When Vocations Call, Who Answers

Posted on 03/13/2011 by paulefallon

This piece was presented as an editorial commentary on WBUR in March, 2002.  I recalled it when I read a recent NY Times article about he unfolding sex-abuse scandal in Ireland, which I discuss in a companion piece.

There is a crisis of vocations in the Catholic Church.  As Cardinal Law decimates the ranks of local priests in light of sexual abuse revelations, who will replace them?  I recently met a seminarian, and I was troubled by what I found.

I met ‘Steve’ at a gay night spot.  We exchanged small talk and telephone numbers.  Steve told me he was a philosophy student and an artist, looking for that special someone.  Several phone conversations and a dinner date later, Steve’s story was quite different. He is not a graduate student at BC; he is studying for the priesthood at St. John’s Seminary.

Steve is in his thirties.  He talked about struggling through college and holding a series of hourly wage jobs.  He described his dream of being an artist on the coast of Maine.  He wished he had a regular boyfriend.  But his jobs had been dead ends, he never completed a piece of art, and he considered himself ‘unlucky’ in relationships.  Steve was at loose ends when he struck upon the idea of becoming a priest.  His local diocese pays his expenses now, and though he has little money, seminary life is nicer than what he managed on his own.  Once ordained, Steve anticipates an even higher standard of living.

Dinner conversation centered on his vision as an artist, and his attraction to men.  He admitted that most of the seminarians were gay, although “no one ever talks about it, especially with the scandal going on.”  He spoke of his studies only once, how much he enjoyed teaching morality to junior high school students.  But his enthusiasm alarmed me when he continued by saying, “I have always found young boys and men to be so beautiful.  I have always been attracted to them.”

The application requirements of St. John’s Seminary include interviews, psychological testing, and discussions about spirituality, and sexuality.  So how does a sexually active homosexual with an artistic fantasy more vivid than his calling to Christ manage to pass the tests?  I fear the Church evaluates their seminary applicants with the same blind eye that continually found John Geoghan and other abusive men ‘fit’ for priestly work.

When I dropped Steve off, St. John’s, the imposing building and elegant lobbies graced by portraits of Pope Paul VI and Cardinal Law struck me as an ironic place to prepare for priestly vows.  Although diocesan priests do not take a vow of poverty, such as Franciscans do, there is something unsavory about a person going into the priesthood for creature comforts.  Perhaps their vow of celibacy is equally incongruous.

In my 1950’s youth, priests were revered for sacrificing spouse and family in order to serve God.  But these days sacrifice is not so highly regarded.  People can lead lives of service without having to deny their essential aspects.  This makes the priesthood a pragmatic choice only for a man like Steve, a guy with few prospects and no qualms about teaching morality in the afternoon then disguising his identity in search of men at night.

As long as the Church extracts the price of celibacy from those who wish to be priests, the dilemma of finding qualified vocations will increase.  But celibacy’s harm is greater than simply deterring talented men from entering the priesthood.  It actually offers a haven for men of conflicted or deviant sexuality; men willing to wish away their sexual selves in exchange for positions of respect and influence greater than they can achieve elsewhere.

A vow of celibacy does not drain a man of his sexual desire, it merely denies it.  The ongoing scandal of abuse by priests painfully illustrates that when the desire overwhelms the vow, heinous crimes and irreparable suffering follow.

Handing abuse claims against current priests to outside authorities is a necessary response to past sexual abuse by priests.  But the Church must do more.  It must guard against future abuse.  It must scour its own training grounds to separate those who deserve sanctuary to follow a true calling from those merely craving the comfort of seminary walls.  Then it must put forth a call to those currently denied the opportunity for priestly vocations – woman, openly gay men, and married people.

Diocesan priests are not monks and men whose vocation is to escape the world rather than to serve it have no business being diocesan priests.  To ordain them diminishes the vow of priesthood, and increases the risk of further abuse to come.

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Lessons Learned from a Welfare Queen

Posted on 03/06/2011 by paulefallon

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is getting a lot of traction calling out public sector employees as 21st century welfare queens. Thirty-five years ago Ronald Reagan popularized the phrase during the 1976 presidential campaign, spinning elaborate tales of women, mostly black, who abused the welfare system.  The image of profligate black women fleecing hard working Americans played well; ‘welfare queen’ is a term that invites a visceral response.  Reagan eventually won two terms as president; the parties tripped over themselves to enact welfare reform, and when President Clinton ended ‘Welfare as we know it’ in 1996 by replacing Aid for Families with Dependent Children with the stop-gap TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families), welfare queens disappeared from public discourse.  But back in their glory days, 1977 and 1978, I had the good fortune to know one very well. 

I spent that academic year as a VISTA volunteer in Levelland, Texas, providing housing and energy conservation assistance to the poor and elderly of the South Plains.  This required a disparate set of skills – absorbing arcane government eligibility regulations, palling with cowboy booted USDA county agents, learning Spanish, designing solar hot water heaters, driving 2,000 miles per month, praising the cornbread and Jell-O salads at the endless covered dish luncheons, shooting a gun (my first and only time), downing Tequila shots, getting stoned, and dispensing hundreds of thousands of dollars in energy and housing assistance funds to the polyglot of whites, blacks and Latinos who scrape a living from this broad swath of earth dominated by huge corporate farms.  The fields were beautiful, miles of speckled white cotton and brilliant yellow sunflowers undulating in an immense inland sea; the towns were ugly, squat and pale; the people friendly and accommodating.

One day I canvassed the black neighborhood north of town, across the tracks, within the shadowy stench of the soybean processing plant, to tell people about the energy improvement / heating bill assistance available. I knocked on the door of a wide, narrow house with a long front porch.  A black woman answered, medium height, medium weight, medium expression, a few curler papers stuck to the ends of her damp hair. 

