Bondye voye bay-m moun (Day 16)

Since our car wasn’t working yesterday, we took a tap-tap to carry pizza back to the group. Carrying two steaming pizza in downtown Port-au-Prince seemed laughably a worse idea than handing out money on the street, but it went fine. Only a few street children latched themselves, literally, on to us. We spoke Kreyol to them and they just seemed more encouraged to hang on. On the way up the hill the driver demanded ten American dollars from each of us until our friend Beth, who is fluent in Kreyol, started arguing back. “Why in the world would we have ten American dollars on us in downtown Port-au-Prince?” I was laughing at what I could understand. Suddenly the whole tap-tap, which can be as cold and unfriendly as a London subway, lit up with conversation: the Haitians were arguing for us, saying things like, “These white people speak Kreyol, they are almost Haitian, leave them alone!” The driver, defeated, took our five gourdes coins and went back to the front seat. The Haitians were laughing. “You understand Kreyol?” one asked me. “Sometimes,” I replied. The whole tap-tap became this little bonded unit, soon to be separated by the flow of the city and separate ways.

The car we drove yesterday to the orphanage wouldn’t work upon leaving. We had to walk home. I am not having luck with cars, nor with clutch-starting the car, though I do it all the time with the Eurovan. I went back with Domonde and the battery charger/jumper box and he got it up and running again, though I am not sure how. He drove us around in the city with it.

Last night we went to a dance performance by the Resurrection Dance Theatre of Haiti.
It is located in St. Joseph’s House, an amazing edifice near Petionville, four stories of fine construction. Basically, the nicest place I have ever seen in Haiti. Even more impressive is the fact that this is an orphanage of sorts, a Boys Club Haiti where “abandoned, physically and mentally challenged, and homeless children of Port-au-Prince” go to live. There they are given schooling not only in scholastic subjects, but also in traditional Haitian dance, music, and art. The men in this school have become finely expressive hands, instruments, and bodies of prayer. The dance performance was indeed a prayer of movement, of hopeful expression. I could write about the rainstorm that threatened to spoil the evening, the willingness of the crowd to endure and be flexible, the professional behavior of the dancers, but I will hold these memories for myself and hope that you can one day see this troupe, a company that has performed all over the world and even for Pope John Paul II. Their CD of English and Kreyol folk songs is one of the best Haitian a capella CD’s I have heard. All of their art is honed, professional, with craftsmanship. With the community living, the Kreyol speaking, the nice house with its own chapel, the program for the arts, I have already begun to wonder if I could ever work there….

God always puts people around in your life to drive you crazy. Not because they are bad people or because they have issues—they are very normal; so normal, in fact, that they are very much like you. Then they drive you crazy because you project onto them or see in them what drives you crazy about yourself. There are some women staying with us right now here who drive me crazy. Unfortunately for them, they have the unfortunate luck of having very similar characteristics to someone at home with whom I also have a difficult time.

It is dangerous to identify a spiritual problem: you are forced to work it through, mostly on your own. God seems to say, “I will withdraw the graces with which I have let you make do, but now you must work.” I suddenly feel like I have no patience, no compassion for them.

I am trying to withhold judgment, both on myself and on them, but somehow both of these women rub me the wrong way. I keep trying to bring myself back to myself and leave the scorn I feel aside. I have not felt like this in a long time—it is almost a foreign sensation to me. This is going to be a bigger spiritual challenge than car problems or lack of water and electricity; I would almost favor those to this because of how this makes me feel about myself and about them. I thought that normally I have limitless tolerance; I am apparently wrong.

Sometimes I feel like they are listening, but only with a mind of how to correct whatever it is someone else is saying. This is all too familiar to my own inner struggles. They are intellectually prideful, naïve, and extremely liberal; they would be the non-art school equivalent of the sensational art school girl who does things for shock value, but whose art remains inherently empty, though, to their credit, these women are doing real good in the country here. Perhaps it is a control issue for me that they reject my advice on a regular basis, which is a cause for humility. They seem to take their freedom to do whatever they want to do whenever they want to do it, petulant in the guise of care-free attitudes. Of all these things, I have been sensitive of myself lacking in this way, even in the last few days. They are also idolatrous of the poor, though I would admire what they will accomplish if they do not become burnt out or disillusioned first; perhaps I do not feel that I am doing enough compared to them—a beautifully dangerous and ensnaring mentality, propelling action but inducing guilt. They are not still, always favoring experience. Though I have been writing about the importance of this I feel resistant nonetheless. Fear on my part to yield? There seems to be a dangerous mixture of naivety and freedom. Or, perhaps they are confident when I am not, fearless when I am fearful.
Both/and, probably.

All this being said, they challenge me in the way I need to be challenged, in a way that perhaps I am not normally challenged.

Today God also sent someone to me in a reinforcing way. A group of people showed up unexpectedly at our gate; they were from Charlottesville. I had met two of them before at diocesan meetings, and another, Rhonda, a Catholic Worker, multiple times. The person responsible for picking them up at the small airport never came by, or too late. It seemed so random for them to show-up at our door, but we gave them shelter for an hour until Dawn, the representative from St. Joseph’s Hospice, appeared apologetically. As she told everyone her cellphone number for future emergencies, I felt that I should plug it into our phone for safe keeping. As she was leaving, I asked her a few quick personal questions about Hospice and specific types of non-alternative palliative care; I felt that she would be open to such questions. She seemed shocked that I knew about such care and Hospice and hugged me. “Call me!” she exclaimed, “We have a lot to talk about.” She returns from a trip to Cuba next Sunday. That will give me just enough time before I leave to meet with her and discuss. I said, “That is why God brought these people here!” and she laughed and agreed, not just with her words but with her whole visage.