Time to go

It's my last week in Haiti, so of course, it's been jam-packed with craziness. Katelyn, my replacement, arrived on Monday. She’s amazing and we’ve been having a lot of fun together as I show her the ropes around here. The girls will be in very good hands when I leave, and that makes it a little bit easier for me to go. We’ve been tiring her out with lots of adventures, including the fun of tracking down her missing suitcase in the Port-au-Prince airport. We’ve taken several short hikes up the mountain with some of the kids. On the first one I managed to lose Nate. Turns out he just stopped to explore a cave and then broke his sandal so he took a while to catch up. I threatened to implement a buddy system. Then on the way back down the people at the front of the group stopped at a friend’s house to wait for everyone else to catch up. All the kids arrived and we were just waiting for Nate and Katelyn. 10 minutes later I was really starting to worry, and sent one of the boys up the hill to look for them. Then Nate appeared, running up the hill from the direction of the orphanage. I had several questions, including “How did you get down past us without me noticing?” “What have you done with Katelyn????” and “Where are your shoes?”. Turns out he’d given away the sandals Renick lent him to a little old lady walking barefoot down the gravel road, and then a motorcycle driver offered them a ride down the hill, but Nate forgot the words for ‘right’ and ‘left’ so they took a very roundabout way back to the orphanage and didn’t pass us. Eventually we all made it back, I got Nate and Renick new sandals out of the closet, and we all got mangoes. So it all turned out okay.

Yesterday we went to explore a park Nate and I discovered a while ago and have been wanting to go back to. We figured we would probably have to climb through a broken part of the fence or something, but instead it was really easy. We just gave our IDs to the guards, and they gave us park passes. A very nice manager told us that he couldn’t let us in the upper part of the park because there was heavy construction going on and it was dangerous, but we were welcome to explore the lower part. Which is what we wanted to do anyways. So we had lots of fun climbing in and around half-finished buildings and fountains and swimming pools, chasing after huge lizards, hunting for mangoes (it's mango season, and they are everywhere and delicious and huge) and of course, taking silly pictures. Although that was mostly me.

It kind of felt like we were on an Indiana Jones set.

Angel Cecelia? Or something like that. This building was designed like a greek temple on the outside, and had goats sleeping on the roof, so we referred to it all day as 'The Goat Temple'.

Nate climbed down a storm drain to rescue a chick

Banana leaves make geat hiding places, except for the feet. (No giant crickets this time Mom!)

This is (or would be if it had water) an enormous swimming pool, with a swim-up bar, and a water slide.

In other adventures, we’re trying to organize a building project with a tiny local church up the hill. There’s a team of college students coming next week from Boston, and they’ve raised money to help this church repair their building. So we’ve been meeting with the pastors to hammer out a plan and budget. It has been an adventure in Haitian planning, and has stretched our patience at times, but has also been a lot of fun. We originally sat down with one pastor and asked him to list and prioritize the needs of the church. Then we got an idea of how much money we had, and how many people were coming to help, and went back to the same pastor to ask him to provide a budget and plan for building a new metal roof, new chalkboards and benches, and installing new lights and fans. On Monday the three pastors arrived beaming with plans for a completely new two-story building. Oh Haiti. So we had a long meeting explaining that we have nowhere near that amount of money to spend, talked over more ideas for the project and explained that we want to hire two Haitian workers to direct the team. Yesterday evening they came back again with a realistic budget, but they hadn’t included the two Haitian workers, so we had to go through all that again. Luckily one of our older boys sat down with us to help translate. Throughout this last meeting it became more and more apparent the youngest associate pastor was hitting on me. I was a little slow to pick up on this, as usual. I tried to distract him by introducing Katelyn, and then the head pastor asked what denomination she was, so we were trying to explain Calvary Chapel, which prompted Mano and the two older pastors to get into an exuberant theological debate. Katelyn was worried she’d offended someone, but I assured her that this was normal, and they were thoroughly enjoying themselves. (A few months ago I attended a baptism service at their church, during which the Pastor Emmanuel and several people in the congregation had a 30-minute debate on the finer theological points of baptism in the middle of the sermon). The young pastor took this opportunity to ask for my email and phone number, and left me with a letter that could be interpreted as a marriage proposal. The theological debate was about to wrap up and Nate opened his mouth to launch into goodbyes, when Mano got a twinkle in his eye and interjected, “So Cecelia over here is Catholic…”, and that started a lecture on how all Christians are members of one church, Mano jumped up and ducked out of the room to avoid Nate smacking him and to burst out laughing, and I just laughed and thanked the elder pastors for being so supportive of my Catholocism, tried unsuccessfully to convince the younger pastor that he did not need a picture of me on his cell phone, and started the round of goodbyes that would eventually get the pastors out the door. All just a typical business meeting in Haiti, sorta. Maybe minus the almost marriage proposal.