Emmer Lee Whitfield leaned against the door, listened for a few moments, nodded, then spoke. “I could use that. This here house is so drafty and my bills is so high.”  I wrote down pertinent information. It took a long time. Emmer Lee reported that she was disabled; she had two high school aged children.  She received food stamps and AFDC and SSI and Medicaid; her son was part of a CETA job training program, her daughter was in a different program.  Within ten minutes Emmer Lee rattled off the details of these programs with impressive fluency.  She knew the income limits, eligibility requirements, funding cycles.  I distrusted her.  She didn’t look disabled, her house was no palace, but it was better than most on the unpaved street, she was clearly smart enough to work.  I took all of information and left, resolved to find some way to disqualify her from receiving yet another government program.

Back in the office, I asked about Emmer Lee Whitfield.  Everyone smiled knowingly.  She was a professional welfare recipient, receiving virtually every form of assistance our Community Action Agency offered.  And even though it galled me, she qualified and received energy conservation assistance.  As the year progressed I ran into Emmer Lee from time to time.  She was pleasant and soft spoken but having decided she was a fraud, I gave her little opportunity to justify herself.

The next round of energy conservation assistance funds arrived with more complicated eligibility requirements.  One provision required forming committees of local citizens charged with evaluating and disbursing the funds.  The committees had to include members from the community at large, the utility companies and the ‘target population’, a bureaucratic euphemism for poor people.  My job was to assemble and facilitate these committees in seven counties, which meant a meeting pretty much every night.  When I considered who might serve in Hockley County, of which Levelland is county seat, Emmer Lee Whitfield topped my list. 

In a typical meeting of a Community Energy Conservation Group, four to six folding tables and chairs sit in a square.  The utility executive arrives in a suit; as does the community member that I cajoled from our board. They sit next to each other in the front of the room.  Other representatives of these groups sit nearby and take notes.  I sit to the side with my huge stack of applications.  The target community representatives sit in the far corner in their work clothes. I describe an applicant; pass the paperwork around the table.  The executives scan and comment.  The target representatives nod.  Whoever the suits recommend gets the money.

But the first meeting in Levelland was different.  The Vice President of the utility company set himself in the main seat.  Emmer Lee Whitfield came in and placed her purse right next to him.  She wore a shirtwaist dress of satin sheen, small pumps and a single set of pearls.  With the natural order of the room disrupted, the rest of the group found chairs as they could.  I started through the applications.  Emmer Lee looked them over first.  She checked the name and provided an opinion.  “Bertha Mae really needs this because husband is laid up… Wanda’s boyfriend is working nights on a rig down in Denver City, they are doing fine…Millie doesn’t need the cash so much, but she could use some repairs that she can’t manage now that her son has left home.”  She commented on every black applicant and a good number of the whites and Latinos as well.  Emboldened, the other target representatives spoke up.  The meeting took longer than usual, but when we were done we had actually allocated the money according to an understanding of need much deeper than the application forms could describe.

I walked home that night, past the quiet courthouse square and the bank sign flashing time and temperature.  Eighty-two degrees at 10 pm on a quiet May night.  The sky never exhibited more stars.  In two months I would be leaving; I was ready to go.  Hopefully I had touched some people during my tenure, but that night it was me who witnessed an event that would shape my perspective forever; a woman of extraordinary ability at the top of her game.  Emmer Lee Whitfield was the most accomplished welfare recipient I ever met, and even if it is not a skill we condone, I had to applaud her ability, a poor black woman in a backwater of our country with scant education and few prospects. In 2011, a well dressed articulate black woman sitting next to an executive might be accepted as an important member of the proceedings, but in Levelland, Texas, 1978, she was brazenly out of place. 

I believe Emmer Lee Whitfield understood the options that life presented her with a clarity few of us can claim, and she understood that her best opportunities lay in extracting the most from the welfare system.  I am confident that without welfare, Emmer Lee would have survived; perhaps she would have even exceeded the limits that the welfare life imposed.  But I acknowledge her decision to be a welfare queen as a rational one.  Each of us, every day, absorbs the world around us, assesses our strengths, our opportunities, and determines how to engage with the world.  The systems our society has established, whether they be Wall Street or welfare, are key factors in these decisions.

The principle lesson I learned in my year in VISTA was almost the opposite of what I expected.  It was not a lesson of altruism or virtue.  It was the stark, Ayn Randian reality that “All people act in their self interest” and the corollary acceptance that “Self interest is always the best possible motive for action.”  The magic of realizing this reality in the context of a VISTA year is that it begs the question of what constitutes self-interest.  I believe Emmer Lee Whitfield acted in her best interest, very astutely, as a welfare queen.

Fast forward to 2011 and we have Scott Walker facing off the unions in Madison and Chris Christie stirring venom in Trenton, demanding that the ‘welfare queens’ of the public sector forego collective bargaining rights and accept the insecurities that we pension-less, seniority-less, private sector employees have learned to endure. 

Like so many points of tension, this is a debate about self-interest.  Out of fear, the public employees perceive their self-interest lies in the status quo.  Proponents of less government envision collective benefits from lower taxes and they rattle the taxpayer’s sense of injustice to strip benefits enjoyed by a dwindling few. Each group defines self interest in a narrow, niggardly way, fomenting division by defining a limited resource pie that must be sliced into winners and losers.

No one acknowledges how the systems we create twist individual self-interest out of whack with broader objectives.  Having had the good fortune to know a woman who made clear, rational decisions and ended up a welfare queen, I know that our conflicts about competing self-interests will continue until we change the tenor of the debate.  First we must define the collective interest, and then develop political and economic systems that align individual interests with the common good.  Each individual will also always act in his or her best interest, and I think that is good.  How individual interests reinforce the collective interest; that is what defines us as a society.

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Yoga Among the Chrisitians

Posted on 02/27/2011 by paulefallon

In Haiti I practice yoga first thing in the morning.  I claim a spot on a concrete slab at the far end of the mission house grounds.  I face the sea. The sun rises; the warmth of the day climbs; fishermen drift past in their dugout canoes. I move through the familiar sequence of Bikram poses.  I concentrate on my breath; my body grows limber; I come alive.  Practicing yoga in Haiti is nothing like it is in Boston, where a session is a full ninety minutes in a hot room (hotter than Haiti) with a diligent instructor.  Here I do a half hour, perhaps, of stretching and breathing. The familiar dialogue runs through my head.  I could force myself to a more rigorous workout, but, Haiti being Haiti, I am content with less.

