Katharine has brought to my attention that Stories to Tell is a blog we share. In its roughly twelve (12) months of existence, corresponding roughly to the time we’ve been in Haiti, I have published approximately one (1) post. I hope to see this change.

John Le Carré penned a thriller-turned-film about a hum-drum British diplomat pulled into an international conspiracy. As with all Le Carré protagonists, this one happens to have an exotic pastime: he gardens. Just as he often roots out the weeds that would kill his tender plants, the central metaphor for the novel (or at least the film; I’ve not read the book) is how he methodically tends to the crises that have overtaken his life. Hence the title, the Constant Gardener.

This also feels like an apt analogy to life here, though I don’t mean the getting-to-the-bottom-of-international-conspiracies part. I mean the weeding part.

I have no green thumb. I confess to have killed, inadvertently, many plants. But I have always excelled at one activity that is a corollary to successful plant-growing: weed-killing.

The job of choice through my adolescence, whether on church grounds or a family friend’s palatial suburban estate, was pulling weeds. I considered myself quite good at it but have found myself exercising this skillset less and less in the last decade. That is, until coming to Haiti.

For all of Haiti’s problems with deforestation (Katharine touched on this here), plants and trees can grow fast. Like, really fast.

An illustration. Several months ago we paid a Haitian fellow to “prune” the trees in our yard. Armed with a machete, he did more than take “a little off the top.” He hacked off limbs. Literally. The denuded trees and bushes were scandalized. And yet, a few months later they look like they did before.

Equatorial sun and torrential spring rains will do that. The problem is that weeds spring up just as quickly.

Looking for an easy way out of our yard’s growing weed problem, we tried goats. We’ve learned they lack discretion when it comes to dietary choices and hoped they would eat their way through our patches of weeds. We borrowed our bosses goats (pictured). Though cute, they were terrible. They tangled themselves by running in circles, bleated through the night, and, most fatal, did not eat the weeds.

Terrible.

And so a few weeks back I decided to roll up my (short) sleeves. I would reach back to my heady youthful days, reclaim my skills, and mount a campaign to reclaim our yard.

I figured the job would take about ten hours.

Ten hours later, I figure it will take another ten.

I am probably wrong.

The battle is already lost. While some grasses are gratifyingly easy to pull up, others are like quilting with the most tenacious clumps of roots I’ve ever seen. If I leave the yard for a few days I find a new patch has sprung up. If I revisit a corner dealt with a week ago, I feel as if I’ve traveled back in time.

People say adjusting to life in Haiti tends to amplify one’s sense of incompetency. Weeds, along with language learning, have taught me this is so. I may start growing weeds and killing plants, as that seems better tailored to my abilities.

Going up the mountain in Dezam!

June 5 is World Environment Day, and every year the MCC program in Dezam, Haiti mobilizes hundreds of people in the community to celebrate in the most fitting way I can imagine...

We traveled to Dezam for the event, along with three of our Port-au-Prince co-workers, and we hope this short narrative, along with the music and photos attached with paint a picture of our day!

At 6am, a crowd met at the MCC Haiti Dezam office for a sip of water, energizing music, and words of instruction for the full morning ahead. Shortly afterwards, we set off, all 300 of us! The whole crowd, in two single file lines, marching up the dirt road that leads to the base of a chain of mountains. And what do we do next? We CLIMB. High, high up, steep paths, we made our way to the top of a bleak mountain, one that - like most mountains in Haiti - has been stripped bare over the centuries, leading to so much erosion and environmental degradation that plagues Haitians' livelihoods.

What was our mission, once we reached the top of this mountain? Why, to plant trees of course! Together, we planted 5,000 little saplings. It was a blast; I was so thoroughly exhausted and sweaty, but the event was fantastic.

As we climbed the mountain, we could see the seedlings of years' past, growing into strong young trees. After the long morning hike, we enjoyed a 3-hour program at another small village outside of Dezam, where participants shared an amazing meal and learned more about caring for the environment in skits, dance and song. We wrote before about the meaning of konbit. This was our first true konbit experience!

We'll let the pictures speak for themselves now. Enjoy the show! And press PLAY here first, to get a taste of the sounds of the day, as you browse through Ted's beautiful pictures.

(This music represents a traditional style of Haitian music called troubadou, and the lyrics speak of planting trees together: Hey, it's time to plant trees for the environment; Let's go! Let's go! )

This tap-tap carried the speakers that kept people energized as we 

marched towards the foot of the mountain

I can't tell you how good this water felt after our descent from the mountain!

A pause on top of the mountain, as the planting finishes up

One of thousands

Our MCC shirts have this Kreyòl proverb on back: Many hands makes the load light. 
This was definitely shown to be true today!

