In December 1989, Sister Joan Chittister was part of a Pax Christi USA fact-finding
delegation to Haiti. During that visit, Sister Joan met with church and government
leaders, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the future elected president of Haiti, and peasant
organizations trying to bring freedom to the then military controlled government.
We are printing generously from the journal she kept during that trip to give a
glimpse into long-suffering Haiti and the indomitable spirit of the Haitian people.
When the plane left Miami for Port-au-Prince I was tired, hot and apprehensive at
the thought of going to a country whose history is a series of private armies at
war with one another and at odds with the people.
So why am I here? Bohnoeffer writes: “There is a meaning in every journey that is
unknown to the traveler.” I will have to let Haiti itself teach me why I’m here.
All the way down today I read and reviewed material on the country’s history,
political situation, and poverty. But in the United States, we hardly even know
where Haiti is, let alone what it is. And worse, we don’t care.
One thing I know for sure as the plane begins its descent: From the air, Haiti is
beautiful — an island coast, rugged hills, and blue, blue water. The question is:
What is its soul like?
*****
Foyer Solidarite, the place we are staying, is deceiving. It’s a huge plantation-style
mansion at the top of a hill. At first I was almost shocked to see the marble and
wrought iron and the open veranda. But inside, everything was large and bare. It’s
clean. There are art posters proclaiming the scriptures of the poor. There are
wall frescoes in native style. But there’s nothing else. No lovely furniture, no
television, no hot water in the shower; the cold water a trickle. There were,
however, beautiful flowers in each sparse bedroom.
*****
It has been quite a morning. First we went to the clinic run by the radical priest
Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide — if by radical you mean someone committed to the
church of the beatitudes. He has denounced the government and challenged the
bishops to speak for the poor. As a result, he has enemies in multiple places. But
not among the poor. When church officials removed him from his parish, St. Jean
Bosco, the poor coverged en masse on the cathedral until Aristide was reinstated.
His clinic is a huge old house and courtyard on a side street of a lower middle
class section of Port-au-Prince. Over 2,000 people have come to the clinic for
medical help. In addition, he has a work program for street children, boys who
have no money, no job, no education. He also teaches them to read. Some sleep
there on old bare mattresses on a wet concrete floor when there is nowhere else
to go.
Aristide is clearly revolutionary, a prophet, a scourge of the system. There have
been several attempts on his life and, as we sat on the veranda overlooking the
playground and listened to him, it was clear why. When Aristide talks about the
“expatriation of American profits” and the “new slavery of economic
dependence,” he becomes a threat to church and state. The church, after all,
has privileges here that are not to be bartered for the people.
He’s a very small, very intense man. I had no doubt that I was in the presence of a
holy man who will probably die for Medellin and Puebla and Vatican II and
preferential option for the poor.
As we drove away from his damp, dark dormitory, the tiny classroom and the
sparse pharmacy, I saw Aristide’s name painted on villa walls all over the hills.
Ed. Note: Aristide was laicized and became Haiti’s first elected president in 1990.
He was twice the victim of coups, the last occurring during George W. Bush’s
presidency. He is currently in South Africa, barred from entering Haiti.
*****
Port-au-Prince is a tragic place. It is paradise on one hand and hell on the other.
It sits overlooking the beautiful Caribbean on rolling green hills under the world’s
bluest sky. And it is a cesspool.
The poor are everywhere; the streets are gullies and the buildings are in various
stages of collapse. Our four-wheel drive vehicle rocked from side to side as we
maneuvered around pits on the main streets of town that were so deep they still
held rain water from two days ago.
******
After lunch we went to St. Martin and Cite Soleil, the slum sections of Port-au-
Prince. Cardboard shacks lined mud paths barely more than a car-width wide.
Children, literally thousands of them, played in the mud and dirt. The kitchens
were burners at the front of the huts, the beds were old mattresses or pieces of
cardboard. The roofs were corrugated metal and there were miles of them.
Women washed clothes in basins full of rainwater and dumped the suds into open
ditches. Men hacked sugar cane and dragged heavy loads on wooden flatbed
wagons attached to their backs like yokes.
