We woke up early Sunday morning to get the word out. Teaming up with tree nursery workers, we fanned out in teams of three or four and visited churches. We talked about the importance of trees, which of course wasn't lost on any of these people. We also informed them that because there had been three days of no rain, the delivery wouldn't happen on Monday morning unless the dry spell was broken. I've never actually been affected by a lack of rain before in my life. Supposedly a few years ago in Seattle was one of the worst droughts the city had ever seen, but the water kept flowing out of my tap the same as ever. Here, just three days without rainfall is enough to disrupt the normal flow of life, and everyone feels it.
Unfortunately, the rain didn't come Sunday afternoon as we had expected. So the livrezon was delayed, and we came up with other plans. Not far from Dezam is a place called Saut d'Eau, literally "jump of water."
A couple of weeks ago I received a care package from my home church, Seattle Mennonite. Among the goodies were a stack of letters written on recycled squares of paper. One of them was from Jennifer Delanty, whose children I taught in Sunday school. Last year, when Jennifer found out I was going to Haiti, she was very excited, and recommended a book to me called Quitting America. It's by a civil rights lawyer named Randall Robinson, who has fought many years for reparations for slavery. In the last few years, he got so fed up with the cynical politics of race in the Unites States that he up and left to live on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, the birthplace of his wife. Quitting America is a challenging, and sometimes angry book. It has a whole chapter of righteous indignation towards the misery of Haiti, and America's complicity in it. Definitely not for the faint of heart, the proudly white, or the blindly patriotic. And while part of me (regretfully) was put off by his very strong rhetoric and blanket statements, what he said had a ring of truth to it. In the end, while I knew I couldn't truly understand his point of view, I felt like some of my reasons for moving to the Caribbean overlapped with his.
So I was delighted to see a letter from Jennifer included in the care package, the last line of which struck me deeply: "you walk on hallowed ground!"
She's right. I feel it often here. But I rarely feel it as strongly as at Saut d'Eau, which is a vodou pilgrimage site. Each year during Easter week, and at a couple of other times, massive crowds pack into the steep hills that surround the falls, digging their feet into the mud to experience the mystical healing powers believed to be there. Plus it's beautiful and refreshing.
And as always, Gabriela stole the show:
