24424: Hermantin(News)Despite situation, Haitians proud and hopeful (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Posted on Sun, Feb. 27, 2005



Despite situation, Haitians proud and hopeful

BY JOE MOZINGO
jmozingo@herald.com

PORT-AU-PRINCE-- Haiti was in a panic. President Jean-Bertrand Aristide had
fled the country days before. Men fought in the street. Drivers blew over
curbs and highway medians in hysteria. Resentment, rage and fear collided
from all directions and left corpses littered on the streets.

Father Rick, a priest and doctor from Connecticut, kept body bags in the cab
of his pickup. One morning, he came upon a man splayed out half-naked on a
road, his head crushed by traffic. Passersby gave the body a wincing glance.
Drivers swerved around him.

With death such a personal act, his departure was so humiliating, so public
-- a father or husband or son finishing his life as a mess to be cleaned off
the highway.

The priest knelt in the road and gave a prayer, a strangely intimate break
in the furor of the day. Then he and his colleagues gently put the man in a
bag and lifted him over to the side of the road. The morgue wasn't
functioning so there was nothing else to do.

''At least everyone is not looking at him now,'' said Father Rick, as he
drove away to his clinic in the slums. ``I could drive around all day
picking up bodies. It's such a culture of death here. It's everywhere.''

Even now, a year after Aristide entered exile, life and death in Haiti
remain stripped of any insulation -- raw and entwined filaments both
terrifying and exhilarating.

Witness a Vodou ceremony late one night in a decrepit building behind a
carwash in the capital.

A houngan priest breathes fire from a Vodka bottle and women in red dresses
dance and chant on the cracked-earth floor as if they were guided by one
nervous system, losing themselves to the furious beat of the drums. A
generator rumbles and rain pounds on the tin roof as their dresses flare and
flicker like flames in a ring of fire.

The energy pulses and drops like a fever, and their faces fill with fear,
and then playfulness and then rapture, as one by one they quiver and open up
to the spirits, the loas.

Visitors are often surprised to find Haiti's people are not broken-down and
despondent -- but instead exuberant and proud and hopeful.

They laugh hard, cry hard, play hard. And they perpetually feel their
blessed country will soon emerge from centuries of misery.

It is an infectious spirit.

''When you know your day is full of nothing, you find anything and you're
jubilant,'' said Father Rick. ``Here you could find an absolutely cruddy
piece of plastic on the ground and say, `This is my lucky day, I can plug
that hole in my roof.'

``For all the physical emptiness here, there is tremendous spiritual and
emotional satisfaction. They're alive in a way that many people in consumer
cultures are not.''

In a shanty by Port-au-Prince's seaport, a little boy with no pants or shoes
gleefully flies a kite made of a shredded trash bag and sticks. His mother
watches through a crack in the door. The floor is wet from the rains that
routinely swamp the area with mud and sewage. She nibbles a piece of clay to
calm the hunger and give her baby some more breast milk.

In the slum of Cité Soleil, warring gangs turn a neighborhood into a
no-man's land. Burned houses line an empty highway that no one dares to use.
Men are arguing in the marketplace overlooking the road. One is threatening
to pull a gun.

As the sun is dipping into the bay, two paper-white apparitions come down
the road. Everyone looks down in awe.

The ghosts are in fact Belgian missionaries, a elderly husband and wife out
for an afternoon stroll. The woman wears a yellow dress. The man wears a
straw beach hat and shorts and a big knife in his belt.

He demonstrates how he thwarted a thief the week before. 'I put my knife on
his neck and went, `excuse me,' '' he says.

''We have no problems here,'' his wife adds. As they walk on, the locals
shake their heads in disbelief, as entertained as people get in this part of
town.

Downtown, a wedding becomes a tragicomedy that could send a first-world
couple to marriage counseling for the rest of their lives.

The groom is poor, from the northern mountains. Now living in the capital,
he has to pay for a wedding to impress his bride's family, who suspects he
might be a deadbeat. He drives a jitney and hustles for extra cash.

By December, he has everything set up. He borrows a nice black suit and
crisp, white shirt and has them cleaned and pressed. On the big day, he
rents a minivan from a friend and begins transporting his vast extended
family from various suburbs to the crumbling old church downtown.

All goes smoothly until he comes upon a roadblock of armed men and burning
tires. He tries to turn around but is trapped by other traffic. He sighs,
knowing this will not end well. A kid with a gun orders him and his
relatives out of the car. He watches the minivan get doused with gasoline
and go up in flames.

The gunmen let them go, and he and his aunts run to the church, several
miles away. They won't be able to pick up the rest of the family. His mom
and his sister will have to miss out.

At the church, the bride's family gets to talking. Where is he? Is he going
to ditch this marriage? They nod knowingly. By the time he arrives at the
church -- sweating profusely, his white shirt blackened by tire soot -- they
have come to their conclusion: He is a loser.

The ceremony is a fiasco. The bride and groom literally flee the church when
it was done. The reception is canceled. The city is shut down by gunmen.

When the family finally gets together for a party two days later, there is
only one thing they can do: howl and cry in laughter.