Deep Yoga

Posted on 11/19/2012 by paulefallon

If there is one downside to all the travel during my past year, it is the frequent interruption to my daily yoga practice.  Though I may stretch and strike some poses in Haiti or Kalamazoo, the full Bikram experience requires an instructor’s guidance in the hot room.  I still practice every day when in Cambridge; a year ago that meant 25 or more classes in a month, but lately I have months with fewer than ten sessions.  I am faithful when in town, I am still limber and manage my poses; occasional yoga is better than none.  But without sustained practice, the meditative depth slips away.

 

This month I am blessed with three weeks at home, as I insist on celebrating Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday, among friends and family.  Between doing prodigious yard work and preparing for the feast, I enjoy a sustained string of yoga classes.  With each class my poses settle deeper. For the first time recently I actually touched my head and knee in Standing Head to Knee Pose and my elbows scraped the carpet in the Head to Knee Stretching.

 

But it is not the increased flexibility that I relish so much as the physical / mental balance that accompanies consistent practice.  That moment in Toe Stand, when my weight is balanced on the ball of one foot, the ankle of my suspended leg rests on my knee, my eyes focus on the floor four feet in front of me, and I raise my arms to prayer.  It is not simply a physical contortion; it is a moment when my sweaty, loose body merges with my consciousness.  I float; a moment of perfect balance between the force of gravity and my ascending spirit. I am simultaneously weightless and mindful and centered.  It is a deep yoga that I cannot attain through occasional practice. It is why I savor the privilege to practice every day

Posted in Yoga | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

The Cost of Construction

Posted on 11/12/2012 by paulefallon

Back in the days before the earthquake the rule of thumb for the cost of construction along Haiti’s Southern peninsula was $25 per square foot; the original number we used for the Forward in Heath Clinic.  After the earthquake the number doubled overnight to $50 per square foot.  Then, as we designed engineered structures we experienced a steady creep to $70, even $80 per square foot.  This may be small compared with American hospital construction costs, which routinely hit $500 per square foot, but it is a massive increase in three years and causes havoc with trying to assemble enough money to build here.

 

The challenge of figuring out how much it costs to build in Haiti is exasperated by the upside down relation of materials to labor from what we experience in the US.  A first order approximation for American construction is that 1/3 of the cost is for materials, 2/3 for labor.  In Haiti the proportion is reversed, then doubled.  Even with labor rates creeping from $4 a day to $6 a day, labor represents only 10-15% of the cost of construction, while many materials cost more here than on the mainland.

 

Philanthropic projects like BLB and MoHI get all sorts of things donated, and we are happy to have them, but the cost of shipping goods from the US to Haiti is high, and the reliability of receipt it tenuous.  Very little arrives ready to install for free.

 

Our single largest expense is steel.  There is a reason why so many Haitian buildings are under reinforced; rebar is expensive.  There are few suppliers in Haiti, demand is high, supply short, but we will not scrimp on this critical structural ingredient.  While a typical Haitian house has 3 – #4 bars in each column; we have 8 – #6 bars.  That is six times more cross-section of steel, at six times the cost.

 

Everything about steel is expensive, including the delivery.  Rebar comes in thirty or forty foot lengths. It arrives on long flatbed trucks that cannot climb the hill to BLB, so the delivery company dumps it along Route 2 and laborers carry them to the site. BLB has over 2,500 forty foot long rebars buried in its concrete.  A laborer can drag one rod up the hill, or a group of three to five laborers can bundle several together and shoulder them.  Either way, we have made 2,500 round trips to get rebar to the building.  Each round trip takes about half an hour.  That is 1,250 man hours,

 

One day I was returning up the hill while a group of five laborers carried a bundle.  Wanting to be helpful, I slipped my shoulder under the bars and took up my share of the load.  I did fine for twenty or thirty paces.  Then I started breathing hard.  Soon I could not keep step.  After a few minutes I dropped away.  The laborers did not mind; they smiled at my effort and reveled in their superior muscle.

 

I wondered how much this Herculean effort to move steel uphill cost. 1,250 man hours at $6 a day is just shy of $1,000.  Peanuts, it seems, for such effort.  Still, like so many construction costs in Haiti, it represents real money that has no corollary in this country, where machines that the place of so many human hands and backs.

Posted in Haiti | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

What does it mean to Be Like Brit?

Posted on 11/04/2012 by paulefallon

This is the speech I gave last night at the BeLikeBrit gala.

Someone told me that there is an NGO for every 750 people in Haiti.  I never verified that statistic but it feels about right.  NGO’s are everywhere.  Oxfam and USAID and Mission of Hope and Be Like Brit and Hands and Feet and Lifeline are names as common in Grand Goave as Macy’s and Wal-Mart and Stop ‘n’ Shop are here.  They are the engines of Haitian commerce, each a name to be trusted when you’re shopping to help others.  But wait a second, one of them is different. One of them is not a name.  One of them is a command.  Isn’t it just like Len Gengal to start a charity and instead of naming it with a noun, he makes it an order.  “Be Like Brit.”  Not Britney’s Orphanage or Britney’s Good Stuff, but, “Hey, you there, this is how you should act.”

