Miami Herald Article...

(Miami Herald, June 5, 2010)
A visitor finds sorrow and pain -- and beauty and kindness -- in Haiti

By TORY FIELD


PORT-AU-PRINCE -- We saw a woman selling dirt today. Dirt to eat. Walking downtown by the palace. Along Champs de Mars, which used to be a big open space but now is crammed tight with tents and tarps and cardboard and sheet-made homes pushed in to every scrap of bare ground. She was selling candy and crackers and dirt baked with salt and butter into small discs for eating.

I am remembering the conversation I overheard again and again in the United States right after the earthquake. People saying that they don't understand how Haiti has been the victim of so much hardship -- poverty, violence, coups, hurricanes and now this.
It is clear, from one minute being here, or from a few clear voices telling the history, that this latest tragedy is piled on top of a much larger mountain of pain. And that mountain is not the work of God or Mother Earth, but the work of humans inflicted on other humans. And that is a completely unnecessary, avoidable suffering, piled up for over 500 years.

...Le Marron Inconnu, "The Unknown Slave"- this beautiful sculpture, sits in what was once a large open space, by Champs de Mars, near the palace. Now it is completely surrounded by tents.

We are trying to take some pictures for the articles we are writing, but each time I pull it out I feel shameful. My friend and co-worker Deb, who is here documenting the effects of the earthquake and the work of popular movements, tells me when she was in Cite Soleil years ago she remembers graffiti that said, ``Tourist, do not take a picture of my suffering.''

Yesterday we took a taxi to go visit Marise.
....Marise is part of an organization in Port-au-Prince called KOFAVIV, working to ensure women's rights. She is the mother of five, the three youngest of whom she is now living with in a home built out of sticks and tarps.

We got in the taxi on the way to visit her, and a few minutes into the drive we were laughing with the driver about some little thing. And then Deb asked him, as she does of most everyone she talks to, if he lost anyone in the earthquake.

He pulled out a tiny picture, the size you get for school pictures of his beautiful little 8-year-old girl.

She was out playing in the yard near a wall when the earthquake happened and the wall fell on her. He dug her out himself and she had already passed. He wanted to take her to the countryside to bury her and was trying to gather the money to arrange getting there.

He waited three days, but after three days he could not wait any longer. So he had to wrap her carefully in a sheet and carry her into the street. Front-end loaders were coming through the streets to scoop up the bodies left on the curbs. He could not stand to leave her in the street to be scooped up by a machine. The only thing he could do was wrap her in a sheet and place her gently in the bucket of the front end loader himself -- to be driven away and buried in a mass grave. He says he thinks of her every minute.
"I am resigned,'' he says.

I hesitate repeating this story. This story that is not mine, but only witnessed, knowing that I, who am writing it, and you who are reading it, can be touched and then move on through the day, while someone else forever lives the depths of it. I wonder what greater purpose it serves, or if it numbs people to suffering to hear people's hard stories.

My hope is that maybe, in some complex configuration, that connects strangers across the world . . . some steady simple equation of ripple effects. . . that a heart hurting for this little girl will connect to some resolve to love larger.
The strength to nurture some other precious life.

Marise gets in the cab with us with kisses for everyone including the driver, whom she has never met. I imagine there is an undercurrent of understanding that they don't yet know about.

He says, ``I see my daughter all the time, especially when I am eating.'' She says, ``I cannot eat.''

We walk down the road to the house Marise has created. She is lovely and dignified and full of grief. I won't tell you her story right now. Only so much heartbreak can fit in one letter.

And though the heartbreak seems endless, there is so much more to be told. Endless gifts and lessons and beauty.

...Beauty like friendships that persist without spoken language, like the warmth and kindness I have been shown every day I have been here. Beauty like neighbors who daily watch out for each other, like doctors who do their work in the streets and clinics each day because their hearts demand it...

Beauty like the strength of so many Haitian people who despite countless reasons to feel hopeless are coming together hopeful and determined to rebuild something beautiful.


The author works with Other Worlds, an education and organizing collaborative that documents political, economic, and social alternatives that are flourishing around the world.

This piece is an excerpt from her daily journal.