The program afterwards: a little girl looks on

Other sounds from the day: during our descent from the mountain, the sounds of the village and our co-worker Eclan singing sweetly along the path.

Some information about Haiti's environment:

Haiti, before its soil was touched by Europeans, used to be almost entirely forested. Today, for a variety of factors from colonialism to peasants'continued practice of chopping down trees for charcoal, is now less than 3 percent forested. 

MCC Haiti's reforestation work, which is centered near Dezam in Haiti's Artibonite Valley, has been working for over 30 years to find creative, sustainable solutions to Haiti's continued environmental degradation.

MCC Haiti has twelve national staff in Dezam who run a variety of reforestation programs. An activity like the one we participated in last Friday is just one of many projects, which includes 22 community-run tree nurseries that produce over 500,000 trees per year.

Though our work is based in Port-au-Prince, it's always a pleasure to check out MCC's work in the Artibonite Valley. To read a story that gives you a sample of MCC Haiti's reforestation work, go here.

Our week in D.C., 2015 edition

I haven't yet had a chance to share about our most recent trip to Washington D.C.

In a previous post, I shared how two of the most challenging, yet rewarding experiences since we started with MCC Haiti have been during week-long work assignments in the U.S. capitol.

During both trips, I found myself thinking both this is so hard and this is so cool at nearly the same time.

In mid April, Ted and I took a somewhat unexpected opportunity to travel to MCC's Washington D.C. office to collaborate with partner organization Church World Service on a conference presentation on Haiti's justice system, share at First Mennonite Church Richmond about MCC Haiti's programs, and to participate in several advocacy visits with USAID, the World Bank, and the US State Department.

There were a lot of firsts during this trip!

I will share about our time in the form of several highlights.

1) Time to be back in the States

The hot water, the grandly decorated airbnb room we booked, and the yogurt, cream cheese and berries that awaited us for breakfast each morning - each of these things held a major 'WOW' factor for us that is probably hard to understand if you haven't gone without these things for a certain stretch of time.

The neighborhood where we stayed reminded us of Mt. Airy in Philadelphia, the last neighborhood we lived in before moving to Haiti. The low stone walls demarcating people's beautiful gardens, the sporadic cherry blossoms, and the large, early 20th century mansions were an appealing treat for our eyes.

2) Chance to be a tourist

During a few small pockets of time, we got to appreciate some new sites in D.C. For the first time, I got to go inside the Library of Congress. We also sought out some delicious eats such as the homemade pop tarts at Ted's Bulletin and a Cuban restaurant in our neighborhood. We also got a lot more savvy with the D.C. metro system, enjoyed some of the familiar monuments with friends on our final day, and discovered new hip spots such as the Eastern Market district.

3) Learning from the older and much wiser

The first part of our work trip was spent with participants at the annual Ecumenical Advocacy Days event. The main sessions and smaller breakout groups were filled with seasoned advocates - who are also ordinary citizens - from all across the U.S. The topic chosen by EAD coordinators for this year was Mass Incarceration in the U.S. They chose this topic several months before the blow ups in Ferguson and in other cities across the U.S.  I will just say that the coordinators and participants put on such a display of faith, commitment, and severe passion for justice that were super encouraging and amazing to us. There were over 1,000 participants in total.

On Day 2 of the conference, Ted shared alongside a Church World Service colleague about the woes of Haiti's criminal justice system. He relayed in detail how the redundancies and corruption within the criminal justice system leaves 70% of inmates without even a proper trial. They sit in overcrowded prisons, often without food provisions, until fate, a bribe, or special circumstances allow them to see a judge and receive proper sentencing. Even though EAD has a primary focus on domestic issues, they create space every year for participants to attend a variety of workshops that expose them to difficult realities around the world.

4) Getting our 'advocacy' on

It's still a new experience for us to prepare strategic talking points, research the opinions of powerful decision makers, and enter into a private meeting with them, ready to share a very specific, clear message on behalf of others. This is the thrust behind an advocacy meeting in our role with MCC.

Our great colleague Charissa set up multiple meetings for us in the days after the conference. We sat with the Haiti Special Coordinator at the U.S. State Department, two members of the Haiti team at the World Bank, and the housing specialists at USAID. It was very interesting for us to gauge each organizations' level of interest in what we had to share, and also to learn about their current approaches towards development in Haiti.

Advocacy towards government bodies is a really fascinating thing. Being in D.C. - and Port-au-Prince for that matter - it's easy to sense the hugeness of government structures, and their immobility. Yet at the same time, as we did our own advocacy visits concerning Haiti issues, we could see the dozens of other EAD participants walking to their representatives' offices to share their views on certain legislation that could help stem excessive sentencing and the swelling prison population in the U.S. There is a history of citizen engagement with government in the U.S., and it was very eye-opening and impressive to see this.

