Island within Island

Posted on 03/03/2013 by paulefallon

haiti-001Islands are sanctuaries.  We are drawn to their simple clarity.  Their geographic confines liberate our psyche.  We envision life on an island as purer and more satisfying.

My life in Haiti is simpler than my life in the United States.  When I arrive on Hispaniola I feel unencumbered. I rarely use the telephone; I check email but once a day.  My mind wanders Haiti’s hilly contours.  Daydreaming is not merely tolerated, it is encouraged. After all, I am on an island.

However, after eighteen visits I have developed responsibilities in Haiti.  I have work and a semblance of schedule. The work is satisfying, except when it’s frustrating; the poverty motivates me, except when it numbs me. From my earliest visits I have developed a habit; whenever Haiti’s challenges overwhelm me, I pause and look out over the sea.  There, floating on the horizon is La Gonave, rising out of the mist, a place imbued with peace and calm; beautiful in its simplicity.  From a distance La Gonave’s serenity offers me solace.

Lex and Renee Edme, founders of the school we are building, carry long memories.  Last summer two ideas came over me and I sent them an email request.  I asked if we could inscribe Luke 6:48 somewhere on the new school (He is like a man building a house, who dug down deep and laid the foundation on rock. When a flood came, the torrent struck that house but could not shake it, because it was well built.).  I also asked them if we could visit La Gonave.  Lex was born on the island and has a boat that could take us there, on a rare day when neither work nor church beckoned.  I mentioned these wishes only once, but in the fall, as the school’s walls rose, Renee pointed to the surface above the front door.  “This is where your Bible verse will go.” Then, on the final day of my last scheduled trip, Lex announced that we would go to La Gonave.

The view of La Gonave from the hill above town or along the beach is one of god’s most beguiling creations.  On clear days the island stands in bold relief against a crystalline sky and the smooth sea.  When the weather is cloudy, it billows among its cumulus neighbors.  On hazy days it merges with the muted blue-green of sea and sky, an ethereal realm of imagination more than any actual place of rock and soil and root.

I know that La Gonave is poor, so poor that men leave for months on end to be day laborers in Grand Goave.  I know that La Gonave is awash in voodoo and mysticism; the natives crowned the Marine sent to patrol the island during last century’s American occupation as the ‘white king’ in fulfillment of an ancient myth.  I know that La Gonave is a poorer, simpler version of Haiti, yet it had become my Bali Hai and I was compelled to visit.

The boat ride from Grand Goave to Au Pac takes about an hour.  Unfortunately for the first twenty minutes we motor past the garbage from the river floating on the bay.  Eventually the water turns ultramarine, the swells rise, the cross currents press against our hull and my dream island slowly grows.  Tiny squares appear in coves along the shore, other structures emerge along the ridge line. Steep hills littered with scrub trees connect the parallel habitations.  Everything comes into focus. Lex slows the boat to a crawl. His navigator stands at the bow, eyeballs the bottom and hand signals us through the narrow channel that leads to the small pier in the center of the village.  Lex points out the school on a coral rock outcropping to the east; we have brought clothes and pencils and paper and cartons of energy biscuits.  When we tie up, villagers line the dock. They brigade our supplies to the narrow sandy beach.

Au Pac fulfills every fantasy of an island paradise.  The shallows of the cove are perfectly clear, fish squiggle among the wavy sea grass, clusters of clams cling to the coral bottom.  Thousands of conch shells in subtle pinks and oranges form a berm between the water and the sand.  We parade our goods up to the school where twenty-five or so children sit in pews and recite the numbers on the chalk board.  Lex’s arrival upends the lesson.  In minutes the entire village arrives.  While Lex distributes his bounty I linger in the shady breeze outside.  Powchino, a painfully thin local man with a pocketful of English at his disposal, appoints himself my guide.  He tells me of the fish they catch in their wooden junks morning and night to ship to Port-au-Prince.  He shows me the oblong sponges they collect with snorkeling gear and sell for $15 a kilo to a fragrance concern in Miami, though I cannot quite understand their purpose.  He tells me of his brothers and sisters, his parents on the island, his own madame and two children.

After all of our cartons are empty we parade the length of town, a single path with shacks on either side, the sea to the south and marshes to the north.  The houses are no more than six inches above sea level.  At every storm the citizens scamper into the mountains, the sea washes through their world and then they return.  There is no electricity to short circuit, no upholstered furniture to mildew, nothing that can’t survive a good salt water wash.  It seems odd to me that they don’t build their houses on the slope, but it is their life and they choose to live it tight to the sea.

