Nothing is Guaranteed

Yesterday I watched a little boy denied lunch. His name is Sheinder. He’s Haitian, very petite, and one of our students—three clues he likely doesn’t eat much at home. This midday meal of Feed My Starving Children Manna Pack Rice is probably the biggest, most nutritious meal of his day. He is accustomed to a heaping portion piled on his tin plate: a portion you might find ridiculously oversized for such a little boy. But he consumes it all. I’ve seen him return for second helpings.

Yesterday we ran out of food. Sometimes this happens, and it’s always heart-wrenching. The sound of the spoon scraping the bottom of the pot when there are still children with empty plates makes me cringe. Someone will be going hungry.

This year the second grade class is the last class to eat. The twenty-six come up from Recreation after washing their hands, and oft their sweaty faces, and make an unruly line in the kitchen to receive their lunch. All of our students know to ask for a large “gwo” or small “piti” or “ti kras” portion. Everyone is required to have at least a small helping of the rice and beans because of the nutritional value. Some students lament their minute spoonful as they favor their home-brought, store-bought snacks or treats, but generally everyone is obedient.

Then there are those like Sheinder, who come with tummies ready to be filled to bursting, so that the meal might carry them through the next twenty-four hours or so. Those like Sheinder, who live in shanty-like houses with sagging walls, tarp reinforcements, leaky tin roofs, and underfed family members.

These children are as hungry for food as they are for affection, for their desperate parents work dawn to dusk to provide for those hungry mouths. There is little time for tenderness.

At school we try to give love in all ways: from meeting those desperate felt needs of thirst, hunger, illness, and nakedness, to the more insidious ones of loneliness, doubt, neglect, and ignorance. But with our humble wonderful staff of 13, we cannot lavish enough attention on 144 hungry children.

We at least try to guarantee they are greeted by name, fed, and watered every day.

This week, I watched two of those things go unfulfilled.

Praise God, it was not the former.

This week electricity has been even more sparse than usual. We haven’t received power until at least 8:00 at night and lost it by 2:00 in the morning. These are sparse, dark hours, not hours to do repairs or run water pumps. Water pumps such as the one needed to fill the cistern that fills our school water barrels. Like many buildings, we have neither electricity nor running water at school. Unlike many school buildings, we are blessed with sound walls, floor, and roof. We do not fear the rain. We are blessed with two toilets for the students. We do not have to send our children outside to the latrine and they do not have to squat over drains or ditches. Praise the Lord.

However, these toilets are flushed manually by the waste water we collect from hand-washing. 144 students and 13 staff go through a lot of water every day washing their hands after using the restroom or before eating (which we require.) Thus the school runs through 2 55-gallon barrels of water every day for washing and flushing—and nearly an additional barrel’s worth to fill the 5-gallon drinking buckets in each of the six classrooms.

That’s a lot of water. (Although still significantly less than a school with running water would use for power-flush toilets, sinks, and water fountains.)

This week, the cistern that supplies that water went dry. There was no electricity during the day to run the pump that could fill the cistern. Monday and Tuesday we watched the water levels drop, told we needed to buy water, although we’d already paid the water bill for April.

“It’s not our problem,” Beverly said to Rose, director to director, as Rose relayed the news from our afternoon custodian in charge of filling the water barrels. “We paid for this month.”

“Yes,” Rose said, “but not their problem, too. No EDH, no pump. No water.” She wrung her hands emphatically in that Haitian way, as though absolving herself from guilt as Pilate tried to do.

No, it wasn’t the water business’ fault. The city had not given us power. It wasn’t really their fault, either. EDH is the national electric company Electricité d’Haïti, controlled from the capital. Everything came back to the government and their lack of organization, lack of infrastructure, lack of ability. Ayiti pwoblem. Haiti is a broken country tangled with problems; follow one thread of an issued and you will find yourself back to the Gordian knot at the center.

“So what do we do?” Beverly asked, as I relayed to her again the necessity of doing something. There was no extra water left in the school. There had again been no electricity. The cistern was still bare. The water we did have was swarming with mosquito larvae. We dumped bleach in the barrels in hopes of killing some off.

Rose shrugged. “Buy water,” Rose said. “Arold says he needs 100 gourdes.”

So we paid. Through the morning, and through this week, Arold toted in 5-gallon buckets of water from another source. He carried one on his head and another in his hand. This morning he came through with three in a wheelbarrow. The first time I refilled the hand washing bucket I thanked God to see water brimming the top of the barrel.

But two days ago the kids were thirsty. They are supposed to bring a water bottle to school, whether it be a thermos, canteen, or recycled Coke bottle; so they can drink water through the day. For every malady we tell the kids, and staff, to drink water. Haitians are dubious of water’s merits, but we are insistent.

Two days ago some of those kids who had faithfully brought their water bottles came to me. “Madame Rachelle, I want some water,” said some third and second graders.

Grimacing, I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I answered. I didn’t know where there was any water.

Sometimes when one class has emptied their bucket we send the kids in groups to another class to refill bottles—that day I was sure every class was dry.

