The washer and dryer at Ms. Sue’s starts early in the morning and ends late at night.
With forty two kids, clothes get dirty and, even with throw away diapers, there is hardly time to wash, dry,fold, and hang. Some of the clothes are hand washed in buckets in the front yard and the girls are most often saddled with this task, though Peter was scrubbing his white sneakers yesterday morning in a sink in the laundry room..
Ms. Sue wants the outside laundry location changed, because, near the house, the soil gets wet and makes mud that gets tracked into the house by almost a hundred little feet..
The new outside laundry area is in the shade, pebbles bordered by a square perimeter of heavy rocks borrowed from a collapsed retaining wall next to the guest house where I bivouac during my volunteer visit.
The girls are washing in the new place today, but, mostly, they laugh, talk, learn.
Clean clothes are a treasure, especially when you have no treasure chest to put them in.
Making do doesn’t mean you can’t have fun doing,and kids, even in rough times, always find ways to have fun.
One of the kid’s lifts the slow running hose and sprays the others till the hose is wrestled away and staff gets them all quiet again.
Having to do your laundry is a lifetime chore and having a little fun, when you do it, makes you like it more than you should.
In a hallway to the tv room, on a wall in front of the boy’s dorm, is a tree with kid’s photos hanging like fruit.
These photo’s were taken some years back and the children have long since outgrown their photos, each day becoming something new, their emotions taking them on minute by minute roller coasters.
For businessman, kids are future buying customers or part of their future labor force.
For schools, kids are society’s future mom’s and dad’s and bring money from the state.
For politicians, kids are future voters who will have to pay for current policy mistakes.
For Jesus, children are to be nurtured.
At Ms. Sue’s, children give this home its life. They run down halls, swing on swings on the playground, sharpen pencils at school, recite devotionals, watch Disney movies before bedtime, do their chores with only a little complaining.
It takes a long time for human fruit to ripen.
Yesterday’s photo’s don’t do justice to today’s faces.
It is, I’m observing, time for some new portraits.
Haiti Made is a local countryside Cafe and Gift Shop.
If you walk outside the Christianville front gate, past the security man sitting in a chair with an automatic fully loaded weapon by his side, you make a quick right and follow a single winding lane road into the countryside until you get to their front door.
Less than a quarter mile, past the Old Well, you can drop by Haiti Made, grab a smoothie and visit with locals and foreign tourists in the heat of the day.
Displayed on tables,walls and pallets are handmade items made by local men and women who are part of the Haiti Made’s craft co-operative.
Jan is in court today and works the register, takes orders, meets friends who come in with pitches for various community projects. There are Americans living full time in Haiti and many have Christian intentions and charitable goals.
Love and Grace are operative words today and the smoothies are truly smooth. My favorite is banana cherry, but some of the kids like banana peanut butter, or cherry lime. They are all made with real fruit and thick enough you can use a spoon to scoop them out of the glass..
On this hot afternoon, with heat rising and the feel of rain in the air, going to Haiti Made makes a good comma in another long drawn out Faulkner sentence about hope and fear in a desolate Garden of Eden.
If a smoothie isn’t your cup of tea, you can choose a cup of coffee and have a muffin.
On a hot afternoon, it feels good to sit under the shade trees on the patio and swing in an old tire swing that hangs down from a tall sturdy branch above it by a thick thick rope that only a hangman would love.
When you travel, you meet reality.
Haiti shares its island with the Dominican Republic. Haiti speaks French and the Dominican Republic speaks Spanish. Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere while the Dominican Republic is a tourist mecca with white beaches, all inclusive resorts, stunning landscapes.
Haiti was discovered by Columbus, claimed for Spain, ceded by Spain to the French, and became an independent country when Toussaint L’Overture, in 1804, led half a million slaves in revolt.
In 2003, Voodoo became an official Haitian religion.
There have been 70 dictators here since their Independence Day.
Unemployment is around 80% .
The 2010 earthquake that hit Haiti was a 7.0 magnitude with over 300,000 Haitians killed and property damage that has never been rectified.
There is too much Africa and Europe here, and not enough opportunity and freedom..
Being kept a slave, by your own countrymen, is hard to fathom.
Where all the money donated to Haiti went, after the earthquake, is in someone else’s Swiss bank account.
Outside the front gate of Christianville, you take an immediate right to go to Haiti Made, a local cafe, coffee and smoothie shop run by Americans.
An eighth of a mile down the rock strewn, bumpy, water puddled lane, that barely makes a foot path, is the landmark Old Well.
It is called old because it is a deep well drilled in the 1950’s when the Christianville Bible University occupied the hillside above the well. The University was taken out by one of Mother Nature’s hurricanes some years ago and all that is left of it is a concrete shell of a building at the top of the ridge, obscured by battered trees and beat down vegetation.
