Bleak can be beautiful—at least when Mother Nature��or mankind��has gone awry. Taking in the juxtaposition of disfigured trees in a desert, rare��beasts on a barren island, a house engulfed in lava, or a��brillant��white desert used for testing end-of-the-world missiles,��one is compelled to redefine the concept of beauty. Here are five rare apocalyptic places that will get inside your head, and stay there, long after you’ve returned to pretty civilization.

Hike the Caribbean Pompeii

Montserrat, Caribbean
When the ��erupted in 1995, it buried two-thirds of this (it’s just��ten��by��seven��miles wide), including Plymouth, its former capital. Luckily, most of the people in the affected area were safely evacuated.��Recently, islanders who have relocated to the island’s unaffected northern side��have begun offering the zone of destruction.��, on the lush��northern coast, is a secluded��jungle retreat of villas, some overlooking the sea, that offers full-day tours ($65) to explore��places like the abandoned Montserrat Springs Hotel��and the old airport. Alternatively, get a bird’s-eye view of the devastation on a ���ǰ���. Stick around to try Montserrat’s excellent diving, hiking, birding, and spearfishing.

Get there: Fly to Antigua, and then take a 20-minute on Montserrat��or a two-hour in Antigua.��

Explore a Silo of Stark Beauty

White Sands, New Mexico
is the world’s largest gypsum desert. (Gypsum is��the mineral used to make chalk.)��It’s��275 miles of sand so blindingly white that��it looks like you could be in Antarctica. The entire area��was under the sea 100 million years ago,��but even though the ocean left this place for dead, its apocalyptic reputation stems��from being the site of the first nuclear bomb test. The explosion occurred on the Trinity Site, 30 miles from Las Cruces, and is open only two days each year: the first Saturday of April (April 5, 2015) and the first Saturday of October (October 3, 2015). The visitor center,��open six��days a week��year-round, has an eerie��. Since you might need some cheering up after this site, take a ��(the source of White Sands’ 4.5 billion tons of gypsum),��see fossilized animal footprints at the bottom of Lake Otero,��or hike the five mile .��

Get there: Fly into Albuquerque and drive 240 straight-shot miles south to Alamogordo, or land��in nearby��Las Cruces and drive 30 miles.

Swim in an Asteroid-Impact Zone

Chicxulub, Mexico
The asteroid impact that may have destroyed the dinosaurs 65��million��years��ago is now a network of swimmable caves called cenotes. They’re peppered throughout the Yucatan Peninsula, but Chicxulub, about a three-hour��drive west of Cancun, is where scientists believe the occurred. “Half of the crater rim is undersea;��the other half forms the cenotes [sinkholes]��which we have all over the peninsula,” says Yuanita Stein, editorial director for .��Base yourself in Cancun (if you can stand the crowds) or stay closer in��, the Yucatan capital. Pop into the to see a history of the crater, and then dive on in. Just be sure to go with an official guide��since .��

Get there: , and��then take a nine-mile��bus ride��to ��or drive west 30 miles to Merida.

See a Polar Bear Sanctuary

Wrangel Island, Russia
Wrangel Island has a curious history. It was one of the only plots of land��that avoided glaciation during the last Ice Age, and scientists believe this Arctic tundra is��where the last wooly mammoths roamed. Today��this 2,900-square-mile��island 88 miles off the coast of Siberia is a veritable Galapagos of the Arctic, with unusual plants and wildlife, like musk��ox, Arctic fox, Pacific walrus, snowy owl, and the relatively large polar bear population ().��Only recently opened to tourists—who largely come to see the gathering sites of polar bears—travelers are otherwise forbidden without proper visas and park passes. Outfitters like facilitate the process,��but it comes at a price: A��15-day excursion costs $11,200, excluding flights.��

Get there: Fly ��direct from Moscow to Anadyr,��the port to Wrangel Island.��

Camp at the Gates of Hell

Erta Ale, Ethiopia
Erta Ale is as inhospitable to human life as you can imagine. As the sun sets, smoke emerges from the cracks beneath your feet��and an eerie red glow emits from a gurgling lava lake (one of only five��on earth) located in the center of one of the world’s only . San Francisco–based writer��Jill Perambi says camping in the Denali Depression, in the northeastern region of Ethiopia,��was one of the most intense experiences she’s ever had:��“The strong sulphur smell made our eyes water and throat burn, and without headlamps (our main light source was the lava itself), we could’ve easily tripped and fallen into the boiling lava.” Plus, air temperatures . Take a , which��include stays on the surrounding caldera, but only if you’re looking to .��

Get there: Fly into Mekele, Africa, on��.��From there, it’s about 80 miles to Erta Ale��with a tour on land.

Surf the Scene of Mad Max: Fury Road

Namib Desert, Namibia
The ocean once covered the arid, unforgiving landscape of this desert in southwestern Africa. Sand, dunes, and rock outcroppings now stretch as far as the eye can see, which made it the perfect set for the postapocalyptic thriller��. Despite the bleak feel, it’s a popular place for sandboarders, as home to the world’s tallest sand dunes,��some reaching upwards of 1,000 feet. Check out the hills near Sossusvlei in the ,��which overlooks Dead Vlei, a 550-year-old petrified forest. ��runs a few duneboard-centric tours, or stay at , just at the lip of the park. For bragging rights, hike up the Big Daddy Dune (1,066 feet),��the largest sand dune in the world.��

Get there: Fly into , the capital of Namibia.��From there, it’s either a six-hour drive or a one-hour air��taxi flight to Sossusvlei with your tour company.

