Haiti: 10 Days of Blessing

Fr. John Spicer kept this journal of the trip he made to Haiti Feb. 16-25. Other members of the group were the Rev. Linda Yeager, deacon at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Kansas City; Dr. Anne Bray, a Kansas City-area pediatrician; and Nick Mann, a pre-med student at Truman State University in Kirksville, Mo.

Friday, Feb. 16, 9 p.m.

We’ve made it to Miami with only the slight frustrations of poor timing. The airline told Linda that we should be at the airport three hours early when really only 45 minutes would have been plenty. And by the time we got to the hotel in Miami (which the cabbie had never heard of), we were about two hours later than scheduled. I’ve just enjoyed half of Nick’s pepperoni and bacon pizza, and I can feel the salt coursing through my veins. Life is good.

I’m still a bit worried about my kids and their fear that I won’t come home. Dying doesn’t actually worry me, but abandoning them does. All shall be well, I know. Daniel is sure I’ll be protected by God since I’m here to do “the Lord’s work,” he says. Tell that to the Salvadoran nuns, or Dietrich Bonheoffer, or…. He’s not ready for a discussion of theodicy, especially not as I leave town for Haiti. I do pray that I’ll come home safely and on time – just so they don’t have to worry or feel abandoned.

Tomorrow, we fly to Port-au-Prince and then to Les Cayes. It will be a day of giving up and, as Linda said today, practicing the ministry of presence.

Saturday, Feb. 17, 1:07 p.m.

We’re in the airport at Port-au-Prince, waiting for the group from New York City that’s joining us on the commuter flight to Les Cayes, supposedly at 3:30 or so.

We’re in what would be the Admiral’s Club if this were an American airport. This is first-class Haiti – a few blans like us (the Haitians call Anglos blans, meaning white) and Haitian elite. This room is air conditioned, clean, well-lit. The furniture is comfortable if not plush – overstuffed chairs and couches. The tile floor is clean. There is one TV, tuned to CNN in English. Aside from the mosquitoes in the bathroom, this could easily be America. Across the room, there’s even a “Salle Internet,” whose wireless signal allowed Nick to get an Internet connection on his laptop as he waits.

Flying in, my seatmate and I got the one row with no window in the window seat. What I could see through other windows was brown earth with patchy tree coverage in the environs of Port-au-Prince. As we came in, we could see buildings that looked like something from war-zone news footage – broken, crumbling walls; broken windows; no sign of life around them. My guess is that people live there, though we couldn’t see them.

We were met by the assistant to the bishop of Haiti, who brought us up to this privileged room. Now we’re waiting with Pere Ajax, who among other things runs the Business and Technology Institute (BTI) at Les Cayes, as well as serving several congregations. I feel badly that he’s wasting his incredibly taxed and valuable time babysitting the blans rather than working with the people here.

My seatmate on the flight was fascinating: a Haitian who moved to the U.S. for school and stayed. He’s a manager at some business in New York, making $60,000 a year, he told me quickly. He’s traveling to Port-au-Prince today for Carnival, tomorrow through Fat Tuesday, as were many others on our flight. I told him why I was going, and he told me he wants to be able to make some difference for the people of Haiti, especially for the children, whom he said suffer tremendously. So he asked for my contact information so that he could contribute to Maison de Naissance (MN). That is the reign of God – moments when people see beyond themselves and respond out of love.

Saturday, Feb. 17, 10 p.m.

We’ve come to Les Cayes. There is so much to say, and I so much want to go to sleep. So here are a few disconnected thoughts….
I find that I may be preaching Ash Wednesday morning, so I need to listen for a sermon. But what would I say about repentance and turning toward God to the people of Les Cayes? How dare I? And how would I begin to know what they need to repent from? It hit me in a conversation with Anne after dinner that what we all need to do is to turn toward hope. Somehow, I would need to paint a picture of turning toward hope – maybe the man on the plane. Some of that hope is about economic progress for Haiti, but ultimately we find hope in bringing hope to others.

Driving in from the airport was like stepping into a Frontline or National Geographic documentary. The poverty is palpable. The resources are virtually nonexistent. The mountainsides are brown from deforestation. The land seems dead, and there is no industry to be seen beyond selling lottery tickets, charcoal, and chicken parts.

