“It is in the shelter of each other that the people live.”
— Irish proverb
If we don’t shelter one another, we are lost. If we don’t shelter one another none of us has a home; none of us has heart, has peace, has rest. If we don’t shelter one another, we are alone, alienated, adrift.
Believing this to be true, struggling to understand community and what it meant to care for one another, I wrote the prose poem below some years ago, wrote it in the voice of a woman who had the experience described:
My apartment has a view of the city skyline
A street lady keeps coming to visit me. She’s looking for her son, leaves me notes. I called the police. They said to call if she comes again. She hasn’t come again, but when she does come, she tries to get in.
Of course, she can’t get in.
She only rattles the door.
Would you have responded differently to the woman’s visitor? What would you have said or done?
Tomorrow, in the spirit of these questions, I’ll bring you a guest post, written by my dear friend and fellow writer, Mindy Shannon Phelps. Mindy’s post will further address this issue of “sheltering”–offering another voice of witness.
Hope you will come back tomorrow and listen to Mindy. Let’s help her feel welcome!
Lucy is a dog with wanderlust. She loves to go just about anywhere. And though she looks the part of precious pup–
My seven pound “princess,” in fact, behaves badly anywhere other than her black, backpack carrier—
Very badly!
Lucy does not possess anything remotely resembling a sweet disposition. Her bark–loud, high-decibeled, and persistent–is her best weapon in an arsenal of ways to get what she wants.
But John Grogan, author of Marley & Me, insists that all dogs are great, and bad dogs–“the greatest of them all.”
And Lucy is indeed a great traveler—
Lucy is such a perfect companion on the road, that Sara and I have trotted the globe with her in tow—if for no other reason than she’s at her best, her most charming and well-behaved in planes, trains, and automobiles.
And on our world-wide odyssey to find canine obedience and tail-wagging good manners, our first stop with Lucy was Vietnam—a country Lucy traveled top to bottom, bottom to top.
Lucy behaved beautifully during our grueling 24 hour trans-global trip to Saigon. Honestly, I couldn’t have hoped for a better outcome.
However, day-to-day living with Lucy in Vietnam proved more challenging, since, for the first several days, I couldn’t locate a blade of grass within a 10 block radius of our apartment. There was a park a 15 minute walk away, but it was so far that even getting there involved rehydration stops along the way:
And once we finally arrived, it turned out dogs were not allowed on the lawn. I kid you not!
One morning, a security a guard reprimanded me, “Not dog on grass! Not dog on grass!” When I showed him the pink poop bag with which I intended to pick up any excrement, pink poop bag I had brought purposefully all the way from the US—biodegradable and environmentally friendly—he seemed not the least impressed and repeated his demand with all the more irritation, “Not dog on grass! Not dog on grass!” But Lucy refused to pee or poop on pavement. What was an environmentally conscious, dog-toting-to-the-Far-East American to do?
What I did was find this lonely square of grass in front of the Indonesian Consulate:
But once she adjusted to only a tiny turf, Lucy was off to places like the Reunification Palace:
She visited famous fountains:
She even participated in a student survey:
She insisted on praying at Notre-Dame Basilica:
Lucy traveled the 1,100 miles from Saigon to Hanoi by train—a nearly 30 hour trip:
She loved lounging in our compartment and mooching meals from Sara:
In Hanoi she visited the Temple of Literature by back pack:
She enjoyed Sunday brunch at the world-famous Metropole Hotel:
Lucy took us shopping in the Old Quarter:
There she bought the smallest conical hat in all of Southeast Asia:
Lucy continues to turn heads even now that we live in Haiti, but she still insists no well-mannered Maltese would do Vietnam without a millinery consultation.
Wall to wall
memory is platformed
into rows
Now asleep
Now awake
Now a place not namable
(asleep)
a jagged interlude
of spine
rock
tooth
decay
I am here, I remind myself
this bed
I am now
two faucets
one sink
I count
lose count
forget
Begin again
stripped
“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—“
–Emily Dickinson
in the center where the people
should be is a red and white
checked cloth which covers the
dining room table where the
parent is working. the parent
has cut up the picture in order
to save space in the sticky
plastic-covered pages of the
family photograph album.
i want to write a poem about
this picture with a hole in the
center where the family should
be, but the parent says i should
write about something else.
perhaps then this is not a poem
about the picture. perhaps it’s
not the picture that’s important.
perhaps it’s the table.
think about the table.
My partner Sara and I are beginning to lose touch—
Lose touch with what it means to be an even remotely “normal” American couple. Some might say that’s not such a bad thing, but I promise you, we have gotten so far from the center of the bell curve, we can’t find the bell any more. We can’t even hear it ringing in the distance.