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The cinder-block school has no windows and no doors, just a string of incandescent lightbulbs hanging down the center of the ceiling like the spine of a great whale. It’s hot and humid, and the room throbs with the voices of 200 Haitians who have paused from fishing, gardening, or painting the sides of handmade wooden sailboats to come see the special visitor who has traveled 1,500 miles to Île de la Tortue, an island where the hills are green and lush and the sand is sugar white and the small children play with shells that line the shore by the thousands.

They have been waiting all day under this tin roof, watching one local man set up his old Casio keyboard and another tune the heads of his bongos, so that they can see the blan, the white man, the first ever to visit the school on this nearly roadless island five miles north of the Haitian mainland. In short, they have come to see me. And I have come to see one of them: Ervenson, the Haitian boy whom I have been sponsoring for 12 years.

Every month since the fall of 2000, I’ve sent roughly $35, or about $5,000 in total, through a Christian organization called . Compassion funnels money to children all over the world to pay for things like tuition, schoolbooks, clothes, food, medicine, and sneakers. I sent the money to give him a better life. And I’m here to see if it actually made any difference.

The only contact Ervenson and I had during that time was through handwritten letters. I wrote the first one when I was 15 and included a photo of myself in a ball-chain necklace, my braces sparkling in the camera’s flash, a few dozen zits covering my face. With his response, I received multiple copies of the same photo of him, one that I can only barely remember now. He was five, with a shaved head and a baggy, short-sleeved shirt that buttoned up in the front. His lips were pinched tight against a smile.

Often the letters would pass each other in the mail, so they never became much of a conversation. They were more like questionnaires. How did he like school? What did he do with his friends? What was the weather like? Each letter was translated by someone working for Compassion, and there were times when I felt like I was getting updates about a relative through an aunt. Oh, Ervenson? He’s a soccer star, and he loves the color purple.

As I sit at the front of the schoolroom, a keyboard amplifier blasting in my ears, I wonder whether we’ll have anything to talk about. Will he like me? And then there’s the larger question: Did the money do any good? Each month I sent a check, trusted that it was being put to good use, and forgot about the transaction entirely.

At this precise moment, however, I am most worried that I won’t recognize him. Because for as long as I’ve known Ervenson, the only pictures I’ve seen of him have been small headshots. He could be any of the teenage boys in the room. So I smile at everyone, just to be safe. And then, in a lull in the dancing and singing, the translator leans over and says, “Here is the boy.” And here he is. Ervenson. Pimply faced and thin. His eyes are wide. His arms are like piano strings, stretched wide to welcome me.

When I started sponsoring Ervenson, I was camping at a Christian alt-music festival in rural Illinois, where bands played concerts for sweaty mosh pits of Jesus-loving teens. Between two of the shows, someone from Compassion International got on stage and talked about how difficult it was to be a child in places like Haiti. They described the lack of clean water, the rampant disease, the voodoo ceremonies on every corner. Even then I was vaguely aware of my privilege as a white American male and felt a little guilty about it. Plus, I had a part-time job at a guitar store, which meant that I had enough spending money that I wouldn’t miss thirty-odd dollars out of my monthly paycheck. I signed up as soon as I got home. All I had to do was get online, do a quick search by age, country, or birthday (in case I wanted someone who shared mine), and then click that I agreed to send the checks.

Almost immediately, Compassion sent an e-mail suggesting that I write to Ervenson. Many child-sponsorship organizations actually support villages, not children—the child that you “sponsor” actually just lives within that village. Not Compassion. My money went directly to him, less 20 percent for overhead. It’s one of the few organizations in the $3.4 billion child-sponsorship industry where you can exchange letters and develop a relationship.

Which I tried to do—until I was a junior in high school. Until that point, I’d been as Christian as you could get. I “witnessed” to friends, trying to get them to accept Jesus as their savior. I led praise and worship at , an annual event where Christians gathered in front of their high schools and prayed before classes started. I held a Bible study in my house once a week.

But at 17, I rejected my faith. Mostly because it stopped making sense to me. Jesus was friends with prostitutes and the poor, he wanted to help the outcasts. But it seemed to me that many churches—or at least the ones I’d been to—were missing the point. The larger a church was, the more money it spent on sound systems and video equipment and massive buildings with large water features out front instead of helping people who needed clothes or food or a place to live. It began to feel more like a rock concert or a gala—a place people went to be seen or to impress other people.

So, in the black-and-white thinking of youth, I gave up. I felt like a hypocrite when I sang praise and worship songs in front of other kids, because I didn’t believe a word of it. Instead, in 2002, I started smoking pot, became a Democrat, and stopped writing Ervenson. The letters had begun to feel a little fake. When I asked questions, he rarely answered them; when he wrote, it sounded like he was being prompted. I later found out that Compassion makes the kids write three letters a year. Besides, Compassion International is a Christian organization, and though I wasn’t quite clear how, I knew that they were evangelizing to him. I didn’t stop sending my monthly 35 bucks, which seemed cruel. But I did stop caring.