Even though I know I’ll be home in two days (!!!) I can’t quite wrap my head around it. I am quite happy and settled here, and although I am SO excited to see everyone and have a wonderful summer planned, I do not want to leave here. At all. I think this just about every night as I sit on the roof, enjoying the breeze and watching the sun set into the Caribbean while eating a giant fresh mango. I am also worried that it’s going to be very difficult for me to jump back into busy American life. As I put it to a friend this week, “I am very very happy living life at Haitian speed. Which is 10 times slower than psychotic hamster on drugs American speed”. Amusing, but also true. Life just goes a little slower here, people value time much differently, and I like it this way. It’s one of the many things I’ll be trying to hold on to as I come back to the states.

Easter

My Easter in Haiti was much different than it has been in previous years. I spent a lot of it being very homesick, both for home and Swarthmore. But it was so beautiful in different ways that I wasn't expecting. On Maundy thursday, I decided to skip going to church in the afternoon because it was the last day of Kelly and Emma's visit, and they had brought everything to do tie-dye with the kids. So I spent the afternoon twisting t-shirts, shooting people with rubber bands, and trying to convince the kids that yes, the dye really would stain their skin. Overall we ended up with more dye on the shirts than on the kids, so I think it was a success. After that Emma brought out several packs of party balloons she had brought with her. The kids blew them up and predictably started whacking each other upside the head. Pretty soon one got knocked away, and the breeze caught it and sent it flying over the edge of the roof and out over the neighborhood. Everybody stopped and stared as this big yellow balloon hung suspended over the street. And then the kids looked at each other and their eyes lit up with the 'you're thinking what I'm thinking!' look. Everybody blew up three or four balloons, and then stood at the edge of the roof. On the count of three everyone threw their balloons in the air, and then watched in delight as 100 huge colorful balloons floated serenely down the hill in the light of the sunset. Everyone in the neighborhood below stopped what they were doing to watch, we nearly caused several motorcycle accidents, and kids gaped open-mouthed and silent for a moment before they set off in happy shrieking pursuit to try to catch the balloons when they finally landed. It was beautiful, and kind of surreal. I felt like I might be in a Pixar movie, or one of those colorful Sony Bravia Colour commercials (if you haven't seen their bouncy ball spot, go find it on youtube, it's amazing).

On Friday I went to the Good Friday service at Caridad parish, but I had a lot of trouble focusing. I love the Easter week services, it's my favorite part of the year. And I was frustrated that I was missing all of my favorite parts because I don't understand the language very well. I felt lonely and isolated and rushed, and just wanted 10 seconds where I could be still and pray without feeling people's eyes staring into me. It wasn't any of the things I wanted from Good Friday service. But, God is great, and he very quietly let me know several things: first that Easter actually isn't about me, at all. Second that I shouldn't take for granted the beautiful familiarity of liturgy in my own language. And thirdly that Jesus was dead, and that's about as lonely as it gets, so suck it up. (Okay, maybe that's not exactly how he said it...)

