Haiti

My friend John volunteered for a year in Haiti at a school. I met him this past August at Notre Dame after his year of service. After the earthquake he felt compelled to go back as many else would as well. This is one of his emails. He writes about his time at the school and the time post-earthquake. I thought some of you might find it interesting. He is also a great writer so it doesn't seem long. He has a few more emails that I might post as well.

anpil men, chay pa lou

--With many hands, the load is not heavy.


Dear All,

I am alive and well in Haiti, grâce à Dieu. It would be hard for me to put the last two weeks into words.

If limited to only a few, I’d say:

Rubble

The Oasis

Aftershocks

Roadside Bonfires

Palm Tree Silhouettes

Timoun

What Does Faith Look Like?

Drenched and Dancing

But if you could see the orange stains from mangoes under my fingernails, the reddening on my neck from the tropical sun, the chalk from blackboards and earth from kids’ feet and puppy paws on my pants, the timbre of my voice when I’m singing Tande’m tande’m, konnen konnen, you’d know I was doing all right, probably better than all right.

Hope this finds you feeling ALIVE, and well.

John.

…

For those of you with time and interest, here are a few more words…



Rubble After less than five hours in the air and five more on a bus, I found myself on the outskirts of a broken city. You’ve all seen the pictures: walls buckled and floors and ceilings stacked like pancakes, homes reduced to piles of cinderblocks, a poor city with no skyscrapers where you could see the stars at midnight turned into a burial ground for thousands upon thousands of people in about thirty seconds.

It makes you shake your head and gasp and wonder why. But I did not come here to shrug.

So, the next day, I led a team of about six students to do some manual labor in the neighborhood surrounding Louverture Cleary School. Six skinny Haitian kids in hard hats with wheelbarrows and shovels and a sledge hammer, with neighborhood youngsters looking on wide-eyed.

The outer wall of a house had fallen during the earthquake, cement and busted cinderblocks in a pile on the ground. We used the sledgehammer to break up the remnants of the wall into small pieces. We then filled the wheelbarrows to capacity, rolled them down the street, and dumped them in a 16’ x 16’ plot where the school was financing the construction of a new house.

It was something special to watch the team of young students lay the foundation for a new home with the rubble of an old one. Transformation.

The Oasis One afternoon earlier this week, the school was visited by a battalion of soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division of the US Army. I almost didn’t see them for their camouflage at first; really, but their M-4 assault rifles were kind of hard to miss once I got up close. These, along with their heavy packs and jackets, were laid in two long rows near the front gate.

After ten minutes, some soldiers were playing basketball with students, others were giving piggyback rides, playing games of monkey-in-the-middle with Army-Issue baseball caps, or having their tattoos examined by inquisitive children.

Talking to a soldier named Joey, he said he had been in Haiti since January 17th (though others had arrived only hours after the earthquake), and overall it was a good experience. For those who had not been deployed before, it was valuable practice in entering a foreign environment, trying to distribute food to large crowds of hungry people whose language you don’t speak, and assessing targets without the burden of an enemy threat. To those who had seen duty in Iraq, it was a pleasant reprieve. “Here,” one soldier said, with a Haitian six-year-old sitting on his shoulders, “no one is trying to kill you.”

The highlight for their battalion was, unanimously, coming to our school. They call it “The Oasis.” I was asking them if they’d sampled Haitian culture. Of course they weren’t allowed to sample the Barbaincourt, but they smoke the locally made cigarettes like chimneys. When asked if I’d tried the menthols, I said no: “I don’t get out much.”

Without missing a beat, amidst the sound of bouncing basketballs, laughter, and little running feet, a soldier from Montana looked me in the eye and said, “I wouldn’t want to.”

Aftershocks This week was to be a return to normalcy at the school. We were at our all-time high of student population since January 12th. Armed with chalk, textbook, and a year of experience, I was totally unmatched against Mother Nature.

The first aftershock woke me up, but I wasn’t sure what the hell was going on. Thought I was dreaming. The eerie feeling came when the earth stopped shaking but the building was still rumbling as the students stampeded out of their dorm rooms at 4:30 in the morning. It had been a 4.7, so I’m told.