The commuter airport in Port-au-Prince was a bit unnerving. So many people crowded into a small waiting area. No way to know whom to trust with your bag. No sense of when the plane would actually leave, and no way of being sure you were getting on the right one. Only two of our six pieces of luggage came with us. And yet Jesus says to be ready for it: “You lack one thing: Get rid of what you have, and give it to the poor. Then come, follow me.”

That’s my challenge for the next six days. Am I ready to let loose of what I cling to? Am I able to empty myself? Kenosis is so much easier when the stakes are so much lower.

Sunday, Feb. 18, 4:40 p.m.

We have done very little today, and I’m very tired anyway. The day began at 5:30 a.m., getting up for a 6:30 departure for the liturgy at St. Paul’s in Torbeck. The presider was Pere Millien, a retired priest who presided at the two liturgies today while Fr. Steve Smith, leading the group from St. James’ in Manhattan, preached. Translating a sermon in real time, phrase by phrase, is clumsy and long. After the second liturgy, in a village that seemed like nothing more than a field with a couple of houses, we went to Pere Millien’s home for lunch with the St. James’ group.

All that sounds very organized, but it didn’t feel that way. Aside from knowing that we had to go to Torbeck about 6:30, all the rest just sort of happened. We went to the rectory at Torbeck between services for coffee and sandwiches. We all milled about there while trying to discern what our hosts and our guide for the day, MN’s administrator Vaina, wanted us to do. Haitian communication tends to be very indirect, which makes it interesting to figure out what you’re supposed to be doing. (Similarly, at Pere Millien’s home, Madame Millien would not say that lunch was ready but instead kept asking everyone whether they had had a chance to wash their hands.) Then, after lunch, we came back to Hosanna Guest House, where we’re staying. We’ve been resting and reading since then, waiting for the plane carrying Cindy Obenhaus and Dr. Stan Shaffer to arrive.

All that driving around today raises the issue of the roads. Most roads here (outside the towns) are the rough equivalent of Ozark river beds: channels through the trees and fields, with huge rocks, ditches, holes, etc. Jarring doesn’t begin to describe the ride in the pickup. Our driver, Vaina’s husband, said vehicles last about two years here before the roads destroy them. The exception to the rule is the main road connecting the towns. It is beautifully paved, and thus it becomes what we’ve been calling the “Haitian Autobahn.” The people make up for the slow pace on the dirt and rock roads by driving at breakneck speed on the paved part, weaving among dogs, bicyclists, pedestrians, motorbike riders, kids wandering into the street, donkeys, etc. In and near the towns, there are people all along the roads. Some are selling things in tiny stands – candy, cigarettes, snacks, drinks – but most are just walking or standing along the roadside. I asked Vaina’s husband what they were doing, and he said basically they have nothing to do. Apparently, only about 20 percent of Haitian men would be considered “employed” by Northern standards. Others subsist.

It is a symptom rather than an underlying problem. The real problem is that there is so little economic activity. Industry consists of hawking what you can from a stand, providing services such as auto repair (no surprise), and selling lottery tickets from the ubiquitous stands along every road in or near a village. They are easily the most noticeable landmarks. Vaina says there are two competing lotto systems. But what you see is one shack after another, marked with different names (my favorite is “Guarantee”) but offering the same chances. An unpleasant man I used to work with in the Missouri Governor’s Office called the lottery “a tax on stupidity.” Looking at it here, I think it’s more a tax on despair.

In other news…. My roommate on this trip is a pre-med student at Truman State University named Nick, and he’s fiercely intelligent. His mind works so fast that mere mortals like me can’t keep up. He’s finishing college in three and a half years just he can get out of Kirksville and into medical school. He’s here to pilot a program he’s arranging that would involve testing Haitians for malaria in their homes. He’s arranging a $3,000 grant to fund it, and he’s coming back this summer, by himself, to do it – once he’s learned French and Kreyole. And I was proud that I got good grades in college….

Our group has now been joined by Stan, Cindy, and a Haitian college student named Jean. He’s being recruited to work at MN. He’s studying civil engineering, and Stan wants him to oversee the community-health home visits and the data they’re gathering, as well as a project to study and improve the availability of wells. Stan always has the next step here in mind. What a gift he is.

