Haiti Anniversary Action
Because our training in Mind-Body Medicine was interrupted by election riots in December, we scheduled half day workshops for our December trainees on January 11th, 2011. It was a place for us to share feelings just before the anniversary of the earthquake, a refresher course, a time for questions and guidance, the opportunity to gather and sit and eat together in our new CMBM Port-au-Prince office. What a treat to have space for people to come- 60 or 80 at a time if we need it – windows that shed light, and a kitchen to cook in.
At the end of our time together we sit silently for a few minutes, morning and afternoon, remembering losses, allowing tears to wet our cheeks and spot our clothes. And then we hear about the help that these men and women are already offering others — in hospitals, schools, churches and tent camps. We make plans for how we will work together with Haitian people everywhere, and the ways we will continue to share ourselves and what we are learning.
The Key to Haiti's Happier 2nd Anniversary
Sometimes, on this first anniversary of the earthquake, it feels like very large, steady hands are needed to pull together the two sides of the gaping wound that is Haiti, hands that Michelangelo might fashion for this purpose.
I find myself looking around as we circulate through tent camps with little food and water, no health care or education or employment for the tens of thousands of people I see, for the hundreds of thousands who still live like this all across the region. “How can this be?” I shout – but only inside my head – how can we, Americans, the world community, all of us, let this continue? Our hearts were touched a year ago. Politicians said the right things, famous people answered phones on television and lent their shine to the pleas for help. Billions of dollars were pledged. Where are they? Why is there scant organization, no plan, so little mercy and fellow feeling?
It worries me, as much for ourselves–the privileged, literate, and apparently protected– as for those who live exposed to heat and rain and hurt.
In one of our workshops on January 11, 2011, the day before the anniversary, two men – a priest who tends a devastated parish and an accountant who has left his paying job to bring whatever order he can to two tent camps– share their drawings. (Read more about CMBM’s drawing exercise in this earlier Haiti entry.)
The accountant, a large serious man, sees himself planted in the midst of a quilted crop of families, cooking fires and plastic sheeting; the priest’s drawing of his slim black-clad figure is bright with God’s light refracted through a mirror framed in rainbow colors. The drawings of their “biggest problems” are, with no other guidance, no consultation, virtually identical. One side of the pages shows effort – to salvage and succor, hands reaching out, shovels in the earth – and a row of disconnected figures: “the ones who could help but don’t” “the rich and powerful who do not care.” They are barely sketched, drained of color. On the other side of the page, the people in the camps are suffering, but they do have bodies and expressions.
We need to offer them help, ourselves, in order to be human; and we need this at least as much as they need our help. That is the key to a happier future anniversary.
