Chain Saws and Wood Chippers

Nope, this is not a description of the latest construction project or earthquake recovery project in Haiti. This is what’s going on in my parents’ neighborhood in Arlington. As I flew home on Sunday, the flight was held up over Providence for about 45 minutes waiting for weather to clear in Boston. Then when I landed and called my dad, he explained that a tornado – what turned out to be a “macroburst” – had hit their neighborhood while I was in the air. There were more than ten huge trees down, some of which fell on cars and houses. Their house was OK, but there were two huge trees from neighbors’ yards now covering their backyard. Oh, and there was no electricity. So I woke up on June 6 and got ready to leave Haiti in the dark, and arrived home and ate dinner and started to unpack in the dark too. Who needs electricity anyway? I told some neighbors that I don’t know how to operate a chainsaw, but if anyone had a machete I’d be happy to help. I don’t think they really got it.

Since Sunday night I’ve been busy, but also just really enjoying some of the small things. I started an apartment search on Monday that seemed dismally depressing at first, but which turned around on Wednesday morning when the Craigslist gods smiled upon me and I beat a kagillion other people to the punch on the perfect Davis Square apartment. Lease signed, checks written Wednesday, and I can move in July 1. I’ve spent some time at PHA beginning to sort out exactly what my job will be next year, but mostly just hanging out with kids and adults, catching up, and wondering how it is that ninth grade boys can grow six inches in a year. Amazing. I’ve done a lot of walking around in this unseasonably chilly, but brilliantly sunny week. It’s such a pleasure to be able to just go where I want to go, and no one even notices me. Anonymity is not really possible for me in Haiti. I’m enjoying iced coffees and burritos from Ana’s Taqueria and stop lights and the T and the view of Copley Square through the giant glass windows as I came down the escalator at Copley Place.

I’m off to Chicago this afternoon to join some of my favorite people for the “Tour de Farms,” the annual fundraising ride for the National MS Association. We’ve done this ride a few times in honor of Michael John Myette’s father who has been battling MS for many years. Now we’re riding for Erika too, his wife and one of my very closest friends from Notre Dame, who was diagnosed with MS this fall. Yet another reminder that our own life plans amount to so little compared with God’s plan, and that there is no shortage people in anyone’s life in need love and support. Really, you don’t have to go to Haiti to find someone to help.

It will be a wonderful weekend, I’m sure, despite how terrifyingly out of shape I am. I rode 20 miles on Tuesday and it was a little rough. 150 over two days? Right … I’ll be fine. Which reminds me, if any of you want to make a contribution to our team, The Loose Sprockets, here’s my fundraising page: http://main.nationalmssociety.org/goto/BetsyBowman

After this weekend trip, I’ll enjoy a quiet summer, I hope … moving into a new apartment, getting settled in a new job, catching up with old friends, spending time with family and welcoming new nieces and nephews into the world. In August I hope to return to Haiti for a week to help the new group of volunteers get settled into their teaching roles. Then school starts in September and a whole new adventure begins. Maybe I’ll update this blog again with updates from Haiti in the future, but they certainly won’t be so frequent. Thanks to all the people I know and all the people I don’t know who have been reading this and even sharing it with more people. I hope you’ve enjoyed it – and that you continue to keep Haiti in your thoughts and prayers and ACTIONS in the years to come. It’s going to be a long road.

If you want to read another interesting blog – here’s the blog of the PHA students visiting Guatemala for the month of June. They arrived just before the volcano erupted and the torrential rains began. Now their trip has changed form a bunch of kids coming to see the world and learn Spanish to a bunch of kids helping to dig houses out of the mud. Sound familiar? www.juniorjourney.blogspot.com

All the best,
Betsy

Graduation

It was beautiful. There's not much to say really that these pictures don't already express. There were a lot of joyful kids and families and the whole thing went off without a hitch. It was a wonderful way to spend my last day at Louverture Cleary School.

Snapshots of the last weeks

Back in March I was a little bored … not anymore! May has been busy and hectic and at times stressful and irritating, but also fun and joyful. A few snapshots of LCS in May …

Construction: The maintenance guys have been busy. They’ve rebuilt the front wall surrounding the school that came down in the earthquake, and have almost completed three other damaged walls. It’s amazing to watch them work. They had to break the old foundation to pour a new one, and there are no jack hammers for that. They did it with sledgehammers and pick axes. Then they had to pour the concrete, and there are no cement mixers. They do it by hand – mixing the sand, gravel, cement and water, stirring it on the ground, then shoveling it into wheelbarrows to transport it to the site. And did I mention that in the middle of the day it’s been in the high nineties for the past few weeks? In all of these projects, students have been working too. This whole place was constructed by this community, so students have always been involved in construction projects here. They’re so proud when they see the wall that they helped to build.

Schedules … again: Apparently it is my calling in life to coordinate school schedules. This has often been part of my job at PHA, and post-earthquake it has been one of my major responsibilities at LCS. This past week required coordinating the final exam schedules for the oldest students whose school year is over, while maintaining the normal schedule for the rest of the kids. Now I’m working on the schedule for the extended school year through June – though I won’t be here to see it happen. The graduates will come back in June to work with their professors to prepare for the national exams that they must pass later in the summer. I was working on their schedule today and then one of the kids tonight just said, “wait … we have to be here at 8? They told us 9 …” I really am the last to know anything around here. Back to the drawing board.


Liz’s visit: When I decided to come to Haiti last year, Liz Murray, my long time PHA colleague and most recent roommate, proposed coming to visit. She and I both know that chances to visit Haiti are few and far between, and April vacation seemed like the perfect time. Then … plans had to change. It looked like she wouldn’t be able to come at all since flights were not easy to book, and were not cheap, but then she figured it out somehow and spent five days at LCS last week. Not surprisingly – to anyone who knows Liz – she was hanging out with the 11 year olds in about ten minutes and was doing crowd control for the kids waiting in line outside the “store” within her first four hours in Haiti. She came with all kinds of supplies and goodies for kids (and some for the grown-ups too … if you’re ever wondering, frozen Toll House chocolate chip cookie dough will survive a flight to Haiti!) Mostly it was just so wonderful to have someone who knows me so well in my normal life witness my Haiti life.

A fresh coat of paint: Classes ended Wednesday and the younger students went home, and then the graduates returned to campus to do all the prep to make the school look beautiful for their families to see it on Saturday. It’s amazing what motivated kids can accomplish in a few hours! With only a little supervision from adults, they painted every flat surface they could get a paintbrush on, and the school buildings, benches, and walls look beautiful. They’re also painting their class mural, on the new front wall whose plaster was barely dry this morning. Their mural includes the names of the 41 graduates and their class name “Odyssey” with an incredible image of a ship at sea. Again, talent combined with motivation and a deadline yields some incredible results. And what were the adults doing while he kids painted? We made 20 cakes and 24 lasagnas for the graduation lunch. The cooks are making the “real” food, but we decided to pitch in where we could!


Goodbyes: The kids here see volunteers come and go every year, and to be honest, I expected them to be a little guarded in their relationships with us as a result of these annual goodbyes. But they’re not guarded at all, and their farewells were so sweet and their thank you’s so sincere. I’m so happy that five of the ten volunteers will be returning next fall, and two will stay until the end of the extended school year in early July. I think it will be so good for these kids to have some consistency, and as the years go on, to still have people around who shared the earthquake experience with them. When they ask why I’m not staying, I tell them that I promised some other kids I’d come back after a year, and that answer seems to satisfy them. But I’m dropping some pretty strong hints that I intend to visit in the not so distant future … maybe with some of those other kids I know.


Tet anba – upside down: We love to do things a little backwards at LCS – turning conventional things on their head. On the last day of class, that meant the staff showing up at the morning meeting wearing kids’ uniforms. We each conspired with a student to borrow their uniforms, then marched out in a line to stand in front of the kids at their daily 8 am meeting. It was pretty hilarious. Some of the staff members literally WERE LCS students a year ago, so they looked pretty normal in their green plaid skirts, but some of us looked pretty fabulously ridiculous. This uniform just does not look good on most white people. It was a wonderful moment of levity in a busy week full of exams and grading.

