I’ll be heading home soon

Their lives are built on poorly constructed roads. Or dust and rocks. Their lives are shaky, just like their homes made of blocks with too much sand, too little cement.

They work so hard, but are not employed. Not in the way we imagine. With job sites and time cards. Their work begins before the sun peeks above the horizon. In cities or villages or in clusters of homes far away in remote mountains.

Cleaning. Searching out food. Cooking what little they have. Sending children to school.

If they’re lucky.

The lives of the Haitian people are tender and unstable most days, but they are not unrooted.

No. The people of Haiti rise each morning, stretching sore muscles into another long day, anchored in the history and tradition of a people who won freedom from slavery while they still were in chains.

I am grateful to have been “home” in the U.S. for all these months. I still have a few presentations to make, even a sermon I am writing for my own home church.

But as September winds into October, I am preparing to head back to my other home.

Where people struggle daily with poverty and hunger and political and social instability.

And once again, I will join forces with them as they work together to make their lives better.

The fight for Haiti’s independence from slavery began 225 years ago, but the spirit of revolution still lights in their eyes.

Please keep all of us in prayers, friends.

Quiet. So quiet.

It feels like a confession. It has been nine months since my last blog post.
And I feel terrible about that. Truly.
I’ve been in the U.S. since May. I’m traveling to visit Presbyterian congregations and other groups about our work in Haiti. Even though I have traveled back to my U.S. home more than many mission co-workers are able to do, a multi-month stint here is — at best — startling.
I have just now found my first-country rhythm. And it has been busy. I spend a lot of time on the highways and country roads traveling to visit churches in several states.
I am spending a great deal of time with family, which is precious, but it makes me miss my Haiti friends and “family.” I am afraid I’m losing what little ability I had in Haitian Creole.
And I am trying to keep up with what is going on back in Haiti at the same time.
So about mid-way through my time here in the U.S., my best friend and I headed out on a week of respite. We traveled to the southwestern tip of Virginia to a state park where we spent our days relaxing at the pool, visiting small towns whose names end with Gap and enjoying the wildlife that appear in laid-back rural regions.
A handful of deer grazed on the lawn of the cabin where we stayed. Wild turkeys roamed through the wooded areas. A small turtle who crossed the road declined my efforts to direct him (her?) to safety.
In other words, in the all the hustle and bustle of traveling and speaking and preaching and praying, this week of respite was a true vacation.
And all of it gave me time and space to remember that I haven’t made a blog post in nine months! Unacceptable!
And in that realization, I thought about the title I gave this blog years ago when I traveled to Haiti to live and work.
The long way home.
I am so grateful to have two countries I now can call home.
I am grateful for the families who have taken me in during my journey — people who are in one moment strangers, and by the time they show you where to find the extra toilet paper, you suddenly are close friends!
This whole journey has been like that. I traveled into a foreign country and was received with great kindness and joy.
Then I traveled back to my home country, and strangers here receive me the same way.
It reminds me again and again how this Christian gig works — first we are strangers, then we find connections.
First God loved us, and then we connect with all those others who he loves.
And in the quietness of Natural Tunnel State Park, in a place so slow that wildlife checks us out as whether we should roam freely, I remembered all of this again.
I’m back to blogging. My stories are about Haiti and about this wonderful home of ours.
I’m grateful to be among you all.

Shinay’s story

An acolyte pours water over the priest’s hands before the priest consecrates the bread and wine for Holy Communion.

I watch this tiny part of the Mass with as much intensity as I do any of it. It is no less important than the consecration, the serving or even the consumption of the Body and Blood of Christ.

We come to serve with clean hands.

In rural Haiti, where there is no place with running water to clean up before eating, I often am approached with someone holding a pitcher, a sliver of soap and a container to catch the stream of water as I rinse my hands. The person holding the pitcher and soap pours enough water so I can wet my hands, then offers the soap, takes it back and pours again for me to rinse.

The water is cool against my warm hands. The pourer watches carefully so he or she does not waste water. As I shake my hands dry, I always feel the emotion of this ordinary moment.

It is intimate, deeply personal, almost holy.

The first time someone poured water for my private hand washing, I had just arrived at Papa Luc Celestin’s home. I felt overwhelmed with all that being an honored guest entails, and I still was struggling to deserve such attention.

Papa Luc’s son, Herns, was holding a pitcher of water when he brought a small tub to me while I sat at the head of the humble table filled with warm Creole food. He motioned for me to hold my hands under the stream of cool water. I rinsed my hands, lifting my head to watch Herns carefully instruct me. He handed me a clean towel, and when I turned to the table, already I was overcome with emotion.

Thus began my missionary training.

Serving another is not a skill. It is simply providing what is needed in the moment.

Throughout this country, when I have the chance to eat in the most rural area, I welcome the chance to help someone else wash and rinse his or her hands.

Service is not an obligation. It is an honor.

And when we all have shaken the last of the clear water from our fingers, we clasp hands to pray and then to enjoy God’s bounty. Together.