So–in light of this loss, today, I bring you the top 10 ways you too can be the most un-American of American couples:
#10. Station armed guards outside your house.
This is sure to eliminate any and all illusions of privacy.
(If you are new to the blog, my partner Sara and I live in Haiti where threats to security are common. Click here to read a post about this.)
#9. Argue frequently about how you will generate electricity.
Sara and I have been known to have some of our hottest arguments around just how long we can safely run our generator, especially on days when we have no or very little electricity from the city. I don’t like to be hot. Heat makes me irritable, bitchy, and stressed. So during the hottest nights here in Haiti, I’ve wanted to keep the air conditioning on, or at the very least, a fan running—neither of which are possible without electricity or our generator running.
(To read an entire post dedicated to Haiti’s infrastructure issues click here.)
#8. Do without television.
Instead watch DVDs of “30-Something” for evening entertainment. I knew things were getting bad when over the weekend Sara and I watched back to back episodes of the show’s first season and felt like we were enjoying a special treat, hovering around Sara’s laptop like kids in front of Saturday morning cartoons.
“Oh, boy!” we exclaimed elbowing one another. “Isn’t this great!” We would have broken out the popcorn, if we had a microwave to pop it in.
#7. Go to bed before dinner.
Not out of passion, but because you’ve become dreadfully boring and tire easily.
#6. Have no hot water in your kitchen sink.
Not to mention no dish-washer.
#5. Develop an active fear of kidnapping.
On average—there’s a kidnapping a day in Port-au-Prince—usually of foreigners, often of ex-pats working for NGOs on earthquake reconstruction. And in fact, a number of these kidnappings actually happen in Petion-ville, where we live, since most NGOs have set up their operations from this location.
Many ex-pats are kidnapped from their cars. To alleviate that risk we drive with seatbelts on, windows up, doors locked. It’s harder to be pulled from a vehicle that way.
#4. Stage incidents of international canine trafficking.
I know most folks don’t traipse the planet, canine companions in tow, but Sara and I, for whatever reason, see fit to move our mutts to whichever corner of the globe is hosting the latest in earth-shaking disasters.
For example, it was challenging to take a 40 pound, blonde terrier to Vietnam, where the meat of medium sized, light skinned canines is still considered a delicacy. And though it ended well, concluded with Ralph arriving uneaten in Hanoi, it proved so crazy-making along the way, we “sanely” decided to bring him here to Haiti this past summer.
However, that trip proved less eventful—except for his traveling companions on the flight from Miami to Port-au-Prince—the 10,000 chicks he still hasn’t stopped chirping about.
(For an entire post on pet-transport mishaps click here.)
#3. Appreciate the difference between “trash” and “stash.”
Sara has “placement issues”—a problem she blames on her training as an architect and which she insists I knew about prior to our partnering and simply can not change. Bottom line—Sara likes to arrange things: drawers, cupboards, closets, the contents of the refrigerator, mayonnaise, mustard, ketchup arranged in tidy rows—like items lined up together—like soldiers—an army of condiments ready for edible action. If an object doesn’t fall neatly into rank, the solution for Sara is simple—throw it in the trash.
I, on the other hand, tend to collect things—and not the kinds of things most would consider collectables, but which I gather in the name of “potential art”—items I prefer to call “collagables”—buttons, beads, ribbons, rocks, shells, business cards, bottle caps, maps, matchboxes, newspaper clippings, play bills, and, among other things, sales receipts—in my mind the most under-rated and readily available of all the collagables—a free gift with each purchase, so to speak.
Sara insists my stash is trash!
#2. Agree on only one thing.
That there are too many white people in America.
On one of our recent trips back to the US what stood out to both of us most, even though our home is in an ethically-mixed neighborhood, was the overwhelming huge number of Caucasian in the city where we live. At one point Sara turned to me in the grocery store produce isle and asked: “What do you notice about being home?” My response was immediate, “There are so many white people in America! I had forgotten.” It surprised us how quickly we both had become conditioned to what seems an appropriate ethnic mix. We had made a shift that we noticed only when coming “home.” If this can happen for us, it can happen for others. Come join us. Make the switch.
#1. Be denied the right to marry.
This one I think speaks for itself, but if not please watch this video:
Sara reminds me, that though we don’t have the right to marry in Kentucky, we at least now have an openly gay mayor in Lexington, so that’s a step in the right direction. (To read about Jim Gray click here.)
However, Sara also insists that, by far, the weirdest thing about us as couple is that I asked her to brainstorm with me about “what makes us weird as a couple.” I’m not exactly sure what’s so weird about that, but Sara says my not recognizing the strangeness of that request makes it even weirder. I don’t know. You be the judge.
