Haiti #2

Leli fe bel

"When it (the weather)’s beautiful…"

Dear All,

I write you from the tropics, in the midst of 40 Lenten days in the desert. Know that I am well. I’m remembering to take my malaria medication, to drink plenty of water, and to keep my eye out for falling coconuts.

It’s funny: we had a visiting group from the USA last week, doctors and college students. Talking with them, they were amazed that someone would choose to live in Haiti in such austere conditions for long periods of time—the absence of running water, cheeseburgers, and HD television; the overabundance of mosquitoes, heat, and hard times. One of the doctors told me, “I’m glad I came here, you know. It’s a life experience. But I know I’m never coming back.”

Maybe I’ll never be able to fully explain why I love this place, why I relish walking with those who live here, who have no choice. Or why, despite the heat, it feels like anything but a desert to me.

With prayers for health and Joy wherever you are,

and with Love,

John.

…

Negotiations Atop a Ten-Foot Wall The visiting group had brought a brand-new volleyball down to the school. Wednesday was the first day I’d used it in my sport class, forming a circle with the handful of students interested in learning how to set, bump, and spike, while the rest of the class played soccer with a partially deflated basketball.

At one point, I left the aspiring volleyball-ers to settle an erupting dispute in the nearby soccer match. By the time I’d quelled the fight with threats of just taking the ball away and made it back to see how the volleyball playing was going, the new ball had, of course, been kicked over the cinderblock courtyard wall.

Class was almost finished, so I sent the students to drink some water before their next class, and proceeded to mount a waist-high pile of cinderblocks and then climb to peer over the wall. From the top, I could see into our neighbor’s plot of farmland, the white ball resting among the hand-ploughed earth only yards away. A man stood off at a distance, wearing a straw hat and with spade in hand, his back bent into his work. I called out to him in Creole:

“Excuse me, sir, I don’t want to bother you…” He looked up at me, still for a moment, then turned back to his tilling.

I pressed on, “Excuse me, sir. I don’t want to bother you, but I need you to help me. That is my ball in your yard. Can you throw it to me. Not now, but when you get the chance.”

Again, he just stared.

“You see, the students in the school kicked it over. They did not do it on purpose. Kids do that, you know. I can climb down, but I don’t want to mess up your field. Please throw it back.”

Finally, he spoke. “I will if you give me money.”

“What?! You want me to give you money for my ball? That’s stealing.” I was about to win a friend, or burn a bridge.

“You think I’m a thief.”

“No, I don’t think you’re a thief. You’re my neighbor. And neighbors have to help neighbors. Today, I need you to help me. Maybe tomorrow you will need me to help you.”

At this point, he smiled. He set to walking toward me, probably perplexed at this persistent white boy straddling the top of a ten-foot wall. He picked up the ball and said, “Where do you live?”

“I live here at the school. I’m a teacher. A volunteer.”

“What do you teach?”

“English, with some other things.”

“I’ll give you the ball if you teach me English.”

“Okay, that’s good. What do you want to know how to say?”

“Everything.”

“Everything? I can’t teach you everything.” He looked down at the ball, tossed back and forth between his hands, then looked up at me with a grin.

“Okay, do you know how to say ‘good morning’?”

“Bonjou.”

“And you can say, ‘good afternoon’?”

“I don’t know.”

I taught him the appropriate greeting for all times of day. He smiled and threw the ball up to me. I caught it and said “Thank you” in English. He cocked his head to one side. “Thank you. Sa vle di, mési.”

“Okay,” he said. “Thank you.”

…

When the Walls Fall Down The students here at LCS live tough lives. They come from very poor families, and life is even harder now since the earthquake. When life gets shitty, it’s good to have someone to talk to. It is possible that the very best thing I do as a volunteer is listen.

I have a good rapport with the kids; partially because I speak French and Creole, partially because I was here last year, and partially because my favorite thing to do when I’m not doing anything else is to simply find someone and talk. I can think of three moments last week when the Joy and Weight of having these two ears hit me square in the face.