By the time I finish with the warm-up and move on to the balance poses, others stir.  They climb out the dorm room or their tents, head for the bathroom, pour coffee, move with the quiet stiffness of early morning.  No one says anything, but their eyes puzzle over my arched back, my extended leg, my locked knee. I focus straight towards the sea, but I feel their eyes on me; another curiosity in this exotic place.

There are three types of people at the mission house.  There are the mega-Christians, and I mean Chrisitans.  They have morning prayer and evening prayer, and bible study and every other word out of their mouths praises God and his work.  They believe that God directs everything in the world.  They come to Haiti to convert people and don’t spend time doing rudimentary things like building houses or teaching children to read.  They are here to spread the Word.  I find it ironic that these people come to Haiti, where if God had a plan it certainly isn’t playing out very well.  Yet I understand that precisely because conditions are so meager, the potential for conversation is high.  I interact with these missionaries at my peril.  Still, in moments of feistiness I actually seek them out to parry.  My favorite conversation, late one night, was with a 23 year old Christian from Pennsylvania studying to be a minister.  A strapping kid, serious and cock-sure.  After a twenty minutes of trying to convert me to no avail he said, “Okay, let’s start with all the things we do agree on.  First, that man is evil and is born into sin.”  I looked at this guy, less than half my age, and asked straight out, “Have you ever seen a baby? Can you tell me that a human baby is evil or has any sin?”  It was all downhill from there; no one’s convictions budged after more than an hour’s volley.  Still it was tremendous fun.

Next are what I call the functional Christians.  They believe Jesus is the Son of God and all the basic tenets, but they come to Haiti to help improve the lot of the Haitians in the present.  These folks have big hearts and generous spirits; they understand human frailty and may even admit to a few faults themselves.  They are here to work on their own Christian souls, to live out their Christian values.  They may believe in the next world, but are firmly grounded in this one.

The third type of person at the mission house is me.  I am the only person who is not a Christian, unless I bring one of my children, in which case we become a pair of infidels.  I actually refer to myself as an infidel when I am Haiti. It is the perfect moniker.

I was irked when I first understood that virtually all missionaries in Haiti are religious.  Then I realized my annoyance was displaced.  The Christians everywhere.  The airport is full of shiny groups in matching T-shirts emblazoned with fish signs that spread out to every corner of this deserving land.  True, some are blinded by soul conversion, but many more are doing good work, and if I suspect their motives are less than pure, that is beside the point.  The presence of the Christians is not annoying, it is the absence of everybody else. Where are the people who don’t have conversion quotas?  Where are the people who can come to Haiti and lend a hand without an agenda to inflict on the Haitian people?  Where are the liberals?  Home writing checks for causes, I presume.  They sure as hell are not at Mission of Hope.

And so I accept that being in Haiti means being surrounded by Christians. Which really is not so bad; they are considerate, polite, and don’t make a lot of late night noise.  I am intrigued by the surety of their convictions.  The longer I live the less sure I am of the world, while these folks have all the answers. Actually, they have only one answer – Jesus Christ.  But since He is the answer to any question, they have covered all the bases.  We have enough common ground in our commitment to Haiti to handle a good deal of conversation and we are respectful enough to avoid anything controversial.  Unless I bait them, it is not hard to steer clear of politics or creationism, and they are wary enough of my appellation as infidel to avoid any particulars of my life back in the States. 

But there is the yoga – they can’t help but see the yoga.  I know they are intrigued, a few comment, but mostly my morning yoga is the daily assertion that, “I am here with you, but I am not of you.”

On September 20, 2010 Albert Mohler, the President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, posted an essay on his blog about how yoga is irreconcilable with Christianity.  “When Christians practice yoga, they must either deny the reality of what yoga represents or fail to see the contradictions between their Christian commitments and their embrace of yoga.”  I went to his blog; I read the essay.  I already knew what Albert Mohler would look like, a doughy white guy with great hair and terrific suits, and I already knew that many of his positions would be anathema to me, but regarding the conflict between Christianity and yoga, I admit to being one with Albert Mohler.

He contends that it is possible to do stretch exercises to care for the body, but that it not really yoga. I agree.  He states that yoga begins and ends with an understanding of the body.  I agree.  He even posits that “The physical is the spiritual in yoga, and the exercises and disciplines of yoga are meant to connect with the divine.”  I agree.

Yoga is so much more than exercise.  It is welding the mind body connection; thereby strengthening each.  It ascribes great power to both the body and the mind, power that Christianity denies.  Christianity is hierarchical; the individual is told what to believe by a higher authority.  Believers call this divine revelation.  Non believers call it smooth talking guys with their hands out.  Yoga is not compatible with Christianity because Christianity will not allow an individual to connect with their own being in such a powerful way.  Often, as I struggle with standing head to knee pose, perhaps the most difficult of the Bikram series, I stare at myself in the mirror and the phrase ‘God is within me’ floats through my head.  I have yet to do that pose as a god could, but I continue to improve and some day I may reach that perfection. 

In Jesus Christ, Christians have created a god who took on the form of man.  In yoga, man pursues the form of god.  This is what the Christian missionaries in Haiti confront each morning as I struggle through my postures.  Their ultimate goal is to sit at the right hand of their god.  Mine is to get ever closer to the god already within me.

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Somewhere

Posted on 02/20/2011 by paulefallon

In the opening shot of Sofia Coppola’s most recent movie, Somewhere, the camera sits in a single position revealing about a third of a race track in the California desert.  A car enters the frame, circles around, disappears.  The sound of the engine, off screen, diminishes, grows louder, the car reappears, circles, retreats. The sound of the engine diminishes, grows louder, the car reappears, circles, retreats.  Over and over.  You try to convince yourself that this is interesting.  You’ve just paid $8.00 and dedicated two hours of your life.  But really, it is boring.  Almost annoying.  Finally, just as you are considering leaving, the car stops.  Stephen Dorff steps out and stands in front of the car.  That’s all.