It was human degradation in slow motion. Post-puberty girls squatted against walls
to urinate. Small boys had no clothes at all. Women my age had small children
crawling all over them or huddled lifeless in the corners of cast-off packing boxes
that had delivered refrigerators to the rich.
The driver of the Land Rover that took us through the area was obviously nervous.
I was too thunderstruck to be afraid, too numb to worry about myself. I put the
video camera on my lap, torn between two values — take film home that would
arouse U.S. consciences or sit quietly and respectfully in the presence of death.
After all, what kind of person takes a picture of a corpse?
Here, surely, was living death without benefit of all the niceties. In funeral homes
perhaps death can be ignored, but here? No, here it must be confronted.
On the docks of Cite Soleil the van broke down. We’d gotten out to take some
footage of the boats and the laying of nets, but when we went to start the car, it
was dead. Crowds gathered quickly, all young men and boys, pushing and asking
for money, candy, pens, eyeglasses. Anything at all.
And so, this crowd of nuns and peace people began to give them things. David
gave them magic tricks. Helen David gave them sketches of themselves, the kind
you pay $25 or $50 each for on Jackson Square in New Orleans. Bernadette gave
them lessons in the alphabet and I took pictures of them with a video camera.
They loved it. The crowd got bigger and bigger.
*****
St. Martin and Cite Soleil were a frustration to me, but Hinche, the bush and
Central Plateau were a shock in the medical sense of the word — all my systems
went into low just to survive.
In the first place Hinche is 75 miles from Port-au-Prince. It took over six hours to
get there and seven and a half to get back. Every mile out of Port-au-Prince gets
worse. Potholes turn to gullies, gullies turn to stones, and stones turn into
flowing mud on the edge of a cliff. Houses turn into huts, huts turn to shacks and
shacks turn to lean-tos. The trip up the mountain was a progressive, inexorable
excursion into dehumanization.
We were stopped at five military checkpoints along the road. Clearly the peasants’
movement is a great concern.
MPP, the peasant movement of Papaye, had started as part of Ti Legiz, a basic
Christian community of the Haitian church. But the church has distanced itself
from the more assertive reform movements since July 1987, when hundreds of
peasants involved in organizing land reform actions were massacred in Jean-Rabel.
The movement, they told us, started with two groups. There are now 5,000 groups
with 75,000 members.
The peasant leaders’ faces were black, strong, soft and beautiful. They had been
jailed, tortured and terrorized, they said, but they would not stop. They would
rather lose their lives.
“If the government gave me 2,000 gourdes, I would not quit the movement,” one
man said. “The money will disappear, but the movement gives me life. They can kill
me but 10 more will rise to take my place.” They talked about how the movement
had taught them to organize, given them a credit union, begun reforestation
programs, and brought them support.
There was only one woman in the group. One of the wives, I thought, or a worker
perhaps. Then, as the night got darker and the small, bare, yellowish bulb above
our heads lost its strength, she began to speak and she wasn’t shy.
“The movement started with three women’s groups and now there are 700, 14% of
the MPP groups. The movement is good for women, too, she announced. “Men
use women like brooms. When they’re worn out, they just throw them away.” Her
voice got firmer. “Women’s rights will benefit the whole family, but when the
women made claims, the bishops repressed them. Some women were also jailed.
But the movement is bearing fruit: Women are speaking out and I have seen them
interpret the Gospel at Mass.”
This universal voice of women is one great common cry of pain, I realized. I looked
at her and smiled. She smiled back. But inside I was crying and so, I think, was she.
The building where we were meeting was a public school that had been open for
a year and then abandoned as the state had abandoned all social programs in
Haiti. The residence halls — six dormitories around a center courtyard thick with
high grass and brambles — were standing wide open, doors akimbo and locks
broken. There were sinks and toilets and showers, but none of them worked. A
huge tarantula was in the dorm doorway; a smaller one in the cupboard.
These were the worst living conditions I had ever been in, and they had been
prepared for us with pride. We strung our mosquito netting together, sharing bug
sprays, laughing to keep spirits up. I found myself thinking of all those military
checkpoints where they insisted on knowing where we would sleep that night,
and thinking of Jean Donovan, Ita Ford, Maura Clark and Dorothy Kazel. It is
outstanding how average people like us can manage to get into situations like this.