Mandy is a Philo student, which means that this is her last year at LCS. She wants to study political science, but her parents want her to study Law. She is one of my brightest students, fluent in four languages, and I know she can excel in any field. But the universal problem of teenagers disagreeing with parents could be rendered moot—the earthquake wiped out many of the universities in Port-au-Prince. Not all of the buildings fell down, but many were damaged, and all are closed. Many students were killed when their classrooms and libraries came falling down.

Now, no one knows when the universities will re-open. Mandy’s future is obscure. We talked for a long time in the calm evening hours of Study Hall, wondering about the When’s and How’s of life. I looked her in the eyes and told her not to worry, that the universities will reopen, that her parents only want her to be happy, and that her inner light will lead her to a beautiful future.

But if the answers to her questions are blowing in the wind, they are inaudible for now.

Patrick is also a Philo student. He is struggling with his fellow classmates, and fears becoming alienated. “So-and-so said I said this, but I didn’t. So-and-so said I said that, which I did, but they misunderstood.”

We were out on the far playground, swinging on the rusty swing set and watching the sunlight sink down the day’s drain. It was kind of refreshing: I couldn’t solve his problems, but drama amongst adolescents is normal. Teenagers have social crises, earthquake or no. For once around here, Mother Nature was not to blame.

There was no one else he felt like he could talk to, though. I and I was there.

There’s something to be said for just being there.

Jesly is a middle-school age student. I saw her sitting alone on Friday afternoon, looking off at something/nothing in the distance. It took a while, but she eventually opened up to me. She was having a problem with some of the girls in her dorm room—normal. But life’s normal challenges get harder when the ground has shaken out from under you.

“They say I always cause trouble. Do you like students who cause trouble?”

“Well, I like you.”

“So, you think I cause trouble?”

“All students cause trouble sometimes. Even I cause trouble. We have to try to be better.”

Then I saw that she was crying. She was not sobbing, just tears falling silently down her beautiful dark-chocolate-colored face as she said, in Creole: “When I’m sad, it makes me miss my brother. He died in the earthquake. Now, I need you to pray for me.”

And so I do.

…

The Tropics? Last week, we had a wave of cooler, dreary days. Temperatures plummeted into the mid- to lower-seventies—Ha! I even slept with a sheet one night. Students asked me if it ever gets cold like that where I’m from. I explained to them the difference between “cold” and “cool.” They were incredulous about snowstorms, but seemed more believing when I explained about radiators and central heating, etc.

Finally, the sun came back out. I guess we need cloudy days to make us appreciate azure skies. Now, it’s back to Hot. Sweating is the norm. When you fight it, it’s rough. But once you give in, it’s not so bad. I always shower before bed, then crawl into my mosquito net with my fan trained directly on me—that’s the one time of day I’m not sticky with sweat.

Today, to fight the heat, I cut my own hair. Buzzed it with an electric trimmer. By this point, I’ve gotten pretty good at it. I even taper the sides. Some of the neighborhood kids told me not to do it, because they liked playing with my weird white boy hairdo and want me to grow it long. But it’s just too hot for that.

…

Chalk Dust Teaching is going well. Most of my classes have between 20 and 30 students. I try to find interesting things to lecture about. I’m having kids write their own parables for my religion classes, and next week we’ll talk about Saint Patrick’s Day—from explaining the Trinity in Ireland using the Clover, to green clothes and green beer, to bagpipes and pots of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Also, last week I started teaching English to 7th-grade students (took over for a volunteer who needs more time to devote to her duties that involve expanding our Timoun program). It’s a blast—we work on verbs, do lots of vocabulary, and I’ve taught them a couple songs as mnemonic devices. Being able to yell at them in Creole is a real boon to classroom management.

Each day by the end of classes I am pretty much covered in chalk dust. It’s a good feeling, actually. I still get a rush out of having so many pairs of eyes looking to me, and seeing light bulbs go off in their heads.