The next night at 1:30 am, there was a 5.2 aftershock. The following day was one of my hardest in Haiti. I was teaching in the outdoor classroom situated immediately outside one of the girls’ dorms. How was I supposed to teach as my students kept looking over my shoulder to watch their classmates stream out the front gate with their bags packed? Some left because they were scared their dorm would fall down. Some left because their parents came to get them, or because all their peers were leaving, or because an aftershock was their version of a snow-day, an excuse to blow off class.

I was distraught; it felt like sand slipping through my fingers. There was one point where I almost cried, watching one of my brightest and most ebullient students head for home. “Kile w’ap vini anko (When will you come back)?” I asked her.

“M pa konnen (I don’t know),” she said.

“Dako. M’ap tann ou (Okay. I’ll be expecting you).”

The next day, I had four students in my Rheto (Juniors) religion class. My lesson plan went out the window, and we just talked soberly. After lunch, I was beat. The sun was too hard. The barometric pressure was too much. I was uninspired to lesson plan. I’d been shaken.

…

There is a pivotal battle at hand, a battle between ignorance and knowledge, between fear and courage. These seem clear-cut, to the outsider. But the battle between mind and heart is perhaps the most crucial, and the most opaque.

The radio programs in Haiti broadcast hearsay. This is ignorance. A soothsayer predicts an aftershock, and everyone believes them a prophet when the earth starts shaking. Problem is, people talk about aftershocks every day.

What we know is that our buildings are safe. We know this because multiple teams of expert engineers have come, checked them out, and told us this. It’s science. Some of the buildings are cracked, but the fissures are cosmetic, not structural.

A 4.0 or a 5.0 earthquake is not dangerous for us at this point. What is dangerous is a mob of people running for their lives, trampling one another. It takes courage sometimes to walk very slowly.

We can make charts of Richter scale stresses versus building materials’ durability, use physics to define the dangers. We can know that we are safe but not believe it. The head knows that a small aftershock will not bring these buildings down, but the heart has a good memory. It recalls the buildings in ruin, the loved ones crushed to death, the sheer panic of your world shaking on its axis.

To move on, we need to maintain a sense of normalcy. We cannot rebuild this country if we are living outside in tents and letting the piles of rubble become permanent fixtures, if we give up, and walk out the door.

But kids are kids.

If your family was mauled by bears, would you want to sleep anywhere where you know that a bear could waltz into your room in the middle of the night, rock your bed, breathe down your neck?

If your family drowned at sea, would you want to live on a boat?

Another question is: if we build temporary tent cities, and International aid groups come and supply fresh water to their inhabitants, then people are “relieved” after this natural disaster, right? But when do the aid groups pack up and leave this foreign land? When there is no longer a need? Guess what, people aren’t going to leave tent cities as long as there is fresh water for free. So, will the aid organizations pull out and leave people to die of thirst?

Maybe they’ll get wise, give people shovels, and help them dig wells.

…

Some of my students are translators at local hospitals. Patients come in, and the doctor says to my student, “Ask them what’s wrong.”

“What’s wrong?”

“My house fell down, my children are all dead, I have no job, and my husband has abandoned me. Maybe he’s dead, too.”

“Okay, but I cannot tell the doctor that. You need to have some illness, some injury for this hospital to help you.”

“But I have none.”

“What did she say?”

“She said her heart hurts.”

…

It is hard to convince a heartbroken people to let the dead bury the dead. It is hard to convince foreigners to truly invest, and listen to what people need, and walk with them toward a better future, instead of handing out crutches, which create only dependency.

It is hard to convince students to sleep in rooms that shake like tombs when an aftershock hits.

It is hard, not knowing what tomorrow will bring. If we wait to rebuild, to transform our world, how long will we wait? If we wait to start class for one month, then we might have an aftershock in one month and one day. Of maybe in two hundred years.

We’re just going to have to learn to live in harmony with the Unknown.