The only time I really thought about him was when I got another letter. They didn’t say anything important, but they made me think. About him. About being a Christian. I thought about whether God was being shoved down his throat. I wondered if that was a fair trade-off for getting an education.

Even though I had my doubts, I kept sending money. It felt good in that pat-yourself-on-the-back, first-world-guilt-assuasion sort of way. It was maybe the one selfless thing I did with regularity, and I believed that being a good person required selflessness. I had started to think that that was what Jesus was really getting at anyway. Don’t judge people. Love others like you would yourself. If you have money or food or clothes and someone else doesn’t, help them out. I hoped that’s what I was doing with Ervenson.

Don’t get me wrong. I still got angry that megachurches built stadium-size sanctuaries when people in their communities were homeless. And I still couldn’t see any reason why Christians would make it into heaven but other good people—be they Buddhist or Muslim or atheist—were doomed to hell. But I realized that I could be a different type of Christian than that. And in my own faith, sending Ervenson money was exactly the type of thing I felt I should do. I started writing to Ervenson again. It was still boilerplate stuff—it’s snowing here, study hard—but it made me feel a little less shame for not being involved.

It did not, however, help me know him better. When the earthquake hit Haiti in January 2010, I stood in my apartment in front of the TV with a bowl of oatmeal and tried to remember where he lived. Port-au-Prince? La Gonave? I had thrown away each of his letters as I read them, so there was no way of going back to see. And though I worried a little, I didn’t take the time to call Compassion to find out.

Then, in late 2011, I got an e-mail. Ervenson would like to meet you, it said. It was a form e-mail, something every sponsor gets on occasion, but it was the first time I had received it. If I wanted to, I could pay Compassion to join a handful of other sponsors to meet our respective kids. By then, Ervenson was 17, and I was 26. In a year, he’d be an adult and I’d no longer support him. This was my last chance to see him. I decided: Yes, I did want to meet him.

I expect Haiti to look poor. I expect vast tent cities sprawled out on the hillsides and buildings half demolished by the quake and people picking through garbage for food. I do not expect it to be beautiful. When I arrive in Port-au-Prince in April 2012, one of a dozen Compassion sponsors here to meet their kids, the Caribbean is the sort of blue I’ve rarely seen. The mountains seem to cover the length of the island. People are everywhere, dressed in bright purples and oranges and yellows. Tap-tap truck taxis painted in pseudo-psychedelic patterns careen through the streets, bouncing over potholes, the people inside swaying in unison like a choir.

[quote]Tap-tap truck taxis painted in pseudo-psychedelic patterns careen through the streets, bouncing over potholes, the people inside swaying in unison like a choir.[/quote]

We see our first tent city as the road curves north around the bay. A patch of sea blue tents and tarps appears on a denuded hillside. Beyond the tents, stones are arranged in acre-large squares. “Are those fields?” I ask, thinking that perhaps Haitians have used the after-earthquake chaos to start new agricultural ventures.

“Those are mass graves from the earthquake,” says Ben Depp, an American-born photographer who has spent the past five years in Haiti.

“There were so many dead, we had to burn some of them,” adds Jeannot, our Haitian translator, who was himself trapped for two days in the rubble.

After the earthquake, money poured into every NGO working in Haiti, including Compassion. The organization sponsors more than 75,000 children here. There are programs for babies, kids in school, and college students, but they all work roughly the same. Donors send a check, Compassion routes it to its in-country offices (staffed almost entirely by Haitians), and they in turn give 80 percent of the cash to the kids to spend on various specific things: food, health care, books, supplies, tuition at Christian schools, things like that. ������������������������

Thankfully, I learn that kids do not have to accept Jesus in order to attend school, though they do have to attend a weekly meeting called Club, where they learn about Jesus and how to be a moral person. But I appear to be alone in my concern about evangelism.

On that first night, all of the visiting sponsors gather at the hotel for a quick talk. “OK,” says Yvonne, our wispy tour leader, who wears a permanent smile. “What did you see today?”

The group is quiet for a minute before one woman finally speaks up. “There’s a spiritual darkness here,” she says. Heads nod in agreement throughout the circle.

Ben and I look sideways at each other, my eyes trying to say, Can you believe this? Granted, it’s been only one day, but I’ve seen more churches than public-service buildings.

“Voodoo has such a stronghold,” she adds. (In the mind of most evangelicals, voodoo is pure evil, though it’s really an amalgamation of West African animism and Roman Catholicism.) And so the group prays that Compassion’s programs will help lead people out of voodoo and into Christianity.

Thankfully, I have Ben as a roommate. Like me, he grew up in a conservative Christian home in the States and moved strongly to the left in college. And like me, he was a little uncomfortable with the meeting. So we sneak away after the prayer and step onto our third-floor balcony overlooking the Caribbean.

While working as a photographer for outlets like The New York Times and Newsweek, Ben’s been present at some of Haiti’s most pivotal moments in recent history. When the earthquake hit, he and his wife were at home in Petionville, a leafy neighborhood in the hills outside Port-au-Prince. Dressers, tables, and chairs fell over; pots and pans hit the floor. The three-story hotel behind them crumbled, but their house stood. Much of the poorer parts of the city weren’t so lucky. He said there was dust in his teeth, throat, and eyelashes. Once the ground stopped shaking, Ben grabbed a pickax and helped dig through the rubble looking for bodies. “It was like the apocalypse. The dead and the injured were everywhere,” he says. “Everybody was helping dig strangers out from under collapsed houses and caring for the injured.”