At any rate, remember that “normal” is a difficult to define category. I appreciate that. But if you recall the 1960s television sitcom, “The Odd Couple,” you’ll see that I’m not talking so much about individual issues that separate us from the crowd. I’m looking at the entire constellation of individual quirks that combine to make a couple what most others would consider strange. I’m looking at the “Odd Couple” factor, if you will.
Felix Unger and Oscar Madison epitomized for a generation of Americans just what it meant to be uniquely coupled in the 1960s.
But If Felix and Oscar were the not-so-average pair of heterosexual bachelors in the 60s, I would argue that Sara and I are the same for this decade’s no-where-near-single lesbian couple—a uniqueness not related in the least to the reality of sexual preference.
In fact, Sara and I give whole new meaning to the notion of “odd couple”—sexual orientation not withstanding.
We may be weird–
But we do want to wed!
What sets you and your partner apart from the crowd? What makes a couple “weird” in the country you call home? Do gay and lesbian couple have the right to wed where you live?
Still struggling to create, still struggling over all. So, I’ll share another poem I wrote a while back. Thank God I have this stuff to pass along on off days. My apologies for this deviation from the normal fare. I hope this gives you another sense of who I am as a writer.
This story is about the heartless and dishonest action taken by a company that claims to not only be “America’s largest and most reliable wireless network,” but also the one “more people trust.”
Clearly, America’s trust is ill-founded. And I am about to show you why.
My partner Sara and I live in Haiti, where Sara directs the recovery operation for one of the world’s largest and most well-known international aid organizations. I live in Port-au-Prince with her and blog about Haiti’s need for more relief, more aid, more care, more prayer. Sara does the work. I spread the word.
On the weekend of February 4th, Sara and I were in Miami for a long weekend away from the stress and strife, the grit and grime that is Port-au-Prince. But before hitting the beach and soaking up the sun, we wanted to upgrade our phones and renew our Verizon Wireless contract.
Up until that Friday I had an unlimited international data plan for my mobile phone—something that was essential to my functioning in Haiti, where access to both electricity and wireless is limited. I needed to upgrade my phone because I blog and the WordPress software I need was not available on the model of Blackberry I owned. Sara also needed an equipment upgrade, since her BlackBerry had stopped working several months before.
Frustrated that our access to electricity in Haiti had not improved even a year after the earthquake, we stopped at a North Miami Verizon Wireless store on our way in from the airport. We were eager; we were enthusiastic as we burst through the door and were greeted by a Verizon employee with, “Would you like to buy a Droid today?”
“No,” I sighed. “Really, I’d prefer another Blackberry, perhaps the Storm.”
The Verizon representative was willing to show me the Blackberry but eager to point out how difficult it was to type from the touch screen. He suggested I try. I did. Indeed, it was difficult.
“Really,” he offered. “The Droid 2 keyboard is more user-friendly and easier to operate.”
To make a long story short—
I tried the Droid. I love the Droid. Sara tried it. She loved it. We were sold.
We were in the store for close to two hours. We explained our circumstances to our now friend from Jamaica, who understood our frustration, as he too had grown up on a Caribbean island. We discussed my need to blog from my phone. He even loaded the WordPress software for me and moved the icon to my home page for easy access.
He empathized. He insisted the Droid was truly the answer to our data needs in Haiti. He referred to the unlimited access to email and internet we would enjoy. Things would be better.
Two hours later we left the North Miami Verizon Wireless store 2 Droids richer and $600 poorer—
Since, when we got back to Haiti the following Monday evening, we discovered we had no unlimited international data package. The phones were useless to us. We spent $600 and, in doing so, lost the very feature that made the phones useful to us, in fact, essential to us.
We had been duped.
So the first thing Tuesday morning, I called Verizon to have the problem resolved. I spoke with a “customer service” representative. I spoke with 2 managers.
Finally, manager Lenora empathized with our situation and agreed to submit a claim to the “Inactive Pricing Committee. “
Now, 7 expensive phone calls to US “Customer Service” later (Verizon refuses to remove the roaming charges associated with those calls), I learned this morning that Verizon has denied our claim, because we bought Droids and the unlimited data package had only been available on Blackberries.
If only we would return our phones to the nearest Verizon store and trade them for Blackberries then the committee MIGHT be able to reconsider our claim.
Maybe the “customer service” representative offered we could mail our phones back to the US.
Yeah, right—mail 2 VERY expensive phones from a country that doesn’t have a national mail service.