What transpires over the next eighty minutes is more or less more of the same.  Long camera shots on routine, often tedious activities. Stephen Dorff plays Johnny Marco, a somewhat known B-actor living in the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, floating through that period of ennui after a film is complete and before its release.  Apparently he is a big star in Italy but not much thought of here in the US.  He is bored by the twin pole dancers he hires to entertain him in his room.  Or maybe they are doing it for free, because others seem more taken by Johnny Marco than he is by himself, or than the audience is for that matter.  We sit and squirm in our seats, wondering when something is going to happen, not yet comprehending that this is all there is going to be, and it is really quite a lot.  Stephen Dorff is great to look at, a master of being the beautiful man who pretends not to know it, so accustomed to the world falling to his feet, he barely notices.

A young teenage daughter, Elle Fanning, drops in for a cursory parental visit.  She leaves.  The disembodied voice of an estranged wife announces over the phone that she is going away for some time. No notice, no explanation. The young girl is back. This time for longer. Johnny has to keep her until summer camp begins. Perhaps it is two weeks away, perhaps more. Time passes in hiccups.  Father and daughter coexist.  Hard to say who is more mature.  My money is on the daughter.  The awkwardness of too much contact, more than either would have garnered from the custody agreement, gives way to a few laughs. She cramps his style. He doesn’t score as often as he could; she disapproves, with an important stare, of the woman she finds at the breakfast table one morning.  They don’t talk much; there isn’t much to say.  They swim, play paddle tennis, drive around a lot.  The car is really loud.  Their emotional range is stuck as a broken gas gauge.  They appear to register half full, but they are approaching empty.

Finally, on the drive to camp, the daughter cracks a bit. Her mother hasn’t told her when she’ll return. What will happen after camp?  Ongoing life with father doesn’t seem a likely option for either of them.  She climbs on the camp bus; they shout towards each other over the competing engines. Words of support, or regret, or love. We never know.  They can’t hear each other, we can’t hear them.

Back in his room, in the seedy, aching debauchery of Chateau Marmont, everything is the same, except only now we understand what is missing.  The daughter may have been only a minor blip up in life, but she was the only blip.  All is flat again, and after the uptick, the flatness is more oppressive.

There is only one false scene in Somewhere.  The most dramatic scene. Johnny on the phone, apparently with some former triumph, imploring her to revisit, crying out that he is nothing.  At this point, it is stuff we already know.

Johnny checks out of the Chateau Marmont. He gets in his car and drives straight.  Along the freeway, along a secondary highway. Along a rural road. Until he stops his car, gets out and walks.  Straight.  We don’t know where he is going, probably neither does he, but at least he is not going in circles.

After the movie ended I sat in silence.  I felt like Johnny Marco (except for the being beautiful part).  I am a middle-aged single man, an empty nester, my two children off to college.  I pride myself on letting them go, letting them find their own way, giving them enough rope to get into trouble if need be, but never so much they forget they’ve got me for backup when they need it.  But I miss them ferociously, gutturally, with an emptiness that is tangible, sometimes urgent. It gnaws me in odd moments, like the one watching Stephen Dorff walk towards / away from his destination.  Once you have experienced the total immersion of being with, living with, molding and being molded by, your own flesh and blood, your own children, what’s left in life is just a long game trying to retrieve that vitality.  After being a true parent, however poorly, Johnny Marco could not retreat to the craven familiarity of the Chateau Marmont.  Now that my children are gone, I ask myself, over and over, what will I do now?  How will I fill the space they have left in me?  Can I fill the void with any degree of grace or meaning?

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A Tale of Haiti

Posted on 02/12/2011 by paulefallon

When I think if Haiti, the first image that comes to mind is my son Andy and me sitting in our folding chairs wedged against the chain link wrapped boulders that form a sea wall along the beach at Grand Goave.  It is sunset, the tail of a steamy August day that we spent building transitional housing to get families out of tents, followed by a murky swim in the Gulf of Gonave, stroking through the silty grey-green water created by the constant erosion of the Haitian hillsides, to reach the line where the water turns grey-blue.  The transition is crisp; the grey-blue water is both cooler and sweeter then the muddy stuff closer to shore, but hardly refreshing against the pressing heat.  Dinner at the Mission House will not be for another hour or so and we have adopted the habit of cocktail hour to watch the sunset.

The scene is worthy of a resort in any idyllic tropical island. Except, of course, there are no cocktails at the Mission House, so we have nothing to lubricate the imagination.  Except, of course, that we sit in folding chairs propped against boulders instead of in sleek chaises bordering a pool deck.  Except, of course, that the ornamental buoys bobbing on the sea are really empty plastic bottles bunched together to mark the locations of rickety traps below.  Except, of course, that the logs hewn into canoes are not charming set pieces but are the actual boats that Haitians ply out to sea each morning and night in their attempt to eek out a living in this pre-industrial country.  Except, of course, that you have to squint through the detritus washed up on the beach, past the laundry drying on rocks and the squabbling crowd at the mouth of the Grand Goave River, where people wash their clothing, their motorcycles, and their bodies in the same muddy water. Except, of course, that this scene will never be confused for St. John or Tortola or Martinique, because, after all this is Haiti, where resorts exist only in our heads.

As we sit a young man strolls along the beach. He swaggers with the casual air of nowhere to go, nothing to do.  He moves towards the sun, falling fast towards the line of the sea, just north of where the cliffs of Petit Goave crash into the sea.  A moment before his lithe form blocks our view he jumps up, spikes his fist to the sky and lets out the exuberant shout “Haiti!”

Andy and I exchange a glance. He raises his eyebrow and says, “You’d never see that in the United States.”

Americans are a proud people, patriotic boosters of a beautiful, bountiful country, a political system rooted in equal opportunity and the material benefits that flow directly from our obvious goodness.  It is a chauvinistic pride, drenched in the certainly of American Exceptionalism and the belief that if fortune shines more brightly on us, it is because we are more deserving.

