by Shelley Byrnes
Recently, Haitian immigrants in the United States have been in the news after being the subject of false, harmful rumors. These discussions of Hatian communities brought up memories of my time in Haiti. Back in the day, I worked at St. Alban’s School for Boys in Washington, DC; we had a brother school in Haiti and over the years I took three trips there.
These experiences were life changing for me AND for my students. We discovered that Haitian culture is based on hospitality. There were so many amazing encounters!
On a faculty-only trip, we got out of the Land Cruiser that “Tony of Toyota” rented us and climbed the rest of the way to the top of the mountain where the school was located. Our guide (who was also the principal and teacher of the school) asked if we were thirsty after the long climb. When we said yes, he called over one of the students who looked to be about eight years old. Our guide spoke swiftly in the Haitian creole dialect that combines French and West-African languages. The young boy nodded furiously with a look of pride at being given such an important job and ran off down the mountain. Meanwhile, we continued with a tour of the three-room schoolhouse, and visited with a small group of teachers and a couple families.
About an hour later, the boy came running back up the mountain, carrying a single Coca-Cola can inside a lunchbox thermos with uneven ice chunks packed all around the can. He was beaming! This boy had run all the way to the nearest town to fetch this can of soda for the visitors.
As we played tic-tac-toe in the dirt with some of the students and listened to the teacher tell of their need for school supplies, we watched a family chasing a chicken up and down the steep mountain. It caught our attention and we watched for a good half an hour as they tried to catch it. One of my fellow faculty members looked at me and said, “I know what’s for their dinner tonight!” I agreed that must be what was going on. It turned out, an hour later, they served that chicken along with fried plantain to us for our dinner. They did not eat with us because there was not enough to go around.
That same week, we were headed to Deschapelles where the Albert Schweitzer Hospital is located, and the clutch in our vehicle stopped working. We could not get out of first gear. We had a math and an English teacher with us, and the Chaplain, who was an Episcopal priest. I was the only one who spoke any French, and the only food we had was dehydrated. This was in the days before cell phones; in Haiti at that time, only larger towns even had landlines. (The smaller towns had one business that had phones for rent. You prepaid by the minute and sat in a booth to use the phone.) But even that was not an option; we were not anywhere near a town.
As we got out of “Tony of Toyota’s” vehicle to see if there was anything we could do, we were approached by two young men. They spoke in creole, asked us to wait, and disappeared into the woods. Shortly, they returned with a white man who introduced himself to us as Carl Spitz, the Director of the Episcopal Seminary in Haiti! He was a New Yorker. He immediately asked the two seminarians (for that is who the two men we first met were) to get a moped each and take the men of our party over to the closed Club Med where there was a phone they could use. They headed off to call Tony of Toyota about the Land Cruiser. Tony’s response was “No problem, no problem” and said he’d send someone with a new vehicle tomorrow.
Fr. Carl invited us to his home. He started up the generator connected to the two bedroom guesthouse (so that the air conditioning could be turned on) and told us to stay the night. We had a lovely dinner of spaghetti with sauce made from tomatoes picked from his garden; we drank mango and rum drinks with juice made from mangoes picked from his tree. We sat on his back terrace under blossoming passion fruit vines looking out on the Caribbean Sea.
I am convinced that the Holy Spirit was with us. How else could we have broken down in such a fortuitous place? When we thanked Fr. Carl for taking us in, he quoted Hebrews and told us that he always entertains strangers, for he therefore sometimes entertains angels unawares.
After we received a new rental from “Tony of Toyota,” we headed off to Deschapelles and decided to accept Fr. Carl’s invitation to attend service at the local church where he served on our return to Port-au-Prince. It just so happened that we were there for Palm Sunday. The service was amazing. His church was the only one in Haiti that allowed Haitian drummers to play; the drums were taboo in the other churches because white Christians associated them with voodoo. Fr Carl knew that if Haitians were ever to embrace Christianity, they would not do it at the expense of their own culture and the drums were integral to that. We followed along in the French prayer books and witnessed the Passion of Christ played out with Haitian drums playing throughout. It was haunting and beautiful.
On my last trip to Haiti, I led a group of St. Alban’s students. We helped some Mennonites do some terracing to prevent the crops from washing down the mountains during monsoon season. We were picked up from the fields by the Mennonites in a pickup truck. Some Haitians waved at us to ask for a ride and we stopped. A woman holding a baby handed the baby up to me so she could climb into the truck. When I offered the baby back to her, she waved me off. She had no idea who I was but she trusted me to hold on to her child as we rode in the back of a pickup on dirt roads! One of my students snapped a photo. I still treasure that picture. It shows the connection between people when there is mutual respect.
We brought donated medical supplies to the Albert Schweitzer Hospital and spent a full day sorting and organizing those supplies. We also spent a day rolling bandages that had been used, washed and sterilized to be used again. The hospital allowed our students to watch a couple surgeries by standing on stools behind the surgeons wearing sterile coverings.
And we were asked to hold a set of newborn twins. They were premature and less than a pound each. These babies would not make it. There were no incubators, no surgery to help, but everyone in the hospital was taking turns holding the babies so they knew love before they died. I could hold one in the palm of my hand.
The students were from DC. Many had parents in government. Their first reaction to some of these experiences was to list all sorts of things that we as Americans could teach Haitians or impose on them to solve the deforestation or medical system issues. It was difficult, but as we spent more time with the Haitian people it was easier for my students to understand that it was not our place to solve their problems for them. It was our place to understand that the Haitians themselves knew their culture, issues and the connective aspects better than we ever would. It was our responsibility to create friendships and support their solutions as they implemented them.
Anytime we travel abroad, we learn not only about another culture but about ourselves. The assumptions we have about our own role in the world can be challenged and adjusted. The way hospitality is shown to us teaches us about how we can show hospitality to others. We learn about how God works in the world and how we can show God’s love. I am so very excited to see what God does in my heart and the hearts of our youth pilgrims this next summer when we go to Croatia.