Saturday morning we decided to go for a walk. Nate's mom was visiting and wanted to see some of the city. The week before we'd climbed to the top of the mountain, so we decided to try to go the complete opposite direction and try to get down to the ocean.  I looked at a map and scouted my path from the roof, but mostly I was just winging it, as usual. Unfortunately the main road was terribly flooded - I think a water main may have broken - and trying to find a path to walk, rather than wade, was really difficult. This prompted me to turn off the main road much too early. I still knew I had us heading directly towards the ocean, I just hadn't gone as far as I wanted to reach an easy access from the main road. Instead we started winding our way down little streets, through a neighborhood. I do mean 'winding' because none of them kept in the same direction for more than a few hundred feet and it felt like we were in a maze.

I don't quite know how to describe the rest of this. The three of us got quieter and quieter. This was supposed to be a fun jaunt to the 'beach'. Instead we were half-lost, zig-zagging through the tangled streets of the area i'd been trying to avoid, and none of us were having fun anymore. But we felt that the water must be just beyond the next row of houses, so we kept going picking our way along as the neighborhood went from bad to worse, and then you couldn't call it a neighborhood anymore, and then it was definitely a slum, going from bad, to worse, to desperate, to incomprehensible. Cardboard and plastic bags strung together with twine, sitting precariously a few inches above the water on a bank of trash that has slowly accumulated into semi-solid land. Here we'd made it to the bay, the Caribbean ocean! And all I wanted to do was cry, for what should have been a breathtakingly beautiful paradise but is instead a hell on earth. For the naked children scavenging in the trash next to the goats and the pigs. For the young mothers staring at us from dark doorways, too exhausted and desolate to even be surprised at our presence. For the knowledge that every storm that churns up the bay wipes out their flimsy homes and they are at the mercy of the weather and their only barely less destitute neighbors.

What a place to be on Holy Saturday. I felt so strongly that despite my maps and plans God had led me directly to the heart of all that is miserable and wrong in this city, to remind me exactly why this world needs a redeemer and convict me of my complacency.

Back at the orphanage later that afternoon, we hid Easter Eggs for our kids, thanks to Nate's mom bringing lots of Easter candy specifically for this purpose. I wasn't sure it would be a big hit, so I was amazed to see even the girls with attitudes the size of Texas sprinting and elbowing their way down the stairs with the rest when I yelled 'go!'. Watching 40 teenagers shout and scream and squeal with delight and frustration (these kids are sneaky, they find an egg, eat the candy, then replace the egg and hide to watch someone else find it and discover it's already empty...and then they laugh their butt off), I was remembering the people in the houses down by the water, and was so thankful that our kids have been able to have a happy life here.

Sunday morning Nate and his mom came with me to Caridad, where it was packed. You think churches are crowded in the states on Easter? This was insane. And that made it a little hard to concentrate on translating the mass. But it was impossible to not catch the joy that was just radiating from people, especially the old ladies. They were literally dancing in the pews every time there was music, as if to say, "I have been solemn and penitential for all of lent, and now it is time to CELEBRATE gosh darn it!" Truly wonderful. Dr. Bernard and Claudette came down for a wonderful Easter feast, and then invited us up for the rest of the day to Tomasin. So the rest of my Easter was spent covered in babies. And it was there that the restless discontent I'd been holding onto for the past few days - wanting to be celebrating holy week with Tri-Co, thinking of past Easter dinners in the friend's meeting house, wanting an Easter basket, being annoyed that things weren't in English - finally melted away. Holding my favorite baby and playing with several others, watching the sunset light up their beautiful faces, I realized that I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

This is Jonathan. When I first came to Haiti he was two months old and the newest baby at the orphanage so he's been my favorite.  He always looks terrified in pictures, (this is the least petrified face of about 20 pictures), but I swear the rest of the time he's smiling, especially when you sing to him.

I LOVE this guy. Always happy. (Notice Janmbelin wrapped around my legs, very annoyed that someone else is getting my attention).

The face pretty much says it all. She may be tiny and adorable, but she is 100% full of Haitian attitude.

Valencia is totally conked out in my lap, and John and I are counting rocks. It's very exciting, we gathered a small crowd. Oh, and Emily slides into my back, I tickle her, and then she climbs up to do it again. That's also what's happening with Samuel and Nate's mom on the right.