Monthly Archives: November 2010

by - 12 Comments

A Prayer for Haiti


We now know, according to national health officials, that more than 1000 have died from cholera here in Haiti and that Haitian President Preval fears cholera riots will spread to Port-au-Prince today.  Violence aimed at UN peacekeepers began over the weekend in Cap-Haitien and Hinch, as well as smaller towns around the country—this amid unfounded fear that members of a Nepalese contingent brought the disease to Haiti.

In the midst of all this, I feel fairly safe in my small section of the city, Petion-ville, essentially the Beverly Hills of Port-au-Prince.  With 2 armed guards posted at my gate around the clock, whether there’s rioting in the capital or not, I’m blessed with a security so many here are forced to do without.

 Admittedly, Haiti isn’t all that safe for foreigners, especially in this city, where non-Haitians are kidnapped, on average, of once a day—mostly for ransom, sometimes because people are desperate, often because the prison here was damaged during the earthquake, allowing criminals to escape and (still on the loose) commit crimes against the very people who are here to help.  Not more than a month ago someone was kidnapped just outside the gym where I work out most mornings.

Unfortunately, my experience in Haiti is limited by these security concerns and the policies implemented by the NGO where my partner Sara works—one that, unlike some smaller organizations and church groups, has the size and funding to manage risk effectively. 

But I am safe.  And though I don’t work directly in the community, though I don’t go into the camps and feed the poor, I know I am doing my small part, providing a home for Sara and giving her (I hope) the security she needs—the strength to direct a massive disaster response operation for a housing NGO that works in nearly 100 countries.  

The effort sometimes leaves her a little frayed around the edges and me a bit torn up in the process. But, we are blessed to be together, loving one another, learning to love a country that has been fighting now for centuries—fighting first against colonial oppression, fighting later against oppressive dictators, and fighting now a disease that’s dictating the fate of way too many.

Please pray for us.  Please pray for Haiti!

by - 0 comments

Watering Change


No water has flowed from the faucets at my house here in Haiti for 2 days, and I’ve decided not having water is way worse than not having electricity.

Bottom line:  I’m not a happy camper—or at least—not happy camping, as the case may be.

At the same rate, I must confess, to living a ridiculously comfortable life here in Port-au-Prince, certainly by Haitian standards.  So, I have no real reason to complain, especially when one considers the more pressing crisis of cholera contaminating the water supply, an epidemic that has killed nearly 1000 in the past few weeks, sickened nearly 20 times as many, and incited violence against UN peacekeepers in a number of towns across the country.

It’s mostly a matter of not having what I’ve come to expect after more than four decades of running water’s near perpetual availability.  To say I’m spoiled would be both true and minimizing of just how comfortable, on some level, I think I’m entitled to be—an ugly truth, I don’t totally know how to change about myself.  Perhaps, doing without is the only way to train myself otherwise.  And it seems it may indeed be a matter of training, relearning how to think about the resources in America we so casually take for granted, waste, complain about, and even don’t know how to survive without when shortages arise.

Frankly, I’m embarrassed, after living in Haiti for a number of months, to come from a country that plays survivor games on television (to the appeal of mass audiences), calling that “reality” TV.   But the sense of entitlement I’m uncovering in myself is exponentially more shameful.

After a chronic illness left me unable to work for a number of years, I’d come to consider myself fairly self-aware, someone who thought about poverty and hunger and wanted to do something to alleviate suffering.  But, too much thinking coupled with not-enough acting, can clearly translate into an hypocrisy I and too many Americans, both liberal and conservative alike, unknowingly live by.

Certainly, I don’t have the answers, not even for myself.  I only know that by the time this piece posts, it’s likely water will again be flowing in my house and complacency will become even easier, once more.  I can only pray that my attitude improves, that I learn to do with less, that I complain less about the little things and do as Ghandi said we should, “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

If only I knew how!

by - 5 Comments

Airing Family Secrets via Haute Couture


Two days ago, on her 72nd birthday, my mother shared her newest mnemonic device.   And I thought, in all fairness, I should pass along the technique, in case you want to remedy your own memory deficits by adopting my mother’s method.

This all came up when I asked my mom to call us in Haiti during our family’s annual let’s-celebrate-mom’s-birthday-event scheduled for yesterday afternoon.

When I asked my mother to make the call, she said, “Well, I’m afraid I’ll forget.” 

I reassured her that she didn’t have to worry.   I would email my sister and ask her place the call. 

“No,” my mother declared confidently. “I’ll just clip a clothes pin to my lapel.”

“Really,” I replied. 