After two hours we have seen what there is to see.  We climb back on our boat, I palm Powchino a twenty for his guidance and we shove off.  We enjoy cokes and chicken salad from our cooler; it would have been rude to eat in Au Pac where we saw no crops growing or evidence of any food once our biscuits were devoured.  The sea is mid-day calm, the cross current peters out, as smooth as vintage dimpled glass, as ancient as the village we left behind.  The island of Hispaniola lay ahead, but it does not offer the comforting mirage that La Gonave presents from afar.  Haiti rises high; the peninsula wraps around Grand Goave’s wide cove like monster claws.  Compared to La Gonave, Haiti is complicated.

No adventure in Haiti is worth its salt without a hiccup, and sure enough we have watery gas in our outboard; it takes over two hours to sputter home.  I do not mind.  I sit in the bow and let my feet dangle in the direction of home.  I think about Powchino and his parents and children, day in and day out in that village connected to the rest of the world by nothing more than a tenuous channel, no vehicles, no stores, no clinic, no tele-anything.  Au Pac is beautiful in daylight, it would be glorious on a starry night, but how tedious it would be day after day, and night after night. Even after visiting, I cannot really understand how the residents pass their time. They exist on an island within an island; they lead a life of abject poverty and abject purity, a life we fantasize about when our world pulses with stress; yet it is a pristine fantasy few of us could bear to live.

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Au Pac Village, La Gonave

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Au Pac from the Shore

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Au Pac Street

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Perfect Yoga

Posted on 02/24/2013 by paulefallon

awkward_pose_3-001There is no such thing as perfect yoga; there is always room for improvement in any posture.

All yoga is perfect; each pose reflects our mind and body at its moment of execution.

These two dichotomies ripple through my mind in every yoga practice.  I strive to make my postures deeper, stronger, more precise, yet I accept the limits of my being and how my body varies day to day.   If I languor in lax acceptance, I may feel fine in the hot room but enjoy fewer benefits over the course of my day.  If I press too hard, I distort the continuum of practice and risk injury. If I accept every posture as ‘the best I can do right now’ I set a very low bar, but if I define perfect yoga as the ultimate expression of every pose, it is so daunting I am not motivated to improve.

About six months ago I developed the notion that perfect yoga, for me, would be to execute all 26 postures to my best ability.  That sounds easier than it is. In almost every class I sustain one or two poses to my maximum ability; it is not unusual to extend a pose to a new threshold.  But there are always other postures where I fall short.  I fall out or miss full height or depth.  In theory I can achieve ‘perfect yoga’ because I have achieved each of its constituent parts at least once, but realistically, stringing my 26 best poses together in one sequence is an unlikely feat.

My crux for a perfect yoga practice is standing head to knee followed by standing bow; eight balancing poses in a row. It is rare for me to execute them all at my fullest depth without falling out at least once.  I began to pay very close attention to how I do them.  I realized that holding in my abdomen truly helps me balance in head to knee, and envisioning my standing leg sturdy as an elephant grounds me in standing bow.  Week in and week out I focused; still every time I faltered; until one day two weeks ago, when I didn’t.  I held each balance the full time at full depth.   I was so excited on the eighth pose I could barely concentrate, but I threw the idea of a perfect series out of my mind and focused on that posture in that moment.  Then I nailed it.

Since then I have fully executed those eight poses half a dozen times.  I can foresee a time when it is the rule, not the exception, that I can maintain them.  However, that does not mean that I have had six perfect classes, for there are the other 24 poses, and keeping them all at maximum ability is an ongoing challenge. In the past week my head got closer to the floor in separate standing hands to feet, my full locust got higher.  The standard for prefect yoga gets harder with every class. I hit a plateau, and another rise emerges, beckoning me to pursue new heights.

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Zero Dark Thirty

Posted on 02/15/2013 by paulefallon

usa-001On a brilliant after-snow Sunday, my friend Chuck and I hit the streets to grab a burger and a late afternoon movie.  Since I have seen virtually nothing, while he, being fully wired to popular culture, has seen ‘em all, I yielded the movie choice to him and he selected Zero Dark Thirty.  I am not a war movie buff, but The Hurt Locker was terrific and the buzz about Zero Dark Thirty is uniformly high, so I looked forward to seeing something of quality outside my usual range.

