking attention, love, and help. Being back in New York numbed me.

Having come from a country that has so little, I suppose that it was to be expected that it would shock me to return to a country that has so much. I thought that I’d become more aware of how fortunate we are and gain an even stronger appreciation for what we have. While both of those things have certainly happened, I couldn’t help but become really critical of my current disposition and of the environment around me. One word, in particular, kept on surfacing in my head: wastefulness.

Waste comes in many shapes and colours in New York and in my life. Electricity is wasted. Food is wasted. Time is wasted. As I continued to reflect on all of this on the plane, the anger transitioned into frustration over how poorly I have allocated all of the resources that I am so lucky to have. Specifically considering money and time, I know that I can be so much better at how I spend both of them. While I have to remain realistic and concede that I can’t devote everything and all of me to the service of others, I know that there are steps that I can take that will have a profound positive impact on what my life looks like; I know that I can waste a lot less.

The sadness emerged when I started to think about how resistent I have been about giving more of myself. At church, I have heard time and time again about the needs of the city and of the global community, yet I usually chose to serve where and when it was most convenient for me. I looked for opportunities where I could take a short subway ride home or where I could easily get brunch afterwards with friends. Yes, this is all better than doing nothing, but it does not characterize the sacrificial heart that I am called to have.

Yet, in Haiti, I can say that I got a taste of what it was like to give all of me. There, I had left my home, my job, my family, my friends, and the bulk of my comforts to serve. It was exhilarating and I was able to share the same kind of sacrifice and experience with nearly thirty others – then strangers, now friends. As the plane was making its final descent into the airport, I began to pray for an opportunity to return to Haiti; I left behind a big part of me and my heart melts at the thought of how much more that could be done there. For a brief moment, I even considered recklessly abandoning everything I have in New York to go back on a permanent basis. (This was summarily dismissed as being slightly too big of a leap for me at the moment, but I am encouraged that part of me would even fathom such a remarkable shift.)

Instead, I am going to try and take something Janiel Owen (Executive Director of the mission) said and accept that as a challenge for myself: to make myself available. Just as the Samaritan made himself available to the beaten man in the classic parable, so too can I make my time and my resources available wherever I am, be it in New York or in Haiti. I will volunteer more. I will save more to donate more. And, come January 2014, I will return to Haiti.

To all of my supporters: thank you, from the very bottom of my heart, for helping me and the team get to Haiti to have such an immersive and transformative experience.

At work, I am asked to solve problems. People problems. Project problems. Design problems. Business problems. And, if I do say so myself, I think that I’m pretty good at doing that.

But there is an entirely different class of problems that I am not very good at solving. Sitting in a comfortable chair in an air-conditioned room in New York, surrounded by electronic gizmos and with plenty of food in my kitchen at home, I am worlds apart from a shockingly high proportion of the human population that struggles to meet their basic needs. Almost half of the world lives on $2.50 a day or less. (You can talk to me about purchasing power parity all day but, in the places where a dollar does go a long way, think about all of the things our governments and social programs “give” us that they don’t have.) Indeed, many of those people live here in New York and I do make an effort to bring relief through initiatives with Forefront and through places like The Father’s Heart.

Growing up in Canada, I was raised in a more socialist environment and I feel some of the ideals of socialism have stayed with me. When I think about the adage of how one can judge the qualities of a society based on how well (or poorly) they treat the least fortunate among them, I am proud of the systems and programs that Canada has implemented. As technology continues to power an unprecedented rate of globalization, we find ourselves coalescing into one interconnected community that spans across the world. And there are many who are not fortunate among us.

In a recent conversation I had, participants posited and agreed that not everyone can be missionaries or doctors or relief workers; the world wouldn’t work if that was the case. While I wish my work somehow improved the human condition more, I can also accept that fact that it facilitates my support of efforts that do. It doesn’t change the fact that I want to be a direct agent of change, though.

Sometimes, such an opportunity comes my way. My good friend John Black works with Northwest Haiti Christian Mission, an organization that operates in the poorest region of what has recently become the poorest country on the planet. He mentioned, in passing, that he was leading a trip down to Haiti in January and said that I should think about it. I didn’t at the time but, as the next few days passed, I felt a strong conviction to break out of my bubble and to go for it.

So, come early January, I will be joining him and over a dozen volunteers from Canada and across the United States on a trip that will change the lives of at least two Haitian families, countless children, and all of us headed down. (Even though we all can’t be relief workers, we all can be relief workers sometimes.) You can read more about the trip and on how to support the volunteers here. Please join us – physically, spiritually, financially, or however else – as we seek to address some of the third world problems in our global community.

Some time ago, I wrote a comparison comparing what became the Galaxy Nexus and the iPhone 4S. I ended up getting the Galaxy Nexus because I trusted Google and was already in its (open) ecosystem. There came a point in time when I had a Chromebook, an Android tablet, and an Android phone.

But, no longer.

