Beautiful, Beautiful Haiti

In 1997, my friend Nathalie and I put together a little booklet for the children who attended the Episcopal school in Petit Trou de Nippes, Haiti. We had a graphic design artist do all the drawings of the children based on the hundreds of photographs we had taken while there. We wrote four little chapters on health and hygiene. The topics ranged from frequent washing of hands; not touching another person's blood; bathing with soap and warm water; frequently brushing teeth; eating a variety of food; limiting the consumption of sugarcane stalks; boiling water for half an hour, and attending school. We had it translated into French and Kreyol (Creole). It was reprinted in 2005 and I was told it is still utilized by doctors and nurses who travel down to Petit Trou at least three times a year. We could recommend these things because for many years the Episcopal churches in Colorado had been going down to that one particular site and drilling wells for fresh water, establishing a school, bringing down bags of items and products like soap, toothbrushes, etc. For six years, this country consumed my every thought. If I wasn't there, I was working in the makeshift office out of St. John's in Boulder maintaining the database we had organized of all the school children. I was continually giving talks and slideshows to various groups to garner interest and funding. I sponsored a boy, I sewed the bags that held the personal items we would distribute to the children upon our arrival—the soaps, washcloths, ribbons for a girl's hair. I was on the advisory board of the Colorado Haiti Project. I dreamt of the turquoise cove we swam in and of riding on  camions for 80 miles on unpaved roads, through muddy rivers that tipped the camion sideways. When I was there, I was seized with fear because I did not miss my own family. I wanted to stay there forever. To remedy that, I brought each of my boys with me, on separate occasions. Each time I returned to the states, my body felt pummeled with parasites and it would take me at least two weeks to a month to recover. If you have a sensitive stomach, Haiti is not the best place to spend two weeks. It has been years since I've been there and my doctors advise me not to go again. At first I felt like part of my own body had been severed from me; now I just feel a deep, yet dulling sadness for a country that seems to never change. Sometimes, if I smell woodsmoke and there is some humidity in the air, I smell Haiti. I can even conjure it's smell by opening a bottle of vanilla. We used to buy bottles of vanilla in the cathedral shop that is no longer there because of the recent earthquake. I have been thinking of it a lot lately and wondering if, out of those 50,000 bodies that have been slowly unearthed, one of them is the boy I sponsored. He would be around 22 years old now. He had been banished from the Petit Trou mission site some years ago because he broke the jaw of one of the Haitian teachers in a dispute. He had gone to P-au-P where most young men end up going because the countryside, though stunningly beautiful, has no jobs to offer an unskilled, minimally educated person. I know I must start inquiring about him otherwise he will pop up in my dreams for years to come. It will be a long process to track him down and if I do find him alive and well, what will I say to him?

"I'm so sorry that I sponsored you only through elementary school and then abandoned you?"

That is the curse of the missionary. Pat Robertson has got it backwards. The Haitians are not cursed. We are. Especially those of us, out of good intention, who went down there to help and found ourselves bound in chains, body and soul, to that country forever.