And so we had to tell the kids our constant remedy of “drink water” was impossible: there is no water.

That morning my voice was nearly inaudible. I’d gone to bed with a stuffy head and awoken with a sore throat. As Beverly stood in the office, sweat running down her face (that’s normal for us), looking down at attendance to see which boys needed fungal cream for the irrepressible head fungus, and spooning cold medicine to runny-nosed kids, thinking about report cards on Friday, inscriptions of the incoming class, picking up our food allotment for the previous month, dwindling peanut butter and cracker supplies, teaching first grade English, returning to the house to file finances, contact partners, and return messages about her ailing mother and husband—as she stood there in her tight uniform with barely a breeze stirring the stuffy room (at approximately 80% humidity), Beverly was, as Rose, said, “not happy.”

I went to her and hugged her, pressing my own sweaty face close to hers, so she could hear my faint voice.

“It’s just there’s no water! Water is so basic! It should be guaranteed!” she said. Blessedly, usually it is for us.

“But this is Haiti,” I reminded her. “Nothing is guaranteed except Jesus.”

She managed a weak laugh. Me, too.

Better to laugh than cry.

And how true are those words. In Haiti perhaps they are more obvious, more visible in this broken place of pwoblem, pwoblem, pwoblem, of hungry children, parasites, sagging houses, sewage, unemployment, and instability. But in this whole world there is nothing to be sure of. Everything collapses.

This winter in New Hampshire we lost power for a time. A blessedly brief time, but for a while there was no electricity. That meant there was no running water, no light, no internet. For my parents, it did not signify no heat or cooking for they have a gas stove and wood stove. We stow water for emergencies and can set refrigerated food outside to keep in the frigid air.

But how inconvenient! Oh, how we love our electricity!

Another nor’easter dumped snow on us the morning my father suffered atrial fibrillation (AFib)—cardiac irregularity. He couldn’t snow-blow the driveway to clear out the 18 inches of snowfall so we could drive to the hospital. Oh, such helplessness!

This kind of desperation is how life in Haiti is much of the time for most of the people.

Beverly and I are not so deprived at the house where we stay, although many of you first-worlders are surprised at what we do without.

Life is undeniably sparse here.

This week, that sparse desperation touched us at school. In the lack of water so children were left thirsty in the high heat and humidity. In the lack of food as we ran out at the end of the second grade line so four boys were left with a fraction of their usual heaping portions. In the parents and guardians pushing for inscription forms to enroll their three-year old charge in the lottery for next year’s class: In one afternoon we received 86. The class can only take 25 students.

Such desperation, such suffering, can be overwhelming.

Sometimes it has knocked me down just to witness it.

This week, it did not.

Because I remembered what we are guaranteed: Jesus is with us. Through trial, temptation, through storm, through starvation, through persecution, imprisonment, through heat, humidity, and hunger. Through parasites, manifestations, darkness, and thirst. He is there with us.

He helped me to be strong for Sheinder.

So when Sheinder, this petite second grader, was denied his proper serving of lunch, I did not cry with him. He turned to the wall with a wail of objection, outcry at the injustice of seeing his twenty-two classmates walk away with their desired amount of food, small or large. He left his diminished plate untouched on the serving table.

Not only was his portion already undersized as our server, Madame Dada, scraped the bottom of the pot for rice to set on the three remaining plates, but it was then further reduced as she halved his portion to give some rice to the last student who had none.

The other boys accepted their plates and the crackers I pulled from the cabinet to supplement. They began to eat with gusto.

Sheinder turned to the wall, resting his forehead on the cement and looking at the floor.

He didn’t want crackers. He didn’t want to eat at all.

“W’ap manje?” I asked him. He shook his head.

His classmates reached for his plate to divide it among themselves. I shook my head.

“No. Leave it for Sheinder.”

Then I picked up the plate myself and led him from the room. I took us down to the office and sat Sheinder on the bench beside me.

For the next five minutes I just held him.

I didn’t have words for him, but that didn’t matter. I held him and rocked him, kissed his forehead and let the love flow into him.

Then I straightened up.

“Ou pral manje?” I asked. He nodded. He would eat.

From my backpack I took a granola bar and added it to his plate. From the table I took a lollipop another student had given me and put it in his pocket for later.

Then I handed him the plate and let him eat.

Sheinder was solemn the rest of the day. But he ate. And he felt love.

Love conquers that desperation. That sparseness.

This afternoon, as I worked in the office, Sheinder trooped in with an enormous heaping portion of rice and beans on his tin plate.

“Wow, Sheinder! Are you hungry?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, beaming.

“Are you happy?”

“Yes,” he said again, nodding.

“Hooray!” I said, hugging him. We went up to the kitchen together, and four other boys held up their own heaping plates for me to see. Madame Dada grinned at me.

“We have food!” I said. “Thank you, Jesus!”

And that Name is the only guarantee we have in this life.  

 "Surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age." - Jesus (Matthew 28:20 NIV)