So many generous gifts

After the earthquake, the students at Montrose School (where I went to school from sixth through twelfth grade) raised about 2000 dollars for LCS through “coin wars” and a benefit concert. Though they understood why it was critical to just send money, they also wanted to give some kind of gift to the students directly. So they worked with their art teacher to create eight beautiful posters that represent LCS and Haiti and HOPE. They used some of my photos to get ideas and others just used their imaginations, and the results were amazing. Liz checked the huge tube of posters as her luggage, and on Thursday afternoon we spread them out on the basketball court for the kids to see. They loved them. They loved the representations of themselves and their school and appreciated the thoughtfulness of the artists so much. They also loved reading the artists’ biographies so much, through which they learned things like what lacrosse is and what after school program means and which year in school are sophomores. Almost immediately they suggested making a gift in return for their new faraway friends, and in just two afternoons, a little crew of four 16 year old boys created four drawings for the girls at Montrose as a way to say thank you. I don’t know … I just can’t help thinking that these are the kind of experiences that change kids’ whole view of the world and their own place in it.

Earlier in the spring, Prospect Hill Academy, the school where I have worked for the past 8 years, announced that they would contribute about $3000 of their “PHA fund for Haiti” to the Haitian Project and Louverture Cleary School. This money will be used to underwrite the programs within the school that support the neighborhood children who are too young for LCS. Presently, there are eleven children in full time day care / preschool, about 50 who come for lunch and play time each afternoon, and about 25 school aged children who do not attend school consistently are attending classes here taught by LCS students. I think this program is such a perfect match for PHA. It’s about kids helping kids, and about reaching out to the community outside of one’s own little world. I hope that one of these years some PHA kids will get to come here and see it for themselves!

And at least once a week I receive an e-mail from a friend or family member reporting that some other friend, or a local elementary school, or somebody’s church had a fundraiser and raised a hundred or three thousand dollars of the Haitian Project. It’s amazing to see how many people have actually followed through on their well intentioned promises to do something to help. If this many people actually stay engaged in Haiti’s progress in the critical months and years ahead, then I am truly hopeful that Haiti can rebuild itself into a better country. It’s going to be a long road though, and the work has only just begun.

Odyssey Class

I wrote the article for the June edition of the THP newsletter about the graduation of the class of 2010, who named themselves “Odyssey.” The article will be published later in June (so is written in the past tense about an event that hasn’t happened yet … but you get the idea.) I think it came out well, and tells a good story about some special people. Here it is …

The LCS class of 2010 made a particularly appropriate choice this year in choosing their class name, Odyssey Class. Truly their years at LCS have been just that. They came to Santo 5 as eleven year olds in September of 2003, and after the chaotic failure of the government in February of their sixieme (7th grade) year, and a violent earthquake in January of their philo (senior) year, their graduation on June 6 was a particularly joyful celebration of the accomplishments and future of these 41 men and women. But these graduates don’t dwell on the two great tragedies that dominated their first and last years at Louverture Cleary. They focus instead on their many happy memories, their wonderful friends, teachers and mentors, and the mix of joy and sadness that they feel as this chapter of their lives comes to a close.

Stecy Naika came to LCS as an eleven year old, leaving the home she had shared with her aunt since the age of three. To get Stecy to her primary school, and herself to work on time each morning, her aunt, Marie Kettly, had to wake Stecy at 4:30 am. When she heard about LCS from a friend at her church, Marie Kettly knew that her niece was intelligent enough to get in, and she loved the academic rigor and the discipline of the school. As she sat reminiscing last month, Marie Kettly explained in Kreyol that “Stecy was so timid as a little girl. Now she is confident and loves to talk with everyone.”

Truly, Stecy is one of the most gregarious of her classmates, and as her favorite class has always been English, she expresses herself with flair in her third language. She hopes to go on to University to study International Relations. Like all Louverture Cleary students, she has so much love for her country, and the hope that she and the rest of the Louverturians will be the leaders who will make a brighter future for Haiti. She explained that her happiest memories of LCS are of “the many people who think about a better world, and work for it, like Mr. Moynihan, Mr. Zamy, and Mr. Pierre.” She knows that it is their example and the discipline which they provided that have prepared her to “work hard and face the mean world.” She smiled as she added, “I’m not scared of anybody because I don’t have to worry about what the world thinks. I can be myself.”

In the days and weeks after the January 12th earthquake, these Philo students stepped up to leadership that would never be demanded of most students their age. As the staff and volunteers were occupied with preparing meals, and clearing debris, and coordinating with THP in then US, it was the philo students who facilitated the orderly distribution of meals on the soccer field, and the cleaning of dishes. They led the morning prayers, and organized both work projects and games for the younger students. Their leadership was essential in those days, and it is exactly this hard work and leadership that Haiti desperately needs at this critical moment in its history.

Stecy’s eyes filled with tears as she talked about her feelings on graduation day. She mused, “I am turning a page of my story and beginning a new chapter, and I am happy, but also sad to leave so many friends.” Her Aunt smiled as she echoed those same mixed emotions, explaining, “I am proud of Stecy and happy that my work as a parent is done.” She paused before adding, “but I know that my work is not really done.” As they smile for pictures and hug friends and teachers goodbye, Stecy and her Odyssey classmates know too, that their journey is only just beginning.

Poetry Out Loud

Poetry Out Loud
At PHA, one of my favorite new traditions is the annual “Poetry Out Loud” competition. Poetry Out Loud is a national poetry recitation competition for high school students, and a PHA sophomore has been the Massachusetts state champion for two years in a row. The purpose of the competition is to encourage a love of poetry – of all different styles – in high school students. The idea is that the best way to demonstrate deep understanding of a poem, is to memorize and recite it, so that a student’s own unique interpretation of the poem will be communicated through her performance. It’s fun every year to watch the kids who don’t say much in class shine as they perform a published poem, and to discover new interpretations of poems that I thought I had understood before.

LCS kids love to perform, and they love to compete, so I thought that maybe some of them would rise to the challenge of memorizing and performing a poem in English. Sure enough, they did. I chose poems that I thought they could access – Shel Silverstein and Langston Hughes and a few other lesser known poems – and also invited them to write, memorize and perform an original poem in English. Sure enough, we had eleven participants who did an incredible job performing the poems. The winner was a seconde (10th grade) student named Caleb who wrote a hilarious poem about mosquitoes, and the second and third place finishers both performed the Shel Silversetein poem “Whatif …” The other kids cheered like crazy, and I think next year there will be even more participation. There are a few videos here – of Caleb the winner, Vanessa the runner up, and Olibirs, a philo student who wrote an absolutely hilarious poem – an ode to the incinerator.

At the same time as the poetry competition, the kids were putting on their annual language competition, known in French as la genie. Each class chooses a team of six to compete against the other classes in a competition full of questions in French, English and Spanish. There are translations, vocabulary, spelling and the hardest of all, idiomatic expressions. It was amazing to watch their facility with juggling three foreign languages at once, and also to witness the passion of the participants and their classmates. They cheered and roared when someone spelled a hard word correctly as if it were a world cup match. The winners got to choose a book from some extra books from the library, and all participants got “tickets” to redeem at the language store (where they can buy school supplies and other little goodies.)

As the school year winds down, it has been delightful to watch the kids enjoying some of these simple traditions and embracing new ones with such enthusiasm.

New website!

Check out the new website for the Haitian Project! It's beautiful and full of so many great pictures, as well as all of the updates since the earthquake. You can sign up to receive weekly updates, and make donations online.
http://haitianproject.org/

Felisitasyon Klas 2010

Graduation for the Louverture Cleary School class of 2010 will be on Saturday June 5, the scheduled graduation day since last August. I think these might be the only kids in Port au Prince graduating on time, and I’m really proud to have been a part of making this small miracle possible. They’ll still have to prepare for their national exams, which unfortunately will not take place until the end of August, as opposed to late June. But we’ll celebrate the accomplishments and futures of the class of 2010 with the community and their families on the regularly scheduled day. That really is a small miracle.

This week I had the privilege of taking the official class picture, and the individual cap and gown photos for each student. These will be printed in the US, and presented to the kids as a gift on their graduation day. The kids are struggling a bit with the fact that their philo (senior) year was without many of the fun traditions and celebrations that they have watched other classes enjoy for the past six years. They didn’t get to plan the all day party in April which usually marks the school’s birthday. They’re not going to have the traditional weekend retreat in May. Even the food at their graduation dinner is going to have to be a little different this year. All of these changes are necessities, based on the lost academic time, the unique financial requirements of the year, and the shifted focus of many staff members. So, given their quiet disappointment about all of this, it was really a pleasure to take them through a process that was so totally joyful. They were positively giddy as they posed for their class picture, and tried on the white gowns and red caps and did their hair and posed for their portraits. I’ve never taken formal portraits before in my life, and really, I’m not that good at it. But they didn’t care. It was all so much fun.