Haitian pride springs from a completely different source.  It is the pride of the survivor, the underdog; the black sheep of nations.  Corrupt, backwards, poor beyond comparison, yet vibrant in its identity, resilient to absorb the shocks of politics, economics, and nature that never seem to cease in this fragile, eroding country.

At one level our countries can be viewed as similar.  In the eighteenth century Americans overthrew an oppressive monarchy and formed a Republic of most noble intentions.  Forty years later Haiti did the same thing, throwing out the French Plantation owners who had turned Haiti into both the most productive Caribbean nation as well as the most oppressed.  At the time of the 1815 revolution, Haiti had the highest proportion of black slaves in the New World.

But the similarities cease upon achieving independence. Americans in 1781 represented the full range of a society.  We were well-educated, had robust resources and the transition from being a colony to being a nation was a smooth one.  At the time of the American Revolution, the standard of living for the average American was greater than that of our counterpart in England.  Is there another case in history where the rebel was more affluent than his ruler?  Is it any wonder that once independence was achieved we were able to build on its success almost without pause?

Toussaint L’Ouverture led the slaves to overthrow the French in 1815, but once the French were gone, there was no underlying structure upon which to build a nation.  No institutions, no economy, no way to translate the wealth that colonizers extracted from the Haitians to use for their own purposes.  The people were poor and uneducated and no one in the world would recognize, let alone assist, the world’s first Black Republic. They were on their own, and even if they did not flourish, they survived.  Haiti remained insular, creating such introverted policies as denying foreign land ownership, policies that keep Haiti apart from the greater world but also preserve its independence. Haiti has been racked with corruption and malevolent dictators, but aside from a pesky invasion by the US through the 1920’s, Haiti has remained independent.

It is almost 200 years since Haiti became an independent country, and by any measure, it is a mess. Yet when I am there, when I see the young man jump for joy against the August sunset, I intuit the great value that Haiti has to offer – to me and the entire world.  The value of Haiti is not in its success, but in its perseverance.  The value of Haiti is not in being proud of plenty, but in being proud in its meagerness.  The value of Haiti is in understanding that life has worth, even joy, without accoutrements.

I often say the people in Haiti are poor but not unhappy.  In the United States poverty is seen as a weakness, a character deficiency.  Poor people are ascribed as lazy, difficult, or stupid.  In Haiti poverty is a fact of life. Almost everyone is poor, it the standard condition and therefore does not carry negative connotations.  When Thomas Hobbes wrote that ‘the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, short and brutish’ he could not had Haiti in mind. For although life in Haiti is always poor, relatively short, and sometimes nasty, it is not brutish and never solitary.  Haiti is a society rich in community, rich in the understanding that we cannot survive this alone, nor would we want to.  In many ways, I find the values espoused in Haiti exact antitheses of those in America.

On January 12, 2010 Haiti shook with a 7.0 earthquake.  Three percent of the population died that day (that would be nine million Americans), 22 % lost their homes (66 million equivalent Americans) and 33% of the citizens needed emergency aid (100 million Americans).  I often say, only partly in jest, thank god the earthquake struck Haiti because if it had happened here, we Americans could never have borne it so well.  In our society of entitlement, we are up in arms if the trains are delayed or the overnight snow is not plowed before the morning commute.  We have lost our ability to persevere, to accept nature’s vagaries as beyond our control.  We expect emergency declarations, government aid, and restitution to anyone damaged.

I am not justifying the horrors of the earthquake in Haiti.  In truth, it was a mild earthquake and if Haiti practiced contemporary buildings practices, the loss of life and property would have been much less.  That is why I work in Haiti, trying to establish better standards for ‘the next time’.  I don’t suggest that passive perseverance is a better strategy for coping with life than the rampant drive to ‘fix’ things that is the hallmark of America.  I only suggest that each strategy has its limits and we have much to learn, to value, in how Haitians make peace with, and even celebrate, a world most of us would find unbearable.

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Yoga in the Storm

Posted on 02/05/2011 by paulefallon

I woke at 5:15 am, as usual, last Thursday and peered through the blinds to review last night’s snow.  Eight inches or more and still falling.  I called the Bikram studio and, alas, no weather cancellations.  I shrugged into my pants, zipped my parka to my chin, pulled my gloves tight and walked into the white.

The atmosphere was too gentle to be declared a storm; an elegant layering of particles, dense on the ground, unperturbed by tires or boots, easing up at eye level to a downy grey flecked with pinpricks of white, ascending to an expansive, bloated vault above. Particles of snow flowed down from this endless sky smooth as a five o’clock drink; without force, without urgency.  There was so much snow, but nary a flick of wind.  I was shrouded in iridescent brilliance.

The walking was easy; the snow deep but fluffy. At the corner a distant motor and faint headlights announced an oncoming plow at a slow, steady speed.  I realized then a plethora of mechanical hum – trucks in all directions carved paths in the snow, reasserting the organization of streets upon the landscape. 

I arrived at the station, one of a few.  A train arrived at a dawdling pace.  It stopped.  I boarded.  We moved on.  Cautious, deliberate.  As the train went underground we moved a bit faster, but not much.  The few passengers were quiet; a moving meditation.

I emerged at Back Bay.  The streets were not plowed.  Ribbons of grey tire tracks meandered in easy curves, as though the vehicles were dancing a casual fox trot to their destinations.  Maintenance staffs of the commercial buildings scraped their shovels across granite paving. A section of townhouse storefronts along Boylston Street remained unshoveled.  A series of distinct boot prints punctuated the clear expanse of glistening snow.  A brave person created the first depressions, then perhaps one or two others matched their gait.  The prints formed an intention; they were trod heavily enough to be called a path. They led to the studio door.

There were six of us that morning for the 6:15 am Bikram yoga class, plus the owner Jill as the teacher.  We were an indulgent group, drifting into the 110 degree room to stretch and sweat while the rest of the world woke with a chilly shrug and proceeded to dig themselves out from nature.  With so small a group, we each received helpful corrections, our practices improved.

