Haiti

Haiti The Dover Church
Sixth Sunday of Easter, May 29, 2011
Scripture: Psalm 66, John 14: 15-21

Last Monday, Jim MacDonald, Dave Melville and I were sitting on the veranda of the Visa Lodge Hotel in Port au Prince, Haiti, having a late lunch. There were a number of other parties at the tables around us, all clearly foreigners like us, most probably here on humanitarian business like us (there not being many other kinds of business to speak of for foreigners in Haiti). The lunch was buffet style and I, for one, approached each hot tray with suspicious curiosity. I am hardly a food snob, but Haiti was a new world for me and I was, as I said, curious in a suspicious rather than expectant sort of way about what I’d find under each warming lid: the usual, rice, beans, leafy greens, and then the meats; first, some sort of barbecued red meat on a skewer...I’d seen a lot of goats walking the streets of the city. Could it be? When in Rome…I’ll try some of that. Next, a white meat swimming in a white sauce….judging by its toughness and rubberiness to the touch of the serving fork, I guessed chicken. Safe bet. I’ll try some of that too.
Back at the table, Dave, Jim and I were chatting about our experiences during the first 24 hours. It was really like two conversations weaving in and out of each other. One conversation was impressionistic, the people we had seen in the various hospitals and clinics we had visited, the enormity of destruction from the earthquake, the vast expanse of blue and gray tents in camps packed into every open space, the insane drivers, the piles of filth and garbage lining every street, the collapsed presidential palace. All of that was fundamentally contradicted by the beauty, joy and hope of so many Haitians, laughing kids playing with a stick or tin can, the posters of the smiling, young new President pasted to the sides of tarpaper shacks. We talked in snippets, offering little snapshots of memory, which I think was the only way we could edge our intellectual and emotional ways into the reality we found ourselves in in Port au Prince. The enormity of the catastrophe could not be swallowed whole. This would have to be processed in small bites.
The other conversation was more businesslike. “So what do you think about that operation? Can you see an opening for us there? How do you think that would work? What do you think the cost effectiveness of our participation would look like? Can we raise that kind of money?” I mostly listened to this part of the conversation, not really having much to offer. I know relationships and possibilities, can judge enthusiasm and sense the Holy Spirit, but dollars, cents and business plans, those were Jim and Dave’s thing.
At some point I noticed that our conversation had taken a decidedly business turn, which gave me an extended opening to address myself to my lunch. Never having had goat before, the barbecue having been so thorough, and my French not doing much with the Creole, I decided after a few bites that I’d never know what was on that skewer. Then to the white meat. As I said, it looked and felt like chicken, but when I put it to my lips it turned out to be fish, a very tough, very chewy, quite lacking in flavor yet smelling like fish, fish. The bouquet and texture were so inspiring on my palette that I gave it over for people watching the other folks on the veranda.
The first group that caught my attention were a dozen or so enormous guys in athletic wear with tattoos on their bulging muscles. I pointed them out to Jim and Dave: "who do you think those guys are?" Football players seemed to be the logical conclusion. And we were right: some players from the NY Giants down to do humanitarian work with the NFL Players Association. We had just come from a hospital paid for by the NHL Players Association and the Canadian government, so it looked like the NFL was also either already involved or just about to be.
At another table sat four older ladies in various kinds of floppy beach hats and baggy over bathing suit beach dresses. "Who do you think they are?" Dave took a quick look and said with a smile, “definitely nuns.” We laughed, “how’d you come up with nuns, Dave?” To which he answered, “older ladies drinking beer and eating pizza in the middle of the day in a place like this…. gotta be nuns.” Looking down at my mystery fish and soda, I thought to myself, “pretty smart nuns.”