Incidentally … one of the other small miracles of this year is the fact that two days before coming back to Haiti I made a total impulse purchase and bought a really nice digital SLR camera. I had enjoyed taking pictures so much in Haiti, and I was getting frustrated with my little point and shoot, so on January 8, I bit the bullet and bought the fancy Cannon. However, as soon as I was back in Haiti, I had major guilt about it. How had I just dropped 600 dollars on a toy when people here don’t see that much money in a year? Well, two days later, as I found myself taking detailed pictures of cracked columns and fallen plaster and dangling concrete and sending them to engineers in the US who were working to determine the structural integrity of our buildings … I realized that my impulse to buy that camera wasn’t entirely my own. That camera has been essential in sharing the LCS story with our friends in United States, and I couldn’t have done it with my little point and shoot. Hooray for impulse buys! I’ll keep that in mind next time I’m coveting an expensive pair of shoes …

Soup Joumoun

We weren’t in Haiti on January 1st to celebrate Haitian Independence Day, so we had plans to celebrate it with the Haitian and US American staff together on the first weekend after we returned in January. Well … other things happened … and we just never got around to it –until today!

Haiti celebrates its independence from France on January 1 each year, because after expelling the last French troops in November of 1803, Jean Jacques Dessalines, the revolutionary leader and first president, declared that independence would be proclaimed and celebrated on the first day of the new year. That day, in Cap Haitian, the city on the north coast with the citadel from which the last French ships had sailed the previous November, Dessalines proclaimed the Haitian Declaration of Independence. Somewhat ironically – or maybe tragically – the document was written in French, the language of Haiti’s colonial oppressors, since the descendants of Africans from so many different places did not share a common language of their own. It’s a shocking document, both for the striking resemblance it bears to the language and sentiments of the American Declaration of Independence written about thirty years before, as well as for the very un-Jeffersonian anger and violence which permeates it. Promises to “swear to the entire universe, to posterity, to ourselves, to renounce forever to France, and to die rather than to live under its domination,” are followed by the not so veiled threat to “pursue forever the traitors and the enemies of [our] independence.” Needless to say, after fifteen years of the most horrific violence, this declaration of independence was not sealed with handshakes and the flourish of a quill pen. It was sealed with blood and promises of retribution.

Along with the official pronouncement of independence, Dessalines led the people in a symbolic reclaiming of their rights as free people. That morning, he ate squash soup, the French delicacy long refused to the slaves, and invited the people gathered to do the same. Since then, the tradition in Haiti and in Haitian homes in the US is to greet the new year not with champagne toasts and wild parties, but with family and friends gathered around an early morning breakfast of squash soup. For years teaching in Cambridge, I have heard Haitian kids talk about their unique New Years tradition, and have occasionally enjoyed a Tupperware bowl full of squash soup leftovers on January 3 when school begins again, and I have always wanted to try making it myself.

This morning Benoit and I met in the kitchen at about 4:15. Unfortunately the electricity was out, as it often is at that time of the morning after the batteries have run out of juice and before the sun has come up to get the solar power going again. He chopped open the GIANT green squash, which looks like an orange pumpkin inside, and scooped out the guts. I got to work washing, peeling, and chopping sweet potatoes, regular potatoes, turnips, carrots, onions and garlic. As we worked, more helpers appeared, we drank two pots of coffee, and listened to Wyclef Jean. We boiled the squash, then pureed it – skin and all – in a blender. Benoit had prepared the meat before in the traditional way – by soaking it in citrus juices, then boiling it with garlic and scallions. We then boiled the pureed squash, and added the veggies, meat, macaroni, and lots of salt. (It wouldn’t be Haitian food without lots of salt!) By about 6:45 we were ready and a much larger than usual crowd gathered for an early Saturday morning breakfast. We had so much food that we were able to share it with some of the neighbors – men who were on campus to help with a building project, and some of the women who come to wash the clothes of those of us who are utterly incapable of doing so ourselves. We wished each other Bon Anè, and declared it the new year of 2010 ½ … and frankly, given all that’s happened here since January, it felt kind of good to turn the page of the calendar, even if it was to an imaginary new year.

Fahrenheit 451

Nobody likes the idea of burning books. I know I certain;y don't, but sometimes you just have to.

Working for so long in schools, I have had lots of opportunities to be irritated by the “donations” that people make to the “less fortunate.” They pack their boxes full of the crap they don’t want anymore, drop it off at the door of a local charity, pat themselves on the back for their generosity and take a little tax write-off. Then, the school or charity has to figure out what to do with the donations. Don’t get me wrong, oftentimes people donate wonderful, useful things to schools. But too often they really just donate the crap that they don’t want and don’t know how to get rid of. So, I’ve had to face the question of what to do with unwanted, outdated, irrelevant books. My answer is always to resist the temptation to “save them because maybe some day someone will want them.” No, if we can’t use it right now, then I choose clean, organized storage spaces over the unlikely possibility that some mythical, future teacher will find a good use for the materials that all the actual teachers of the present think are useless. At PHA, this has meant that I have often led parades of boxes of books to the dumpster, or more recently to the curb where a non-profit recycling company picks them up. In Haiti, it’s not that simple.

On Thursday, a huge truck from Food for the Poor pulled up on Santo 5 and I watched as boxes and boxes of mysterious donations walked in the door of the school. Food for the Poor donates a lot of food to LCS, and this year they also provided us with 12 gently used, well refurbished computers for the kids’ computer lab. But in exchange for all the useful things they bring us, sometimes they bring us crap. I think I’ve written about the cases and cases of tiny leather cowboy boots, and the rejected cosmetics for white people that have appeared on our doorstep in the past. This time it was about a hundred boxes of English curriculum materials from some elementary school district in Ohio. There were a few boxes of reading anthologies, fifteen copies of three different books, which will be incredibly useful for the English teachers working with our youngest students. But beyond these ten boxes, there were 90 of teachers’ editions, answer booklets, catalogues, glossy professional development guides, and lots of other propaganda for the publishers of the “Storytown” reading program. The part when I really went through the roof was when I opened the box full of cardboard sleeves that looked like they contained some kind of DVD or CD-Rom … but no … oh wait … they were all empty. Thanks for that.

We sorted through the things we can legitimately use and then had to face that awkward questions about what we should do with the rest of it? I was a proponent of burning it, the way we burn all our trash around here. But the whole day as we sorted all the brightly colored spiral bound teachers’ editions on tables outside on the driveway, the kids were watching curiously as they passed by. They love books … any books … but especially books in English. I tried to show some that these weren’t books for reading – some were literally catalogues of additional curriculum materials. But as we started walking wheelbarrows full of materials back to the incinerator, the kids were begging us not to. So we stopped. What’s worse, giving poor kids useless stuff that will probably end up contributing to the momentous trash problem in this country, or the scandal of burning books in a school full of kids who are hungry to learn? We opted for the lesser evil behind door number 1.

So on Friday afternoon we set up tables by the front gate, and as kids were dismissed for the weekend, they took whatever they wanted. And they wanted all of it. Actually, despite our best efforts at order and discipline, they pretty much stampeded the tables to get what they could. Situations like this always make me – and pretty much everyone else who comes from cultures of wealth and privilege – really uncomfortable. When you’re so accustomed to not having anything, it doesn’t matter what the free thing being offered is – you’ll pretty much run over a kid half your size to get your hands on it because you know it’s not going to be there tomorrow.

By three o’clock the kids were gone and so were the unwanted books. We were left to burn the cardboard boxes and contemplate the weirdly complex ethical decisions that Haiti forces us to make. Sometimes the right answer is so obvious, and sometimes it’s a million shades of gray.