It is even more astounding that Haitian peasants cannot get out of them.
******
The bone-jarring trip down the mountain was even harder than going up had
been. It was market day and burdened beasts and people were walking for miles.
The rains came early and slicked the shale roads. At the foot of each hill, water
ran over the road up to the tailpipe of the van. Whole families gathered to wash
their clothes and bathe their children at the waterfall where the road was
supposed to be.
There are six months of rain and six months of dry weather in Haiti. During the
rainy season, the roads are covered with mud every day, and walking the
mountain is both dangerous and almost impossible. During the dry season there is
no water in the area at all. The peasant really never wins. Flat land in the valleys
and plains belongs to the rich. The eroded mountain sides belong to the poor,
who walk their crops down the steep slopes in the rain and up in the heat.
When we got a flat tire, a kind of poetic justice aimed at people in big cars who
drive up and down mountains scattering donkeys, women and children, we
stepped out of the van into mud over our shoes. Mountain mud, I discovered, is
one of the great levelers of life.
People came out of their one-room shacks to stare, to pose for pictures or ask
for money. It was hard to tell who was the sideshow: the peasants and their
nothingness or ourselves and our obscene affluence. Surely, somewhere there is a
middle point. The ideal is not that no one should be rich, but no living being
should be this poor.
******
On the way to the airport this morning children in droves rushed the car to sell
trinkets, wash windows or wipe down the car for a penny or a bite of food. And
the tap-taps, brightly painted flatbed trucks with slatted sides and blinking lights
that haul people like cattle in lieu of public transportation, drove by sporting
their names: Confiance en Dieu — Confidence in God; Merci Jesus — Thank you,
Jesus; Esprit — Hope; and, Golgotha.
White tourists, as few as there were, left Haiti carrying straw baskets, wearing
straw hats, brandishing brightly-colored paintings from a drab, drab world. As we
circled Miami — each of us descended from immigrant backgrounds of poverty and
oppression —I knew with an awful awareness that the Statue of Liberty had
turned out her light.
delegation to Haiti. During that visit, Sister Joan met with church and government
leaders, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the future elected president of Haiti, and peasant
organizations trying to bring freedom to the then military controlled government.
We are printing generously from the journal she kept during that trip to give a
glimpse into long-suffering Haiti and the indomitable spirit of the Haitian people.
When the plane left Miami for Port-au-Prince I was tired, hot and apprehensive at
the thought of going to a country whose history is a series of private armies at
war with one another and at odds with the people.
So why am I here? Bohnoeffer writes: “There is a meaning in every journey that is
unknown to the traveler.” I will have to let Haiti itself teach me why I’m here.
All the way down today I read and reviewed material on the country’s history,
political situation, and poverty. But in the United States, we hardly even know
where Haiti is, let alone what it is. And worse, we don’t care.
One thing I know for sure as the plane begins its descent: From the air, Haiti is
beautiful — an island coast, rugged hills, and blue, blue water. The question is:
What is its soul like?
*****
Foyer Solidarite, the place we are staying, is deceiving. It’s a huge plantation-style
mansion at the top of a hill. At first I was almost shocked to see the marble and
wrought iron and the open veranda. But inside, everything was large and bare. It’s
clean. There are art posters proclaiming the scriptures of the poor. There are
wall frescoes in native style. But there’s nothing else. No lovely furniture, no
television, no hot water in the shower; the cold water a trickle. There were,
however, beautiful flowers in each sparse bedroom.
*****
It has been quite a morning. First we went to the clinic run by the radical priest
Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide — if by radical you mean someone committed to the
church of the beatitudes. He has denounced the government and challenged the
bishops to speak for the poor. As a result, he has enemies in multiple places. But
not among the poor. When church officials removed him from his parish, St. Jean
Bosco, the poor coverged en masse on the cathedral until Aristide was reinstated.
His clinic is a huge old house and courtyard on a side street of a lower middle
class section of Port-au-Prince. Over 2,000 people have come to the clinic for
medical help. In addition, he has a work program for street children, boys who
have no money, no job, no education. He also teaches them to read. Some sleep
there on old bare mattresses on a wet concrete floor when there is nowhere else
to go.