Roadside Bonfires This year, the school is more intricately involved in the surrounding community. Besides rebuilding projects in the neighborhood, we do roadside cleanup. This is quite a task in Haiti, where there is no public sanitation. We go out with platoons of students wielding gloves and buckets and wheelbarrows. We pick up plastic bottles to recycle, metal and glass to bury in a huge hole we dig, and every kind of combustible trash known to man.

At the end of the day, we pile the burnable things by the road, douse it with some diesel fuel, and set a match to it.

This might make you cringe, but worrying about the ozone layer is a luxury we can’t afford around here, not yet.

Yesterday, I was accosted by two different Haitian men, neighbors of ours. I was a bit worried at first that people would complain about the smoke, or that the police would haul me away to some dark place. But these men wanted to shake my hand. One talked to me in French for about five minutes, about international politics, and why won’t the World Powers help Haiti get on its feet by ensuring democratic elections with candidates who aren’t corrupt bastards?

I told him that I don’t have much faith in governments. To change the world, I think, you shouldn’t start at the top, but at the bottom, with something as mundane as a notebook and a pen. My hope is in my students, the ones getting their hands dirty to make their country more beautiful one meter at a time.

The second man talked to me in Creole and invited me to come to a concert some time. He was a young guy with a Bob-Marley style cap. The next time we’re out cleaning, he said, he wants to get the whole neighborhood to help. He loves what we’re doing here. He wasn’t looking for a handout. Just a reason to believe that a verdant Haiti is still possible.

The good thing about being a volunteer at LCS is that you wear lots of hats (or spandex unitards under your drab business wear à la Superman). So burning trash helps me blow off steam after a frustrating day of false-starts in my classes, and I am renewed to help cook dinner and do the dishes, then tutor students in the evening. Which brings me to…

Palm Tree Silhouettes My favorite time of day is the evening. This is when the sharp sun softens and gives way to the glow of orangeish bulbs running on solar power.

It’s when I get to catch up with my friends on Haitian staff and practice trash-talking in Creole.

It’s when I get to wander around while students are studying, singing, or talking quietly (sometimes too loud, and I tell them to “pa fe dezòd”). Their voices get washed in a Caribbean sea breeze, mingled with muffled cricket chirps and mutts barking in the distance. Below the swaying palm tree silhouettes, I take the time to just sit down and be with them.

I sit with Melgraff, a sixième (sixth grade) student who wants to practice his English or just talk about the soccer game from earlier in the afternoon, or Mikerlyne, one of my students who wants to teach me Chemistry and tries to convince me that 75 degrees is cold, or Vania, a young woman, with precise soft-spoken English and a kickass smile who asks me why I came back to Haiti.

I give a meandering answer, which boils down to: because my heart wouldn’t shut up/ because I could. But maybe she already understands what I can’t articulate, because she smiles like a diamond and says, “I am very glad you are here.”

That is why I came back.

Timoun is the Creole word for “children” (it translates literally as Little People). This year, THP’s President’s wife is running a Timoun Program, which invites neighborhood kids from about three years old to about nine years old to come and eat lunch at our school, play on the playground, sometimes watch movies, and bathe on Fridays. Christina has been known to advocate for the children, retrieving them from orphanages, taking them to the hospital. Some of them call her “Ma.”

Yesterday, after I got done with teaching and burning trash, I was greeted by Roudna, a skinny four year-old with a smile twice as big as she is, running toward me with outstretched hands, leaping into my arms, and clinging to me with her legs around my waist and telling me to spin, spin, spin.

After a long and frustrating day, I am revitalized by being a sort of surrogate Uncle John the Human Jungle Gym. I’m fluent in Creole Kid Talk: “Pote’m” is “carry me,” “Pouse’m” is “push me” (on the swings), “kouri deye’m” is “run behind me (chase me)” and “gade’m” is “watch me.”

It was after lunch yesterday that I saw a small pack of tykes sitting in a row on a small wall. I walked down the line, giving high fives to tiny outstretched hands along the way.

I am blessed to have days with so many high points. It’s like the flippin’ Himalaya around here.

What Does Faith Look Like? I’m not sure, but I think you could make a strong argument for faith looking a lot like a roomful of eager young minds with their eyes fixed on you, faith that you’ll say something worth hearing.