One of humankinds’ most bewitching attributes is our ability to simultaneously love and loathe something.  From Zero Dark Thirty’s opening scenes I hated the interrogations but I loved watching Jessica Chastain; I disliked the grainy quality but I loved how it well it conjured my Middle East experience of Kuwait.  I found the story hard to follow, until I was completely in its thrall and hung on every word.

I particularly disliked the film’s neutral point of view, presenting the United States decision and tactics to eliminate Bin-Laden without moral context.  Regular readers of The Awkward Pose will recall that I wrote a very-much minority opinion of the US expedition into Pakistan to kill Osama Bin-Laden (Nation of Laws, May 15, 2011).  My opinion has not changed; countering terrorism with terrorism is wrong.  Though we all learn in kindergarten that two wrongs do not make a right, we forget it when filled with anger and rage and revenge; and no one fills Americans with more anger and rage than Bin-Laden.

Yet, I came to appreciate the film’s neutral point of view as one of its most positive aspects.  Director Bigelow has to make us believe that the film is unbiased, so that when we see Obama, our sitting President, declaiming excessive torture in a television clip shortly after the movie audience has witnessed its effectiveness in routing out bad guys, we are conflicted between the world as it is and the world we want to believe in.

From there, my love/hate relationship with Zero Dark Thirty only grew thornier.  The more I fell for Jessica Chastain, the more I wanted her back story, yet we are given no clues why this beautiful, capable, woman spends nearly a decade single-mindedly chasing Bin-Laden.  We want a back story, because we want her to have a higher purpose, but Ms. Bigelow always champions action over motivation.  Perhaps it doesn’t matter why Jessica Chastain is such an unlikely spy; the only thing that matters is that she is very determined and had the odds not fallen in her favor, the movie could have been called Black Hawk Down 2.

Ultimately what won me over to Zero Dark Thirty is an obtuse sort of patriotism. Not the militarist patriotism that we stuck it to Al-Qaeda, but the more subtle, meaningful patriotism that we live in a country where this movie can be made and presented.  That citizens can spend a snowy afternoon in a theater and watch their current President’s judgment implicitly chastised without fear of reprisal on any front. That is a hallmark of our democracy.

The United States cannot hold itself above others in the actions we undertake in the name of defense and security, though they are probably not much different than others countries do or would do if they had our resources. But there are few, if any, countries on earth that accommodate the open range of discussion and debate that we enjoy. By the end of the movie I had no choice but to appreciate Zero Dark Thirty.  Not because I liked the outcome or thought it was the best picture of the year, but because I live in a country where Zero Dark Thirty can be made and watched and debated.

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Winter Storm Warning – Make Mine a Double

Posted on 02/08/2013 by paulefallon

awkward_pose_3-001The first wintry gusts are sweeping down my street.  The weatherman’s frenzied exclamations prompted most businesses to close by noon today. The MBTA will stop running at 3:30 pm.  The governor has declared a state of emergency; the National Guard has been deployed, all cars must be off the roads by four, and non-essential employees must stay home.  I love the term ‘non-essential’, a litmus test of our self-esteem. Who wants to consider themselves superfluous, especially when the going is about to get tough?

How do we prepare for a winter storm? Most locals react by emptying grocery store shelves.  Depending on our social-economic proclivities, we can tangle with the police officer directing traffic at Market Basket’s snarled parking lot, stand in register lines five deep as Star Market clerks scan items with their customary lethargy; grab a bunch of the dwindling 19 cent bananas at Trader Joe’s, where more customers only augment the cheerful chaos; or shoulder among the put-out clientele at Whole Foods who simply must have fresh oysters, lemon aioli, and an apricot glazed tort to compensate for the storm’s inconvenience.

Others, prospective recruits for survivalist meet-ups, collect email weather alerts issued by area cities and towns and replay recorded messages from NStar until they have memorized all the 1-800 disaster numbers.  They know what to do in event of a power outage or encountering a downed power line. Forget the old fashioned idea notion of having a few candles on hand, these folks review the maintenance instructions of their generators, check fuel and exhaust lines, and make sure they have plenty of gasoline to rev up their snow blower.

As for me, I began considering myself non-essential years ago; I always have work to do but rarely have work that has to be done that day.  I don’t go near a grocery store before a storm, which I consider to be nature’s nudge to clear out my freezer.  I have a trusty snow shovel and many candles; any storm aid that requires gasoline only squelches the romance.

