Day 5: Post 2 of 2

Day 5 reflections from Laura

Today, I discovered a dozen new ways my heart can break.

As a psychologist, I have met with children whose histories leave my heart heavy.  I have heard stories and seen faces full of traumas that are named and unnamed.  I have learned how to hold those stories, and the pain and the hurt, to the best of my ability.  I have met with families for whom trauma seems to run through their veins - generations of abuse, pain, and neglect leave them such that I can feel the weight of their stories before the stories are told.

But in Haiti, trauma is in the air they breathe.  There is environmental trauma, and the collective psychological scars of an entire country of people.  How is it that one country can bear so much?  This trauma lives in its founding, in every generation of its history, and is also ongoing and acute.  One cannot be in Haiti and not sense the weight of the trauma as it sinks into your pores.  One cannot be in Haiti and not feel the trauma as you inhale the dusty air.  It touches the very core of you.  There is no way it cannot.  It sinks in, and it breaks your heart. 

I'm struggling again this evening with finding the words.  I can only say that I feel a sense of hopelessness, and powerlessness, and feeling as though the pain and need is so immense that no amount of anything will help heal it.  The trauma is in the water.  Even if complete peace were to arrive tomorrow, it will take generations to unlearn the ways of being they have developed by necessity. 

This is not to say that there is anything wrong with the work we are doing, or with MPP, or with the vision of MPP for the peasants.  MPP is an incredible organization.  UUSC is also an incredible organization, and I had a moment today when talking with the peasants at Village 1 when I was so proud to be Unitarian Universalist.  I believe everyone involved in this organization and its support is doing absolutely the very best they can do, and there is nothing more that can be asked or expected.  I simultaneously believe that this is not enough, that it cannot be enough, and that even - perhaps - there is not an "enough."  In the face of this much suffering, there is never an "enough."

The residents in Village 1 are all people who lost everything in the earthquake 5 years ago.  They were living in Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas, and fled to Papaye when the earthquake hit.  They are adjusting to a life they had never known, and perhaps never even imagined for themselves.  They are living in the aftermath of a trauma in which they lost everything, and they are starting over.

I don't know how one starts again after that.  I don't know how one begins anew in a country where trauma seems to come as predictably as waves crashing on the shore.  I don't know how you have the courage to begin, and begin, and begin again.

And yet, I am also witnessing the beginnings.  In all beginnings, there is loss, and pain, and dreams, and hope.  There is anger, frustration, resentment, and also courage, and bravery, and an ever-present belief that things will get better.  In order to begin again, you must have an inkling of that belief.  Otherwise, no one would be able to begin again.  I don't know where that hope is, or where it comes from, only that it must be there.  I feel it, too.  I don't know how or why, but it is here.

I am thinking about healing and where it comes from.  I'm wondering whether it's possible.  I'm feeling powerless in the role I can have in this.  We all know the story of the boy throwing the starfish into the sea: there were too many to throw them all in, but he knew it mattered to the ones he threw.  In some ways, it feels that this country is covered in starfish and, while I'd love to throw a few into the sea as I pass by, the sea is nowhere to be found.  There is nowhere to throw them, and no water to bring them life: my job is to witness.  To write, perhaps.  To tell the stories.

I'm thinking of a poem titled "A Fixer" by Anonymous.

A fixer has the illusion of being casual.

A server knows he/she is being used in the service of something greater,

essentially unknown.

We fix something specific.

We serve always the something:

wholeness and the mystery of life.

Fixing and helping are the work of the ego..

Serving is the work of the soul.

When you help, you see life as weak.

When you fix, you see life as broken.

When you serve, you see life as whole.

Fixing and helping may cure.

Service heals.

When I help, I feel satisfaction.

When I serve, I feel gratitude.

Fixing is a form of judgment.

Serving is a form of connection.

Perhaps this is my answer.  Perhaps this is where the healing starts: in connection.  Perhaps it starts with witnessing, with hearing, with seeing.  Perhaps it travels, then, from wire to wire, across the connections of space and time, from my eye to my typing fingers.  From the screen to your heart.  From your heart to your hands.

"Serving is a form of connection."

With my feet connected to the floor of the Big Thoughts porch, sitting on the contradictions living inside the Haitian soil, I open my heart in connection to the people of this country - and also to you, in the hopes that you will feel moved to do the same.  In this way, may we connect, and serve, and create the ripples of an ocean into which we may toss the starfish, giving hope and life. 

Inside the cathedral in Hinche

Buying some Haitian music, in Hinche