Aristide is clearly revolutionary, a prophet, a scourge of the system. There have
been several attempts on his life and, as we sat on the veranda overlooking the
playground and listened to him, it was clear why. When Aristide talks about the
“expatriation of American profits” and the “new slavery of economic
dependence,” he becomes a threat to church and state. The church, after all,
has privileges here that are not to be bartered for the people.
He’s a very small, very intense man. I had no doubt that I was in the presence of a
holy man who will probably die for Medellin and Puebla and Vatican II and
preferential option for the poor.
As we drove away from his damp, dark dormitory, the tiny classroom and the
sparse pharmacy, I saw Aristide’s name painted on villa walls all over the hills.
Ed. Note: Aristide was laicized and became Haiti’s first elected president in 1990.
He was twice the victim of coups, the last occurring during George W. Bush’s
presidency. He is currently in South Africa, barred from entering Haiti.
*****
Port-au-Prince is a tragic place. It is paradise on one hand and hell on the other.
It sits overlooking the beautiful Caribbean on rolling green hills under the world’s
bluest sky. And it is a cesspool.
The poor are everywhere; the streets are gullies and the buildings are in various
stages of collapse. Our four-wheel drive vehicle rocked from side to side as we
maneuvered around pits on the main streets of town that were so deep they still
held rain water from two days ago.
******
After lunch we went to St. Martin and Cite Soleil, the slum sections of Port-au-
Prince. Cardboard shacks lined mud paths barely more than a car-width wide.
Children, literally thousands of them, played in the mud and dirt. The kitchens
were burners at the front of the huts, the beds were old mattresses or pieces of
cardboard. The roofs were corrugated metal and there were miles of them.
Women washed clothes in basins full of rainwater and dumped the suds into open
ditches. Men hacked sugar cane and dragged heavy loads on wooden flatbed
wagons attached to their backs like yokes.
It was human degradation in slow motion. Post-puberty girls squatted against walls
to urinate. Small boys had no clothes at all. Women my age had small children
crawling all over them or huddled lifeless in the corners of cast-off packing boxes
that had delivered refrigerators to the rich.
The driver of the Land Rover that took us through the area was obviously nervous.
I was too thunderstruck to be afraid, too numb to worry about myself. I put the
video camera on my lap, torn between two values — take film home that would
arouse U.S. consciences or sit quietly and respectfully in the presence of death.
After all, what kind of person takes a picture of a corpse?
Here, surely, was living death without benefit of all the niceties. In funeral homes
perhaps death can be ignored, but here? No, here it must be confronted.
On the docks of Cite Soleil the van broke down. We’d gotten out to take some
footage of the boats and the laying of nets, but when we went to start the car, it
was dead. Crowds gathered quickly, all young men and boys, pushing and asking
for money, candy, pens, eyeglasses. Anything at all.
And so, this crowd of nuns and peace people began to give them things. David
gave them magic tricks. Helen David gave them sketches of themselves, the kind
you pay $25 or $50 each for on Jackson Square in New Orleans. Bernadette gave
them lessons in the alphabet and I took pictures of them with a video camera.
They loved it. The crowd got bigger and bigger.
*****
St. Martin and Cite Soleil were a frustration to me, but Hinche, the bush and
Central Plateau were a shock in the medical sense of the word — all my systems
went into low just to survive.
In the first place Hinche is 75 miles from Port-au-Prince. It took over six hours to
get there and seven and a half to get back. Every mile out of Port-au-Prince gets
worse. Potholes turn to gullies, gullies turn to stones, and stones turn into
flowing mud on the edge of a cliff. Houses turn into huts, huts turn to shacks and
shacks turn to lean-tos. The trip up the mountain was a progressive, inexorable
excursion into dehumanization.
We were stopped at five military checkpoints along the road. Clearly the peasants’
movement is a great concern.
MPP, the peasant movement of Papaye, had started as part of Ti Legiz, a basic
Christian community of the Haitian church. But the church has distanced itself
from the more assertive reform movements since July 1987, when hundreds of
peasants involved in organizing land reform actions were massacred in Jean-Rabel.
