This week marks, I believe, the EIGHTH week of protests in Haiti, the EIGHTH week of what they call "peyi lok," when the country is locked-down: businesses, schools, and roads are closed, resulting in loss of income, food, medical treatment, et cetera. Riots erupt all over the country. Along with the majority of schools, Christian Academy of Petit Goave (CAP) has been closed for weeks, and everyone is suffering. Our hearts are heavy for the children most of all.
Unable to return to Haiti with said lock-down, I remain here in the U.S. and pray for our brothers and sisters in-country, from the seasoned missionaries to the hungry toddlers. I remain here and write to shed some light onto circumstances in Haiti, egregious without the added complications of lock-down. I write from the experience of listening to our students and their families and from personally visiting their homes and working with them in school. These are truths of how most of them live.
It is uncomfortable truth, truth that makes us conscious, perhaps even somewhat
guilty, of our luxurious comforts. Comforts that are commonplace to the average
first-worlder: hot showers, stocked refrigerators, blanketed beds, closets of
clothes, law enforcement.
The shocking, brutal, and
we-wish-it-weren’t-true truth of the lives of our kids in Haiti, and millions
of children in the majority world, immediately subtracts all those comforts, and
even what we would call “necessities.”
Imagine yourself a student at CAP...
First, there’s your house. It’s
comprised of one, maybe two, maybe three rooms, all joined together probably without
doors in between, only curtains. There are four, five, six, perhaps seven or
nine residents in said rooms. The walls are plywood, cardboard, tarp, woven
palm fronds, cinder block, or some combination there-of. The floor is dirt or
cement. There are no closets. No kitchen. No bathroom (many houses share one
latrine.) No water. No electricity. Possibly curtains grant some visual privacy.
Possibly a chest of drawers holds some clothes, supports an odd assortment of
goods such as a radio, picture frames, a stuffed animal, pots and pans. Maybe
there’s a bed for Mama and Papa to share with the baby. Or a cot. There might
be a pile of blankets which you and your siblings use to sleep on the floor. Maybe
there are windows, slits in the cinder blocks, or open squares fitted with
wooden shutters. Maybe not. Lack of windows adds to the dim interior. Remember,
there are no lights. The door is flimsy plywood with a flimsy lock thieves can easily
break—they’ve robbed the house before—or severe iron that encloses the house
like a tomb. Papa only locks that at night when you’re all going to sleep or
when no one is home.
Outside there is a charcoal pit
or cylindrical miniature range for cooking: a hollowed-out stump with empty
belly for charcoal and an iron grate top. You’ve gotten burned from the fire more
than once. Lines are strung for laundry. Laundry is also spread on the rusted
corrugated zinc roof, the roof that makes a cacophony in the rain and always
leaks. The clothes may spread along the fence about the house. The fence may be
that mixture of materials such as woven fronds, wire, bamboo poles, bits of
plywood, or the house might shelter behind a cinder block wall topped with broken
glass. Remaining laundry may drape bushes or the ground. These clothes and
sheets have been laboriously hand-washed and now sunshine to dry before mold
gathers, quick in the tropical humidity. Sometimes you have to wear damp socks
to school because there wasn’t enough time for them to dry. If you wear dirty
socks the teachers make you wash them, and that’s embarrassing. Better to wash
them at home and wear them damp.
To wash your clothes and dishes
and to cook and bathe, you’ve got to collect water. Somewhere within
(hopefully) reasonable walking distance is a cistern, a public water-source. In
town there are large concrete tanks, maybe as high as one story, with taps and
a drainage basin. On the fringes of the hills are pumps or a reservoir where
you might bathe while women wash clothes, children gather water for home, or
someone washes his motorcycle or his pig. You get strong quickly toting that water
up and down the path to your house; you have excellent balance and posture from
carrying jugs on your head.