Ben’s most haunting photos came from the cholera epidemic, introduced, tragically, by UN peacekeeping troops who came to the country after the earthquake. “I was on my motorcycle, trying to see what the situation was like,” he tells me. “People were literally dropping dead in the streets.” Cholera causes rapid fluid loss. To date, more than 8,000 Haitians—men, women, and many, many children—have died of it. Victims look like corpses even before they die. Ben once found the body of a dead ten-year-old on a rubble-strewn stretch of road. “His mother hadn’t understood how quickly cholera could kill him,” he said. “She didn’t have money to do anything with the body, so she put him in the road for the government body collectors to find.”

The earthquake and the resulting cholera epidemic are only the most recent disasters here. Haiti has suffered through 200 years of brutal dictatorships, military invasions, and natural disasters. The chaos doesn’t stop people from trying to understand and fix it. Haiti’s streets are full of young, white do-gooders in shiny Land Rovers, many from NGOs, governments, or other secular outfits. But every day another group of Christians in matching T-shirts arrives to spend a week building churches or playing with kids. Ben says he hasn’t seen them make a real impact.

“A lot of Christian organizations send groups here for quick trips,” Ben says. “They build a latrine or a school and then head home.” Their efforts may provide some relief in the short term, but they don’t create jobs or a lasting infrastructure—things Haitians desperately need.

It’s not just Christian organizations that come up short, though. Haiti has been called the NGO Republic. As many as 10,000 of them operate in the country, and they’re often criticized for making the situation worse. “It’s one thing to provide water for six months,” says Jake Johnston, who studies aid in Haiti for the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “But they’re not going to provide a public water system for the future of the country.”

NGOs don’t have to coordinate with the government and often start projects without consulting a community. Once construction is under way, much of the money never makes it into Haitian hands. Of the $450 million USAID has spent here since the earthquake, more than 70 percent has gone to U.S. contractors. “It’s hard to have a strong state when NGOs are doing much of the work,” says Johnston.

Remarkably, no one had ever really looked at whether child sponsorship helped or hurt the people it supported until three years ago, when Bruce Wydick, a developmental economist at the University of San Francisco and a Compassion sponsor himself, decided to study the organization. He found that sponsored kids are nearly 27 percent more likely to graduate from high school, have a better chance at getting a white-collar job, and make an average of $14 to $19 more each month. When nearly two-thirds of the country lives on less than a $1.25 a day, as they do in Haiti, that’s a substantial improvement.

“It’s a pretty cost-intensive way of addressing poverty,” Wydick says. It costs more than buying a mosquito net or building a water pipe, for example. “But it works.”

Yet, Wydick’s research hit upon another important aspect of sponsorship. “Compassion does a good job of addressing the internal issues, which we’re finding to be just as important as external.” In other words, self-confidence may be just as crucial to finishing school (and overcoming poverty) as infrastructure. And a big part of addressing those internal issues, Wydick says, is the letters the kids get from their sponsors.

“They have these people telling them, ‘Study hard and you can be successful,’” says Wydick. “And they believe it.”

Ervenson and his family live in a seaside shack on Île de la Tortue (Turtle Island), Haiti’s northernmost island, a 69-square-mile speck five miles north of the mainland. Three hundred and fifty years ago, its primary occupants were a band of European pirates called the Brethren of the Coast. The Brethren are gone, but the island doesn’t look much different today. There are few cars and even fewer roads; the only way to get there is by boat. But first Ben, Jeannot, and I must get to Saint-Louis-du-Nord, on the north shore of the mainland.

After a two-hour wait for the six-seater plane, a one-hour flight, a stop for chicken and rice (Haiti’s national dish), and an hour in the car, we finally reach the dock in Saint-Louis. Live goats hang upside on the sides of pickup trucks, and small tin-sided shacks sell lottery tickets linked to numbers drawn in the States or Venezuela. The sun washes out the colors, making everything look Instagrammed. A small motorboat with a suspect Yamaha engine is waiting for us. But there are two problems: it’s already late afternoon, and our hotel is here in Saint-Louis. Meaning we’ll have to turn right back around from La Tortue—90 minutes away—if we want to make it back before sunset.

Jeannot doesn’t think we should go. “We won’t have time to see him,” he says. “We should go in the morning.”

“How much time would we have on the island tomorrow?” I ask.

“A couple hours,” he says.

After 12 years, I want more than two hours. “Can we stay on the island?” I ask him.

Jeannot and the pastor and the boat captain and a committee of men whose roles I’m not sure of converse in Creole. Ben whispers a translation to me.

“There’s no hotel on the island,” he says. “They don’t know where we can sleep.”

I’m prepared to sleep on the boat if I have to. Eventually, their desire to please the foreigner outweighs their concerns. We go tonight.