The Home Stretch

The kids have been so worried about when school will end. When the government officially reopened schools in April, the word eventually came down that the national exams would be in August instead of June, and that schools should continue through the end of July. Well, for the kids here who never actually left even when we were having “unofficial” school, that news came as a pretty terrible blow, not only for the prospect of having to be in class instead of watching the World Cup matches in June, but also for sitting in the 100 degree blue tents in the hottest part of the summer. After much deliberation, the LCS administration decided that we will have graduation as scheduled at the beginning of June, but that the younger classes will all continue classes through the end of June, in order to give all of their teachers an opportunity to complete fair evaluations of their work over a reasonable period of time. While the volunteers will finish our classes in early June and then go home, the Haitian teachers will continue theirs until the end of the month, and the kids will stay at school without us. It’s absolutely the right decision, even though it’s not particularly popular with anyone. But isn’t that usually the case with most absolutely right decisions?

So now I’m looking at my last six weeks here trying to figure out what I need to be working on. Obviously I have all of my own classes and exams to finish, but I suddenly have this almost panicked sense of wanting to get so many other things done. I’m working with the volunteers on documenting our curriculum more formally and in a more uniform manner than it has ever been documented before, so that future volunteers are left with a somewhat more clear roadmap of what has been done, and what ought to be done in the future. I’m working on the schedule for the month of June, which will look a bit different without the ten American teachers. A few of us are working on an LCS recipe book to document how to make our favorite meals for 30. I’m so excited that five of the ten volunteers have chosen to stay for a second year next year, but unfortunately the five who like to cook are the ones leaving, so we’re trying to help them out as much as we can. Other than that, I’m trying to enjoy the kids and the mangoes and all the uniquely Haitian experiences that happen here every day – the wonderful, the absurd and even the incredibly irritating ones.

I will be returning to Boston on Sunday June 6th the day after LCS graduation. Unfortunately my flight will put me in about an hour or two late for the PHA graduation that Sunday afternoon, so I’ll miss the big day for that group of kids whom I’ve known since they were eleven. I’m so happy to be returning to Boston and PHA, a community that I love so much, in which I have essentially grown up as an educator over the past eight years. My year away from PHA has provided me with the space and perspective I needed to decide to pursue a more formal leadership role within the school. The school is undergoing an important transition right now, reuniting the middle school and high school on the same campus, so this was a great opportunity for me to make a career shift. Next year I’ll serve as an assistant principal with primary responsibility for the 11th and 12th grade students, as well as lots of work with teachers and parents. While it’s totally bizarre for me to imagine a life in school that’s not centered around my own classroom teaching, I’m excited for this new challenge. I think there are parts of this job that I’ll be really good at, and parts that will be really hard for me, and I so look forward to that experience. Being in Haiti this year has reminded me how much I love learning new things everyday, and having to think on my feet and adapt to whatever challenges the day throws my way. And I’m sure that some of the things I’ve learned here this year will help me to navigate the challenges ahead. At least those PHA kids won’t be able to get away with saying bad stuff in Kreyol around me!

2012

I would like to thank the History Channel and Sony Pictures for perpetuating the absurd prophecy that the world will end in December in 2012. That’s going over real well right now in a country full of traumatized people who tend to lean toward apocalyptic conspiracy theories anyway, and who are now obviously particularly susceptible to such ideas. Thanks for that. I’m really enjoying having this conversation with a different kid every day.

Post Earthquake Haiku Therapy

About two weeks after the earthquake, I decided to play one of my favorite games … the community Haiku. It works like this: I write the first two lines of a Haiku, and everyone else writes his or her own last line. This “post earthquake haiku therapy” has been on our wall ever since, and I still half smile and half cringe every time I read it.

The first two lines are:
Seven point zero
What the hell is going on?

The five syllable final lines are as follows … with a little explanation of each person’s earthquake experience:

Betsy: Get under the couch!
I’ve already explained that my somewhat appropriate and sort of insane instinct was to climb under the couch in our common room to wait for the shaking to stop

Mary: Should we not get out?
Mary was with me and Kristen upstairs, and while her inclination to get the hell out was probably better than mine to climb under the couch … we didn’t go anywhere.

Kristen: Please stop shaking now.
I’d say this one’s self explanatory

Elissa: Uh oh … coconuts!
She was outside walking among the mango and coconut trees and incredibly, her first thought was what would happen if one fell on her head. If you’ve never seen a coconut fall to the ground, it could kill you.

Peter: Incinerator?
He was outside dumping a wheelbarrow full of trash into the incinerator when the cinderblock walls starting moving. He thought the incinerator walls themselves were about to fall. Miraculously, only a few of the blocks actually did fall.

Samanthaa: Uh guys, get out now!
She was also near the incinerator with Peter and ran with the kids on the soccer field toward the center of the soccer field, away from the walls that were waving and crumbling.

Jon: Don’t push, pull instead.
Jon and Corey were making dinner in the kitchen and had a huge pot of water boiling on the stove. Amazingly, it didn’t completely fall off the stove. They ran for a doorway and Jon couldn’t figure out why he couldn’t get the door open …

Corey: Hold me Jon, I’m scared!
Corey the Guamanian is the only one of us who had any previous earthquake experience, so it was he who told Jon to get into a doorway.

Meg: I think we’re moving.
Meg was on the soccer field with the kids too.

John: hey guys, sorry I’m late!
John DiTillo wasn’t actually in Haiti on January 12th. He was a volunteer last year, and was safe at home in Hanibal, Missouri when the earthquake happened here. A month later, he had dropped everything at home and was back in Haiti. He’s picked up classes for volunteers who have since gotten involved in more time consuming outside of school projects. More importantly, he was a much needed shot of energy and enthusiasm at a time when we were getting pretty tired. Now he’s decided to stay on past June, and will return to LCS next fall as well. What a blessing.

About a month after the earthquake I started hearing an expression in Kreyol that sort of freaked me out a little at first, but which I have since come to understand and genuinely appreciate. One day in class I asked where a student was, and the response came, “anba dekonb” … under the rubble. I think she was really only in the bathroom or something. Subsequently, questions about “where’s your pen,” “has anyone seen my eraser,” and “where’s the truck” are all met with the same joking response … “under the rubble.” Now there’s even a Haitian DJ who mixed an upbeat tune that says, “put me under the rubble … pull me out from the rubble” and people around here sing it incessantly. It makes perfect sense to me now. Haitians are so accustomed to tragedy, but also love to laugh so much, that it’s only right that eventually there would be a collective national joke about the latest tragedy. We wrote a haiku, and they make morose jokes about being buried under the rubble. It’s the same thing really.

Una Playa Bonita … y Una Presidente Por Favor!

On our first day at the resort near Santo Domingo, I kept laughing to myself thinking, “we are the ideal resort guests … because we will love EVERYTHING!” Did we throw a fit that our shower didn’t have any water for an hour or so? Nope. Were we annoyed that one of the restaurants was closed one night? Nope. We loved everything. The fancy lobby, the ocean view from our rooms (even though we had to crane our necks to the right a bit), the endless buffet, the waiters who came around and refilled our café con leche all morning, the free (I mean already paid for) cocktails … and the forks. Seriously, we were all just pretty excited to have total access to any kind of silverware we wanted at any moment of the day or night. At LCS our forks and spoons have the irritating habit of disappearing, so we end up eating spaghetti with spoons, and drinking soup with a quarter cup measuring cup. Needless to say, the endless supply of forks was pretty great. But mostly what we loved was the total relaxation of it. We didn’t have to do anything except enjoy the picturesque beach and the beautiful, friendly people. I’ve never done the “all inclusive” thing before, and I don’t think I would want to do it for a whole week, but for three days it was perfect.

After the resort we took the bus north to the Samana Peninsula, to a place called Playa Bonita. And yes, it was. There we stayed at a small hotel on a dirt road across the street from a very different, but equally beautiful beach. This one had rougher waves, but even softer sand. And there was no loud music, or people selling things, or free drinks … just the beach. We walked an hour into the little town nearby, bought sandwiches from an Italian grocery store, and rode on the backs of motorcycles back at night. We went on a horseback riding trip through mountain trails to a place called “cascada limon” where we jumped off a 30 foot ledge into the waterfall’s pool below. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve ridden a horse in my life, and I’m SURE I’ve never been on a galloping horse. It was terrifying / awesome … but mostly awesome.