I went over later and discovered that Dave was right when I introduced myself to Sister Rosemary Fry who was sitting on a chaise longue by the pool. I told her who we were and why we were there and asked her at least a dozen questions about herself, what she did, and how she thought we ought to go about doing what we hoped to do in Haiti. She was from Toronto and had been in Haiti for 25 years, so she would have a good idea. Her group had come to the capital for an ecumenical meeting, trying to bring some coordination to all the humanitarian relief work going on. We talked for at least a half an hour.
After dinner that evening, there were the nuns again at a nearby table. They came by to introduce themselves and after pleasantries, Jim and Dave started asking them more questions. We learned that two of them served in a hospital for the dying. Another, who looked to be the oldest of them, although all of them had a certain agelessness about them, bright, smiling, youthful eyes shining out of wrinkled faces, her name was Sister Mary Finnick, said to us, “every month 25 children die in our hospital. My goal is to get that number down to 20. I’ve been here 25 years now and seen things go from bad to worse. Sometimes I despair.”
From the moment we had come out of the airport I had felt awash in an escalating and enveloping sense of despair. Even then I knew that any attempt to describe Port au Prince would come out as a superficial cliché, but I am the preacher so let me give it a shot. Imagine for a moment that you are me at 20 years old. My business is to collect rebar, the iron rods that are inside poured concrete to give it strength. After the earthquake, rebar is everywhere, lying on the ground, sticking out of a piles of rubble. I have a wheelbarrow, which I push around in the 100 degree heat and humidity, picking up rods and rolling them in my wheelbarrow to a man who buys it by the pound from collectors like me. Except today I am not working so I am not making any money. Today I am sitting outside a hospital with Leo in my arms as he dies of malnutrition and diarrhea. Except I don’t know that’s why he is dying because I never could afford to go to school so I can’t read and have never been given any health or childcare education. I just know he’s dying and that my heart is breaking. I don’t know that Leo is dying because our water is infected with bacteria and the minimal food I can afford to buy collecting rebar is both insufficient and substandard. Marie-Laure is at home sitting in front of our tent where we have been living for the last year and half since the earthquake with 50,000 of our neighbors. She is taking care of Lucas, who doesn’t weigh 45 pounds as he does in Dover, but 18 pounds. She has a small goods business in front of our tent, selling odds and ends that she barters for, three tubes of toothpaste, five bars of soap, a couple of dishpans, that’s her inventory this week. We make enough to get by, maybe keep our kids alive into their teens, but not enough to educate them, pay rent on an apartment, buy more goods to expand Marie-Laure’s shop, or buy me a truck so that I can carry more rebar or even become the middle man myself. And our family is only one of several million in this city.
“Sometimes I despair,” Sister Mary Finnick is saying to us. “Sometimes?” God help us, only sometimes? But there you have it, so much hope and joy in the face a million reasons to give up in despair. I knew that God was staring me right in the face, so I didn't offer any comment or question. I just held her words in my heart and pondered them, knowing that these nuns are not delusional. Rather they are living Jesus’ commandment to love, God living in them as they live for others, God pouring the Spirit into them as they pour themselves out for others, God in Jesus abiding in them as they abide with others.
Jesus is right. We are not abandoned, orphaned by God. God has sent the Spirit to dwell in us so that we do not despair as we live out God’s love. Because Jesus lives, we can live, even in the most desperate situations. Many first world Christians think of this commandment to love as a duty, an obligation, a responsibility or burden, something to add to our lists, which, to my way of thinking is not all that much of a motivation. It's not something to burden ourselves with, but the opportunity to live with God, to live in God and allow God to live through us. I go to places like Haiti because there I am truly living the Gospel, set free from all the Godless self-absorption and trivia which bogs me down so often in my daily life. From the first page of the Bible to the last, God is clear that those of us who have so much should help those who have so very little. We, who live in towns whose transfer stations have a richer and more varied inventory than most markets in Haiti, have much to share. What I discover when I live it is that these are the places where God is inescapably present and active and the most trivial things, like holding a child’s hand, are full of holiness and meaning.