Monday and Tuesday were beleaguered by minor after-quakes, but the rest of the week has been better.

Yesterday, I had a twazyèm (freshmen) class of about twenty students (lots better than four). It was my job to teach them religion. In a way, the pressure was off, since religion is not tested on their Baccalaureate exam, which determines if they will get into college or not. In another way, though, the pressure was on, because I am teaching a class that takes for subject matter the Divine and our immortal souls. (!?)

Here’s what we did: I had them sing “This Little Light of Mine.” They loved it. I know because I heard students singing it all over campus later in the day.

Then, we talked about Matthew 5:14-16, about letting our light shine. I asked them how do we do this? How can you tell who is a witness for Truth and grace? They brainstormed ideas: talking about God, following the Commandments, living a life of zeal, loving your neighbor, not kicking people.

I asked them to make an anagram—write their names vertically on a sheet of paper, and then take each letter in their name as the first in a word or phrase that answers the question: “How can I be a witness?”

They seemed to enjoy it, set right to work. I encouraged them to draw using crayons I’d brought, and I let them write in French or Creole if they couldn’t find the word they were looking for in English. For the last ten minutes of class, as they were finishing up, I played a song from a CD I’d brought: “Blessed to be a Witness” by Ben Harper.

Maybe they didn’t learn much about Religion, but it got their minds off of the earthquake and its aftermath for about forty minutes or so.

And it helped me learn their names. My goal is to learn the name of every student in the school. I’m almost there, if you round up.

…

The days are long. Between the many high points are lots of frustrating ones. Short on sleep because the power went out (which means my fan turned off and I drowned in sweat), I miss breakfast because Morning Prayer runs long and I have to go teach. I spend half the day wandering around to see which classes are unattended because Haitian staff are absent (for a multitude of reasons: because they must be home to take care of their families, because the schedule keeps changing as life keeps changing since the quake, because they forget, because they are afraid to teach in classrooms, who knows, etc.), and trying to keep the students in line. Power struggles, miscommunication, people not doing their jobs, kids causing trouble.

So, basically, daily life like everywhere else on the planet.

But I try to make the most of it. For example: when I find a room full of unsupervised students, I ask them what they’re supposed to be studying, to show me where they’re at in the book, if there’s a book. I’ve substitute-taught impromptu algebra, social science, literature, French, English, and sport classes with moderate success.

Dodgeball games and singing songs are what I can hang my hat on.

…

The volunteer corps this year is a great group six women and three men strong, plus myself, and I don’t see how this school could function without them.

I am finding my niche slowly but surely, and getting to know these good people. Already we have a certain understanding, an ineffable shared experience of Haiti, which has a lot to do with, but is not completely limited to, eating tree-fallen mangoes.

Drenched and Dancing Today, Friday, the Philo students were given the task of cleaning out the basin, an underground holding tank for water with a man-hole sized open in the top. This is where I draw buckets of water for my nightly bucket bath, when the rooftop cisterns run dry.

When I was making my rounds to do some substitute teaching, I came upon them working. Picture this:

A dozen kids soaking wet. After some had climbed down a ladder into the empty reservoir to scrub the walls and the bottom with towels and soap suds, some were disinclined to get wet. So, the others filled some buckets full of water from the pump’s spout, and soaked their classmates.

It turned into a regular water fight party, with dancing and singing of the school song in Spanish. I am proud to say that I ended up with a bucket of water dumped on my head, too. I even climbed down into the basin and helped sop up the last bits of water with a towel.

It blew my mind—if given this task in the USA, most people I know, myself included, would refuse. “Hell no, pay somebody else to do it. Or at least give me a sump pump or something.”

But these kids dove into the work with just some cloth and buckets and their bare hands, and they did a great job. And what’s more, they turned it into a jubilee.

And that is the lesson for today. Earthquakes happen. It is hard to make sense out of it, maybe impossible. But there is much work to be done. Together the load is not as heavy.

And if we are going to build our world anew, we’d better add plenty of Joy.