The movement, they told us, started with two groups. There are now 5,000 groups
with 75,000 members.
The peasant leaders’ faces were black, strong, soft and beautiful. They had been
jailed, tortured and terrorized, they said, but they would not stop. They would
rather lose their lives.
“If the government gave me 2,000 gourdes, I would not quit the movement,” one
man said. “The money will disappear, but the movement gives me life. They can kill
me but 10 more will rise to take my place.” They talked about how the movement
had taught them to organize, given them a credit union, begun reforestation
programs, and brought them support.
There was only one woman in the group. One of the wives, I thought, or a worker
perhaps. Then, as the night got darker and the small, bare, yellowish bulb above
our heads lost its strength, she began to speak and she wasn’t shy.
“The movement started with three women’s groups and now there are 700, 14% of
the MPP groups. The movement is good for women, too, she announced. “Men
use women like brooms. When they’re worn out, they just throw them away.” Her
voice got firmer. “Women’s rights will benefit the whole family, but when the
women made claims, the bishops repressed them. Some women were also jailed.
But the movement is bearing fruit: Women are speaking out and I have seen them
interpret the Gospel at Mass.”
This universal voice of women is one great common cry of pain, I realized. I looked
at her and smiled. She smiled back. But inside I was crying and so, I think, was she.
The building where we were meeting was a public school that had been open for
a year and then abandoned as the state had abandoned all social programs in
Haiti. The residence halls — six dormitories around a center courtyard thick with
high grass and brambles — were standing wide open, doors akimbo and locks
broken. There were sinks and toilets and showers, but none of them worked. A
huge tarantula was in the dorm doorway; a smaller one in the cupboard.
These were the worst living conditions I had ever been in, and they had been
prepared for us with pride. We strung our mosquito netting together, sharing bug
sprays, laughing to keep spirits up. I found myself thinking of all those military
checkpoints where they insisted on knowing where we would sleep that night,
and thinking of Jean Donovan, Ita Ford, Maura Clark and Dorothy Kazel. It is
outstanding how average people like us can manage to get into situations like this.
It is even more astounding that Haitian peasants cannot get out of them.
******
The bone-jarring trip down the mountain was even harder than going up had
been. It was market day and burdened beasts and people were walking for miles.
The rains came early and slicked the shale roads. At the foot of each hill, water
ran over the road up to the tailpipe of the van. Whole families gathered to wash
their clothes and bathe their children at the waterfall where the road was
supposed to be.
There are six months of rain and six months of dry weather in Haiti. During the
rainy season, the roads are covered with mud every day, and walking the
mountain is both dangerous and almost impossible. During the dry season there is
no water in the area at all. The peasant really never wins. Flat land in the valleys
and plains belongs to the rich. The eroded mountain sides belong to the poor,
who walk their crops down the steep slopes in the rain and up in the heat.
When we got a flat tire, a kind of poetic justice aimed at people in big cars who
drive up and down mountains scattering donkeys, women and children, we
stepped out of the van into mud over our shoes. Mountain mud, I discovered, is
one of the great levelers of life.
People came out of their one-room shacks to stare, to pose for pictures or ask
for money. It was hard to tell who was the sideshow: the peasants and their
nothingness or ourselves and our obscene affluence. Surely, somewhere there is a
middle point. The ideal is not that no one should be rich, but no living being
should be this poor.
******
On the way to the airport this morning children in droves rushed the car to sell
trinkets, wash windows or wipe down the car for a penny or a bite of food. And
the tap-taps, brightly painted flatbed trucks with slatted sides and blinking lights
that haul people like cattle in lieu of public transportation, drove by sporting
their names: Confiance en Dieu — Confidence in God; Merci Jesus — Thank you,
Jesus; Esprit — Hope; and, Golgotha.
White tourists, as few as there were, left Haiti carrying straw baskets, wearing
straw hats, brandishing brightly-colored paintings from a drab, drab world. As we
circled Miami — each of us descended from immigrant backgrounds of poverty and
oppression —I knew with an awful awareness that the Statue of Liberty had
turned out her light.