Sunday, Feb. 18, 7:55 p.m.

Tonight, we listened as Stan trained two new employees in gathering community-health data on the laptop during home visits. It’s a challenge, given that neither of them has ever used a computer keyboard. Cursors and clicking are foreign concepts. Stan’s patience is nothing short of astounding.

We’ve discovered that the guesthouse has wireless Internet access! That’s another bizarre aspect of life in Haiti: crushing poverty, truly a Third World environment … but we’re reading our e-mail in the middle of nowhere, and you see many people using cell phones. No health care, no jobs, no public sanitation, little running water, only transient electricity for those fortunate enough to have it … but cell phones!

Monday, Feb. 19, 5:30 p.m.

We spent the day making home visits to people living around MN. This is both primary data collection and testing of the database program, as well as testing the methodology for recording data, talking with families, administering medication, praying with families, etc.

A word about MN itself: It’s a birthing center and care facility for pregnant women, newborns, and small children. Mothers can get their prenatal care and deliver their babies in a clean and healthy environment. They can bring their babies back here for scheduled immunizations and well-baby checks. Anyone can come here for family planning services as well. The intent is to provide the highest-quality care possible in a limited area, rather than spreading resources so thin that only meager, sporadic care is possible. This place is itself an outbreak of the reign of God – all these services are completely free, to anyone who comes by.

I want to pass along what I’m experiencing to the people at St. Andrew’s – so what would I tell them? That the Third World is only a short flight from Miami. That the people of this place, in all their own brokenness, are kind and gentle and hospitable to Americans; that they find hope in the encounter with us rather than detesting us for using up so much of the world’s resources. That there is an incalculable difference to be made simply by showing up here and spending time with people in the service of a goal so holy – God’s own reign. That their continuing prayers are even more important than their cash, though the cash is absolutely necessary, because the prayers connect them to Christ in the person of a woman trying to care for four of her own kids and four more orphans in a two-room home with no job other than subsistence farming. That the people here are not angry or despairing, but that they are filled with an incredible peace of living fully in the moment and stewarding carefully what God gives them. And that, despite what I just said, they also deserve more than rice and beans and mangoes to eat, and a water supply other than the same stream in which they bathe and wash their clothes.

Jesus is present in every child that clung to me today. And at the same time, just about every child would have gladly conned me into giving him or her all the stickers and plastic rings I was giving out. The key is to treat them all with love and compassion and accountability – and be willing to be changed by the experience of them.

The kids were the clearest sacrament of the day today, the encounter that embodies the larger experience most vividly. They were really happy to experience the differences among us. When you wave to a young person here, he or she waves back to you with a tremendous buoyancy and lack of restraint. On the home visits, the kids realized that I was the one with the goodies, so they flocked around me. A lot of it was just that – self-interest, like any kid. But then several of them took turns stroking the hair on my arm because it’s so different from theirs. It was very tender and inquisitive, just wanting to experience what this very different person was like, and wanting me to feel that I was welcome among them.

This place is so difficult, yet so rich. The shower in the guesthouse is awful; the floor is dirty; I’m sharing a small room with two other guys; I don’t speak the language; I don’t really know my role. And yet being here feels very right, full of clarity. Theology makes sense here: Care for those around you first and foremost as an incarnation of the way God cares for them, the way Christ ministered to them, and (however you theologize it) the way Christ died for them.

I had a great conversation this morning with a nondenominational evangelical layman who was criticizing an older Episcopal gentleman in a nursing home who didn’t want to talk about his relationship with Jesus Christ. My new friend not only took that to mean that the man was damned but also that Episcopalians don’t value a personal relationship with Christ. The arrogance is stunning, but the limitation of his imagination also illustrates a truth: Personal relationship with Jesus Christ is essential, but you can’t limit Christ to a personal relationship on your terms. We need a personal relationship with the Christ to whom we pray and a personal relationship with the Christ next to us – especially if that Christ is living in a hut with a dirt floor, drinking and washing in the same stream. That’s God’s preferential option for the poor. It’s triage, holy triage: Care first for the ones who are bleeding the most. And remember that to the extent you do, or don’t, you do it to Jesus himself.

Tuesday, Feb. 20, 8 p.m.

