When the Thing You Resist is the Thing You Really Need

It’s nearly two weeks since I left Petion-Ville. I resisted the move, even after hearing gunshots at the gate, because I’m the kind of human being who clings to what she knows.

I had just learned how things worked in Petion-Ville; how to find the key that I needed in the warden’s bunch that I carried, how to change the water dispenser and how to activate the electric pump when the water tanks are empty. I’m not good at maintenance matters at home and I’m even worse at them here. I was determined to learn but my eagerness made me clumsy; I tripped over or spilled everything I approached.

So, I had finally mastered a few basic tasks, giving me some degree of control over my own environment, or so I imagined. Then word came that I would be moving to Tabarre, the school and rehabilitation centre where I work. The move was for my own safety while my housemate was away but I wasn’t one bit happy. I felt like a witness protection scheme criminal moving between safe houses.

I sent a WhatsApp to my boss Gena saying, ‘I know you’re juggling and things change quickly, but I find all of this unsettling’. She replied, ‘That’s how it is here. We have to let go of our need to always know what will happen next’. That’s Mayo for, ‘Get on with it now, Lily White’.

The first night I shared a room with two Haitian girls who grew up in the orphanage that Gena runs. My face fell when I realised that I wouldn’t have a room of my own, like I did in Petion-Ville. I lived alone before I came to Haiti, apart from a short stay with my parents before I left. I really value my privacy. But privacy isn’t an option here. Here, you say, ‘Hello. Nice to meet you’ to someone new. Then you move in with them and hang your knickers on their line to dry.

The girls were friendly and we communicated through gestures. They pointed to the air-conditioning unit and seemed to ask if I wanted it left on overnight. I nodded. At 3 a.m. I had to climb out of bed, put on extra layers and use my towel as a blanket because it was bitterly cold. The girl next to me wore a woolly hat as she slept. I went back to bed bewildered.

I woke up the next morning to see the same girl remove her hat discreetly under her blanket. It occurred to me that she might have set the temperature lower than usual for me, for my comfort. Now she was trying not to offend me with her discomfort. The night before, after lights out and before the polar winds, I heard her chatting to herself. I only realised she was praying when I heard her say mèsi, mèsi – thank you, thank you.

By Sunday night, Lily White was contrite. Tabarre had transformed me and it was hard to say how. Maybe it was finally feeling physically safe. The low-level terror was gone and my brain cells and emotions rejoiced at their sudden liberation. ‘We’re back!’, they said. ‘We’re free to process other inputs now, like that Caribbean sunset you’re watching in a rocking chair on a porch. Look at those colours, all light and dark and swirly, like someone splashed pink lemonade on a bad bruise. We didn’t even notice that when you only fed us fear’.

Maybe it was the beautiful, candlelit Mass that I had just attended in the grounds of St. Damien Hospital. Fr. Rick Frechette is the priest here, a Passionist from the US. He’s also a medical doctor and national director of the charity I work for. When things get really difficult here, really violent and desperate, he stays and says, ‘What kind of shepherd would leave when the wolf comes?’ He said Mass that evening and even though I didn’t understand one word of his long Creole sermon, even though I sweated through it in complete linguistic oblivion, I still felt the better of it.

Maybe it was the news coming through of Hurricane Matthew’s devastating impact in the parts of Haiti that I couldn’t see but that are still in my new neighbourhood. 1,000 deaths and US $1 billion dollars of damage at the last reckoning. When I read that, when I started to comprehend the magnitude of the catastrophe here, I felt ashamed of thinking and writing the words ‘poor me’ on the eve of it. I wanted to edit those words out of my first blog post immediately but I let them stand as a lesson to myself. They’re my first milestone on the path to proper solidarity.

Maybe it was the conversation I had with Annabelle, the praying girl. In her hesitant English she told me that she didn’t know her own parents, that she had grown up in Gena’s orphanage and considered her to be her mother. She said that she didn’t miss her parents but that sometimes, when she saw a mother and child together, she felt sad. She joined her arms and made a cradling motion when she said that and I felt overwhelmed by compassion for the child she once was. Her smile is radiant and she’s always smiling. When I tell her that, she says, ‘It’s because I have a happy heart’.

Whatever the reason, I went to bed on Sunday night with a whole new attitude. ‘Don’t be the person who complains about mosquito bites when people have lost their homes’, I told myself. ‘Don’t be the person who sends uppity messages to her boss when she’s nursing a sick child in hospital and dealing with the aftermath of a hurricane. Be the girl who has no parents and very few possessions but who still shares her small space with good grace and goes to sleep whispering, ‘thank you’. Be that serene soul for a week. If you can’.