Then we scored a reasonably cheap taxi ride back to Santo Domingo (avoiding a two and half hour bus ride all together) and arrived in the capital at about noon on Friday. We stayed at a little hotel run by a German man in the zona colonial, and for the next three days I just kept thinking about Europe. There are cafes with outdoor seating, and people just sit there smoking for hours. There are motorcycles everywhere. Little kids chase pigeons in plazas in front of 500 year old churches. Only it was better than Europe because seriously, Dominicans are way more beautiful than Europeans, and it was a whole lot cheaper. We spent the days walking a lot, enjoying the freedom of being in a city. I drank lots of coffee drinks in outdoor cafes, and struck up conversations with anyone wearing a Red Sox of Yankees cap, which was lots of people.

Santo Domingo was lovely for the mix of uniquely Dominican things and the comforts of home. I went to Easter Mass at a tiny church with about 40 people in it, and instead of the Handel Alleluia and brass quintet (my usual Easter routine) there was a lady with a tambourine and about five nuns singing with her. A good reminder that, as much as I love the music, it’s not all about the music. Then for Easter dinner we did the only thing any self respecting Americans who have been in Haiti for 8 months would do … we went to McDonalds. I think a few of the boys almost cried with joy. I haven’t had a quarter pounder with cheese in years, but wow, that was tasty. Our last night, we planned to go watch the Red Sox and Yankees at a sports bar with a big screen TV, but instead stumbled upon a neighborhood dance party. We spent the evening with a few hundred people dancing Merengue and Bachata in the street while a live band and some old dudes (who could really sing) kept the crowd moving for hours. Instead of bar food we ate deep fried street food, but of course still enjoyed more than our share of the DR’s finest brew, Presidente. And much to my delight, there was a TV outside that was showing the Sox and Yankees, so all night long, I had lots of opportunities to trash talk in Spanish. How exactly do you say “Yankees suck!” in Spanish? Never quite nailed that one down. It was a perfect end to our ten day break.

The whole thing reminded me how much I love to travel. On this trip I spoke more Italian than I have in ten years (who knew there were so many Italians settling in the DR?) and I got to freak out lots of Haitians who did NOT expect the whitest person they’d ever seen to speak Spanish let alone Kreyol. I loved haggling with cab drivers, and negotiating very, VERY badly with an art dealer. Whatever. I don’t care if I overpaid. I love this painting and I feel pretty good about putting my money into the local economy. I love setting out for dinner with the plan to eat at a place recommended in a guide book only to find something way better on the way. It’s just all so fun. Can someone figure out how I can do that for a living?

Now we’re back to Haiti and LCS is up and running without missing a beat. Today, April 6, was the first official school day in Port au Prince since January 12th. The government encouraged the schools which are able to open, and there were kids in uniform all over town. We had 318 kids this morning, closer and closer to our pre-earthquake number. Today one of my absolute favorite kids was back to school for the first time. Rose Celine is about 17, and is one of the sweetest, smiley-est kids I’ve ever known. In the hours after the earthquake, hers was one of the terrified faces that drove home for me how serious this whole thing was. Gone was her smile – and the tears on her face and fear in her eyes is an image I’ll never forget. Then the next day she was gone, and I’ve wondered how she is for almost three months now. So I was so happy today to see her there in my first period Spanish class, looking a little overwhelmed but smiling nonetheless. Vacation was wonderful, but Rose Celine is back to school, so I better be here too!

The Rainpocalypse

I know that people in the DC area lived through several feet of snow this winter, the so called snowpocalypse, and that my New England family and friends experienced 10 inches of rain last weekend and are still pumping out flooded basements. This morning, we had a rain phenomenon like nothing that has ever happened in my time here. It rained during school hours. Insert foreboding, dramatic music here.

The rainy season has begun again, which means that it rains almost every night at about 7 for a few hours, or for a while just before dawn. But it always stops by about 6 or 6:30 am, just as we’re all going outside to eat breakfast and get ready for class. This morning, it just kept raining, and literally, this was the first time in my six months here that we have had rain during school hours. If you think about most American schools, rain is no big deal. The buildings are enclosed, and once the kids get off the bus, or out of the car and run in from outside, they’ll be dry for the rest of the day. Not so much here. We have 2 classrooms that are literally outside under trees. We’re using five tents whose floors consist of a tarp over a dirt soccer field. Windows are wide open. There’s not very good drainage. We all have to walk outside to get from class to class. Oh, and we all wear sandals most days.

I of course had my first two classes of the day in one of the muddy tents. Unfortunately we HAD to open the window flaps or we would all have suffocated from the heat, but then the rain came inside. Lucky for me, I’ve been through many years of snowy days at school, so I knew enough to just let the kids spew whatever they needed to say about the rain for a while before delving into any even remotely academic work. It wasn’t pretty, but we survived. The pictures above are from the rainy morning assembly. You can’t actually tell how many kids are under that one umbrella unless you count the feet. I think there are 12 feet. The highlight of the morning however was when staff erupted into a spontaneous dance party in the rain as the kids sang the school song. That helped improve some people’s attitudes …

But in all our joking and laughing about the rain, and the inconvenience of having horrifically dirty feet all day from running around in the mud, I tried not to lose sight of the fact that there are still hundreds of thousands of people living outside in this country. Their tents generally aren’t as nice and waterproof as our classroom tents, and they don’t all have dry buildings to go into to dry off. It’s still going to be a long road for so many of them.

So what else is new?

Louverture Cleary people are doing some really amazing things out there right now, while the rest of us are holding down the fort with the kids at school.

Patrick Moynihan and Corey (one of the precocious 22 year olds around here) have been working with Catholic Relief Services and a few other agencies to open an 80 bed rehab clinic for earthquake related surgical patients. In the first days after the earthquake, there were so many amputations and some pretty incredible surgeries that happened at so many different facilities, with so many different visiting medical teams. But then those patients all went home, or to tent cities, and now the calf muscle brilliantly grafted to some other part of the leg is atrophying, and the incision sites are getting infected. So, this rehab clinic will coordinate the post surgical medical care, as well as social welfare (including helping to secure housing.) It’s an amazing project that many LCS graduates will have important roles in – as doctors, translators, drivers, and social workers. Corey and Patrick have been running all over town for weeks to make this happen, and the first post surgery patient transfers happened this week. The clinic should serve more than 500 patients in the next six months.

People have donated so much money to our relief fund, and the work of helping our staff and neighbors rebuild is in full swing. LCS staff have fixed pieces of several houses,, making them inhabitable again, and are almost done with a completely new home construction for a neighbor whose mud house was totally destroyed. Meghan, another volunteer, is the finance manager for these relief funds, and has taken responsibility for keeping track of spending, and paying our team of laborers from the neighborhood every week. In the meantime, she’s learning how to build houses, which is also pretty cool since she’s planning to study architecture in the near future.

And since the earthquake, we’ve stepped up our work with some of the neighborhood children in desperate need of supervision and care during the day. In the fall, we had our afternoon lunch and play time for 40 – 50 kids, but we realized that this wasn’t nearly enough for some. A few weeks after the earthquake, we realized that a few kids were missing. Sadly, two parents in the neighborhood had decided that they simply couldn’t care for their children anymore and had given them away to an “orphanage.” Imagine the desperation that prompts a parent to do that … It took several days of asking questions and searching to find the children, and as we feared, they were in a totally unregulated and unsanitary situation. It seems that people were basically collecting children, then soliciting money from foreigners to help renovate their “orphanage.” One can only imagine what they planned on doing with the children they had collected. In this whole ordeal, I met the absolute shadiest human being I have ever met, a man who would not tell us where the kids were, and refused to let anyone – even their mother – go to see them. Scary. Anyway, after a few days Christina Moynihan and a few of the drivers and security guys managed to literally rescue 5 children from this so-called orphanage. Unfortunately, their parents were still unwilling / unable to fully care for them, so we basically started a full day childcare program at school. Now Kristen, the volunteer with the elementary ed background, and three of the Haitian staff are teaching and caring for about 10 of the youngest neighborhood kids most in need of care during the day. Then they go home and stay with their families at night. It’s been amazing to see the transformation in some of these kids. They were sick and scared and only wanted to be held a few weeks ago, now they’re running around throwing balls at mango trees with the older kids trying to score a juicy snack.