As of a bit over a week ago, I have abandoned Android. Perhaps it was always looking on as my iPhone-toting friends were snapping beautiful pictures with the amazing camera the iPhone packs. Or maybe it was the hulking size of the Galaxy Nexus getting to me. Perhaps, still, it was the fact that some of the basic Android services I used were riddled with bugs; for example, Google Music tried to download my entire music library every time I was at home and connected to Wi-Fi. Not cool.

I recently got an iPhone from work (a meager 3GS) and decided to give it a shot: I installed some of the applications that I had been using on my Galaxy Nexus and used the iPhone on occasion. I didn’t hate it. In fact, despite being almost three years old, it didn’t feel that terrible compared to the Galaxy Nexus. I was floored. And so the gears started to spin in my head: is it time to rejoin the Apple army?

With the iPhone 5 coming out, I started to contemplate what my next move should be. I was currently enjoying a no-contract, effectively unlimited plan from T-Mobile at a very attractive price. I enjoyed being able to swap out SIM cards whenever I traveled to Canada and be uninhibited by carrier overhead. Do I potentially throw both of these away just to get back into the simple, clean, safe, and sanitized world Apple has created? Here were my options as I saw them:

• Do nothing. Stay with Android and T-Mobile. Cheap but an unpleasant experience.
• Buy an AT&T iPhone 5 off-contract. This will get me the LTE frequency support in the US and Canada, and the ability to swap in a new card without any hassles. Take advantage of employee pricing. Potentially spotty coverage but an improved network.
• Buy an AT&T iPhone 5 on-contract. Same benefits as above but keep $450 to sacrifice some flexibility.
• Buy a Verizon iPhone 5 on-contract. Superior LTE in the US and the ability to unlock the phone for international usage after two months. Better employee pricing than AT&T. Overall, cheaper than AT&T (surprisingly!).

I deliberated up until the last minute and decided to preorder an unlocked AT&T phone when they opened up at 3 am on September 14. I was out pretty late the night before and elected to just stay up to order the phone, only to discover that I couldn’t actually buy an unsubsidized phone from AT&T. I was crushed. And tired.

In the following week, I was told about Verizon’s international unlock policy and figured that’s basically what I needed anyway. Then I could switch to a better carrier with a bigger employee discount. Booyah! Verizon = smaller up-front cost + lower monthly cost + a better carrier. How could I lose? Excited for this prospect, and knowing that I needed to get one pretty soon in order to have the phone unlocked by the time I was home for Christmas, I decided to line up for launch day. Yep, crazy pants, I know.

I figured that I should go to a store around Grand Central because it wasn’t a particularly residential area, and it was close to my office in case something terrible happened where I could just end up going to work early. Plus, Grand Central doesn’t open until 5:30 am so I thought that lines would be shorter than, say, the 5th Avenue flagship store. I woke up around 4:20 am and was at Grand Central by around 5 am. As I came out of the subway, I saw around a dozen or so people inside the station, waiting for the barricades to come down. Not bad, I thought. That was until I rounded the corner through the door and saw another 75 or so people lining up on 42nd Street.

Then, a genius idea came to me. I knew that there was a Verizon store around the corner from Grand Central so I walked towards there to take a peek. There were three people in line. I was shocked. Was something wrong? Were they not getting phones and were these people screwing themselves over? Surely not. Carrier stores always get phones. I spent a few minutes deliberating if there was any downside to going to the carrier store (where I would probably be in and out within 15 minutes) as opposed to lining up outside Grand Central (where I’d probably be for hours). Finding none, I joined the three outside Verizon.

We chatted and laughed at how silly we were for lining up. A couple of the guys were older and the two younger guys spent some time explaining some of the new features and some of the things that can be done with iPhones. (You know, things like iTunes Match and Spotify.) Then it became how long it’d be before #5 showed up, which means how much additional sleep I could have had without any loss whatsoever. The answer was almost two hours.

Maybe people didn’t know about the store or maybe people just flocked to the nearby Apple store without thinking, but the line outside Verizon was never significant. Even as 8 am approached, there was never more than 40 people in line. (I bet the first guy in line, who was there since 2:30 am, felt especially silly.) One running gag we ran was to tell the nth person in line that there were actually only (n-1) phones available. That made us feel only slightly better about ourselves.

As predicted, though, I was out of the store by around 8:15 am. New iPhone in hand, I arrived to work early and had the task of transferring things over before porting my existing number to Verizon. One of the things that I didn’t want to leave on Android was all of my text messages. It’s funny now that I think about it because, despite the number of times people want to break out of the jail that is iOS, I had to go through great lengths to break into that jail and get those messages over. Thanks to some good ol’ programming know-how, I eventually busted in and got it all up and running.

Now that I’ve had the phone for a bit over a week, I can say that some of the sentiments I had in the original comparison stand. Gmail on Android is untouchable. Maps on Android is untouchable (especially considering the current furor over Apple Maps). iTunes + iPhone is untouchable. But I don’t have any regrets. But I do wish that there was a better mobile platform out there where I wouldn’t need to make such compromises. I know, first world problems.