This was especially noteworthy to me after being in a context like Haiti's for the past 11 months, where government bodies are notorious for being deaf to the majority of peoples' voices.

5) A little time to pause

This time was short. Yet who can deny the great opportunity we had to take a little bit of a breather each evening, enjoy some creature comforts, and - top of the list - see some great friends. Two friends from Maryland drove in for a Monday night dinner, where we had a couple hours to unload our news on them and share a delicious meal. A good Philly friend was attending the same EAD conference as us, and two special Philly friends bused down for our final day, to enjoy the sites together (in the cold rain no less!)

In addition, a long Sunday drive to Richmond, VA gave Ted and I a chance to take in the greenery, worship with a sweet congregation, and order that unnecessary egg sandwich and chai latte from Starbucks while on the road. It was just one year ago that we started our road trip adventure from Philadelphia out to San Diego, packing up all our earthly belongings on the long trek that eventually landed us in Haiti.

Farewell, D.C.! Thanks for the great times!

No such thing as ''normal''

Walking home from work today, a little frazzled, I let the cool breeze and the 15-minute downhill walk calm me down. I started to turn an observant eye to my surroundings.

It was then that I had the realization that there is no "normal" day for us in Haiti. Even a day that feels just that – perhaps  sitting at our desks for the majority of the day, eating with co-workers at lunch, and returning to our home at the predictable time – is actually chock full of completely new, abnormal experiences.

These experiences, whether or not we take note, seep into our pores and make up the very fabric of our lives, our existences here in Haiti.

On a simple walk to work, for example, almost everything we encounter is not ''normal'' for us: the clothes hanging from the cement walls, on display for shoppers; the little kids in their adorable checkered uniforms, walking to school while holding a parent’s hand, girls with their hair full of ribbons; the sellers who carry three large baskets stacked upon their heads, calling out their wares; the clouds of exhaust that periodically spew from vehicles and the obnoxious honking; the precarious sidewalk arrangements, loose wires hanging down from the power lines and cars, wheelbarrows, large tree roots obstructing pedestrians’ paths; the shoe shiners; the radio programs broadcasting "La Dessalienne," the national anthem, once the clock strikes 8am.

The days are fun when I take time to appreciate all these things that are new and foreign. Yet, when some time passes and I haven't been taking note, I'll start to feel the effects of my foreign environment all the same: 

Perhaps I will start to feel more pressed at work without obvious reason, couped up, anxious, lacking direction, or Ted and I won't be communicating at all ''fluidly'' and I won't understand why... 

It's because nothing here is ''normal''! Our environment speaks to us even when we don't hear it. We are ''fish out of water'' in a sense, and it only helps to recognize this. It allows me personally to reorient myself, to accept that everyday things can be a little disorienting, and to try to walk forward with more appreciation for all that is truly ''new.''

On Manners

Haitians are so formal, ya'll. I love it! This morning, we sat anba tonel - underneath the shaded meeting space -  in our office's backyard. We were meeting with two young pastor/attorneys, who have been working with Ted on the beginnings of a Christian legal association or network in Haiti.

These guys - both named Simeon - are enthusiastic about connecting legal professionals around the pillars of faith and justice. This morning, they held an informational meeting with another attorney, who is Haitian-American and the wife of a pastor here in town. She holds a lot of program planning, evaluating experience as well as a clear passion for Christianity and justice issues.

The meeting starts off so formally, like they often do. Each Simeon presented their name, background, and stated the purpose of the day's meeting.

There is a formality and high value placed on speech and presentation here in Haiti. When people enter a room, they make sure to give a general greeting to all who are present. If it's an individual greeting, they ask after you, and your family. Did you sleep well, did you have a good weekend. Visitors, at a church service or a prayer meeting, are often asked if they'd like to share a word with everyone present. One often prefaces their remarks with a ''Bondye ave nou" (God be with you) and the requisite response is promptly given, "Amen," before the speaker continues.

Haitians love to give speeches, and they are darn good at it.

In addition, people here are sharp dressers. The photo above serves as Exhibit A. You can bet Ted and I never look as snazzy as those with whom we are meeting. Shoe shiners dot the sidewalk between the office and our house. Kindergartners, college students, businessmen - they are all stopping to get their regular shoe shine for less than 50 cents a pop. 

Why do I appreciate this attention to appearance and to manner that I see exhibited in the Haitians I meet? I feel that it has something to do with the honor and respect that these mannerisms demonstrate - a respect for the given day, for the business, meeting, or task at hand; it connects somehow with the reverence Haitians have for the present moment.

Experiences that Shape Us

During our first 9 months with MCC in Haiti, there have been a couple instances where I have thought to myself,

"Wow, this is one of the hardest things I've ever done,"

and at the same time,

"This is one of the most fun, rewarding experiences I've ever had!"