We’re still not “officially” having school, though we never really stopped having school either. With almost three hundred kids and most of the teachers back, this place is starting to feel more and more normal, which is of course, a good thing for everyone. But for me a weird consequence of all that routine, is that I’m getting kind of bored. I’m back to teaching Spanish, and still overseeing – though not continually retooling – the academic schedule, and supervising cleanup and study, and teaching some kids Italian, and playing with the little neighborhood kids … all the things I was doing last fall. I found myself getting bored this week, and to be honest, a little jealous of the people who are out there working on the more exciting things. I knew that the adrenaline of the earthquake and its immediate aftermath would die off sooner or later as the work became less heroic and more routine, and that then the real work would begin. Well, here we are. I just keep telling myself that it’s my role now, to just help keep things running smoothly here so that other people can get out there and rebuild Haiti.

EpiDor: The Fast Food Disco

I need to describe our fast food restaurant experience last week. It was amazing – and not just for the joy of a cheeseburger, fries, a Coke and really tasty cookies ‘n cream ice cream. It was wonderful because it was a window into a small, little known segment of Haitian society – the middle class. My meal cost about 8 dollars, which is almost twice the minimum daily wage here, and certainly many people don’t earn anywhere near the minimum wage. So the people who live in our neighborhood, even the kids at LCS, are not the kind of people one is likely to find at a fast food restaurant. The only other experience I have “eating out” in Haiti is at fancy hotels where there are lots of foreigners, and lots of mostly very light skinned members of Haiti’s small, wealthy elite. I saw no evidence of this crowd at EpiDor either. Instead, it was full of people in their 20’s and 30’s, not too many families with kids, and not too many older people. There were of course some foreigners, but I think we were the only Americans. Many people were dressed as if they were going “out” – which in women generally means there was lots of visible cleavage, and in men means a well chosen, brightly colored polo shirt. Loud music was playing, creating a distinctly festive atmosphere. There wasn’t actually any dancing, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if dancing broke out there one day. People were laughing a lot, talking to each other, seemingly flirting, and of course, drinking lots of beer along with their burgers. I recognize that Haiti has bigger problems than a lack of causal dining and meeting places, but I actually think that places like this are so important to the future of this country. There needs to be a middle ground – nicer than the food vendors on the side of the road, but not as intimidating and expensive as the hotel restaurants. I can’t believe I’m advocating for more greasy fast food restaurants as a means of economic development, but I think that’s what I’m saying.

Another amazingly Haitian thing about EpiDor – it was total dezod. Chaos. There are two cashiers at one side of the store, and people basically mob them in a crowd not even remotely resembling a line. This scene makes cafes in Rome appear to have military discipline. Lots of elbows, lots of gentle shoving, lots of violations of personal space … but at the end of the day everyone gets their food and everyone’s smiling throughout. After you pay, you get your ticket and go to another counter where there is absolutely no rhyme or reason to who’s supposed to get which food for which people. You just hand it to someone and hope she’ll get your fries eventually. Having jostled with people on the side of the road hoping that the woman selling fried plantains would deign to get me some, I know why EpiDor is the way it is – because most people’s only food buying experience is from the vendors on the roadside, so all this madness is totally normal to them.

I will say that I’ve never worked so hard for a burger, fires and a cup of ice cream in my life. But they were totally worth it.

A Cold Monday and Hot Yoga

This is a picture of our almost completed LCS logo ... we have 270 of 350 kids back at school, and the principal, Mr Hubert (at the front) orchestrated this awesome picture to demonstrate our progress so far.

Here’s a little assortment of news from the past week. No big stories, just life.

It was cold on Monday. . I realize that “cold” is a relative term, but it was seriously chilly. Maybe it was in the sixties, but when the breeze is blowing, and no buildings are really fully closed, and the showers aren’t heated … it feels downright cold. I slept with a blanket for the first time at LCS and wore my hood up on my hoodie sweatshirt in the morning. I saw a staff member wearing a down jacket (which he has because he once traveled to the US during the winter.) Not only was it cold, but it was overcast and sort of raw for two days. Now THAT is weird. Suddenly everyone had a cold and our solar powered buildings had some challenges those days. By Wednesday we were sweating our faces off again and remembering fondly, the Monday chill. It t was a strange little interlude.

We have 270 kids back at school. Each week we (or actually I) have rearranged the schedule to accommodate the increased number of kids. The big shift happened this week when we divided three more classes into two sections instead of keeping them all together in one. The challenge there … room space. We got 7 tents from the Italian military that we set up on the soccer field to use as classrooms, replacing the 6 classrooms in our damaged Jean Jacques Dessalines classroom building. The tents are excellent … except for one thing. They’re blue. Blue does not exactly reflect heat … and since they’re sitting in the blazing sun of the soccer field, but by about 11 am they’re pretty darn unbearable. The kids whine incessantly like teenagers do … and then we do it all again the next day. It’s kind of a hilarious scene actually. There are these seven huge blue tents in two rows on the soccer field. They’re about four feet apart, so everyone can hear everything going on inside the neighboring tents. We moved the kids’ classroom benches and built blackboards to move in. Then we named them after the continents – Europe, Africa, Asia, Americas and Antarctica. But really, they all feel like Africa.

Then yesterday I discovered an excellent use for the tents in the blistering heat of the afternoon. Hot yoga. With all the plastic window flaps closed and the two doors zipped shut, it must be almost a hundred degrees in there. Perfect for some downward facing dogs. I’ve done hot yoga before in some sultry conditions, but this is something else entirely. Too bad my shower afterward was also hot since the water in the black tanks on the roof had also been sitting in the sun all afternoon.

We opened the “language of the day” store again this week. Every day the kids are challenged to speak the language of the day – English on Monday and Wednesday, Spanish on Tuesday and Thursday, and French on Friday. If they are heard practicing the language of the day by staff or the oldest students, they can receive tickets redeemable for prizes in our little weekly store. After Christmas we came back with lots of new additions to the store. We always have the school essentials like pens and pretty pencils and erasers and white out and calculators. But we now have a bunch of matchbox cars, and bracelets, and bubbles and hair accessories and legos. The kids loved it. One little girl, Willine, spent about fifteen minutes trying to decide how to spend her six tickets. She kept picking things up saying, “oh, this is so beautiful …” then moving on to the next thing. She settled on a hairbrush and a very pretty pink pencil with silver hearts on it. She was a very happy customer. Another little boy came and said that he didn’t have any tickets because he used to have ten, but they were in his house and now his house is “craze” (broken.) Bummer. I taught him my favorite expression to describe earthquake induced losses (like my pillow, a set of sheets, and a jar of cilantro). The earthquake ate it. Then I told him he’ll just have to start practicing again next week to earn lots more. Life is tough around here.

There’s a new fast food place near our neighborhood! It’s actually a little mini version of a chain called EpiDor that is part bakery and part fast food joint. They have burgers and pizza and ice cream and beer and crepes and French fries … The other ones in town are bigger, but a hassle to get to with all the traffic these days, so we’re pretty excited to go to this one that’s only a ten minute drive away tonight. I’ve never been so excited for a cheeseburger in my life.

Sunday is Pi day – 3/14. Peter decided to have a pi day math competition for the kids. Unfortunately, this is a culturally and linguistically complex little pun. First, he had to explain to them that we pronounce PI as PIE and not PEE (as they do in French.) Then he had to explain that we write the dates with the month before the date, so the date actually reads 3/14 (as opposed to 14/3 like most of the rest of the world does it. Then he had to explain what PIE is. After all that, he announced that there were some grade level appropriate geometry problems posted, and that the person who submitted the first correct answer in each class would win a piece of pie (to eat, not to throw in anyone’s face you PHA people …..) Today he spent the morning climbing trees, and about 3.14 hours later, he and Mary had produced about 3.14 mango pies – one of which we will consume at 3:14 pm. The others of which will await the kids with the correct solutions to his math problems. I love linguistically layered math puns.

And that’s about it. Two more weeks until we head out to the DR for a week of beach and cocktails with umbrellas in them. Can’t wait.

Iron Chef Haiti: Battle Mango

I really love cooking here. I love the challenge of limited ingredients, and cooking for 20 to 30 people, and occasionally losing power or water in the kitchen. I think what I enjoy most is that when we pull off a meal that’s a little different, and particularly delicious, people appreciate it so much. There’s the added challenge of cooking for the Haitian palate and the US American palate at the same time, but I find it sort of an amusing challenge. And for the record, all you need to do to please the Haitians is make it really salty, and all you need to do to please the Americans is include as many vegetables as possible.