Shirtless men with sea salt dried on their backs carry us on their shoulders like children, 30 yards through the water to the boat. After nearly a week in Port-au-Prince’s dust-choked streets and the endless mud of everywhere else, the water here is shockingly blue and clear. The captain spears a bit of meat with a hook and trails it off the boat, searching for fish. A dolphin briefly swims alongside us, weaving in and out of our wake.

After 90 minutes, we reach La Tortue. Lush hills rise up from the sea. Giant trees line the shore. Boats bounce through the waves, their sails made of tarps, billboard scraps, old sheets, anything they can use. On shore, a small crowd waits for us. Pastor Eustache, a short bald man in glasses who runs the school and church here, shakes my hand. I am the first sponsor to visit this Compassion-supported school, and the community has prepared a welcome ceremony, he says.

We walk through sandy paths lined with bamboo, until we reach the long, gray school. It feels like the whole village is here. I’m starting to get nervous about giving a speech when Jeannot says, “Here is the boy.” Ervenson walks in. I start to speak, but before I can say anything, his arms are around me. Everyone cheers, like we’re long-lost relatives on a daytime talk show. It’s exciting to see him—but also awkward. He barely speaks English; I know only a few words of Creole. So every so often I reach over and pat his shoulder. I am your friend, I’m sorry that I haven’t written as much as I should have, and I’m really happy that you look healthy.

In his last letter, Ervenson said that he recently bought a new pair of shoes with the money I sent. “Hey!” I say, pointing to his white Dexter-brand shoes. “Cool shoes!” But he covers them up, pulling his jeans over them, like I’ve made fun of them. Then he gets up and walks out.

Where is he going? I think. Memories of the way kids made fun of my fake Doc Martens in middle school come flooding back. Or maybe he’s embarrassed because his shoes are nicer than those on the other kids I see.��

When he finally reappears minutes later, he has changed shoes, though I’ll never figure out why. He doesn’t make eye contact as he sits down next to me, so I put an arm around him. Hey man, cultural misunderstanding there. But we’re OK, right? He half-smiles, like he has no clue what I’m saying but wants to be accommodating.

After the ceremony—a half-dozen speeches, another song, an impressive breakdance performance by Ervenson and his friends—he takes me to his home. We pass shacks with thatch roofs, fishing rafts made of bundled logs, and wood-beam ships in various stages of decay. The house’s frame used to be covered in a plaster-like material, but it’s gone now, rotted away by time, sun, and seawater. Tin pieces cover gaping holes to keep out the wind, rain, and sand. The metal roof is rusted through in several places. The cement floor crumbles away. The family lives maybe 20 yards from the ocean, and the tide sometimes washes over the floor, forcing them to wait it out with neighbors until the water recedes.

As I look around his house, my first instinct is guilt. Right now I have $200 tucked into various pockets and my shoes. I briefly consider giving it all to him. But we’ve been cautioned by Compassion to avoid giving money on this trip. And part of me thinks, I gave $5,000—how do they not have a decent house? Did they never get the money? Or is the rusted tin an improvement over a thatch roof? Did I not send enough?

I set my backpack down on the floor and bring out a gift for him. A picture of my family.

“This is my mom, my sister, my brother, and my dad,” I say. Now that I’m here, the picture looks like exhibit A in First World wealth, with our electric lights and aluminum siding and a front door with a holiday wreath on it. So I quickly show him a picture of me and my girlfriend instead.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” I ask.

“N��.”

“N�𱹱��?”

“N��.”

“Is there any girl you want to be your girlfriend?” The crowd giggles as Jeannot translates.

“I have seen some,” he says, lowering his head and almost, just almost, breaking a smile.

As Ervenson and I talk through Ben and Jeannot’s translations, I start to piece together a picture of his life. His father’s only job is selling green wood to be made into charcoal on the mainland. The family mostly live on rice and beans, but sometimes they buy a chicken when they can afford it. They don’t have mosquito nets, so when the family—all 11 of them—sleep on the floor of this 150-square-foot house, they are sometimes bitten and contract malaria. Then they have to go to the mainland to get treatment. The pastor says that they’re able to do that because of the money I sent, but I can’t be sure he’s not buttering me up.

The insects already cover my arms and legs when the pastor says we have to leave, that we’ll be staying at his house tonight. It’s only a five-minute walk from Ervenson’s, but it’s as if I walked into a house in America. He has glass windows. There’s a large cinder-block wall surrounding his acre-plus property. His bedroom, which he graciously offers to Ben, Jeannot, and I, has a queen bed with a headboard, footboard, and mattress. There are two dressers, like you’d see in any American home. His wife has maybe five dozen porcelain figurines spread on every flat surface available. “This is the nicest house I’ve seen here,” Ben says.

[quote]His life will probably resemble his father’s: he will work in the fields, he will collect wood, he will build a small house on his beautiful little island with views of the sea, and over time it will slowly, inevitably fall apart.[/quote]

The next morning, Ervenson gives me a tour of the island. We see his school, with the broken tables and the benches made of planks set atop cinder blocks. We see the soccer field that floods in the rainy season, where Ervenson tells me he scored a goal from the opposite end of the field last year. We see the natural spring where Ervenson bathes before school, after school, and before bed. Through Ben’s translations, we talk about his family’s garden, an hour’s walk deeper into the island, where they grow breadfruit, mango, spinach, beans, and potatoes.