Your feet are tough as rawhide
from picking over roots, rocks, and debris. You scramble along ridges and defy
gravity with the goats playing around your mountain house. If you live by the
sea you learn to “swim,” and appreciate splashing about in the waves as high as
your knees. If you’re really bold you’ll progress to swimming underwater, and
run naked into the surf at every opportunity. If you live in town you play in
the street and jump across the drainage ditch back and forth. When it’s too hot
you find shade beside a wall or under a tree, unless you have chores to do: watch
the little ones, tend the fire, cook food, wash laundry or dishes, sweep up,
tote water. It’s hard work, but you’ve been doing it since you were four or so.
You’re strong now.
When you’re thirsty you have to
be careful. At school they warn you not to drink that water you bring to the
house. Drinking water must be boiled down on the charcoal range. Or you can
purchase an eight ounce “dlo sache” water sack: plastic sacks you drink by
biting open a corner and sucking out the water. Half of that water might be
used to splash your face and hands for want of a sink or simply to combat the
constant heat. You like it when they play with the dlo sache and squirt water
at you like a fountain. But that’s only if someone else is buying. Mama would
never pay for you to waste a dlo sache like that.
You’re hot and tired when you get
home from school. You have to walk in the afternoon heat and dust with your
backpack. All those books are heavy. When you arrive you take off your uniform
right away to keep it as clean as possible: you’ve got to wear it again
tomorrow. You have two shirts and four days to wear them. (On Friday you wear
the school t-shirt.) You put on your house clothes, which might be ratty and
full of holes. You might have sandals to wear, you might not. Hopefully there’s
food to eat. Hopefully you have some time to play, if you don’t have chores, or
aren’t going to church service that evening. Anyway, you have homework to do.
And you’d better finish your homework while there’s daylight. You can see well
in the dark, but reading is tough without light. When you’re older you can congregate
under the streetlights on the main roads with other students, if there’s city
power. You’re lucky if you’ve got a flashlight or can borrow someone’s phone to
shine it on your books. But batteries only last so long. Anyway, you find a way
to get your work done. Perhaps you got ahead in school earlier that day or
excel at finishing it in the courtyard before class starts next morning. You
find a way. That’s the only way to survive.
Your parents find a way, if
they’re alive.
Papa might work as a day-laborer,
hauling buckets of cement, laying cinder blocks, building under the broiling
sun. He might push a wheelbarrow of sugar cane, stopping to skin and chop off
individual pieces with his machete for passersby. He might push a wobbling cart
and sell fresco: shaving ice into plastic cups with a squirt of syrup, a
popular refreshment on a hot afternoon. He might sell cell phone minutes in a
red Digicel apron, sit under an umbrella with a glass case of phones,
headphones, and other electronic gadgets. He might run after "papadap" express
vans with a handful of Dous Makos candy, bottled soda, or pomket muffins,
reaching through the windows to do business with passengers inside. He might accompany
the papadaps on their routes, calling out stops and number of places left in
the van. Maybe he drives a moto-taxi, tends a garden, assists an electrician,
carpenter, or mechanic “boss.” He might be a tailor, custodian or even clean
latrines. Maybe he works away on the mountain or in the capital city. Maybe he
doesn’t work at all. Maybe he’s gone and you never knew him.
Mama might work as a vender,
sitting beside the road in a melee of other women, all trying to outsell one
another. She might have her wide, low baskets spread with candy, fruit, soaps
and lotions, shoes, notebooks, hair ribbons or spaghetti. She might fry
plantains or pate, serve bread spread with peanut butter, ladle coffee from a
bucket early in the morning. She, too, might reach through van windows with
Dous Makos or pomkets. Maybe she’s up before dawn to catch a "taptap" pickup
truck taxi to the bigger market in the next town. She could be a hairdresser,
manicurist, or seamstress, or cook, clean, and wash for another family. After
school you might go there for a plate of what she’s cooked that day, before you
go home without her until she finishes around dusk. She might be too ill or too
busy with her own babies to work for pay. She might live far up the mountain or
work in the capital, sending money when she can. She might be absent. Or dead.