We decided this weekend to have a cook off between some of the Americans who most enjoy cooking - and trash talking about our culinary skills. Tonight was my turn with my teammates Peter, the master baker and rice maker and Mary the skilled sous chef. The rules of the competition were that we could only use the ingredients that we readily have available or already in our cabinets. No special trips to the supermarket or unusual expenditures. So, we decided to center our meal around the most abundant – and free – ingredient in Haiti in March: mangoes. In terms of the rest of the ingredients, we always have rice, which we get for free from Food for the Poor. The Columbian Red Cross dropped off massive quantities of lentils and red beans a few weeks ago, and we’ve been working hard to get through those. We can always get potatoes, onions, carrots and tomatoes, and we can usually get milk and butter too, so we used those basics for our mango inspired menu.

We made white rice in the normal Haitian style, except that we added a huge quantity of curry to the water to flavor the rice, and turn it a little yellow. Then we boiled and mashed lentils with garlic and more curry. We sautéed potatoes, onions and carrots in lots of garlic, salt, curry and cumin. Then to top off the rice and lentils, we made a mango chutney with mangoes, tomatoes, spicy peppers, scallions, garlic, cumin and a little vinegar. Oh my goodness it was beautiful. To drink we made mango smoothies with nothing but mangoes, milk and ice. On the side we made Indian chapote bread. For dessert we had mango cake and coffee with a little chocolate (also from the Columbians …) We fed 20 people, and probably spent about 25 cents per person. Oh yes, I forget to mention that all 30 mangoes that were used in the creation of this beautiful meal came from trees on the school campus which Peter Ulrickson climbed himself.

We started cooking at about 2:30, served the meal at about 6:15, and sat around enjoying the it until about 7:30. We called the meal “Indies: East and West” and I made a playlist of music from the movie Slumdog Millionaire, along with some of Wyclef Jean’s greatest hits. Instead of eating buffet style, we set the table and served everyone plates. There were candles and napkins and place mats. It’s just so nice to take the time once in a while to remind ourselves that there can be so much pleasure in small things. That really, just taking the time to prepare a meal, and eat it slowly makes us all feel a little more human.

And there’s not a CHANCE that tomorrow night’s team is going to make anything more amazing than what we made tonight. We’re totally gonna win.

A Tale of Two Cities

My journey to Notre Dame took two days, during which I passed through three countries, two states and a US territory. When my flight from San Juan was preparing to land in Chicago, I was all irritated because it was landing almost an hour late. Then the pilot came on and said we were preparing for an early arrival. I looked at my watch, perplexed. Then I figured out that San Juan is in a time zone EAST of Eastern time, so I needed to set my watch back two hours for Chicago time. I reached in my pocket as I prepared to get off the plane to dig for money to buy a long awaited Starbucks latte, and had to dig through the Haitian Gourdes and Dominican Pesos before I found any good ol’ greenbacks. On the way back to Haiti I was amazed to discover that the journey from Chicago to Santo Domingo took about seven hours, while the bus ride the next day to Port au Prince took nine. Anyway, it was a complicated journey but so good to be at Notre Dame with many people that I love to share in a beautiful farewell to such a special person. And three days in the United States reminded me once again how much I love hot showers, and what a gift it is that we can drink the tap water.

This journey also included my first ever visit to the other side of this little island, and … I had some serious culture shock when I got there. Before I describe Santo Domingo, I need to note that Haiti and the Dominican Republic have shared so much history, but also have an extremely tumultuous relationship. I’m not much of an expert on Dominican history, though I plan to educate myself a bit more in the next few months. Here’s what I know … before Columbus arrived on this island, the native Taino people who lived here called it Ayiti, which means something about rocky ground. They lived in grass huts, in small family based communities. They fished gathered what they could from the land, and were generally peaceful among themselves. Columbus arrived and forced them to mine for gold. In less than 200 years after the arrival of the Spanish, the Taino people were all but extinct, the victims of violence and smallpox. The next three hundred years brought sugar plantations and slavery and battles between the Spanish and French over this little island which would make both European empires incredibly rich. At some point in the 1600’s, the Spanish ceded the western half of the island to the French, as part of some treaty that I can’t remotely remember the specifics of. And so, the western half of the island, Saint Domingue developed its unique culture based on French culture, slave culture, and the distant memories of Taino culture. The Eastern half of the island meanwhile developed more or less as the other Spanish colonies did. Slavery was less prominent. The Church was more powerful. And there was more mixing among the different ethnic groups on the island, creating a still diverse, but less binary racial climate. In 1804 when the former slaves successfully expelled the French for the last time, they then expanded beyond the old boarder and took over the Spanish side of the island. Though they abolished slavery, the Haitian leaders treated the Dominicans brutally, and about 40 years later, the Dominicans fought for and won their independence from Haiti. The next hundred years brought dictators, military juntas, and dubious foreign involvement to both countries. In the 1950’s, the Dominican Republic languished under the brutal rule of Rafael Trujillo while Haiti suffered under Francois Duvalier. Ironically, these two sadistic dictators hated each other, and did their best to brutalize each other’s people. And here’s where the similarities end. After the DR forced out Trujillo, something changed. While Haiti plodded along under the dictatorship of Duvalier and his hapless son until 1985, the DR was developing. While Haiti stumbled through coup after coup and unimaginable political chaos from the early 1990’s until 2006, Santo Domingo was becoming a mini Miami. I don’t know anything about the last fifty years of Dominican history, but wow … something different happened on this side of the island.

Santo Domingo is really like a little Miami. After about three hours there, I decided that I could absolutely, comfortably live there. There are six lane divided highways. There’s organized public transportation. The city is well lit at night. There are tall buildings and fast food restaurants and ice cream places and fancy hotels and dance clubs on the strip in front of the main beach front. There are families walking around with little kids at night. There’s a big plaza by the water with karaoke bars and outside seating and little kids riding bikes and couples strolling and bachata music blasting from passing cars and nearby bars. The night I got there happened to be Dominican Independence Day, and they were shooting off fireworks all along the beach in a relatively well organized (though definitely not OSHA approved) fashion. I ate the best pizza I’ve had in so long. And here’s something strange … there were a lot of overweight young people, something you just don’t see much of in Haiti. It was like being on another planet. On the one hand it made me so sad to think of people who share so much history, so close by living in such drastically different circumstances. On the other hand, it made me sort of hopeful. They’ve built this recently, after a tumultuous history. There must then be hope for Haiti. I don’t know what the development lessons are … but I hope someone does and I hope they’re in Port au Prince right now helping to plan for the rebuilding of Haiti.

Memory Eternal, Gail!

On Saturday I’ll be leaving Haiti for a few days to attend the funeral of Dr. Gail Walton, one of my most important teachers and mentors from Notre Dame. Gail was the director of Music at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at Notre Dame, and the director of the Liturgical Choir, the group that I sang with all four years of college. She was suffering from leukemia and died on Wednesday from complications after a bone marrow transplant. I’ve written many pages of memories and reflections on how important she was for me and so many others in our journeys into adulthood, but I’ll keep it short here.

I joined the Liturgical Choir in the first weeks of my first year at Notre Dame, and in the following four years I discovered a passion, learned a whole set of new skills, developed some reasonably well informed opinions about sacred music, grew into a more adult understanding of my Faith, formed some of the most important friendships of my life, worked really hard, and had so, so much fun. Gail was an incredibly accomplished musician who somehow tolerated – or rather seemed to enjoy – leading a choir of 60 eager but not all well trained undergraduate singers. I don’t know how she got us to sing the complex music we sang as well as we sang it … except that she was just an incredible teacher. I couldn’t read music and didn’t know a fermata from a subito piano when I started singing with Gail, but fifteen years later I’m still singing some of that same music with my choir in Cambridge, and even have a lot of it memorized from when I learned it with Gail. She taught us to appreciate the liturgical significance of the music we were singing and to approach our music ministry with so much care and respect. She knew that while the Sunday morning Masses at the Basilica might become routine for us, that each Mass brought first time visitors and prospective students and returning alumni and people who were suffering or searching, and that it would be our music that would help them to pray more deeply. We knew we were ministers, not performers, and because of this she demanded excellence.