“Of course,” she claimed.  “Someone is bound to ask why I have a clothes pin on my blouse.  And when they do, I’ll remember we were supposed to call you.  It works every time.”

“Every time,” I said, dumbfounded that my mother had used the technique enough to have gathered such data.

“Always!”

“Wow,” I added.  “I think I’ll have to blog about that.”

“Oh, you should! It works really well—-and everybody has an extra clothes pin hanging around!”

“Sure they do . . . “

. . . but—-for those of you whose laundry habits have surprisingly not carried the clothes pin over into the 21st century or, god forbid, who lack the sartorial daring to add clothespins to your accessory repertoire, my mother claims the piece-of-paper-in-the-middle-of-the-living-room-floor technique works almost as well.

But, of course, I wouldn’t want to hang all  my family’s dirty laundry out to dry.

by - 0 comments

Breakfast for Haiti


Here’s my struggle—potentially trivial when one considers the overwhelming hunger plaguing Haiti—but I’m on a diet and having difficulty reconciling my personal focus on weight loss with the staggering starvation faced on this relatively tiny island.  When I was renaming my blog, I considered calling it “Breakfast for Haiti: a diet diary from Port-au-Prince.”  I thought I might attach a fundraising feature to the site, so while I was focusing on losing what so many Haitians are desperate (even dying) to gain, I could appease my middle class, American guilt by, at least, increasing the amount of money available to fight hunger here.  But this seemed potentially offensive, in bad taste, at the very least, given the fact that even before the earthquake nearly 2 million people in Haiti were “food insecure,” according to the World Food Program.

I come from a country with an obesity epidemic but live in one plagued with either not enough food or a population too poor to feed itself.  This is a painful irony to swallow—quite literally.

So my question to readers really is: could or would dieting Americans find friends and family members willing to pledge a dollar, or five, or ten for every pound they lose—a diet for dollars of sorts? 

Would you sell a literal pound of flesh to feed the poor?  (Would my former colleagues from the English Department at the University of Kentucky read a diet blog that used Shakespeare’s images in such clichéd ways?) 

Would over-weight folks from the US step up to (or away from) the plate on January 1st and reform their formerly failed New Year’s resolutions?   Would this motivate dieters?  Would they be more committed to this kind of effort?  Would America’s biggest losers get off their fat asses long enough to fill the plates of their mal-nourished neighbors here in Port-au-Prince?  Will morning in America mean breakfast for Haiti?

I’d love your feedback.

by - 2 Comments

Haiti, cholera, and other mind-bending events


So–the old blog is reincarnated here under a new name!  It is, indeed, the Vietnam version “reinvented” from yet another edgy location–this time Haiti, where a cholera epidemic has spread to Port-au-Prince–my home for the next couple of years, at least.

But before I address the big issues faced here on the western half of Hispaniola, I should clarify why I’ve chosen this new title.  For my less geeky readers, an “event horizon” is the edge of a black hole, a boundary in the space/time continuum beyond which no light can escape—in many ways, a point of no return.  You’ve taken physics; you know this; you’ve just forgotten.

Bottom line–it seems to me, that the far-away places Sara and I have been over the last couple of years have formed a kind of “event horizon” in my mind–taking me to the outer limits of my own comfort zone, shaping new perspectives in me about both the world around me and this time in my life–a bending of my personal space/time continuum, if you will—–mind-bending for me, at the very least.

However, Haiti itself offers a kind of event horizon–a comparison I first found when reading Paul Farmer’s book The Uses of Haiti.  Farmer begins his chapter of the same name with the following epigraph by T. D. Allman:

Haiti is not simply one more of those tropical dictatorships where to rule is to steal, and headless bodies are found by the road.  Haiti contorts time:  It convolutes reason if you are lucky–and obliterates it if you are not.  Haiti is to this hemisphere what black holes are to outer space.  Venture there and you cross an event horizon. (After Baby Doc, 1989)

Wrap you brain around that statement and you may begin to see why I’ve renamed the blog–because this place, this  location has forced me to rethink my beliefs, not only about myself, but also about big issues such as poverty and hunger–and disease, for god sake!  We’re in the midst of a cholera epidemic!  

But even without cholera sickening folks by the thousands, we had an earthquake here last January, a hurricane last week, and a million and a half people homeless in Port-au-Prince today. 

Was the earthquake an event horizon for Port-au-Prince?  Will cholera bend time and space so there’s no escaping the dis-ease that’s plagued this place for centuries?  Is there light for Haiti?

Note:  You might to check out this article about cholera in Port-au-Prince: http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/sudden-death-by-cholera-a-mystery-in-battered-haiti/19712500