We spent the day doing home visits for Nick’s malaria project. It was great being with so many different families – probably 15 households for my team and the same for the other. At each one, we interviewed the family about malaria – their understanding of it, their history of illness, etc. If they reported a fever in the last two weeks, we went back to them later with the truck, picked them up, and brought them to MN for malaria testing. About 12 people actually came out for the testing, and only one had a possibly positive test. Still, we got the information we were looking for.

In addition, as part of each visit, we administered antiparasitic medication to young children, and we asked the families if we could pray with them and bless their homes. It was wonderful being called to pray for these people’s health, well-being, and joy. I’m sure I’ll never bless as many homes in one day as I did today. The people are so receptive to, and grateful for, prayer. When I asked if we could pray for her family, one woman got down on her knees on the concrete floor. At another home, when we asked to pray, the woman excused herself, went into her other room, and put a scarf on her head to honor God before we could pray with her. There seems to be no real split between their secular and sacred lives. The Spirit, and an openness to it, permeates everything about their lives – even the signs on the buses and tap-taps (pickups carrying an incredible number of people, who “tap” the side to ask for a stop). It is so refreshing to experience the spiritual life being so palpable and so much a normal part of day-to-day living. Also, for future reference: a small corn cob makes the world’s best aspergillum.

Here’s one of the big points to come out of this for me so far: Outreach and mission ministry is not intended just to alleviate the world’s suffering. If that were all it was for, then we could simply give lots of money as our ministry to the “least of these.” But the fact is, that isn’t enough. This ministry is just as much about our own formation as people growing into Christ. We need for this ministry to involve us at a personal, relational level for us to grow into the disciples Jesus expects us to be. Jesus did not simply give marginalized people things that might help them. He didn’t even just heal all the sick and blind and lame. He got involved with people; and in the process, they became a part of him and he became a part of them. And in that encounter, over and over again, transformation happened.

Thursday, Feb. 22, 6:40 a.m.

Yesterday was so full that I couldn’t write, so I’ll try to catch up a bit now…

Yesterday began at 12:40 a.m. with the first of several trips to the bathroom, so I didn’t get much sleep. Stan and Jean also were sick. I wonder what we ate that affected the three of us but no one else. Last night’s goat? The Haitian “beanie weenies” we had for lunch? Who knows?
Because of all that, I almost stayed at the guest house today rather than going to the Ash Wednesday liturgy at St. Saveur in Cayes at 7 a.m. But I’m glad I went. The liturgy was easily the most joyful Ash Wednesday liturgy I’ve ever seen. It’s as if the people simply can’t restrain themselves from proclaiming “Alleluia” in God’s honor. And yet, there was a deep sense of repentance, too. Pere Colbert’s sermon was great, all about finding new life by turning toward God (repentance) and serving others.

At MN, we were to do home visits again as part of Nick’s malaria study. I had my first real frustration with “Haitian time” as we waited and waited to get going once we arrived. The irony was that we weren’t waiting for any Haitians. We were waiting for Ann and Nick to get the malaria tests and the protocol ready for the visits.

The visits themselves were very good, again. My team went to eight or 10 homes and found two people whose symptoms suggested we should test for malaria. A few people know what the disease is, most don’t know about the connection to mosquitoes. Every single household we’ve visited has been pleased to talk with us. Of course, the kids are happy to see us because we’re different, and because we have candy and trinkets. But the adults, too, are willing to talk to blan strangers about their health and their lives. There is no sense of personal intrusion into their private lives and absolutely no indication that they were busy doing something else and didn’t want to be bothered by some outsiders’ medical project. And to a person, they have been happy to have us pray with them and bless their homes – whether it’s a crumbling shack with a dirt floor and thatch roof, or a dwelling of a few rooms with a concrete slab floor, a tin roof, and actually a few furnishings (maybe a table and a dresser). The spiritual life and the “real world” are an integrated whole here. God is felt immanently and personally, experientially, so that engaging in prayer is as natural as the way they bring out chairs from their homes so that guests have a place to sit. Prayer is just a part of who they are, rather than an activity in which they engage from time to time.