There are frustrations, some that are unique to Haiti: teaching in tents donated by the Italian military until we can get a couple of our classroom buildings fixed. The tents are pitched on the soccer field, it they get really hot. I push the students (despite the overwhelming desire to melt in sweat and sleep), telling them that if they give me ten more good minutes of focusing, I’ll let them go early. It kind of works.

And trying to listen to “Faith Like a Child” with my Junior class in the Math I classroom is difficult, because the room is situated near the edge of campus that boarders our street, Santo 5, and the men across the street use an obnoxiously loud diesel-fueled contraption to fabricate cinderblocks all day long.

And some days there is no chalk to be found. And students are always missing, on dishwashing duty or helping with the Timoun (day care) program or for any number of reasons.

But we make do. Teaching in Haiti has honed my going-with-the-flow skills.

…

Digging a Hole/ The Glory of Coke. Last week, my Netwayaj (the time of day after classes when students clean the school and do neighborhood beautification) project was leading teams of male students to dig a new metal pit. The site was located about two hundred yards from the school, down a dirty road that tapers down to an alley, and opens up again to a two-lane thoroughfare lined with palm and banana trees, bordered by cinderblock walls in various stages of collapse, and next to a trash-strewn field.

The work started off slow, me and twelve or so young men picking away at the sun-baked earth with pickaxes and shovels. We made the perimeter about five feet wide by eight feet long, and took turns wielded the tools.

Working for about an hour and twenty minutes each day, the hole grew steadily deeper. Thursday, our last day of Netwayaj for the week (since our school only has a half-day on Fridays to give students ample time to travel home before dark), my team and I worked like a well-oiled machine. I brought my wristwatch, and we each worked a two-minute shift full-out. The guys got into it, pushing each other to work harder.

I also took advantage of this time to talk to the guys about “Manning Up,” being the kind of men their country needs to rebuild. Jeffrey, a smart kid who often has a chip on his shoulder said to me, “But mister, we are still only kids.”

I told Jeff I thought that was bullshit, and then explained what that means. So, we also learned some new vocabulary.

By the end of the day, the dirt on our skin was turning to mud from sweat. But we’d dug a hole, and we’d dug it good and deep. By the time we left the dig site, muscles exhausted and shovels slung over our shoulders, the sun was softening and we had the satisfaction of a job well-done.

I treated myself to a pure-cane-sugar Coca Cola. It hit the spot.

…

Better than Bombs Night time is one of the few times during a day when I can sit in silence, uninterrupted, and read or pray or listen to music when my Walkman isn’t on the fritz.

Last week I read a book called Left to Tell, a beautiful and redemptive memoire by a woman who survived the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Another of the volunteers showed the film Hotel Rwanda to his Philo English class, so I was able to discuss the politics, sociology, and heartbreak of the genocide with some of my favorite students.

“Mr. D., in the movie, the United Nations was not able to help the Rwandese people. The general said they are ‘peacekeepers, not peacemakers.’ So they could not even fire their guns to protect people from killers. It makes me wonder how I should feel about the UN in Haiti. Should I trust them? Why are they here?”

Whoa. I realized I was over my head, so I searched out their English teacher, also named John, who was a political science major at the University of Notre Dame. I listened to his conversation with the student, talk of bureaucracy and red tape vs. moral imperatives, and more questions than answers.

Later that night, I lay in bed and hummed along with my oscillating fan. I wondered how humans can be so inhuman. I wondered what it will take to prevent something like that from happening again, and knew that the answer has much to do with Education and Forgiveness. Suddenly…

BOOM! Boom, boom, boomoomoom…The sound of a ripe mango falling from its branch, crashing onto the corrugated metal roofing above my head, and rolling along to fall and splatter on the sidewalk below.

I prayed a silent prayer of thanks for my many blessings, and even that the hardships that most immediately face Haiti come from natural disasters, a plagued history, and broken systems, rather than men carrying machetes.