Last night, I prepared for the storm by attending a reading by Susan Cain, (Quiet) at the Harvard Book Store and then lingering with a friend over an Italian soda at the Algiers Café.  This morning I woke early and knowing that, should the storm shut me in for a few days, I will miss yoga more than bananas or oysters or a generator or anything ‘essential’, I decided to do a double.

I have done a handful of back-to-back yoga classes in the past few years; perhaps the only thing better than 90 minutes in the hot room is 180 minutes in the hot room.  The first class should be just like any other daily practice, but it is not.  Committing to the studio for several hours throws a leisurely cast over the entire experience. I am at greater ease and, as often happens with yoga, the less conscious I am about my practice, the deeper it goes.

The second class is very different.  I turn Gumby during the warm-up; already loose from the inside out.  During half-moon I am ravenously hungry; I always practice on an empty stomach and haven’t eaten a thing yet.  But the hunger dissipates and I appreciate my hollowness when I wrap myself into eagle.  I am dizzier than usual, class has a dream-like quality, my limbs so loose they seem disassociated from my body.  The sense of order that usually accompanies the Bikram postures evaporates.  Everything is more acute the second time around; I bend deeper and stretch further.  My mind wanders far afield while I remain hyper-aware of my particular position in each particular moment.  Class slips by fast, even as time itself is suspended.

I cycle home as the first fine snow litters the sky.  My mind is at ease, my legs spin, my body floats above the pavement.  If the storm peters out I will practice again tomorrow.  If it turns out to be as ferocious as predicted, I am fully prepared to withstand the blizzard.

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Pumping Up Larchwood

Posted on 02/03/2013 by paulefallon

usa-001The bulldozer has arrived at my favorite house in Larchwood; they are digging the foundation extension, tearing off the roof, gutting the interior plaster.  A simple cottage with fairy tale proportions is expanding.  It held out a long time, nearly a hundred years.  Given its tiny lot and modest frontage I dreamed that maybe it could slip beneath the radar of house explosions in that neighborhood, but progress and real estate brokers leave no stone unturned in a place as desirable as Larchwood, so it was inevitable that someone with deeper pockets than me would be captivated by the cottage, purchase it and improve it beyond recognition.  That is the fate of houses in Larchwood, a charming neighborhood that has evolved from stability to affluence, though the more affluent it becomes, the less charm it retains.

I know Larchwood well. I ride my bike through it every day; it is my preferred destination for an evening walk.  While much of Cambridge contains orderly rows of two and three family houses, like nearby Aberdeen Street; or equally orderly rows of mansions, like nearby Brattle Street, Larchwood is unique among Cambridge neighborhoods.  When it was carved out of the 38 acre Samuel Grey estate in 1915, it was the last sizable parcel left in the city.  Henry Hubbard, a protégé of Frederick Law Olmstead, laid the enclave out according to garden city principles in vogue at the time.  Larchwood has narrow curving streets, petit sidewalks, and shallow front yards. The original houses are all different and all solid, but they are not immense.  Larchwood is Cambridge’s answer to Forest Hills; a model train town come to life; a Halloween trick-or-treater’s dream come true where upscale houses sit really close together.

As the twentieth century wound down and Cambridge’s wealth triggered up, professors made more money consulting than teaching and quaint houses proximate to Harvard appreciated.  But 2000 square foot miniaturized Georgian Colonials and half-timber Tudors lack sizzle.  People wanting ‘signature houses’ started popping out the backs and the sides and sometimes even the tops of these gentle homes.  When I moved to Cambridge in the early 90’s my favorite house was a gable front cottage inhabited by an eccentric MIT professor I knew from the 70’s.  Upon his death, the new owner augmented the simple dwelling in every direction. The former cottage now sports a turret, a side wing, a back wing and a very unfortunate garage. After that cottage inflated beyond recognition, I turned my fantasies to its more homely cousin around the corner.

Over the intervening twenty years more than half the houses in Larchwood have grown.  Some additions are well conceived, a few are awful.  Cumulatively the garden aspect of the neighborhood has declined; bigger buildings mean less green space.  I am thankful that the neighborhood is protected from tear-downs, which puts at least some restraints on construction zeal, but I wonder why people buy nicely proportioned homes and then twist them beyond recognition.  Does the diminishing American family really need more than 2,000 square feet, when most of the time we occupy no more space than the tiny bubble surrounding us and our electronic device?  Does every new owner need to make an imprint on his structure, even when the result is regressive? Our credit cards itch until we scratch them to their limit; we add on, and on, and on, because we can.