We’ve had a lot of conversations about what the problems and solutions here really are. Of course, everything contributes to the problem we see all around us: poverty, poor health, and a structural incapacity for change. But the way that Stan and Cindy put it, the deeper problem is a lack of options in the present system. Once you’re born here, in this poverty and culture, it’s very hard to move in any way. There is nowhere here to go where things are markedly better and no way to go anywhere anyway – little chance to learn anything that would empower you, no way to store up enough capital to get you out of the village or the slum. There are exceptions, of course – the priests, the young men we’ve met like Rozambert (a translator and lay preacher) and Antoine (a student at BTI who wants to open an orphanage at St. Saveur in Cayes). They have found a way to be educated, and that is the key, Stan and Cindy say: education, particularly for females, who do so much of the work of daily life and have no resources for managing it any differently. In fact, Stan says, the strongest predictor of health and physical well-being here is not wealth but level of education. Education offers options, and options offer hope.

I just had a fascinating conversation with one of the women from New York. She went with my group yesterday on the home visits. Apparently, our prayers and blessings of people’s homes caused quite a stir among the New York group in their discussion last night. The conversation was whether it’s OK in a mission trip like this to “evangelize” the way I was doing. Did the people in their homes have the ability to say “no” when we offered to pray with them and bless their houses? Were we imposing our faith on them? And, additionally, the asperging of their homes was seen as an imperial, high-church activity, appropriate for an Anglo-Catholic liturgy but inappropriate for a context such as this. Now, there’s something I never thought I’d see: Me being perceived as an overly evangelistic, and high-church(!), Westerner imposing my faith on others and throwing my foreign sacraments at people who wouldn’t want them. It is amazing how we project onto others that which we reject and that which we fear. The truth is, we’re praying with people and blessing their homes because we did our homework and learned from people who are experts about this context (Stan and Cindy) that this is a perfectly appropriate way to connect physical and spiritual wellness in this culture. And we’re asperging their homes not to impose a high-church liturgical aesthetic but because it’s a symbol, a sacrament, of deep connection between the practice of faith and the stuff of daily life – something they’re teaching us rather than something we’re trying to teach them.

Thursday, Feb. 22, 2:10 p.m.

This morning, Pere Colbert took us to Maniche. Maniche is St. Andrew’s partner congregation and school, so I was representing the people who have “done so much,” as Pere Colbert said, to help them. St. Andrew’s supports the teachers’ salaries, which makes it possible for many more people to send their children to school. Pere Colbert said the annual charge for a typical school in Cayes would be maybe $75 per year, and the cost at Maniche is more like $30 or $40 a year. About 250 kids attend the school, which starts at age 3. There are two school buildings, and the church is between them. The classrooms are Spartan at best – benches with a writing surface running above them, which are also taken into the church to serve as pews for liturgies. There are chalkboards, though, and a real improvement came recently when they put up additional walls to divide the two large rooms in the second building, thereby creating a total of four rooms. Before, four classes were going on simultaneously in two rooms, with about 30 kids in each class….

Pere Colbert asked me to speak to the people there gathered for Morning Prayer. They were so pleased we were there, thanking us profusely for having done so much to help them – the teachers’ salaries and the desks/pews. I felt like what we had done so far was stunningly insufficient considering the need that remains, but we have done a lot of good there. So Itold them we felt just as blessed by them as they felt blessed by us; how we pray for their congregation and school weekly; and how we remember them when we see pictures of them at church. And I said that all these things remind us that we’re all connected, members of one body, so much more alike than different, and invested in each other’s well-being. It was all I could do not to cry.

Now, Pere Colbert says, what they really need are new tin roofs for both the school buildings and for the church. The ones they have are full of holes because the tin sheets were recycled from another structure, so they have the holes from the nails that held them in the first place. Even better, they could use a real roof, with ceilings and everything. St. Andrew’s could raise the money to do that in a heartbeat.

Thursday, Feb. 22, 9:05 p.m.