Yeah, right—mail them safely from a country where we can’t even trust our own gardener not to steal our tools—not because he’s a dishonest thief, but because he is that desperate to feed his family and might be able to trade the hammer on the street for a handful of rice, a cup of beans.
We won’t be using these phones for economic gain. Really, I‘d be a lot more comfortable blogging from the US, and Sara would be more relaxed if she weren’t trying to house the 1.3 million homeless Haitians living in Port-au-Prince.
We don’t make nearly enough money to pay the $70 per month for the 7 GB of data per phone that won’t come close to meeting our needs.
International aid work doesn’t pay well. Blogging about Haiti pays nothing.
Bottom line—
Verizon refuses to restore the unlimited international data plan we had until February 4th, when a Verizon representative dishonestly persuaded us to buy Droids rather than the Blackberries our unlimited access to data depended on.
Verizon has essentially crippled us in our ability to function in Haiti.
Verizon may be the wireless company most Americans trust, but God forbid, the Haitian people place a similar trust in corporate America’s willingness to meet their needs.
Verizon insists there’s really nothing more they can do.
Verizon Wireless is the devil!
(If you are willing, please pass along this story of corporate greed at the expense of the planet’s poor. Please help me hold Verizon accountable.)
Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. —Rainer Maria Rilke
The weekend here in Haiti has ended . . .
The time to catch up—do laundry, make beds, have some spaghetti with the ones we love—has lead us to Valentine’s Day—muddy, gone-amuck Monday Cinderella-ed into—
More laundry, more beds, more spaghetti with the ones we don’t always love.
Yes, the ones we love may be less than lovely at times. But on Valentine’s Day, I’m also thinking about my home here in Haiti and about my home in the blogosphere, readers who care, readers I’ve come to love.
So, it seems essential on this day that celebrates love, a day that celebrates caring and appreciation, that I invite readers I love into the heart of my life here in Haiti–into my home. For it’s as true as it is cliched: home is where the heart is.
A while back, on a truly muddy Monday, I promised photos of our house in Port-au-Prince, promised, that is, when so many of you ranted about our kitchen decor in a post called “Haiti needs to be HGTV’d.” (If you missed that post, click here.)
So, though “Writing Neurotic” still threatens (for an introduction to “Writing Neurotic” click here and here), our wireless is working well today—is almost, semi fast . . . (Notice the adverbs that qualify “fast.” All apply.)
Given this, I’m going to attempt a giant photo upload. (If you’re not familiar with the wireless challenges we face at our house here in Haiti, click here.)
If I succeed, a virtual tour of our home should follow. (Please pray the bandwidth gods, maybe even Saint Valentine himself, remain with us.)
Here’s the deal. Our house sits on a hillside, hovering above the up-scale Port-au-Prince suburb of Petion-ville, where the streets are poorly paved, if at all, and the twists and turns of “almost-roads” threaten even the most seasoned drivers—pot holes the size of swimming pools are not uncommon.
Though there’s little electricity, once you get here, things are lovely. Truly—our home is small but adequate, and we have dressed it up with paint—bold color, saturated color, the kind you want to drink in and absorb.
After honking to alert the guard (yes, he’s armed), he’ll open the gate and you’ll drive onto what is essentially the roof of our house—an outside deck that, for the most part, doubles our living space, (only sometimes exposing us to the stench of burning tire in the town below. Don’t worry there’s been no rioting today. We’re sinus-ly safe for now.)
Jean-Jean will open the gate, and our dog Ralph will greet you.
So come join us, pull up a chair, have cup of tea or a cocktail, if you like. The roof-top deck, where we’re sitting looks like this:
The view from your seat looks like this:
And, if you wonder about that roaring, rumbling sound—it’s our generator round the corner, keeping the lights on for us:
Sorry for that obnoxious noise!
You’ll enter the house itself from the roof, by descending a set of stairs:
From the opposite side of the room, the staircase looks like this:
You’ve entered our main living space—a kitchenlivingdiningroom—what in the US we might call a “great room,” though ours is not so grand.
The kitchen looks like this:
smallandcrampedbutweloveit
Our main seating area looks like this:
Have a seat. Soak in the color.
On opposite sides of this space, doors lead to two rooms, the master bedroom and bath on one side, the guest room and bath on the other.
The master bedroom looks like this:
And the master bathroom looks like this:
You’ll enter the guest room through this doorway:
This room doubles as Sara’s office, but if you spend the night, you’ll sleep here:
Your bathroom, a mirror image of the master, looks like this:
Another door off the guest room leads to a balcony that looks like this:
And a stairway that looks this:
At the bottom of the stairs, another door from the outside opens into my studio and study:
Wait!