I’ve grown accustomed to seeing my mother on a regular basis. Like anytime I catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror. She’s with me wherever I go, perhaps even more closely since she died in 1998.

What’s more surprising to me is seeing Dad. Not in a mirror, but in the expression of a friend here, in a chuckle or in the barely noticeable limp of a hard-working man walking past me.

He’s been gone even longer. He died in 1990. But by all accounts, he got to Haiti before I did.

I told the story again today. I enjoyed lunch with two farmers from high in the mountains above the Artibonite River and a colleague who lives near me in Port-au-Prince. Andre Ceus and Lormè Previlus came to the capital city on business, and the four of us caught up at my house for lunch.

Fabienne asked me about my home in Virginia, and I explained that I grew up on a farm in the countryside of Virginia, in a great valley. I went on to tell them that my father had been a farmer, even though he had been wounded in World War II and lost his right leg below the knee. Farming was his love, so he worked hard to continue the way of life he’d been born to.

“My father had the biggest garden ever,” I exaggerated. Slightly. “And I hated working in the garden.”

Dad’s gardens encompassed a good quarter acre. At least that’s how large it looked when I was 10 and it was summertime and I was expected to pick beans or pull weeds and the neighbor kids were watching television.

Hated. It.

They laughed as expected, then Lormè, a man about 45 but looking older, leaned over the table and gently reminded me in his native language: “But it is the garden that gives you life.”

I nodded, taken aback just a bit by the sound of my father’s voice speaking Creole.

Dad worked a full-time job and farmed on the side. Money was tight in the ‘60s and ‘70s. That garden provided much of our food during the summer, and we enjoyed potatoes from it long into winter.

“I liked eating from the garden,” I replied. “I just didn’t like working it.”

“Your father is smiling at you now,” Fabienne said with a smile of her own.

And I had to agree. My life’s calling has brought me to Haiti where I work with men like Andre and Lormè and Papa Luc, all of them farmers who depend on their land to provide food and extra income for their families. Like my father, they cherish the land they toil. Like my father, they keep their spirits up even in the toughest times by telling stories  — and listening, too.

And like my father, to them, family and farming are one in the same.

Lormè isn’t the first to bring my father to mind here. Papa Luc Celestin and his family hosted me for the first month I lived in Haiti. He, too, farmed, worked in carpentry and walked with a limp. “If your father was alive, would he visit Haiti?” he once asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I know I would have a lot of questions from him.”

And I would. And he is here. And he is smiling.

And you know what, Dad?

So am I. I am eating from gardens as beautiful and as essential as yours. I am so grateful for all.

“You keep using that word,” goes the brilliant quote from Inigo Montoyo in the film, “The Princess Bride.”

” I don’t think it means what you think it means.”

And no, I have not been saying “inconceivable” at every turn. The word that keeps coming to my mind and entering into my conversations is “accompaniment.”

I’m new at this missionary business. Feeling called and doing the work of the called are worlds apart. Just like everything I’ve learned about my life and this new, astounding, baffling, magnetically attractive culture in which I’m living.

I’m here to be with you, my brothers and sisters. And when I am fortunate enough to host groups of short-term missioners visiting rural Haiti, I hear myself preaching “accompaniment.”

We are here to be with, not to do for. We come to walk alongside our friends here. We come to share our lives and our stories and find common ground.

A recent trip took us (seven people from the Presbytery of the James, two drivers, a translator and me) far into the mountains where we met with some of those friends. We had many excellent, deep conversations, both among ourselves, (we foreigners) and with the leaders and members of the farmer organizations we spent time with.

We talked about healthy giving. We talked about ways to help without hurting. We talked about these books we’ve all read, like Toxic Charity and When Helping Hurts.

We talked about finding ways to accompany the people here in Haiti.

I used that words so much I finally looked up the definition. You know, just in case I was WAY off the mark. The first definition concerns a musical accompaniment, as in adding the piano to the vocal parts. The second had to do with complementary additions — as in cooking.

Then, I found this. And I’m sticking with it. Because, dear Inigo, I think we’re onto something. Check out definition No. 3.

ac·com·pa·ni·ment

(ə-kŭm′pə-nē-mənt, ə-kŭmp′nē-)

n.

1. MusicA vocal or instrumental part that supports another, often solo, part.
2. Something, such as a situation, that accompanies something else; a concomitant.
3. Something added for embellishment, completeness, or symmetry; complement.

Yes! It is about completeness.

I live and work in Haiti not to be the sole helper. I am here to be completed.

And, if you should come to be with, you will be on that path as well.

Because God is in this mix, as always. He is here for the journey, for the discussions, for the hard questions. And He is here when we visitors exchange funny looks with our hosts because we often don’t understand one another.

And only God will complete any of us.

The most excellent, conceivable part is that he puts us in touch with one another toward that end.

Today is Ash Wednesday. The beginning of Lent. And this day I begin to practice mindfulness. Part of that is examining the words I use, especially in nurturing beautiful relationships with my family and friends across a great sea and beyond a great cultural divide.

Look here for more of this journey.

Blessings abound.