Late this afternoon, we went to the hospital in Cayes, downtown. I found myself actively not engaging with people there because I had the feeling of a visitor to a concentration camp: How on earth can I respond to this?
Here are a few images that stay with me. The ER smells, an open room with beds and gurneys lining both walls, desolate sick and injured people waiting to be admitted. We found out later that all patients come in through the ER. (We also found out, from a Haitian general practitioner we met at BTI, that the majority of actual emergency cases are from traffic accidents – no surprise, given that all 25,000 residents of Cayes seem to be on the street at all times, and that there are no traffic rules other than the laws of natural selection.) The lab is open to the air, as is the whole hospital, so anything and everything can fly or crawl in. The lab specimens sit on the counter, unrefrigerated, waiting to be processed. Rats scurry on the drive separating the different wards. Families have to provide food and basic nursing care for the patients, and no services are provided unless the patient pays for the care and provides his or her own medical supplies. And on and on.

The pediatric ward was filled with pitiful children, most especially the tiny girl, maybe 9 months old, no doubt failing to thrive, who was sitting on her bed, all by herself, not crying but looking plaintively at everyone who came by. She was so weak that, when she fell forward, she couldn’t get her leg back from underneath her body. We hoped that her family was gone momentarily to get her food or something. But she also could have been alone, one of the many orphans. One of the other mothers was watching out for her, at least, when she could. As they say, it takes a village….

And yet – compared with the rest of Cayes, the hospital is a relative oasis. At least this is a place where they’re doing the very best they can. It is, in its own way, an island of hope. And just to underline the point, parked in the hospital courtyard was a tap-tap with “God Is Full of Love” emblazoned over the windshield. Hope thrives in the same streets in which the rats scurry along.

Friday, Feb. 23, 7:30 p.m.

Following up from last night…. All the wildly colored buses and tap-taps have sayings written over the windshields and the back windows. Some are non sequiturs, like the Nike swoosh and some marketing phrase, completely out of context. And then, there are the others – proclamations of hope and Good News in the midst of overcrowding, illness, unemployment, and economic stagnation. Here are a few of my favorites:

• “Jesus Surprise”
• “Omniscience de Dieu” (omniscience of God)
• “I love you”
• “Merci, Dieu” (thank you, God)
• “Merci, Jesus”
• “Bonté de Dieu” (kindness of God)
• “Grace de Dieu”
• “Dieu et mon prié” (God is my prayer)
• “God is Full of Love”

Life here is infused with a spirituality that is seamlessly interconnected with “real” life – and in it, they find Christian joy. “Not joy as the world gives it,” as John says, but a “peace that passes all understanding” – and certainly all Western rationality.

This morning, we went back to MN for the last time, to gather up what we’re taking home and to say good-bye. A digression: Yesterday, in his rambling through Cayes, looking for adventures, Nick found a dentist. He talked with the dentist because in our home visits, we came across a woman with serious tooth pain and decay, and Nick wanted to find out about the cost and possibilities for treatment. So today we went back to find the woman with the toothache, to see if she would let us take her into Cayes and get her teeth fixed. She agreed and (as they always do) went inside to put on her good dress before going out of the village. We drove her into town, and Nick and Anne took her into the dentist’s office. It turns out that she needed four teeth pulled, at total of $44 American. So with that and a little extra money for Tylenol and a motorbike taxi ride home, we paid for her care.

Was it right for us to have done this? Now, once the woman tells her story to her family and the other people in the village, several (maybe many) will come to MN, looking for a trip to the dentist for their toothaches, which I’m sure are legion. And Vaina at MN will have to tell them that the blans are gone now and we don’t have the resources here to help you. We may have opened the floodgates and left someone else to clean up our mess. But, on the other hand, here was the constellation of events as they unfolded: We imposed ourselves into this woman’s life, doing an MN home visit. Naturally, she told us about her tooth pain because we asked why she was wearing leaves pasted against her jaws. Then, Nick happened to find a dentist, with training and equipment and everything, who was willing to help and whose care we could easily afford. Would we have been living in Christ if we had ignored these events and decided not to help her because it would make life at MN more difficult for a while? Granted, helping one woman with bad teeth doesn’t change anything – except for that one woman, in whom Christ lives and suffers.

It was hard to leave MN and know I won’t be back, at least not for a long time. It was hard to leave the little kids who came for candy and stickers and rings. It was even hard to leave the girl, about Kathryn’s age, who constantly tried to trick me into giving here extra stuff. Every day, she came asking for more, with absolutely no compunction. Even if she had in her hair the ribbons and clips we gave her earlier, she would swear she never got any. She (and several others) would take off the plastic rings I gave them, hide the rings in their mouths, and hold out bare fingers to prove they hadn’t gotten one yet. Then I would say “no” and point at my mouth and look at them over my glasses, and they would slink off, giggling. They are just as broken as I am, and just as good. And we’re all members of one body.