Impressions of Haiti
 |  |  |  |  |
| Home||Benedictine Sisters of Erie||Catalogue||Joan in the News||Contact Benetvision Fund for Prisoners||Retreats||About Benetvision||Ideas in Passing Benetvision • 355 East Ninth Street • Erie, PA 16503-1107 • Phone 814-459-5994 benetvision@benetvision.org • Fax 814-459-8066 Copyrighted © 2007 Benedictine Sisters of Erie, PA |
PRAYER FOR HAITI: My friend, Rose Marie Berger wrote this prayer and gives
permission to circulate it freely.
A Prayer for Haiti
by Rose Marie Berger
Most Holy Creator God, Lord of heaven and earth,
we bring before you today your people of Haiti.
It is You who set in motion the stars and seas,
You who raised up the mountains of the Massif de la Hotte
and Pic La Selle. It is You who made her people in your very image:
Their gregarious hearts and generous spirits,
their hunger and thirst for righteousness and liberty.
It is you, O Lord, who planted the rhythms of konpa, Twoubadou,
and zouk in the streets of Cite-Soleil; You who walk the paths
outside of Jacmel and Hinche. Your people, O Lord, cry out to you.
Haiti, O Haiti: The world’s oldest black republic,
the second-oldest republic in the Western world.
God, You are the One who answers the cries of the suffering.
You are a God who sees, frees, and redeems your people.
“I too have heard the moaning of my people,” you spoke to Moses.
Now, Lord, speak again to Chanté, Agwe, Nadege, and Jean Joseph.
Speak now, O Lord, and comfort Antoine, Jean-Baptiste,
Toto, and Djakout. Raise up your people from the ash heap
of destruction and give them strong hearts and hands,
shore up their minds and spirits. Help them to bear this new burden.
As for us, Lord, we who are far away from the rubble and the dust,
from the sobbing and moans, but who hold them close in our hearts,
imbue us with the strength of Simon the Cyrene.
Help us to carry the Haitian cross. Show us how to lighten
their yoke with our prayers, our aid, our resources. Teach
us to work harder for justice in our own country and dignity in Haiti,
so that we may stand with integrity when we hold our Haitian families
in our arms once again. We ask this in the name of Jezikri,
Jesus Christ. Amen
Rose Marie Berger, an associate editor at Sojourners magazine, is a Catholic peace
activist and poet. © Rose Marie Berger (reprint freely)
permission to circulate it freely.
A Prayer for Haiti
by Rose Marie Berger
Most Holy Creator God, Lord of heaven and earth,
we bring before you today your people of Haiti.
It is You who set in motion the stars and seas,
You who raised up the mountains of the Massif de la Hotte
and Pic La Selle. It is You who made her people in your very image:
Their gregarious hearts and generous spirits,
their hunger and thirst for righteousness and liberty.
It is you, O Lord, who planted the rhythms of konpa, Twoubadou,
and zouk in the streets of Cite-Soleil; You who walk the paths
outside of Jacmel and Hinche. Your people, O Lord, cry out to you.
Haiti, O Haiti: The world’s oldest black republic,
the second-oldest republic in the Western world.
God, You are the One who answers the cries of the suffering.
You are a God who sees, frees, and redeems your people.
“I too have heard the moaning of my people,” you spoke to Moses.
Now, Lord, speak again to Chanté, Agwe, Nadege, and Jean Joseph.
Speak now, O Lord, and comfort Antoine, Jean-Baptiste,
Toto, and Djakout. Raise up your people from the ash heap
of destruction and give them strong hearts and hands,
shore up their minds and spirits. Help them to bear this new burden.
As for us, Lord, we who are far away from the rubble and the dust,
from the sobbing and moans, but who hold them close in our hearts,
imbue us with the strength of Simon the Cyrene.
Help us to carry the Haitian cross. Show us how to lighten
their yoke with our prayers, our aid, our resources. Teach
us to work harder for justice in our own country and dignity in Haiti,
so that we may stand with integrity when we hold our Haitian families
in our arms once again. We ask this in the name of Jezikri,
Jesus Christ. Amen
Rose Marie Berger, an associate editor at Sojourners magazine, is a Catholic peace
activist and poet. © Rose Marie Berger (reprint freely)