I was sad but not surprised to see the forces of progress obliterate the little cottage I admired.  I fantasized about one day moving out of my own house (which is sizable yet retains the same footprint it was born with 115 years ago) and retiring to that modest two story rectangle with its tiny attic window.  The cottage invited rest and repose.  It seemed the perfect house for nestling into a long book on a winter afternoon and reading in the faint daylight until lapsing into eternal sleep; I could imagine no more pleasant setting for my last breath.  But now the house will be big and fresh and I will have to find a new end of life fantasy; it would never do to slip peacefully away in a house so full of bumps and pops.

People love Larchwood because it induces visions of grace and community and simplicity. But the cost of entry is so high, that once landed there, people cannot leave simplicity alone.

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Winter Yoga

Posted on 01/27/2013 by paulefallon

awkward_pose_3-001On clear, cold winter mornings the pre-dawn air is thin, the paving salts have turned the blacktop silver grey.  I pedal deliberately, the only bicycle amid few automobiles.  I coast over every bridge and through every turn, dangling my right leg just over the surface, on vigilant watch for demon black ice.  I see no one.  The beacon light of the Bikram Studio glows along JFK Street.  As I mount the stairs I wonder if perhaps I might be the only yogi alert on this frigid January morning.  Of course I am wrong.  There a dozen, no twenty, no more than twenty disciples arrayed along the black lines of the studio, soaking in the heat.

I savor these ‘one hundred degree difference’ days when the thermometer registers single digits out of doors and triple digits within.  This is class 884 – my yoga diary has disintegrated into a simple calendar chit that registers attendance.  Heather is our teacher, she has taught Wednesday mornings in Harvard Square forever; bone thin with huge red hair, a recent husband, and a pair of dogs.  She is a terrific teacher with the right mix of purpose and humor, heat and humidity.  I take my favorite spot, just to her right under the center fan.  Heather corrects me often, but I never mind her improvements.  I have a bit of a crush on her, which is ridiculous given my usual lack of interest in skinny people or redheads or, girls. My crush is just another element of silliness in a world that is torpid inside and freezing without, where I flex with sweaty abandon while the rest of the world creaks to rise.

You might think that after so many classes one more hardly matters; that I am as flexible as I am going to get; that another half-moon plus or minus isn’t going to make a morsel of difference.  I should feel good about being able to rest my head on the floor in fixed firm but should accept that my forehead will never touch the carpet in standing hand to feet.  But that way of thinking would be wrong, because even after 883 classes, change occurs within me every class, every day. Most changes are tiny; my eagle pose keeps getting lower and lower, though I would need a caliper to measure it.  Some changes are ephemeral; one morning four months ago I actually touched my head to my standing knee but have not been able to replicate that feat again.  Occasionally wholesale change sweeps over my practice and I establish a new normal.

This winter my yoga flowed to a new plateau. Somewhere around class 846 my lower back opened up and it has stayed loose for weeks.  As a result a whole group of poses became deeper and stronger.  My knees finally locked into standing head to feet, my torso held firm in triangle, I gained height in cobra, and my elbows hit the floor beside my knees in the final floor stretch.  One day my fingers struggled to clench my toes in a sit-up, the next day my palms flew beyond, cupped my digits and I grabbed my instep.  It was bizarre and sudden but appears to be lasting.

Daylight arrives about the time I leave the studio; crisp and bright though still bitter cold.  I pedal quickly along Brattle Street.  Traffic is heavy, women with impeccable makeup and patrician men grip their coffee mugs while navigating their Lexus’ and Mercedes’ and Lincoln’s out of Cambridge’s privileged driveways.  I nod to them; partly because a savvy cyclist wants to ensure that bleary-eyed people motoring tons of steel notice him, but also because I am in such a cheerful disposition, and they’ve got some bending and stretching to do before they can catch up with me.

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Adopted by an Orphan

Posted on 01/22/2013 by paulefallon

haiti-001This is another essay published in conjunction with the third anniversary of the Haiti earthquake. This appeared in the Boston Globe Magazine on January 20, 2013 under the title ‘The Boy Who Adopted Me’.

 

I reach down; a small black hand places a pair of nails in mine.  We are building temporary houses after the Haiti earthquake, wooden frames covered with plastic, held taut by flat-head nails with concave washers.  Our crew, American volunteers and local Haitians, erects a tin-roofed house in two hours. The boy under my shadow proves useful and reliable; whenever I drop my hand another nail appears.

We hike to the next site; my helper clutches the nail bucket.  “Dieunison” he responds when I ask his name. “Over there” he answers when I inquire where he lives.  Gestures and smiles communicate better than my Creole or his English.

