Video: Going to Haiti - Part 5: Choosing Happiness with Emily Beers - CrossFit®

For five weeks, Emily Beers obsessed about the CrossFit Games Open. She tied her self-worth to her performance. Then she went to Haiti. And things changed.

"Today I'm surrounded by poverty and hunger. The Open is the furthest thing from my mind," she says only days after completing the final workout of the five-week competition.

At a school, Beers dishes out a salty cornmeal paste for children. The meal includes weeds, leaves and dirt.

"It's so crazy. People wouldn't even eat that food back home," she says. "It would be thrown out and ... they come and they're not even complaining. They're so grateful."

Later that afternoon, the group of CrossFit athletes with whom Beers is traveling visits Kannot. There, travel companion and paramedic Julie Roberts treats residents for whatever maladies they have. One patient is a boy with a badly infected machete wound.

"I don't like to see people hurt and suffering," says Roberts, who has traveled to Haiti more than a dozen times for humanitarian work. "And if I can do something, it adds to my life. It just, it makes me a happier person."

Beers, meanwhile, has gained perspective.

"Life isn't about how well you perform at workouts. It's about how well you perform at life. And nobody is better at that than Haitians," she explains. "That's the beauty of this place—acceptance and the choice to be happy."

Video by Carey Peterson.

Video: Going to Haiti - Part 4: The Trip to Jarvais - CrossFit®

In Haiti, life is hard. Most Haitians are just looking to survive from one day to the next.

"It feels as though their everyday life is what we do at CrossFit for a workout," says Jessica Coulter, one of three Canadian athletes who accompanied Julie Roberts to the Caribbean country where she has made multiple humanitarian trips.

Simply watching Haitians pour concrete is an eye-opening experience.

"When you're watching people do the labor, you realize how important it is to be able to use your body and use your health to the fullest ... of its capacity," Kane Morgan says

The group visits the tiny, remote village of Jarvais, where medical care is nonexistent.

CrossFit Journal staff writer Emily Beers hands out candy to children while Roberts, a paramedic, diagnoses villagers' medical problems with Morgan's help.

"They live in what we'd consider a dire state of affairs. Most of them don't have shoes, let alone proper nutrition," Beers explains. "But their happy, innocent faces will stay with me forever."

Video by Carey Peterson.

Video: Going to Haiti - Part 3: A Warm Welcome - CrossFit®

Haiti is the poorest place Emily Beers has ever been. Life expectancy is 61 years, and in the tiny village of McDonald going to school is optional for children—half the population never learns to read.

It's here that Beers' friend Julie Roberts has spent so much time, starting microcredit loans and funding latrine projects.

"Basically, we're making a small investment to people that can't afford a business," Roberts explains. "What they end up doing with the capital is as they make profit, they pay the loan forward to their neighbor, to somebody else nominated in the community, and so it grows exponentially."

The loans are a way to avoid being dependent on the international community, says Kane Morgan, another one of Beers' friends on the trip.

"What it ends up doing is empowering the individual to realize, 'If I put in the hard work, I can better my condition in the long run,'" he says.

Among the businesses is one that purchased a pig, which has since given birth to piglets.

"It's amazing how something small, like a litter of pigs," Beers says, "can bring so much hope to an entire village."

Video by Carey Peterson.

Video: Going to Haiti - Part 2: Welcome to McDonald - CrossFit®

Although Haiti is one of the most impoverished countries in the Western world, Emily Beers is eager to make the trip to gain some perspective on her life, which was previously filled only with thoughts of competing in the CrossFit Games Open.

For Beers' friend Julie Roberts, it's her 13th time traveling to Haiti.

"I have a lot," Roberts explains. "I have so much in my life, and I have had a lot of really cool experiences, and I have a good family, and I have so much opportunity being born in Canada, but something that's always gotten to me is people suffering."

In addition to Beers and Roberts, Kane Morgan and Jessica Coulter make their way to the chaotic Port Au Prince airport and then finally to the tiny village of McDonald. Shortly after arrival, two women show up at Roberts' temporary home to offer their cooking—chicken, rice, beans and mangoes—to the visitors.

"Right away they had food for us," Coulter says. "They're very lovely people. They're very welcoming."

Afterward, with no electricity to light her hand, Beers starts to write the old-fashioned way—with pen and paper.

"I just feel very overwhelmed," she says.

Video by Carey Peterson.

Video: Going to Haiti - Part 1: a Shift in Perspective - CrossFit®

For five weeks this year, Emily Beers obsessed about the CrossFit Games Open—so much so that she became "a less-focused coach, a more scatterbrained writer, a more careless friend, daughter and girlfriend."

But after such a month of "self-induced stress," Beers stumbled upon an opportunity to gain some perspective: a trip to Haiti, when one of the members of CrossFit Vancouver planned to travel to the Caribbean country for charity work yet again.

"Having an opportunity to do something like this, to do some charity work in the poorest country in North America and one of the poorest countries in the world, is going to be quite an experience," Beers said.

The objective was to get to a place where she could be more relaxed and joyful.

"I'm anticipating a shift in perspective," said Beers, who finished second in the Open in Canada West and completed 13.5 shortly before heading to Haiti.

Video by Carey Peterson.