I prayed that ignorance might be wiped out with a loving vengeance.

Books are much better than bombs.

…

The Art of the Sledgehammer Two weekends ago, I had one of the toughest days of manual labor in my life. Several volunteers and a group of Haitian staff affiliated with LCS set out around 6:30 AM to help clean up a fallen wall at our brother school across the city, St. Luis Gonzag.

The wall had been around ten feet high. Now, the bottom two or three feet were intact, but the top of the wall had toppled into the school grounds—one hundred yards of cinderblock, cement, and rebar.

We worked all morning long, smashing up fractured cinderblocks with sledgehammers, shoveling debris, and heaving stones from inside the school onto the sidewalk on the opposite side of the wall. Dump trucks were came to haul the wreckage away, and we loaded their beds by hand.

After several hours of hard work, my muscles were tiring big time. Lunch time came as a relief. I downed lots of water and inhaled a Meal Ready to Eat (we had boxed of these donated to the school by the US military. Imagine me sitting next to a work site in Haiti, soaked in sweat and weary, eating vanilla pound cake, cranberries, and self-heating beef stew [just add water]. I was delightfully flabbergasted. A heck of an invention).

Thankfully, our numbers grew throughout the day, as more men showed up to work. Eventually, a bulldozer from US Aid came and helped load the wall debris into the dump trucks. By the end of the day, 3pm, I was worn out—a wrung-out rag, a beat up bag of bones. But it was fulfilling work, rebuilding Haiti one cinderblock at a time. Over the next two days, a sheet metal fence was put up as a temporary barrier.

Yesterday, a team of LCS volunteers and staff went to perform a similar demolition mission at the Sisters of Charity (Mother Theresa’s folks). Five of us worked with sledgehammers and pick axes and shovels to break apart a downed wall that was blocking the road in front of the orphanage.

People from the neighborhood gathered to watch, and young men offered me their advice for free. Some even pitched in, thankfully. After less than an hour of laboring in the hard Caribbean sun, I was feeling fried and tired.

But we kept on. Taking turns, I found that smashing the shit out of a busted wall was a phenomenal channel for venting my frustrations with our beautiful but broken and heartrending world. I heaved the hammer up high above my head. Thud. This is for genocide. Thud. This is for earthquakes. Thud. This is for clouds looming over kids’ futures. Thud. This is for my own hard heart and shortsightedness and doubt. Thud. This is for the lonely. Thud. This is for empty stomachs and hearts. Thud. Thud. Thud.

I swung until I had nothing left in me, and the fruits of my labors lay broken on the ground. And I looked at the faces of the men working with me. Sweat stung my eyes. There were no black faces or white faces at this point. I couldn’t help but smile. Covered head to toe in cement dust, we were all gray.

We managed to move the wall about three feet, which was enough room for traffic to pass.

Then a bulldozer and some dump trucks showed up, ordered by our President, Patrick Moynihan. They did a good job cleaning up. It was impressive to see the heavy machinery at work.

I slept like a bear last night. And today my back is sore. The twinges of pain are good, though, because I earned them.

Suspended Chords On weekend mornings, campus is quiet. I like to play my guitar in the chapel. It’s an open-air building, with large white pillars on the perimeter, and the limbs of tropical trees reaching in through the iron gates between the pillars. Their shadows dance across the floor like birds in a fight.

Playing the gee-tar is a good way for me to pray without words. I’ve written a couple songs in the month that I’ve been back on the island, and I like to send them spiraling on the sea breeze up above the trees.

They don’t have words yet, but the words will come.

Some days, local street urchins, students, or a fellow LCS staff member will hear me playing and wander up to the chapel to listen. Last week, a group of five kids sat on the wooden benches we used for pews and I played them a song I’d written last year: “our designs get broken; plans are given to change…” They clapped along with the rhythm, adding a wonderful pulse to the tune. I sang loud and they clapped loud.

It was a good moment.

…

Okay, that’s enough for today.