“It’s beautiful,” Ervenson says of his island. “A beautiful little spot.”

Does he think he’ll have to leave this place if he wants to work? I ask.

Maybe, he says. For a job. “I would really like to work in an office,” Ben translates. Then Ervenson says he has a question for me. “Can I come visit you?”

It catches me by total surprise. I try to imagine Ervenson showing up in my tiny studio apartment back in the U.S. Sleeping on my couch. Trying to cook something on the stove while I’m at work. Deciding to stay permanently while he goes to college. It’s selfish and un-Christian, but I can’t imagine myself enjoying that.

I’m pretty comfortable with the current arrangement of sending money, occasionally writing a letter, and keeping my distance. Which may be the problem with the NGO-donor relationship in general. When disaster strikes, it feels good to send money, whether it’s a tweet to the Red Cross or through an organization like Compassion. But most of us don’t want to go beyond that.

“What do I say?” I ask Ben in English, worried that Ervenson is picking up on my hesitation.

“I can say it’s difficult,” says Ben. “That there are visas and documents that have to be signed. That it’s not an easy thing.”

“Do that,” I tell Ben. So he does.

Before I leave Ervenson, he walks me to the dock, carrying my backpack from his home, past the village market, and over the beaches so thick with shells, we have to watch where we’re walking.

“Do you think you’ll have a good life?” I ask. He takes a moment.

“I have some hope for myself with my education,” he says. “If I can finish this education and continue high school, I think that things can be good.”

The trouble is, he doesn’t finish high school. For the next 17 months, I write him once a month, encouraging him to study hard, trying to do what Bruce Wydick, the developmental economist, says effective sponsors do. Then, in October 2013, I get an e-mail that says:

Ervenson has left Compassion’s program because [of] unjustified absence from program activities for two consecutive months. This means he is no longer able to be sponsored. Please know that your sponsorship made a difference in the life of this child, and even though he is no longer in the program, the love you have shown will continue to have a great impact.

Despite the reassurance, I don’t know that it did have a great impact. I knew that high school was a stretch for him—his teacher told me he was an average student. But the point of donating the money was to give him a better life. Ervenson got roughly $28 of my money each month. That’s far more than the majority of his fellow Haitians make in a month. Some of that (roughly $6.25 per month) went to pay for school, and some went to books and school uniforms. Those things are relatively cheap in Haiti. What I don’t get is, how did the money not improve his life more than that?

Maybe most of it went to higher tuition, which in turn put a new roof on the church or created jobs for teachers. And really, I’d be OK with either of those. But when I look at Ervenson’s home, at his father’s life, at Ervenson’s own future, it feels like the money failed. I believe Wydick when he says that, over time and a large enough sample size, Compassion helps people move into the middle class. Indeed, one former Compassion child is now in Haiti’s Parliament.

But I also know that this island is far removed from many of Haiti’s most pressing problems, such as cholera, the earthquake, and deforestation. And still, the money did not lift him out of poverty. Maybe it takes time. Maybe it takes more money. I’m not an economist. I’m just a kid who—perhaps naively—believed that I could make a difference.

The money did what Jesus asked when he told his followers to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick, etc. But, as with most aid to Haiti, I don’t think it will have a long-term impact, at least not in this particular case. His life will probably resemble his father’s: he will work in the fields, he will collect wood, he will build a small house on his beautiful little island with views of the sea, and over time it will slowly, inevitably fall apart.

When Ervenson left Compassion, I debated whether I would sponsor again. On the one hand, I’m still not comfortable with the evangelism, and I worry about contributing to Haiti’s aid problem; on the other, I believe that the money can make a difference, though there’s no guarantee that it will. And then, less than two months after Ervenson left, Compassion sent me a letter from another boy named Widny. I didn’t request it, but it was sent all the same. Widny is nine years old. He lives on Haiti’s southern coast, about 130 miles from La Tortue. He likes math and soccer and the color yellow. I grabbed a pen, and I wrote him back.

is an associate editor at �����ԹϺ���.

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Access & Resources

Montserrat, minus the lava
By Katie Arnold ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������Another Day Under the Black Volcano

Once you get over the fact that two-thirds of Montserrat is now buried under a thick layer of ash, it’s possible to view the “Emerald Isle” as the ideal Caribbean destination. The 13-square-mile area stretching from St. Peter’s to the rugged north coast is miraculously intact, and the weather is perpetually sunny (when the wind blows the ash out to
sea). Crowds, needless to say, are not a problem: It’s highly likely you’ll have the beaches, trails, and lush river valleys virtually to yourself.

Around the Island
Montserrat’s resorts may have closed their doors, but you can still find decent accommodations, guide services, and outdoor activities if you know where to look. In St. Peter’s, David and Clover Lea have turned a wing of their house into Rose Hill, private guest quarters with spectacular mountain views (doubles, $55; 664-491-5812). Rendezvous Bay, the island’s only white-sand
beach, is reached via a winding, two-mile footpath from Little Bay over craggy Rendezvous Bluff; bring your mask and fins, as the reef offshore is ideal for snorkeling. Sea Wolf Diving School offers one-tank dives to 30-plus offshore reefs, as well as PADI instruction, snorkeling excursions, and equipment rental (dives, $40; 664-491-7807); and Danny’s Watersports will take you
deep-sea fishing for marlin ($250; 664-491-5645).