By the time we finished, showered and changed the snow had ceased, the sky grew brighter.  The day blossomed and would be fine.  Still, very few people were on the streets and those who were focused on their snow moving tasks; essential employees all.  I decided to walk to my office, about 15 blocks.  I appreciated the stretches where sidewalks were clear; I navigated the portions still clogged.  I felt superfluous, separate from the singular activity of snow removal that bears down like a commandment immediately after a storm.

When you practice Bikram it is hard to describe how essential it becomes to you.  If I miss a day when I am in Boston, I feel incomplete.  On days that I can’t practice first thing, I travel through my activities unbalanced; something is amiss until I get to class.  Only after I have completed my daily class can I establish my connection to the world.  For Bikram practitioners, the yoga is essential.  That is why the studios almost never close for weather.  That is why six of us struck out to go to class that morning.

I could have stayed home; I could have had a cup of tea and waited for the snow to dissipate.  I could have shoveled my walks. But instead I rose through the snow, savored the early, quiet streets and warmed my body with stretching and empty-minded meditation.  I shoveled later, after I got home that night, because in the morning, yoga is essential for me.

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Jameson – Revisited

Posted on 01/30/2011 by paulefallon

There he was, halfway up the road to the new orphanage the first day I returned to Haiti.  Jameson has an internal compass that points right to my heart.  I wrote about Jameson here on 12/11/2010, and as I prophesized, I ran into him again in Haiti this January.

 Jameson was taller and thinner, though still more robust than most of the other children of Haiti.  He jumped into my arms and Abby took our picture.  He smelled of damp earth, his scalp covered with knots from lice or some other tropical delicacy, his bare feet a Kandinsky collage of cuts and scrapes caked with mud.  His eyes, which I recalled as pure white around the iris, evidenced that trace of yellow common among Haitians.  But his smile was wide as I remembered.  We marched up the hill to the orphanage site, his arms around my neck, his hips and ankles wedged against my waist.

Haiti is full of children.  Almost forty percent of the population is under 15, and since many of them are not in school much of the time, they amble everywhere.  Although the infant mortality rate has been cut almost in half in the past twenty years, to 48.8 deaths per thousand (135th in the world, the US is 33rd at 6.3 deaths per thousand, per UN World Population Prospects), the healthy fertility rate of 3.17 births per woman will ensure that Haiti is full of children for the foreseeable future.

By most measures the lives of Haitian children are improving.  More children are in school, more are immunized (75%), and only a small percentage is officially malnourished.  Still, compared to American kids, Haitian children are small for their age, quiet and subdued.  I cannot help think is due to a lack of stimulation, both in terms of nutrition and life experience.

Except, of course, Jameson.  He has boundless energy and likes to engage / rebuff other children with the frenzy typical of any American school yard schemer.  The first day he was filthy with mud, the next day he showed up at the site in clean shorts and a button down shirt.  The next day again he was again in a rag, while the fourth day he was shiny clean and proclaimed he was going to the carnival with his parents.  Just as his appearance changes, so does his demeanor – solicitous then bullying then taciturn. He doesn’t have a cohort of friends, like many of the children who move as a singular mob, yet other children are keenly aware of him. He is a figure cunning, awe and respect.

There were seven ’blancs’ at the site and within a day each of us had our own cohort of Haitians who trailed after us.  Most of the children gravitated to Ross, a recent college graduate with an easy manner and a huge carton of lollipops that he doled out.  At 6’-6” he could swing several little Haitians around at once; a sort of human jungle gym.  Jameson took whatever lollipops could be had, but he did not trial after Ross.  He was ‘my Haitian’, which was fine by me. 

Jameson asked me for a drink from my water bottle.  Haitians are renowned for their ability to go without water.  After the earthquake one survivor was found stuck for 24 days.  Most anyone would have died from dehydration by then, but Haitians rarely drink water, never between meals, and have developed camel-like capacity to go without fluids. The water bottles we Americans strap to our belts are just another humorous thing about ‘blancs’.

But Jameson, being bold, asked for a drink and I gave him one. ‘Thank you Jesus!’ he shouted as he gave the bottle back to me, a typical Haitian response to just about anything. I told him Jesus had nothing to do with it and, being a quick study, Jameson never mentioned Jesus to me again. 

Once or twice he asked me for money. I told him no and he shrugged.  A Haitian who doesn’t at least ask a ‘blanc’ for money isn’t worth his salt, but my rejection didn’t dampen our camaraderie one bit.

I did give Jameson a book.  My niece and her toddler boys had sent a crate of books for me to deliver to children in Haiti.  Jameson got Ferdinand the Bull, one of their favorites.  Through the week I saw different children studying different books.  Ownership is a pretty fluid concept. Children pick something up, use it as they will, drop it, someone else picks it up.  One might think that with so little of their own, possessions might be precious, but the opposite seems the case.  They have nothing and they get by; things that fall their way are welcome but they don’t become attached.

And that is how Jameson is with me.  On the last day I gave him a hug and said goodbye.  He ran off, waved one last time.  I expect I’ll see him the next time I am in Haiti.  Hopefully, taller, stronger, and just as mischievous.

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Treating Abby, Healing America

Posted on 01/23/2011 by paulefallon

My 22 year old daughter Abby spent ten hours in an emergency room in Miami Beach over our vacation with a high fever, chills and aches.  Malaria symptoms, we assume, from our trip to Haiti.   She received three lumbar punctures, several IV’s of morphine and a few blood tests to rule out both malaria and meningitis until, at midnight, the doctors shrugged their shoulders, forgot about the Tropical Disease consult they had ordered and released us with three pain prescriptions despite the fact that no pharmacy in the area opened until 8 the next morning.  Ironically, the book in my backpack during this all too familiar story of misguided American medicine was T.R. Reid’s The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Healthcare.

