Gratitude, Loss, and Music
Rica's home suffered extensive damage during the earthquake. With your support, one week later she and her family finished building their temporary shelter.
Dear friends,
I write from Port-au-Prince, after spending seven days in Petit Trou. In Petit Trou there was great sadness, pain, and loss. There was acceptance, but not resignation. There was joy in the small things, pride in the chance to help neighbors, and a consistent expression of gratitude for life, as difficult as life may be in this moment.
I am deeply grateful to you who are so generously fueling the relief activities I witnessed over the past week. With your support, we’ve infused over $65,000 into community institutions, with much more to follow in the coming days. These funds have been shared directly with families and employees in urgent need or have gone to locally led initiatives focused on housing, food, and water. In both cases these funds have gone through local partners.
Early next week we’ll provide a more detailed description of how our response is unfolding, but for now, from the airport, I share a note on what it was like to be in Petit Trou as a person and a friend.
In short, it was gut-wrenching.
Long-time participants in our work know how personal our relationships in Petit Trou are. Newer supporters may not. For those in the latter group, who may have come upon our organization because of the earthquake, the following context may be helpful.
We are not a disaster relief organization. We have supported community development in Petit Trou de Nippes, through overlapping, locally led programs, for over 30 years. Our long-term relationships are institutional, with formal commitments and locally led strategic plans. But they are also deeply personal. Since the morning of the earthquake our partners in education, agriculture, community health, and girls’ empowerment have engaged with great courage and capacity in a direct response to meet the urgent needs of their community.
To talk with friends, to see their battered homes and listen to their fears, to sit in the courtyards where many now sleep beneath tarps, to share a sip of rum as aftershocks continue and as mosquitoes thrive amid the standing water that lingers after rains, was heartbreaking. To sit with the doctors and nurses at the clinic, and to witness them treat patients in stifling heat under tarps and tents, was to unmistakably feel the injustice that pervades our world. To play chess with the children in the school courtyard, to hear their questions about the earthquake, and to feel their uncertainty about what comes next, was to understand that while our work here is founded in the belief that we are one human family, we have such a long way to go to reflect that ideal. Our challenges and our poverties remain so very different.
And finally, music.
To hear music drift in at night while falling asleep in my tent, a simple camping tent that is now a coveted resource in Petit Trou, was to understand what kind of power, faith, and courage exist in this country we so gratefully consider a part of our lives and identities.
As the Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat has noted, resilience is a tricky concept when applying it to another. In short, “Haitian people are very resilient, but it doesn’t mean they can suffer more than other people.”
This truth is profound and important as we celebrate the strength and light we see in our friends. No one in Petit Trou is used to this, or in some way built to handle this. The beauty in the music, in the rhythms of the hand drums and the harmonies of the acapella spirituals floating down from the hills, is not an indicator that those who are singing are doing alright.
It’s an indicator that they are deeply aware of the challenges behind and ahead, and that in singing together, they are sticking together, one day, one night, one song at a time. The people of Petit Trou, whether formal institutional leaders, or leaders in their own families and neighborhoods, are steadfast in their work today. In our own humble way, we remain steadfast as well.
We continue to be grateful for your support, and we know we can count on you as needs evolve in the coming weeks and months.
I hope you’ll join us for a discussion on the 12th, and please look out for a more detailed update on our response early next week.
With so much gratitude,
Wynn Walent, Executive Director