If you can’t commit to a week’s stay on Montserrat, sign on instead with an outfitter for a day of diving, hiking, and volcano viewing. Reuben T. Meade Double X Tours offers PADI-certified scuba diving, a trip to the Montserrat Volcano Observatory, and a hike up Jack Boy Hill for Soufriˆre views ($225, including ferry; 664-491-5470).

Getting There
Now that w. h. bramble international Airport is out of commission, your only option is to arrive via ferry or helicopter from neighboring Antigua. Carib World Travel operates a twice-daily ferry from Heritage Quay to Little Bay port on Montserrat ($60, round-trip; 268-460-6101). Montserrat Aviation Service’s helicopter makes the 20-minute hop twice a day ($68, round-trip;
664-491-2362). The Montserrat Tourism Board will help arrange on-island transportation (664-491-2230).

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Leeward Islands
By Matthew Joyce, Tom Morrisey

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The islands of the Lesser Antilles' northern chain may share a location sheltered from prevailing northeasterlies, but that's about all they have in common. Name your sport, then pick your island.

Anguilla
The scrub-covered, flat, dry interior of this 35-square-mile island is no place to spend your hard-earned time off, but if you keep to the perimeter you're in beachgoers' heaven. Of Anguilla's 33 stellar beaches, hailed as the best in the Caribbean, first prize goes to Rendezvous Bay, a two-mile-long sandy crescent on the island's southwest side, where you can search for driftwood and seashells among the dunes. First runner-up is palm-shaded Savannah Bay, on the relatively undeveloped east end, which serves up respectable bodysurfing waves and a steady onshore breeze. Also in the east end is Shoal Bay Beach, a favorite among the locals because of its beachfront cafés and snorkeling on a close-to-shore reef.

When the ocean is calm, Dive Anguilla (two-tank dive, $70; 809-497-2020), in Sandy Ground on the northwest side, can take you to Prickly Pear Reef, an underwater canyon eight miles off the north coast, where you can swim among huge staghorn corals, sergeant majors, and striped squirrelfish. Closer in is Sandy Deep, a mini-wall rising 15 to 60 vertical feet. After dark, fill up on lobster and beer at Johnno's in Sandy Ground, where locals gather for barbecues and live reggae.

For beachfront digs, you could splurge at Cap Juluca Resort (doubles, $595-$1050 per night, including breakfast and all water-sports; 800-323-0139), a Moorish extravaganza of white-domed villas on Maunday's Bay in the west end, but your money goes twice as far at La Sirena Hotel (doubles, $230-$295; villas, $295-$495; 800-331-9358). Near Mead's Bay Beach, also on the west end, it has 20 rooms and five villas spread around two pools and a landscaped garden. For bargain rates, stay in one of three beachside studio apartments at La Palma Guesthouse in Sandy Ground (doubles $75; 809-497-3260).

Nevis
During the seventeenth century, provincial Nevis became the social hub of the Caribbean when it attracted European aristocrats to its renowned Bath Hotel and Spa just outside Charlestown, the capital. The spa spent a long time in ruins, but a recent renovation has opened it to twentieth-century travelers (a 15-minute soak costs just $2).

You can get to Nevis from its sister island, St. Kitts, via the daily plane (one way, $25), but it's better to approach this laid-back, 36-square-mile island on the old green ferry (one way, $4) that links Basseterre, the Kittitian capital, to Charlestown. During the 11-mile, 45-minute ride, the island comes into focus: cloud-capped Nevis Peak, long-abandoned sugarcane fields, and the remnants of the old sugar mills that once were the island's economic mainstay.

The best way to see the island is on foot. Because of a welcome dearth of tourist-oriented businesses, arrangements for hikes, walks, and horseback rides are best made through individual resorts. Golden Rock Estate (doubles, $245, breakfast and dinner included; 809-469-3346), in the hills above the east coast, is a 16-room former sugar estate with bougainvillea-covered stone buildings, hiking trails, and 96 acres thick with orange, mango, and grapefruit trees.

The oceanfront Nisbet Plantation Beach Club (doubles, $355-$455, including breakfast and dinner; 809-469-9325), on the north shore, recalls its previous incarnation as an eighteenth-century coconut plantation with a reconstructed great house and 38 ceiling-fan-cooled rooms. Horseback riding along the beach and through old plantation pastureland ($45 for two hours) as well as guided hikes ($30 per person) can be arranged through the hotel. The most challenging is a five-hour vine-and-root-grabbing ascent of 3,232-foot Nevis Peak, but given the clouds that often obscure the mountain, you may see more scenery 50 feet under at Monkey Shoals reef, where you'll spot nurse sharks and octopuses hiding among sea fans and fluorescent sponges. Scuba Safaris in Oualie Beach (two tank dive, $80; 809-469-9518) handles everything from resort courses to full certification.

