Samedi

I helped to take the large group to the little airport at 6:15 this morning; the other group left by 8 or so. I let Ted sleep in, so I covered all the beds with plastic and locked the doors—the groups are coming back through before any others arrive, so we do not need to change the sheets.

Nothing really happened today at the house besides reading and my other daily disciplines. We ate lunch and watched the World Cup match having dragged the TV to the front porch where it was cool.

Ted’s aunt arrived and took us to her house up in the hills north of Port-au-Prince. It was beautiful and will be quite expansive some day. I talked with his uncle in French, Kreyol, and English, which was confusing at best. He speaks all three plus Spanish. I still haven’t mastered English yet, so…..We watched more World Cup and were stuffed with salad, plantain, and Couronne, the famous Haitian soft drink. The drive back was equally amazing—the plains around the city are so green right now—I had never seen such a sight here. I also saw my first traffic light, but, of course, it was not working.

Ted and I had an interesting discussion on the way down the hill about class structure and liberation theology. It is so often that those for the poor advocate stealing from the rich, put down the middle class, and elevate themselves to a special place. I myself was trained to see things in this very way during my first trip to Haiti, but I began to suspect this was not honest. Liberation theology has a point: injustice is usually wrought from the top down and we must be mindful of this historical point. But it is equally dangerous to take this to the extreme, which is what humanity always does. Being a mouthpiece for the poor does not mean trashing the rich. Simply put, rich people have their problems, poor people have their problems. We are human, so we have issues.

I read a quote in the book I am consuming, "The Shadow of the Wind" by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, which says a lot more about this if one considers it thoroughly: "The most efficient way of rendering the poor harmless is to teach them to want to imitate the rich."