Often, at this well, there are vehicles, motorcycles pulled off the road while men and women fill yellow five gallon plastic jugs with water to take home for cooking, drinking, and bathing.
I splash water on my face, direct from the spigot, stopping my walk to Haiti Made for a moment.
A hurricane, taking out this Bible University on the hill, is ironic.
If the well had been taken out too, the tragedy would have been exponentially worse.
While having a God helps us survive, not having water is a death sentence.
A phone call has been made to get this work started.
This workman uses a ladder to climb up into the tree branches,and, with deft strikes, his machete becomes an ax and tree limbs come down with a crash.
This crew of four has spent half a day trimming trees and another half loading debris into the back of their old pickup to be hauled off. The hood of the truck is left open to cool the engine.
Contrary to popular myth, Haitians work hard when there is work to be done that someone will pay you to do.
My apartment, after this tree amputation, will be fifteen degrees hotter because there are no longer branches to shade me, but I won’t have to listen to mango’s hit the tin roof day and night, with a noisy crash.
In the famous words of some long forgotten philosopher, written on some bathroom wall, ” The longer you wait before doing something,the better the chances you will decide it doesn’t need to be done. ”
I wish I hadn’t said anything about the noisy falling mango’s on my roof to the East Indian scientists who live upstairs, who then called Elizabeth, who then called the Christianville Public Works Department.
Shade in Haiti is more important than quiet.
Sometimes, it is best to keep your complaint to yourself, hold your tongue, and let things be as they have been a long time before you arrived.
It is Sunday morning.
Sun squeezes through delicate spider webs by an old stump.
Water seeps through screw holes in the tin roof of the guest house.
Children sing songs at Ms. Sue’s.
When you have little, you are happy with what little you have.
The crack in this wall began after a contractor built a security grate of ironwork on top of the storage unit so thieves couldn’t slip in at night and help themselves to someone else’s food. The crack has dangerously expanded and weakened the wall, and, in extension, the entire storage room.
This morning Mich poses next to a Haitian broom that looks like it wouldn’t work but does nicely on concrete, tile, even on stones in the yard. The broom’s fibers are flexible and strong enough to push mango leaves and paper into a pile to be picked up and thrown into an old oil drum to be burned or hauled off later.
The broom’s bristles are held together by rope twisted around them and the long thin wood branch handle. The broom is light to carry and easy to shake out and leans against the wall like a ;professional loafer.
Mich smiles.
He is happy even if this crack looks like a lizard ready to swallow him up and smack its lips after it’s snack.
There are volunteers this week, from Indianapolis, who lend fifty hands.
On our work menu is covering up a newly installed septic tank, filling in a washed out area around the clothesline, spreading gravel in areas that get muddy and cause kids to track mud into the home, sanding and refinishing kid’s beds, making new friends.
Work goes quickly when spread among many, and, by the end of two days, much has been accomplished The septic tank is buried, the washout is gone, beds, with a fresh coat of stain and polyurethane, match up with their mattresses.
Most of us work our own pace and some of the kids help, curious, wanting to try their hand.
Volunteers come and go, but kids, and staff, are here long term.
Nobody here thinks they can do everything by themselves.
The desire to help is a common Christian directive, and helping others, I am told frequently, by church folks, is something “we don’t have to do, but we get to do.”
On customs forms, my destination is spelled – Christianville, Haiti.
Christianville is not a town, city or village but a walled, fenced, compound in the Haitian countryside that is a trade school, a co-ordinating point for churches from abroad doing missions in Haiti, a research lab on TB and infectious diseases, an operator of three private schools, K-12, and the location of Ms. Sue’s children’s home.
The ride to Christianville from Port Au Prince is a juggernaut with the nightmare being highway repair that forces four lanes into one single file lane with police spot checking paperwork of vehicles and driver’s passing through the gauntlet.
Along the main road leading out of town, darting in and out of cars, are walking vendors peddling bottled water, food, treats, toys, and anything else they might make a dime from. Along the rutted road are shacks,smoldering fires, garbage and gaunt faces of urban people surviving a country with eighty percent unemployment.
Through this juggernaut, Ms. Sue, Hannah and myself leave Port Au Prince, enter rolling countryside, green with fields, and, in the distance, mountains. The countryside, anywhere, is better than cities. Cities are squeezed, packed, crammed, noisy, crowded and stacked. The countryside is open, wide, green, quiet, expansive, shady.
My purpose is to make repairs at Ms. Sue’s kid’s home, but most repairs needed here go beyond my pay grade.
I can’t put broken families together. I can’t undo untimely deaths. I can’t make things equal.
Broken rain gutters, sagging gates, leaky plumbing, walls needing paint, moving dirt will be on my plate this week and earning my eighth travel ring will take some effort.
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