Welcome to my website. My name is Tim Tyler and I am a storyteller, writer, historian, trainer and sometime photographer. This site is a sort of scrapbook of my various interests and hobbies. Please feel free to look around. Thank you for visiting.
After travelling to Haiti in 1989, I wrote a story, Schools Are Heavy about the experience. In that story, I wrote:
Traveling through the city you had noticed that everything here hides behind walls. There were no yards, no parking lots, no plazas, no open, empty lots in the city, only walls. Some were simple cinderblock affairs, unpainted and uninviting. Some were stucco or cement, studded with shells or bright colored stones. Some were even painted with fading murals. They had corrugated metal gates, heavy steel gates, painted wooden gates or even ornate wrought iron, but everywhere there were walls. Now you were in the country and instead of seeing the occasional pleasant farmhouse you saw... walls. And the further from the city, the more inventive the walls. Lack of money, it seemed, was no barrier to constructing walls. Stones and hedges replaced cinderblock as the day wore on. And somewhere about the center of the island, you saw the most enterprising and forbidding wall of them all: a neatly trimmed prickly-pear cactus wall. And you learned, this land is all about walls.
On tuesday, January 12 at 4:48 PM those walls, which had for so long sheltered and protected the Haitian people, came tumbling down, killing, maiming and entombing tens, likely hundreds of thousands. Please give to those organizations which are helping the Haitian people in response to this tragedy.