Beyond music, over the years Gail shepherded hundreds of undergraduates through that often tumultuous transition through college into adulthood. She was sometimes one of us – laughing along with our jokes, and standing with us flipping burgers at pre-game concession stands. But she was just as often the adult voice of reason helping us with the difficult decisions, challenging us to be better than we thought we could be, cheering along with all of our success, and helping us pick up the pieces when we screwed it all up. I will always treasure the memories of making beautiful music with Gail, and I will always be grateful for her guidance and friendship in these past fifteen years. I have no doubt that Gail Walton’s kindness and passion and hard work set an example for me that helped me become who I am today.

In the years after college I stayed in close contact with Gail. I would see her every time I was on campus, and at so many weddings of choir friends all over the country. She always responded to e-mails, even the ones that were just to say hi. I saw Gail back in June at Notre Dame at my 10th reunion, and told her that I would be spending the next school year in Haiti as a volunteer teacher. While many people struggled to make sense of that decision at this point in my life, Gail just smiled and said how proud she was – followed immediately by all the motherly questions about safety and security. Throughout the next few months, every time I sent an e-mail update from Haiti she always responded with a quick line or two of encouragement and support. After the January 12 earthquake one of the first e-mails I received was from Gail, offering her thoughts and prayers, even as she herself was suffering so much.

When I got the news that Gail was in her last days, I really struggled with the decision of whether or not I would make the complicated trip from here to South Bend to be with her family and the legions of choir people at her funeral. I knew that I wanted to be there more than anything, but I felt sort of guilty even thinking about spending so much money and time away from my work here. I know that funerals are for the consolation of the living rather than any benefit for the dead, so it just seemed sort of selfish for me to consider going. So I decided I wouldn’t go. Instead, I told myself that I would stand in solidarity with some of my colleagues here and the thousands and thousands of Haitian people who didn’t have the privilege of attending funerals when buildings collapsed on their loved ones last month. I decided that like them, I would just have to find a different way to say goodbye.

And I stuck with that decision for approximately four hours … during which time I realized exactly how much I need to be there. I’ll make the journey through Santo Domingo (since commercial flights are not flying regularly out of Port au Prince yet) and I’ll arrive in Chicago with my one hoodie sweatshirt and 1 pair of close toed shoes and hope there’s not a blizzard going on. I still don’t feel quite right about taking such obvious advantage of the privileges of wealth and my American passport, but I know it’s what I need to do. It makes me smile to think about the music that we’ll sing, and the choir reunion the likes of which will never happen again. It will be beautiful – and for once Gail won’t have to be in charge of every note and every cue and every cutoff. This time, she’ll just sit back and enjoy it all. As the Orthodox Christians say - Memory Eternal, Gail!

School - A Shaky Start

After the earthquake, the government announced that schools would be officially closed for a month. Certainly many schools were incapable of opening due to severe physical damage. Many schools lost students and teachers – some who were killed, and others who left the city for the relative safety and calm of the provinces. The government ministry responsible for education was also decimated – its physical building collapsed and many of the people inside it buried in the rubble. And of course, there was the psychological trauma that everyone was dealing with. So a mandatory closure of all schools in the region for a period of time seemed reasonable to give everyone time to pull themselves together and reorganize.

At LCS we didn’t have any classes at all for a week after the earthquake. But once engineers had pronounced most of our buildings safe, we moved forward with a “para-curricular” school program. I put my well tested scheduling skills to work and devised a shortened school schedule utilizing only the buildings we had available, with only the residential staff as teacher (not the visiting professors who normally come work for a few hours each day). The kids didn’t wear their uniforms, and we didn’t have grades or move on with the standard curriculum. Instead we used that time to get back into some kind of routine, since everything we know about kids after disasters says that the return to normalcy is the best medicine. The student population changed each week – sometimes even day to day – but we carried on as best we could with whomever was here each day.

A month came and went, and we heard little from the government about the future of schools, so we decided to “officially” open school this past Monday after the traditional holiday week of Carnaval. Sure enough, the Friday before, the government announced that schools were not ready to reopen, and that no school – public or private – should do so until more schools were able to begin again. The primary arguments against allowing some schools to reopen were based on solidarity, and equity. There is a perception that if some kids go to school again while others are unable, that it will unfairly position them for success on the state exams. The solidarity argument is simply that everyone’s in this together and needs to stay in it together. Honestly, despite the fact that I almost always support arguments based on solidarity and equity, I think this argument is absurd. By that logic, no one should begin rebuilding their house until everyone can. No one should reopen their store until everyone can. No one should stop living outside until everyone does. So we should all just sit on the rubble and wait … and wait … and wait in solidarity for the magical cure for all our problems that’s never going to come. The solutions will come when individuals – on their own or with the assistance of the government and all the international aid organizations – take those first steps toward normalcy. I’ve seen more and more people out rebuilding their walls. I’ve seen teams of people in the streets of Port au Prince wearing USAID T-shirts cleaning up trash. More and more stores, restaurants and even a few nightclubs downtown are reopening. With each of these small actions – individual and collective – people begin to see a way out. Why can’t it be the same for the schools? Young people in school uniforms are a great source of pride for people of all social classes in Haiti, since public and private schools at all levels require uniforms. They have always been a sign of hope for a better future – not just for the students themselves but for their families and for the whole country. Wouldn’t the sight of kids in uniforms bring much needed hope at a time like this?

So, we opened school anyway. We backed off on wearing uniforms so as not to attract too much attention, but our professors were willing to come back and we announced to the kids that grades were back, and that the 2nd quarter (which should have ended after the third week in January) would end after the first week in March. On Sunday afternoon at 4 pm, we had the usual gathering of all of the kids at the end of the weekend, and we had 237 students, the most we’ve had since the earthquake. There was a very normal excitement and noise level all afternoon, as there is every Sunday afternoon. The kids crowded into dorm rooms (since some of their usual rooms are in buildings that are not usable yet), and even dug out their notebooks during the evening study hours to begin preparing for classes once again. It all felt so wonderfully routine.

Then at 4:30 in the morning we were all shaken awake by the largest aftershock we’ve felt in a few weeks. ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME? There were nervous screams – distinct from the screams of actual terror from the first earthquake – as kids and adults ran outside in their pajamas and assembled on the basketball court. There was no damage, and everyone was OK. Mr. Pierre the principal even joked about being careful to check for “pu pu” on the ground on the way back, in case anyone had – um – had a fear induced accident. The kids all laughed, and though we got an earlier than usual start, we went about the morning as normally as possible, despite some of that old anxiety lingering in the back of everyone’s mind.

The school day went as well as could be expected. I had to laugh to myself as I repeated a mantra in my head that has helped me maintain sanity for many years of working in a forward thinking school …”change is hard … people fear change … change is like death ….” Teachers were confused with the new schedule, and couldn’t understand why we hadn’t just gone back to the old pre-earthquake schedule. Some kids didn’t think we should be starting again at all. And of course, despite my best estimations, the schedule I devised had to be almost completely reworked for the following day. A few of the classes have more than 40 kids in them, so instead of keeping each class in one section, we had to split them into two. While this isn’t terribly complex in terms of the schedule itself, I’m not so sure where we’re going to put these new classes, since six of our classrooms are in a building that needs some serious work before it will be structurally sound enough to hold classes again. We’re working on getting classroom sized tents … or maybe for a while they’ll just have to sit under a tree somewhere. Actually, now that I think of it that might not be so bad … there are thousands of mangoes about ready to fall from those trees!

Now it’s Wednesday, and after significant aftershocks on two subsequent nights, many kids – typically at the urging of their parents – have decided to go home. We have about 160 lefft, but that’s down by almost 80 from Monday morning. It’s incredibly frustrating. I don’t mean to be melodramatic here, but sometimes it honestly feels like we’re fighting some cosmic battle between order and chaos. We’re scratching and clawing and fighting to maintain order here, and the chaos outside just keeps coming. Not chaos in the social or political sense, but in a deeper, almost spiritual sense. Despite all the rational explanations about aftershocks, people continue to insist that these two in a row must mean that another “big one” is coming. The radio spouts inflammatory rhetoric about not going back into any buildings (regardless of their structural integrity) for another month. The government insists on keeping schools closed. These kids are so smart, and after a few weeks and so many explanations and conversations about it all, they were on board. They were laughing and playing basketball again and sleeping inside and getting their friends to come back to school. Now the fear is back and the same old questions are back and lots of kids are going home where they’ll sleep outside in tents instead of inside our perfectly safe buildings. Some days it definitely feels like the chaos is winning.