After lunch, we went to the Business and Technology Institute (BTI), which is run by the Episcopal diocese and supported by the Haitian Episcopal Learning Partnership in Kansas City. Talk about an oasis! It was built two years ago and now serves 240 students in a two-year associate’s degree program. The place is beautiful, by far the best-constructed buildings we’ve seen and the only one (other than the Admiral’s Club in Port-au-Prince) with air conditioning, which is necessary for the computer lab. The lab has about 30 PCs, all new equipment and software. It’s a great example of the way this country will be transformed. As we keep seeing, education is the mandatory first step.

And yet, in this in-between time before a better Haiti emerges, education can be an experience of great frustration, even despair. I talked at length with Bernard, the BTI administrator, about Haiti and what is wrong here. Among other things, Bernard said many of the people who become educated now are finding that they can’t do anything with it because the employment situation in the cities is so dismal. So, they often can’t really do a lot with what they learn, other than try to get to the U.S. But some are staying, and they will be agents of change.

Bernard is an incredibly astute observer of Haiti. He was born there, but his parents moved to the U.S. when he was 3. He’s now in his mid-20s, and he’s just moved back to Haiti 2 years ago to work at BTI. So he has a wonderful ability to “translate” Haiti for an American like me.
I asked about the migration of people, especially young men, from the villages and into the cities, especially Port-au-Prince. He said the situation is much like the experience of urban poverty in the U.S. There is little hope of progress in the rural areas, so young men move to the cities.

The employment situation is almost as bad in Port-au-Prince as in Cayes or the country – a few more jobs per capita, but not many. But those few jobs pay better in Port-au-Prince than elsewhere, so the city fills with young people who become discouraged and try to make it on crime and drugs and violence. Add to that the absence of infrastructure or a functioning government (crumbling buildings, piles of trash in the streets, trash fires burning everywhere), and you have, well, hell. Also, as in the U.S., young men father children in the cities and find they can’t get jobs. So their esteem crumbles, they feel shame for being unable to provide, and they take off. It’s just Bernard’s assessment, of course, but it certainly rings true.

Bernard also gave me a wonderful insight into the roadblocks to Haiti’s progress. As an example, consider the energy situation. In Haiti, electricity is not always available, and electrification has only begun making its way slowly into areas outside towns and cities. Therefore, rural people have to rely on candles for their nighttime light, and urban people have to buy inverters (devices that collect energy when the power is on), large batteries to store power, and generators for times when the batteries are insufficient. Not coincidentally, Bernard says, the same oligarchs who run the power companies also sell the inverters, the batteries, the generators, and the candles. In fact, they buy up the available candles so they can inflate the price that rural people pay. So, if the urban and rural electrification problems are solved, the elite will lose their lucrative markets for inverters, batteries, generators, and candles. And when popular leaders are elected who seek to do anything about problems like these (such as Jean-Bertrand Aristide and Rene Preval), then assassinations and coups d’etat take place.

And there, in a nutshell, is the problem with improving Haiti from the top down. Movement toward transformation will only come from below, from the hundreds of individual blossoms of blessing that are the private and church-related relief and development efforts. Progress will have to come from those who will benefit from it, and no one else – not “smarter” blans who dam rivers and destroy ecosystems and villages, and certainly not from the non-government of this “least” of all nations.

Saturday, Feb. 24, 9:25 a.m.

Praise God! Bonté de Dieu! We are on the plane in Port-au-Prince, ready to leave for Miami and points west. Remarkably, the flight from Cayes left on time, and we had no trouble at all with security or boarding. Pere Ajax had come to the Cayes airport yesterday to ensure that everyone in our group and the New York group was on “the list” for our flight. In Port-au-Prince, Monsieur Murat, the bishop’s assistant, was there to escort us from the commuter airport to the international airport. He brought us to his waiting car and drove us to the front door of the international airport, to the spaces marked “Pour les VIPs seulement!” He whisked us to the first-class line for check-in, where we had to wait all of five minutes before being taken back to the Admiral’s Club, where we had been a week before.