Maybe you don’t live with either
your mother or your father. Maybe you live with a “matante” aunt or “tonton” uncle,
or someone you call aunt or uncle. Maybe you live with grandparents. Maybe with
neighbors. Maybe you’ve been passed from one house to the next with never a
compassionate word or gesture of welcome. You’ve always been just another mouth
to feed and uniform to iron.
Maybe you hate being at the house.
Probably school is your favorite place to be, better even than playing outside.
No one at school has to know what it’s like at home. The teachers love you, you
can play with your classmates, you get food, you have water to wash and drink,
and someone else lifts the buckets. You even look the same as the other kids,
and you look good. Your orange shirt is clean and starched, your blue shorts or
skirt is pressed, and your black shoes are shined. Your hair is oiled and
styled with blue or white bows and clips, or cut close to your head. You and
your classmates look your best; you are proud to be a student. You can read and
write a lot now, which Mama and Papa couldn’t ever do well.
Sometimes you can’t hide where
you come from. When you’re too hungry to listen in class, too hungry to sit up,
they know. It’s hard to be honest, to say you’re hungry, to admit you only had
sugar water since yesterday. It’s hard to ask for food. Mama taught you not to.
When you were really little and didn’t know any better you used to tell Mama
you were hungry. You cried for her to give you food. She scolded you, told you
to be quiet. There wasn’t any food to give you. You might as well stop crying
and forget it. Deal with it. So you stopped asking. You stopped crying when
your stomach or head hurt, or when you were too tired to go get water because
you were hungry.
At school they tell you to ask.
The teachers say you can tell them when you’re hungry and they’ll give you
something, even if it’s not lunch time. You might go to the kitchen first thing
in the morning to get an extra peanut-butter cracker. You might go to the
office during class because you’re crying over your empty belly and they’ll
hand you a plate of rice. They always tell you to drink water. Lots and lots of
water. When it is lunchtime you wash your hands and wait in line for food. Madame
Dada asks you if you want a lot or a little rice, and you say “a lot!” every
time. You hurry back to class and eat as fast as you can so you can get back to
the kitchen for your second plate. That heaping plate of rice and beans is the
best food you’ll get today, so you’d better eat a lot. Most days there is
enough in the pots that Madame Dada can serve you again, you and a bunch of
other kids in your class who have the hungry eyes; but some days there just isn’t
enough as you all want, and you all take turns scraping your spoons in the bottom
of the pots for every last bit of rice. Sometimes you all share one last plate
of rice. It’s hard to share sometimes, when you’re so hungry and just want to
take care of yourself. But you know that they’re hungry, too, and they’re your
family. So you always share. You’re good at ignoring the hunger anyway. It’s
just part of your life, like toting the water buckets and sleeping on the floor
with your brothers and sisters.
Not all of them come to school
with you, and when you see their hungry eyes, hear how their teacher hit them
when they gave the wrong answer, or just sat around the house because they don’t
go to school at all, you know you’re really luck to go to school. Not lucky,
blessed. They tell you you’re blessed because Jesus loves you and is taking
care of you. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like he is, when Mama is sick, your baby
brother has a fever, your sister has a new baby from her boyfriend who left
her, when the rain washes out the path to town, or when you’re all so hungry it
hurts—but they tell you at school all the time that God knows and God is
listening. So you pray. You pray a lot. You figure that you’re still alive, so
God must care. Anyway, you’re glad that God put you in school. You hope one day
you can help your family with your good education. Maybe you’ll be president. The
president doesn’t carry water or sleep on the floor. You’d like to live in a
nice big house like the president. Most of all you’d like to not be hungry. And
for your family to not be hungry. You keep praying. God can make it happen. Even
if he doesn’t make you president, he can make the pot of rice and beans multiply
like the fish and loaves so everyone gets enough to eat.
You go to bed thinking about
school tomorrow. You’re glad knowing you get to go.