Our guard Jean-Jean rushes down the stairs–interupts the tour. He insists the protests have started again. You need to go.
Gosh, darn, you just got here——
We hurry back up the stairs to your car.
Well, at least you’ve gotten a sneak peak at our home in Port-au-Prince, I concede, and as you close the car door, I shout above clatter of gate opening–
Let us know when you can come again, stay a little longer, spend the night.
I’ll send a driver and an armed-escort to meet your flight.
(For a post about madness at the Port-au-Prince airport, click here.)
Happy Valentine’s Day from the heart of our home!
Happy Valentine’s Day–from the (still unresolved) heart of Haiti—————-
I’m preparing a post for next week about why Sara and I are weird as a couple. (And the fact of the matter is, we are way, way weird.) However, that new piece won’t mean as much if you haven’t read the one I’m re-posting below.
I wrote what appears here only a few days into the life of this blog, so few of you will likely have seen it in its original incarnation. It was called “Top 10 Reasons I’m Pretty Much a Freak.” Hope it entertains you over the weekend.
Let’s face it. I’m not normal. My partner Sara has always said I was weird—actually her word was “eccentric”—but you get the picture.
At any rate, amid all the seriousness I face living in Haiti, I’ve decided to lighten things up here today by offering you the top ten reasons Sara still insists I’m what you could call—well—“quirky:”
#10. Left to my own devices, I eat mostly from what my friend Milana and I call the “white food group.” Edible items in this category include: baguettes, bagels, butter, cream cheese, sour cream, lots and lots of sugar—sugar cookies, cakes, unimaginable amounts of pie crust—and if I were a drinker, which I am not—wine!
#9. I’m a double fisted drinker. Not with wine, of course, but with hot and cold beverages, mostly hot tea, Lipton (though since we’ve come to Haiti, coffee has become an option), and Pepsi Max, when I can find it—(Coke Zero, otherwise). Now, for me, this only works in one direction. Namely, if I drink something hot, I have to have the cold cola to accompany it. However, chilled drinks can stand alone—not always needing the hot accompaniment.
#8. I tend to collect things—and not the kinds of things most would consider collectables, but which I gather in the name of “potential art”—items I prefer to call “collagables”—buttons, beads, ribbons, rocks, shells, business cards, bottle caps, maps, matchboxes, newspaper clippings, play bills, and, among other things, sales receipts—in my mind the most under-rated and readily available of all the collagables—a free gift with each purchase, so to speak.
#6. I never use a top sheet. Don’t believe in them. Never have.
#5. I pretty much live with a saint— We’ll call her Saint Sara the Orderly. (And I have saintly siblings, but I’ll leave that for a later post.) Sara has “placement issues”—a problem she blames on her training as an architect and which she insists I knew about prior to our partnering and simply can not change, as they are, in fact, evidence of her Saintly origins—rituals of the Order, so to speak. Bottom line—Sara likes to arrange things: drawers, cupboards, closets, the contents of the refrigerator, mayonnaise, mustard, ketchup arranged in tidy rows—like items lined up together—like soldiers—an army of condiments ready for edible action. Need I say more.
#4. My partner does disaster response. She’s a disaster response expert. Now there aren’t a lot of these people on the planet (though there are quite a few of them in Haiti these days). I believe (and you are free to disagree), that’s it’s the relative scarcity of this species that makes disasters so, well, “disastrous.” In all seriousness, I’m grateful that Sara does this kind of work. It helps make meaning in our lives. And though that “meaning” often means traveling a lot, we’re not exactly heading to what most would call “vacation destinations.”
#3. My mother wears clothes pins as fashion accessories. Actually, at age 72 she uses them as a mnemonic device, so let’s not get all uptight about this one. However, for further discussion of this semi-strange sartorial habit, I refer you to a post from several days ago called, “Airing Family Secrets Via Haute Couture.”
#2. I taught at Oral Roberts University. This may speak for itself—except that I might mention having arrived on campus in 1986, just after Oral sequestered himself in the Prayer Tower for a number of weeks, claiming God was going to “bring him home” if believers didn’t donate 6 million dollars. I know some of you may be too young to remember this, but it’s true. He did it. I was there. And the play the drama department performed that semester just happened to be—“Death of a Salesman”—I kid you not!
#1. My father was in the mafia–pretty much, that’s what it boils down to—Enough said.
Now, none of these items in and of themselves makes one weird—not even two or three. It’s the global picture I’m getting at.
And I haven’t even included here the biggest reason I’m a weirdo. But, let’s face it folks, we don’t know one another well enough yet for me to share all my secrets. It seems though the picture’s becoming clearer—
Kathryn M. McCullough 