Over the next week we build dozens of houses.  Dieunison finds me every morning; I never have to bend over for a nail.  I give him water and snack bars, fair wages for an eight year old Haitian.  We hug before I fly home.

The first January after the quake I return to stake an orphanage I designed, five months later to lay out a school.  Each time Jenison stands along the highway as if he hasn’t moved since I left.  He wraps his skinny legs around my waist.  I am his blan, he is my Haitian.

The second January after the quake I scratch a mid-life itch, quit my job and volunteer to supervise construction in Haiti two weeks every month.  On my first trip back Dieunison’s eyes tear as he tells me his mother died, then he throws back his head yowling like a goat; I can’t decide if he’s joking or masking grief.  Every month his life twists.  He lives with his aunt Michelle in a compound of lean-tos and simmering stew.  She ships him to Port-au-Prince when she can no longer feed him. I search for him frantically until one afternoon his thin figure appears outside our shanty.  I shower him with food and questions; Dieunison’s eyes dazzle at the chicken leg on top of his rice.  We find him a place to live, clothes, a bed, but once I return to the States, he flees.  We forced too much too fast on a boy used to being on his own.  Dieunison becomes a phantom, sightings are reported but he never shows his face to me.  Locals say, “Forget him, he is a street kid”, but Dieunison chose me; I cannot give up on him.

“Are you the man who loves Dieunison?”  A boy I have never seen approaches me. Dieurie is Dieunison’s half-brother; they live with a new assortment of relations. Dieurie is more mature, he cajoles Dieunison to reappear.  The boys frequent the construction site, enjoy hot lunches, and agree to attend school.  My next trip brings cash for tuition, uniforms, books, meals and ‘consideration’ for teachers willing to accept eleven-year-old’s in second grade.  The boys go AWOL at our first school meeting. “Nothing is free”, I lecture when they show up later, guilty and sheepish, “you want meals and clothes; you must attend school.” I banish them from two days’ lunch.

The third January post-quake arrives with the orphanage complete; my regular visits to Haiti are finished.  Dieunison and Dieurie have been in school three months.  They are filling out, sometimes they cannot finish the food on their plates.  They contemplate the leftovers with dismay; getting what you wish for can be disturbing.  When I explain that my next visit is far off Dieunison pleads to stow in my suitcase.  But they are Haitian, they belong here.  I want to give them opportunities, not steal them away.

Construction is an intense activity that ends abruptly.  But Dieunison has tethered me to Haiti for the long haul.  It will take years for these boys to graduate, but if they do their part, I will do mine.  Time does not factor when a boy hands you a nail and stakes a claim on your heart.

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Sweeping Dirt

Posted on 01/20/2013 by paulefallon

haiti-001A Haitian broom is a charming piece of folk craft; a sturdy branch about four feet long and an inch in diameter tied off at one end with hundreds of narrow leaves that bunch out unruly as a cheerleader’s pom.  Over time, sandpaper coarse palms rub the stick to a warm luster; fingers massage the soft wood into a comfortable grip, the leaves splay horizontal, lose their tension and fan out like a chimney sweep’s bristles.  It is a lovely, curious object, if not entirely effective for its purpose.

Every morning when in Haiti, I drive from my guest house in Grand Goave to our construction sites; we are building a school and orphanage.  Dawn is emerging; though the roosters are long past awake.  Dogs and pigs meander along the road.  The few men with jobs are up and gone; folks with no agenda are just beginning to stir.  Shadows pass in and out of shacks; dressing, splashing their faces with whatever water is left in last night’s basin.

The women’s first chore is to sweep the front yard, the hard packed earth that spans from private shelter to the public way.  Some houses have only a narrow path defined by small trees; others claim a broad plane that provides the inhabitants a full view of the passing world.  This is where families dwell until nightfall; interior space is used only to escape storms and catch sleep.

Driving along the rutted road in the dim light, I watch women stand with their feet apart, sway their hips counter to the rhythm of their arms, and sweep away whatever the wind cast down overnight.  Back and forth they waver as if in a trance, shifting across their living rooms, half asleep, near zombies with two legs and a broom. Their sweeping was long ago chiseled into motor memory.

Every morning I am transfixed by their quiet, futile dance.  The women sweep dirt from dirt.  They raise dust, they push it away, and more dust rises in its place.  Are they fools, scratching at Haiti’s tenuous soil, or noble in their quest to create a place of hygiene and order in a land that defies either?  Are they trapped in a Sisyphus-like cycle of endless sweeping or might they someday achieve their desired objective of a clean world?