There, we had two remarkable chance meetings. First, we met the retired bishop of the Diocese of Toronto, a woman who had spent the past three weeks teaching at the Episcopal seminary in Port-au-Prince. She is delightful and authentic – and she was very ready for a hot shower and a cup of coffee in the morning when she got back home, having already lived through quite a pre-Lenten discipline.

The second meeting was even more remarkable. As we were sitting there chatting, in walked Dr. Paul Farmer, the man who largely began the kind of high-quality medical mission that MN seeks to embody (he’s the subject of the book Mountains Beyond Mountains). Anne and Nick talked with him about his work, and Nick’s work to come, in Haiti. I didn’t want to ditch the bishop, so I waited to go talk with him until we were ready to go to our flight. I introduced myself and thanked him for his incredible witness as an incarnation of God’s preferential option for the poor. He seemed genuinely pleased to hear that. I let him know that I’m from Stan Shaffer’s church, and he said he’d like to come visit when he’s in Kansas City again. I felt silly – like a teenager at a rock concert – but this is the closest I’ve ever come to meeting an idol of mine.

I feel very ambivalent about how we got out of Haiti. We got out effortlessly, literally, because of who we are – blans who came here for mission work. Because of our connections, we had the assistant to the bishop meet us and use his influence to get us to the front of the lines, ahead of the common people. And because of my clerical collar, I and the group were given respect we would not have had otherwise. Not only did we wait in no lines, we didn’t even have to deal with the ticket agents. Monsieur Murat simply took our passports and returned with boarding passes, all the way to Kansas City. He even took our boarding passes for the Port-au-Prince flight and shepherded us through the boarding process.

Why is this just? Why is it OK for me, especially as a priest, to walk in as a VIP and get first-class treatment? Here we are, us and Paul Farmer, embodying God’s preferential option for the poor, and we use our status as elites to shove ahead of those deemed “less important” than we are. It is a sin that I embraced gladly and thankfully this morning because it ensured that I will see my wife and kids and sleep in my own bed tonight. I will ask forgiveness from God; but when I return to Haiti, I will seek the preferential option for myself once again, and I will be very grateful for what my participation in corporate sin will bring me. I am inherently privileged – by race, by sex, by nationality, by economic status, by vocation. Is it OK to use that privilege in this situation? That I must leave to “l’omniscience de Dieu.”

Sunday, Feb. 25, 11:00 a.m.

There’s not supposed to be an entry in my trip journal today. We were supposed to have been home 14 hours ago. Our apparent blessedness in getting out of Cayes and especially through the airports in Port-au-Prince was exhausted by those acts of deliverance. We made it to Miami just fine, enjoyed a wonderfully American lunch at the airport food court (no mosquitoes, all the Diet Coke you could drink), bade farewell to Nick, and found that our flight to Dallas was cancelled. In fact, every flight in and out of Dallas/Ft. Worth was cancelled. A huge storm system was moving through the Midwest, from Texas to Chicago. We stood in a line for two and a half hours, along with hundreds of other people, only to find there was no way to re-route through another city. Anne decided to stay in Miami a couple of days as a birthday present to herself, and Linda and I got on the one-and-only flight from Miami to Dallas that day. We got to Dallas about 12:30 a.m. to find that all the hotel rooms were full. So we camped in the DFW airport. Linda tried to sleep curled up in a chair, and I tried to sleep on the floor. Neither of us succeeded.

Of course, the people in Maniche, and Torbeck, and the villages around Cayes sleep like this every night, on their floors of earth or concrete. If they’re lucky or comparatively well-off, they have a woven mat between themselves and the rocks. They definitely don’t have their choice of eight places on the B concourse from which to get sausage-and-cheese bagels and a cup of coffee. I say this not to wallow in liberal guilt but simply to remember that God’s blessings are always present, no matter what – in a two-and-a-half-hour line at the airport, on the hard floor of Gate B30, in a city with 80 percent unemployment, in a two-room hut with a thatch roof and nothing but a pot of rice and beans on the fire. In all these things, the “Bonté de Dieu,” the “Grace de Dieu,” is present. Thanks be to God for these and all God’s mercies.