Montserrat
With lush rain forests, waterfalls, black-sand beaches, and sawtooth mountains, Montserrat inexplicably ranks among the least-developed and least-visited islands in the Eastern Caribbean. and the volcano spewing ash at press time certainly won't help. Nevertheless, the 39-square-mile island is well-known among road cyclists and mountain bikers, who appreciate its tortuous terrain. Montserrat's perimeter road measures less than 28 miles, but it climbs from sea level to 800 or more feet seven times, making it a challenging ride for even the fittest cyclists. Mountain bikers come for the annual Montserrat Mountain Bike Challenge (this year, November 8-15; see calendar, page 24), a weeklong festival sponsored by Island Bikes (rentals, $25 a day, $140 a week; 800-675-1945) in Plymouth, the island's only real town.

The most spectacular route for hiking or biking is a day-long trip through the South Soufrière Hills. It starts with a climb to the top of 1,700-foot Galway's Soufrière, then races downhill through head-high ferns and dense bamboo thickets before crossing elfin woodland, steep gullies, and banana fields and ending with a rollercoaster ride over the Centre Hills back into town.

Settle in at the Providence Estate House (doubles, $77- $92; 809-491-6476), a secluded two-room bed-and-breakfast plantation home that has hosted Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder. But the island's best digs are at the Vue Pointe Hotel (doubles, $140; cottages, $195; 800-235-0709) with 12 rooms and 28 hexagonal cottages perched above the gray sands of Olde Road Bay on the northwest coast. Snorkeling, diving, and fishing trips with local boat captains can be booked through Aquatic Discoveries at the hotel (two-tank dive, $65; charters, $200-$350), which also rents sea kayaks (half-day, $45; full day, $75).

Guadeloupe
Your high-school French comes in handy on this tropical-island outpost of France, where English speakers are as common as Wonder bread in a boulangerie. Located near the southern end of the Leeward chain, the 530-square-mile island has a butterfly shape and a split personality. Grande-Terre, its eastern wing, is as flat as a crepe and fringed with beaches, while its wild, mountainous western half, Basse-Terre, gets fewer visitors than downtown Detroit.

Hikers should head for the 74,000-acre Parc National on Basse-Terre, where Organisation des Guides de Montagne de la Caraïbe (011-590-80-0579) leads daylong treks amid the rainforest-covered peaks ($122 per person), as well as half-day sorties ($75 per person) up the sulfur-spewing, 4,813-foot La Soufrière volcano. Mountain bikers can work off their French-Creole suppers with a thigh-burning climb up 16-mile Route de la Traversée over a 2,350-foot pass. Bikes cost $16 a day or $96 a week at Locatesse (590-88-9143) in Sainte Anne, a fishing village turned resort town on Grande-Terre's south coast.

Pigeon Island, off the west coast of Basse-Terre, ranks among Jacques Costeau's ten best dive sites for its sponge-encrusted walls and teeming schools of tropicals. Les Heures Saines (590-98-8663) offers single-tank dives ($38) and weeklong dive/villa packages ($662 per person, including lodging, breakfast, and ten dives) at Le Paradis Creole, a ten-room hotel with patios overlooking Pigeon Island.

Boardsailors hang out at Centre UCPA ($500 per person per week, including lodging, meals, equipment, and lessons; 590-88-6480), a no-frills, 60-room complex on the southeast coast. You can also stay in Sainte Anne at Hôtel La Toubana (doubles, $187-$318, breakfast included; 590-88-2578), with 32 air-conditioned, red-roofed bungalows on a bluff above Caravelle Beach.

Saba
There's unmistakable charm in an island where conch shells serve as alarm clocks, cottages are chalk-white with red roofs, the only “highway” is called simply The Road, and the capital, situated at the foot of the mountain, is officially called The Bottom.

It is Saba's other bottom that attracts most of the 28,000 annual visitors to this five-square-mile island. The Saba Marine Park (011-599-4-63295), which protects Saban waters down to 200 feet, contains some of the most pristine reefs and walls in the Caribbean. It maintains moorings on 26 designated sites ($2-per-dive use fee), ranging from the 45-foot-deep Hot Springs, where the geothermal-spring-bathed sand is warm to the touch, to Third Encounter, a seamount at 90 to 100 feet.

Winter water temperatures here are in the high seventies, perfect for attracting pelagics. If the currents are right, you can swim due west from Third Encounter and, after a minute or two, a skyscraperlike form begins to resolve from the underwater mist. This is Eye of the Needle (90 feet), a slender volcanic pinnacle festooned with sponges and frequented by barracuda and blacktip sharks. For a shallower dive, you can circumnavigate Man of War Shoal (70 feet), which offers encounters with virtually every species of Caribbean reef fauna.

A small-party specialist charter is Saba Deep Dive Center (two-tank dives, $80, equipment included; 599-4-63347) in Fort Bay Harbor. Somewhat larger boats are operated by Sea Saba Advanced Dive Center (two-tank dive, $89; 599-4-62246) and Wilson's Dive Shop (two-tank dive, $80; 599-4-62541), but Saba really has no cattle-boat operations.

On Saba, most divers stay in the town of Windwardside. One of the largest properties is the Captain's Quarters (doubles, $135, breakfast included; 599-4-62201), with 12 rooms. The newly opened Cottage Club (one-bedroom units, $105; 599-4-62386) has ten cottages on the edge of a ravine. Willard's of Saba (doubles, $180-$300; 599- 4-62498), secluded high on the mountain, is Saba's luxury hotel, with seven rooms, a pool, and tennis courts.

See also:

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