Contradictory human truths play out in these dawn movements.  We are creatures of habit, of pattern.  We do what we know, not always because it is best for us, but because it gives us comfort.  Sweeping dirt provides the illusion of making things neat.  If we sweep every day, long enough and hard enough, we can convince ourselves that sweeping makes a difference. These women never create a sanitary place for their family to live, yet their labor offers other benefits.  When they sweep their yard they claim it in a more tactile way than any deed can bestow, just as anyone who puts effort into a patch of land both owns it and is owned by it.  These mothers know their children need a clean and safe place to grow and thrive and they do all that they can to provide, despite the forces of poverty and disease that thwart their effort.

The futility of sweeping dirt might discourage me.  Instead, it motivates me to create enough hard surface here to ensure that people can eat and sleep and learn and play without mud packing their soles or spiders climbing up their legs.  We don’t need to replicate the blacktop parking lots that span America, but a little pavement has its benefits.

Haitian brooms have long handles; the woman stand upright.  Sweeping is a dignified act, an act of caring, an act that says ‘I matter and my family matters’.  But it is also an act of defiance against the trials of this land.  Sweeping dirt denies natural disaster and physical deprivation, it ignores political instability and economic futility, it mocks every calamity grinding down on them.  Sweeping dirt asserts that these women will do whatever they can, however little that may be, to create a sanctuary for their family on this earth.  For humans everywhere strive to improve our lot, no matter how meager.

_______________________

This article was published in the Cambridge Chronicle on January 12, 2013 under the name ‘We are Creatures of Habit”.  I prefer my original title.

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Buckeye Logic Comes to Magic Haiti

Posted on 01/14/2013 by paulefallon

haiti-001This is the second of four articles I had published in conjunction with the third anniversary of the Haiti earthquake.  This article was published in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer on January 11, 2013.

Since the 2010 Haiti earthquake I have made sixteen trips to design and supervise construction of an orphanage and school in Grand Goave.  Haiti is a poor, backward, corrupt place, but it is also magical.  Mysticism runs strong here where ancient voudou merges the physical and the spirit world.  This mysticism offers solace for people with so little control over their daily trials. Time and again, when my American expectations are upended I remind myself that like magic, Haiti is not rational.

No one would describe Ohio as magical.  It is sensible and grounded, rooted in fertile soil and industrious citizens.  It is the epicenter of the United States’ most enduring and traditional values, a practical place where logic and reason prevail.  Two summers ago I bicycled through Ohio, Cincinnati to Conneaut, passing through Xenia, Columbus, Mount Vernon, Akron, and Cleveland.  I developed a strong appreciation for Ohio’s generous people, hearty food, exuberant cycling community, and its citizen’s faith that the products of our hands and minds, infrastructure and technology, are the tools that build successful lives.

I was pleased when a group of 23 Buckeyes from Akron came to Haiti to construct the growing compound where aid workers stay. They painted banisters and walls, laid out foundations for guest cottages, and built a roof on the new kitchen.  After a frustrating day of demonstrating earthquake resistant construction techniques to Haitian crews predisposed to attribute the tremor to the revenge of angry gods, I appreciated the planning and handiwork required to build a roof of both logic and craft in three days.

The new kitchen is a structure with one right angle and three odd angles nestled into a corner of the compound.  In pre-earthquake Haiti this out of squareness would hardly be noticed; most buildings got flat concrete roofs with cowlicks of reinforcing popping out for an eventual second floor.  Since those roofs crushed many people, post-earthquake structures often have sloped wood joists with metal roofs.  A wood frame will not last as long as concrete in a country susceptible to decay, but it is too light to crush when it falls.

The Buckeye’s new roof is a beauty.  One of the guys explains its logic to me.  “The metal roof needed to be about 3 in 12 slope.  We set the ridge four feet above the dividing wall in the kitchen, so it could be sheathed in full pieces of plywood.  We had to sister the joists, which were only 16 feet long.  We set the longest rafter perpendicular to the ridge and the top of the wall.  Then we laid out the other rafters, some parallel, some not, to determine a consistent slope.  Finally, we built up the angled walls as much as needed to meet the rafters.”  The result is a simple yet consistent roof sitting atop a skewed box.