 Mr. Reid has a bum shoulder.  His American doctor has suggested a total shoulder replacement. He travels to Canada, France, Germany, Britain, India, China and Japan to seek their diagnoses for his condition and find out what treatment would be available to him under each country’s respective healthcare system.  Along the way he provides an intelligent, illuminating, cogent discussion of the many good ways provide healthcare.

 First, he dissects each country’s system. Of course, the US system is the only one that really needs to be dissected because we are the only major industrialized country that has multiple systems.  Seniors (Medicare), veterans (socialized), really poor (Medicaid), middle class (private insurance) and the 45 million moderately poor (out of pocket) all access independent spheres of healthcare.  Mr. Reid argues with conviction that having every major healthcare delivery system operate simultaneously in the United States is the root of our ineffectiveness.  And since we spend 17% of our GNP on healthcare (11% is out nearest competitor) yet rank 37th on the WHO ranking of healthcare systems, our ineffectiveness is hard to dispute.

 Every other major industrial nation operates only one system and it applies to everybody.  It is as simple as that.  Some are run by the government (Britain) others are fully private (Germany), and some systems have a larger private sector than our own.  Socialized medicine is a divisive political term, not an accurate description of how other countries tend to their ill.  The issue is not whether a system is public or private.  The issue is – is it accessible to all?  Reid makes a compelling case that healthcare reform cannot happen until everyone is covered, because only when there is one system with universal coverage does the emphasis evolve from dodging costs (the US system of denying access and claims) to one of promoting health.  As long as we operate multiple systems and their inherent inefficiencies we will be stuck with a medical model of care that stresses treatment over a public health model of care that emphasizes wellness.

 Just when I thought the book was plenty satisfying, Reid delivers two wallops in the last chapter.  First is a simple, sobering statement. ‘The healthcare of a country reflects the morality of a country.’  As the only industrialized nation that does not provide healthcare to all – what does that say about us? 

 Second, I found personal comfort in his decision not to proceed with shoulder surgery.  He learned how to accommodate his discomfort.  The only treatment he received that made a noticeable difference to his shoulder pain was at the Arya Vaidya Chikitsalayam in India.  For $42.50 a day he received astrological guidance, herbal remedies, a staunch diet and daily yoga exercises that increased his mobility.  He left ten pounds lighter with no pain in his shoulder.

 The cost of Abby’s trip to the ED in Miami?  $8,500 for a ten hour visit, and she woke up the next morning with every pain intact while I scrambled around Miami looking for a CVS for some pills.

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Construction – Haiti Style

Posted on 01/14/2011 by paulefallon

“Haitians love to drive backwards.  They just look over their shoulders and gun it.”  Renee Edme laughs as she says this, the two of us staring down Route 2 as one of the Mission of Hope staff speeds backward in the SUV for about two hundred feet before screeching to a halt, flipping the vehicle around and taking off up the dirt road to the new orphanage.  Renee is an American who has lived in Haiti for ten years, the grounded half of ‘Lex and Renee’ who run the Mission of Hope, the one who instills Western concepts of time, schedule and order into the operation with middling success and has a hearty laugh the many times her attempts come up short.

The Be Like Brit Orphanage (BLB) is officially under construction.  The objective of the two week ground breaking effort is straightforward – excavate the site, get it level, stake the building and begin foundations.  Eight of us here from the States – Len Gengel, his son Bernie, and his nephew Ross arrived on December 24, along with Gama, the onsite supervisor who will remain in Haiti for the duration of construction.  I arrived on January 2 with my daughter Abby, her boyfriend Khaled, and Len’s excavator Duke.  I had told Len there was no reason for us to arrive any sooner as the first week would be lost on setting up.  I was right.

Week One was a flurry of hurry up and wait.  Bernie and Ross organized the truck that had arrived by freighter from Miami loaded with everything required for construction, including power tools, a generator, a Mule (Kawasaki off-road vehicle), picks, shovels, hammers, screws, stakes, orange paint, latrine plans, and tampers, as well as an eight foot propane grill they brought for the mission house where volunteers stay and an immense carton of lollipops to win the loyalty of local children.  Len spent the week making arrangements – getting the bulldozer he rented to the site, getting the site staked, getting the soil testing firm he hired to show up, meeting with the three tall Haitian men who loiter at the site.  They wear ID tags and matching shirts and Len refers to them as the ‘Neighborhood Association’, though it is not clear who they represent beyond themselves.

As I predicted, when we arrive on January 2, the bulldozer is unaccounted for in transit and the site is still pristine.

The dozer arrives on Monday.  It is delivered to the wrong site, so we have to negotiate its release from a group constructing a local elementary school who considered the machine manna from the heavens.  By noon we wrest it back to BLB, by one it is at the base of the road, by two we are dozing the road, and by three the Neighborhood Association has mobilized into a contingent who demand a halt in the construction.  By four, Lex is on the hillside negotiating with the abutters exactly where the road will go; the Americans advocating an S-shape that works with the grade, the Haitians insisting on straight up the hill.  By six, resolution is achieved, though of course by that time it is too late to do any more work.

Tuesday morning brings an aftershock of Neighborhood Association activity – new abutters to be placated – but by noon there are hearty handshakes all around and the bulldozer carves a road straight up the mountain.  One stretch approaches a 25 degrees grade.  It will turn into a rapid in the first heavy rain.

Simultaneous with road building, Abby, Khaled and I build a latrine back at the mission house in parts that could be loaded into the box truck and hauled up to the site.  Len is intent on having this for job site sanitation. We are convinced he will be the only person who uses it.

By Wednesday the dozer is pushing dirt on the site.  The box truck makes it up the steep grade; we unload and assemble the latrine.  We have a regular audience of twenty or so.  A dozen children horse around the site, hovering for a lollipop; silent men nap in the shade in the hopes of getting hired as day labor; a few women sit on low stools and watch the dozer scratch across the land.  Whenever it unearths a sizable root they scamper across the site and collect the snarled wood.  By the end of the day they have large piles of roots that they haul off to turn into charcoal – a profitable day indeed.

