15116: From Ellen LeBow, Matenwa, Lagonav, Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

Lbo@cape.com (will be back in the US mid-April)


There is a peacefulness around these afternoons spent alone with just Eden
that belies what's going on down by the water.

Having become a "teacher" by default rather than vocation, I had no previous
experience of the quieting focus one can achieve with a single serious
student (the others didn't show up today, probably trapped waiting at the
water source) or the gratification I get from watching a young kid,
silent-intent- discovering his own natural talent as an artist.

I've watched Eden over the years and he has kept the spare quality dire
poverty has shaped in him - lean to skeletal, enormous, steady eyes in a face
too old for his 16 years, skin strangely aged and frosted with a perpetual
skim of pale dust - his soul strangely aged without a shred of playfulness or
noise the boys around him possess.

But his sense of design is simple and alive, so there's something latent and
rich in his inwardness.

When I'd asked Deirdre to come and teach a few people how to make jewelry for
a few weeks I knew it would be up to me to continue the lessons when she
left, although it was all new to me too. But Jelen, Pedwo, Eden and Villian,
all chosen by the school, "got it" pretty fast, and all I have to do is watch
them, helping them with details only.

When the silk scarf painters began their artistic profession 4 years ago it
was an off-shoot of our fledgling neighborhood "Sant Atisana" - our Art
Center--, no more than a hurricane-battered hut for storage and a single
rough outdoor plywood worktable.

But everyone loved it.
When the inspiration came to find a medium that the most needy women in the
katye could learn, something they could be creative at AND sell,
scarf-painting was a shoo-in. Since then they've shown the community there
can be artistan alternatives to living on the edge of starvation or having
unwanted kids in hopes the fathers will give support for a while.

Now I'm asked everyday on the road when there will be more "atisana" work
like that for others. We're working on it.

A dry, bright, clear wind  weaves around us as we work cutting silver and
copper, lining up glass beads. It will pick up strength as the moon waxes,
rising to a near banshee force - a constant - a mistral - knocking over heavy
things, slamming doors, extinguishing all lamps.

When we Americans see a newly growing moon on its back it appears sickle
thin, but here it's spoken of like a bowl, or a pregnant thing, weighed down
with a thick, dark wind in its belly, waiting to be unleashed.
When full, emptied of wind, it's the brightest moonlight I've seen in the
world.

But the dry, unstoppable winter wind, at once beautiful and driven, feels
like a symptom of a land slowly emptying itself of trees and moisture.
Two-inch thick dust accumulates under and around us.

Meanwhile down by the water things have grown violent.

Once the rainy season began in January. Now it's shrunken to April or even
May. People arrive from miles away to fill buckets and gallon jugs with
washing and drinking water from a single spring-fed PVC pipe at the bottom of
the Nan Josen ravine.

But as more people come to collect, the water pressure has been dropping off
from the drought. As the wait grows longer tension and frustration has begun
to rule the days. Some muscle in, bullying others out of the way. Fights
break out among friends and neighbors. The other day someone was stabbed.
Market women lose whole days of selling. and kids whole days of their lives.
Small children who haven't the power to fight their way in can wait from 6 Am
till late in the afternoon to get their family's supply.

On the road, very late at night I meet people going to the water, hoping to
avoid the maddening crush and stagnant hours.

When the rains finally do come, it's too easy to forget it is not a solution,
but only a dwindling reprieve.

But that's only one side of it all. The Lekol Kominite Matenwa has grown into
a community meeting house where people are invited to come and brainstorm
about what the katye needs. Without government concern or money a lot of it
is still in the dream stage, but things change as ideas get incubated. One of
those is definitely brainstorming ideas for beautiful things people can make
and sell.

Wolan Riviye and I have a new obsession with giant bamboo. We have recognized
it as a fast-growing, gorgeous, self-replenishing alternative building
material.

I brought him a book showing all the things you can make with it, from art to
fences, doors, windows, even houses like they do in the Philippines, without
lopping off what's left of the trees to make planks. And it already grows
here.

As a master builder, mason, artist and philosopher, the future of bamboo in
Matenwa sparked many levels of Wolan's imagination. We found some up in the
hills and now we've already started rooting some of it in trenches dug all
around the new, improved almost finished Art and Music Center, using the rest
of the bamboo to design its windows and doors.

One of his many dreams is to begin a small bamboo "farm"  all with the hope
that, with small, imaginative, sample successes, the more conservative
thinkers around here - so conscripted by tradition and chronic scarcity -
will grow curious, take notice, kind of like Tom Sawyer painting his fence.

RaRa it seems, will begin soon.