Both of the times I have felt these things, concurrently, and most strongly, were during work trips to Washington DC.

And, I see that I haven't blogged about either of them! I believe this goes to show how these times were so impactful, and therefore difficult to put into words.

Last November, Ted and I worked with MCC and CWS staff in Haiti and Washington DC to pull off a 3-day advocacy event in DC, which included a full-day Housing Conference featuring panelists from 6 Haitian civil society and other organizations. Each person brought their own niche of expertise to the conference - two of them had never traveled outside of Haiti and the Dominican Republic - and a few were well-seasoned travelers, bringing decades of academic or political experience to bear on their presentations.

The majority of our delegation.

The conference was a success. We had great participation, and good follow-up meetings with the State Department, a congressional representative's office, and the National Security Council, as well as with other NGOs. Working as a team, across physical, cultural, and even some ideological divides was invigorating and even a bit other-worldly at times. (Lack of sleep and running on lots of adrenaline added to this effect too I'm sure.)

The three-day event was also intended as an opportunity for civil society leaders in Haiti to sit down next to representatives of Haiti's governing housing unit, to exchange perspectives and ideas for solutions to Haiti's longstanding housing crisis. This was a unique, and charged, aspect of our advocacy work over these few days. It's very rare for government and civil society in Haiti to sit down together where the gap between the authorities and the general population is wide.

We felt there were significant breakthroughs as a result of these efforts. Maybe not breakthroughs for all of Haiti, but some personally and professionally for our delegation. And it was certainly an initiation (i.e. trial by fire) for us as newbies with MCC Haiti. The journalist on our delegation was able to mend a relationship with the government official who participated - a relationship that had turned soured over the last couple years without our journalist friend understanding the reason why. (It turns out he had quoted the official in an article when the official understood the conversation to be ''off the record.'')

The same government official surprised us by ''crashing'' our post-conference advocacy meetings with the State Department and National Security Council. (They were invited to the conference, but not these meetings, in which we planned to share about human rights abuses in Haiti, that often reveal the complicity of Haitian authorities!) It was awkward, to say the least.

Yet, a human rights attorney on our delegation shared afterwards that he ''never thought [he] could sit side-by-side in a meeting with someone who speaks a different language than [him].'' By this he meant the different philosophy and ideology those in power seem to have towards the poor majority in Haiti. Yet, through these awkward exchanges the attorney started to see how human rights defenders can - and must - look for and take advantage of opportunities to be in meaningful dialogue with those in power. It is better to engage than to disengage, when possible.

Four members of our delegation: the pensive professor in the back (right), an attorney,
community organizer and pastor involved in community-based housing projects.
(Photo credit: Milo Milfort)

There was also a lot of laughter over our week together. 

Ted and I traveled from Haiti with four members of our delegation. (As a caveat, a fifth, prominent member of our delegation never got on the plane, causing some additional panic on our end.) We offered what translation we could after four months in Haiti. Some of the more hilarious exchanges had to do with ordering fast food at restaurants for a big group, attempting to explain all the sandwich options at Subway and the fact that you can order chicken without bones at Bojangles. One member of our delegation exclaimed, ''Chicken without bones?!'' at the most appropriate and hilarious moment. Another team member - a first-time traveler - asked me twice, "I can really mix the drinks at the soda fountain?" Yes, I know. Our country is pretty ridiculous isn't it. One long day ended in a spontaneous dance party at Busboys and Poets after a less-than satisfying turnout for our film screening.

Throughout this whole trip, I felt that we were truly running in the spirit of ''degaje,'' which is the Haitian Kreyòl equivalent of ''to make do,'' but I feel like it expresses something more. There is a hint of our English language proverb in there, ''when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade.'' That night at Busboys and Poets was definitely a lemonade night.

In the coordination - of programming, and logistics - and the flurry of languages as well as the exhaustion of travel, long days, and switching between life in Haiti and the U.S. capital - I felt pressed in a way I haven't before, pressed to the point that I could hardly believe ''we are actually doing this!''

The entire trip was a delight, extremely challenging, rewarding, tiring - all at the same time. An experience we will truly never forget.

(Photo credit: Milo Milfort)

And what about our second experience in D.C., you ask? This was just last week. Stay tuned...!

Home

It's about time we shared some photos of our home here in Haiti. I had said earlier that it was my goal to share some posts this week that give you a more concrete picture of our day-to-day life. 

I admit that only a couple of the photos below give you a sense of the real layout of our space (sorry about that), but I hope the flourishes captured here, from both inside our home and the yard, help you see and appreciate what we also love about this space - the light, the color, the solace we can experience in this little corner of ours in Haiti.

More Haitian artwork, from the "iron village" just outside of Port-au-Prince

Fond memories of last year's trip to the UK.