Len hires two men to dig the latrine pit and Baptiste, a young bilingual Haitian, to sit the site all day and ensure that tools do not walk.  Four dollars a day is the going rate.  By Wednesday afternoon I am able to stake the site.  Duke and I lay out the extents of the building from the magnificent mango tree.  The ideal layout we had hoped for puts the building too close to one property line so we rotate the building ten degrees.  The grade is steeper than we had eyeballed back in September; a lot of excavation is required.

Thursday is more of the same except for the foreboding sense that the more we move earth, the more earth has to be moved.  At most, there are six hours of productive work in Haiti.  No one starts until 8 or so, break occurs at 10, lunch hour is spent sitting on machines, quitting time is four.  As much as possible, I sit in the shade.  If I try to read a magazine I am swarmed with children who want to page through the pictures.  Sometimes I do that, other times I hold my pages firm so I can actually read.  By the end of day Thursday Len realizes we will never get close to having any foundation grades by Saturday, he calls the machine rental guy in Port au Prince and rents an excavator to work alongside the bulldozer.

Miracle of miracles, the excavator shows up and on Friday we have two machines, which means twice the opportunity for delay.  The bulldozer has a bum battery; once it stops it takes about 30 minutes to caress back into action.  The machines chug and heave due to impure oil and dirty gasoline.  Directions involve English and Creole and arm waving, some Haitians work in feet and inches, others in centimeters, the bulldozer operator is taciturn and scowling, the rail thin excavator operator wears a heavy wool hat and amused detachment. Finally, they reach one corner that is the proper depth.  The soil is good, very good, but we won’t be able to level the entire site before our group leaves in two days.

An ancient man arrives with four mules, each saddled with a pair of woven baskets.  He begins to pick some of the smooth unearthed stones and burden his animals.  One of the root collector ladies jumps up and berates him in a torrent of Creole.  He replaces all the rocks and leaves empty handed.  A translator tells us that Lex has given approval to remove roots but not rocks.  The woman is now part of our team.

Saturday.  We continue to set temporary stakes as the machines work, when they work.  There are moments, when they sing a duet of productivity.  I peer across the land.  A carpet of green trees foregrounds the blue, blue sea.  The water is a vast plain of swirling patterns, smooth and stipples.  It mirrors the shallow sand formations beneath the surface.  White specs of sailboats hover in the blue expanse, the horizon blurs by the rise of Isle de Gonave and the misty sky.  Beyond the poverty, Haiti’s beauty is breathtaking.  

I have brought picture books to the site today to distribute to the children. The adults tear through them with equal interest.  Baptiste spends an hour carefully wording through a book on Antarctic penguins.  His pronunciation is good, his comprehension is sketchy.

I spend two hours reviewing the drawings with Gama, who will remain when we leave.  I outline how to do the final layout, how to understand column lines and detail references. I make a diagram of all the key points and how they relate to benchmark mango tree.  He is shocked that we actually use the triangle theorems he avoided in high school geometry to lay out the building.

We get as far as we can.  About one third of the site is at foundation grade.  Gama gets 100% on my little quiz questions about where to find information on the drawings and how to measure the diagonal dimensions I have laid out for him. Our benchmark is painted.  Two permanent stakes are in place.  Len will be back in three weeks. Perhaps progress will have been made.  It might be square, it might be skew.  Perhaps the site will look then exactly as it does now.  Our work plan is ambitious, our expectations are realistic.

By American standards the two weeks have not been too productive.  By Haitian standards, we made mammoth progress. 

 

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Resolution – More Smiles, Fewer Guns

Posted on 01/01/2011 by paulefallon

My children and I took the T downtown to see The Fighter at the multiplex. Riding over the Longfellow Bridge Andy mentioned that 2010 had been the best year of his life.  Abby seconded the sentiment, and I had to agree.  Each of us had remarkable years – Andy hiking the AT and finding a great niche for himself at UMass. Abby studying in Paris and then travelling through Eastern Europe, and myself, enjoying the reflection of their successes as well as my personal satisfaction working in Haiti.

This morning I read the New York Times Week in Review – The Year in Pictures/2010.  Forty-two pictures in all, remarkable images yet entirely disconnected from our family experience.  I studied each photo and found a total of two in which people were smiling, while in fourteen photos the subjects welled in despair.  A quarter of the photos highlighted destruction, be it natural disaster, man made disaster or the aftermath of war.  The number of dead depicted equaled the number smiling, and guns abounded.

Surely Norman Rockwell images do not sell newspapers, but what is the point of portraying the world so relentlessly bleak? The crowds wailing in Port au Prince, Pakistani refuges clinging to an escape helicopter, an Afghan boy staring down gun barrels, Thai protestors cowing in fear, even the boy scouts are portrayed with arrogant anger. The principal images that offer relief relate to sports – a three year old mesmerized by his soccer ball, a man making a grand swan dive into the Tigris River, a parade to honor the World Series’ Giants.  Does our only happiness lie in escape?

There is one photograph that captures the possibility for change.  Three Brazilian police officers, in bulky uniforms and bullet-proof vests, sit on the floor of a day care center in Rio with toddlers on their laps, part of a community relations effort to bridge the chasm between the police and the residents of Rio’s slums.  It is the only picture that includes both a smile and a gun.

My influence on what the New York Times publishes as year end review is, at best, one in six billion.  Still, I intend to do what little I can to see if next year they might come to see the world through a more balanced lens.  I do not deny the tragedy and heartache of this world, but I refuse to dismiss the joy.  This year, I want to see more smiles and fewer guns.

2011 is staring off with tremendous promise.  On January 2, Abby, Khaled and I fly to Haiti to participate in excavating, siting, and installing the foundations for the BeLikeBrit orphanage in Grand Goave.   Less than a year after the devastating earthquake of 2010, it is an honor to participate in reconstruction.  On January 9 we fly to South Beach for a few days of R&R, where we will bed joined by Andy, my housemate Paul and my friend Larry.  We return to Boston on January 12 in time to attend the gala in honor of Britney Gengel, who died on January 12, 2010 but whose spirit will live on in her orphanage.  It is an auspicious beginning to a positive year.

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