I asked him about hurricane clips to protect the roof from ripping off in a hurricane.  “We couldn’t find any anchors to drill in the concrete block walls, but we found a spool of metal tape and some through bolts. We set the bolts through the top course of the masonry, anchored the metal tape to one end, wrapped it over the rafters, and pulled it tight to the other side of the bolt.”

This story demonstrates fundamental differences between Haitian and American cultures.  Take a dozen guys from Ohio, throw them in Haiti, give them an assortment of tools and materials, a jumbled problem, and in three days they develop and build a rather elegant solution.  Our ability to problem solve is great, we relish the challenge.

On our construction site, where we are building a larger yet more regular building, every step is an arduous process that must be repeated and repeated.  The crew trowels grout into ten walls, but unless we tell them to grout the eleventh, they might not.

This lapse is not due to laziness; Haitians work very hard.  It is simply that their minds work differently than ours.  We look for pattern, for logic, we apply order wherever we can.  Haitians are less analytical, less inclined to assign effect to cause.  They are more comfortable with magic.

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Transformation in Haiti

Posted on 01/12/2013 by paulefallon

haiti-001In conjunction with the the third anniversary of the 2010 Haiti Earthquake, several newspapers have published essays about my experiences in Haiti.  Over the next few weeks I will post them on my blog.  Here is the first one, which the Worcester Telegram and Gazette published on January 8, 2013.

I never met Britney Gengel, the Lynn Universty student from Rutland who died in the 2010 Haiti earthquake.  I never even heard of her until five months after she died, when serendipity led me to her parents.  As an architect who had worked in Haiti before the quake, I wanted to lend my hand in its recovery.  As grieving parents whose daughter’s final wish was to start an orphanage, the Gengel’s wanted to build one in her honor.   We collaborated on designing the BeLikeBrit orphanage.  We travelled to Haiti to select the site and plan the building.  Eventually, the project consumed me; I scratched a mid-life itch for change, left my job, and volunteered to supervise construction.  Hundreds of others, many from Central Massachusetts, contributed time and resources.  For many of them, like me, the spirit of this girl and her family’s determination to make her final wish come true transformed our lives.

Haiti is a land of endless contrasts.  It is dirty, backwards, corrupt, and intractably poor; yet it is also beautiful, tranquil; magical, and spiritually rich.   Conflicts between ancient traditions and modern opportunities are heightened by Haiti’s extreme poverty.  Most earthquake damage could have been prevented if construction had met standard codes, but since Haitians are equally inclined to attribute the earthquake to angry gods as shifting plates, construction crews were wary of the earthquake resistant features we incorporated in our building.  Families are tight knit, yet official marriage is considered optional and eighty percent of children in orphanages have living parents who placed them there for a better chance in life.  Haiti is a fiercely independent nation, but their turbulent history, insular culture and prohibitions against foreign investment crippled it; rendering Haiti utterly dependent on foreign aid.  Perhaps the biggest conflict of all is that this country, dysfunctional by any measure, is so vibrant and endearing; as if a predisposition for protest, a disdain for authority, and a stubborn streak were the ideal ingredients of charm.  Like many before me, I am aghast at Haiti’s poverty yet captivated by its people.

Anyone who visits Haiti returns to the United States a different person; after seventeen trips I hardly recognize myself.  I am drawn to Haiti precisely because it defies comprehension. Haiti falls short of American life by any statistical standard, yet by less conventional, though equally valid measures, it actually surpasses us.  By and large people in Haiti are happy; they are hopeful; they are not defeated by hardship.  Community is strong in a country where life is too hard to even pretend a person can ‘make it’ on their own.  And Haitians are mythically in love with their country.  One evening I witnessed a skinny kid strolling the beach at sunset; he struck his arm to the sky and yelled ‘Ayiti!’ I marveled at his patriotic euphoria despite the devastation all around him, and wondered how many Americans would muster the same exuberance amidst our own bounty.

BeLikeBrit orphanage also defies comprehension.  It is a solid, beautiful building, the most substantial building in town; though it would be unnecessary if such good construction existed before the earthquake. It is a monument to a young woman whose life was dashed in the first bud of adulthood; she inspires us by her lost potential as much as by her actual feats.  It is a testament to humans coming together to serve a higher purpose; to share our capabilities and resources with those less fortunate in an attempt to transform our loss into something positive.

Every one of us involved in BeLikeBrit was fueled by motivations beyond standard measures of economic gain and loss; we gave of ourselves without expectation yet we each received more in return than we donated.  Our good effort will never compensate for Britney’s death, but we can all be proud of the building that her spirit inspired.

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