So what does it mean to Be Like Brit?  First of all, it means you are nineteen years old, which is not all bad.  When we are nineteen the baby fat has evaporated, the pimples are finally going away, we are trim without having to stand on the scale every morning, we have hundreds of best friends forever and we are as beautiful as we will ever be.  We are in college, which is more fun than not; we are living away from our family, which is totally fun; but we still have the parents to fall back on for pretty much anything we need.  We feel very grown up because we can do anything we want.  We are 100% potential.

When we Be Like Brit we are adventurous and fly off to Haiti during January break. Maybe we go because our friends are going, maybe we go because it meets that social service requirement for school, maybe we go because we have a keen interest in the people who live there. Probably it is ‘all of the above’ because when we are nineteen, everything we do, we do for a million reasons. We are trying on the clothes of our future selves.  We toss aside the ones that don’t fit and pick up some cool threads along the way that we might want to put on later.

Being a 21st century kid / adult we use all modes of technology to communicate.  Every whim gets broadcast to the world.  “Just arrived PAP.  The drummers at the airport are cool.”  “The milk here is horrible, I want to start a dairy farm.”  “When I save the world, this is where I will start.”  “OMG I am so sick of beans and rice.  I want to open a McDonald’s here.” Our texts bounce into cyberspace.  They are the lighthouse beams that cut through the fog of youth; they clarify who we will become.  The ones that resonate go viral.

“They love us so much and everyone is so happy. They love what they have and they work so hard to get nowhere, yet they are all so appreciative. I want to move here and start an orphanage myself.”

To Be Like Brit is to remain forever on that lofty apex where anything is possible and nothing poses an obstacle.  Where whatever we wish becomes reality because we are supported by a firm pyramid of family and friends, resources and community.  Where building a dairy farm, or a McDonald’s or even an orphanage in desperate Haiti is not beyond the realm of the possible.  To Be Like Brit is to be forever young and perfect, but to make a difference.

I never met Britney Gengel; I never heard of her until five months after the earthquake. I have spent the last year trying to Be Like Brit.  I haven’t had any success in the part about being nineteen and beautiful again but I often feel a special kinship with Brit when I experience the pressure of life under Len’s thumb.  We are making progress, turning her final text into a substantial place to house orphans.  For those of us who are still here, the burden is a light one.  Britney gave us the dream, but she didn’t stay around long enough, so we have to make it real.

Posted in Haiti | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Death Comes to Grand Goave

Posted on 10/27/2012 by paulefallon

Death comes to Haiti so arbitrary it shatters any illusion that we control our destiny.  Hurricane Sandy is on her third day of delivering heavy rain to Grand Goave.  Unlike Isaac, who quickly shuffled through his fierce gales and heavy rains, Sandy lacks bluster yet drenches us with swirling clouds that refuse to spin away.  Perhaps she lingers to visit her little black namesake at the bottom of our hill.  Perhaps she wants us to reconsider the wisdom of constructing a building so heavy it cannot move when an arc might serve us better.  Perhaps she wants to demonstrate the destructive power of the slow moving tortoise over the quick fleeting hare.  Sandy has already rendered more damage than Isaac, though her skies show no sign of clearing.

This morning five people in Grand Goave died from Hurricane Sandy; a landslide down the mountain next to Be Like Brit smothered a tent where a mother and her four children slept in one bed.  They were buried alive.  When Francky and Gilbert ran to the scene I considered joining, but thought better of it.  Though I add value in areas of design, direction and analysis, I am useless at tasks requiring brute strength, like digging through muddy remains.  The few corpses I have seen in my sheltered life have all been neatly composed in coffins. Corpses here are much more common, yet rarely so well preserved.

According to the World Bank, the average life expectancy for a baby born in Haiti in 2012 is 60.6 years, but that statistic does not jive with anyone’s experience living here.  Making it past sixty in Haiti is not the norm, it is a rare achievement. People who are thriving and vigorous one day are gone the next. Tragedy is the norm. People mourn untimely deaths with loud flamboyance, then quickly return to their daily rhythms. If people lingered in grief, their grief would be perpetual.

In a typical year in the United States I might hear of a few people who have died; most all of them after a full life. In my regular visits to Haiti I learn about someone who dies every month.   Here is a representative list from 2012; I imagine anyone else in this fragile country could give a similar accounting.

Dieunison’s mother died at the beginning of the year. She was reportedly a voodoo priestess, like her mother before her.  I have never heard anyone mention her cause of death, though she could not have been very old.

In February an elderly woman was hit by a motorcycle near MoHI’s gate.  Gama, who is a paramedic, rushed to the scene and collected her to the hospital, but the woman did not survive.

In March Gama’s cousin died, a thirty-three year old woman with a husband and three children.  She had a short, fatal illness though I never heard a diagnosis.

Marieve’s cousin died in child birth in April.  She is survived by a husband, young son and twin daughters, one of whom was born blind.

In May Pepe’s father-in-law died.  He at least had a long life.

Three local youths died in a horrendous wreck when their small car was run into a ditch by an out of control truck in June.  The truck’s chassis ploughed right over the car, crushing and killing them on the spot.

In July Lex’s sister-in-law died; age 42.

August was a month when horror visited children.  A six year old Hands and Feet orphan drowned in the Caribbean Sea.  After searching for hours, the matrons gave up when night fell.  The girl’s body was discovered the next day, her extremities gone. The same month Kylene, a MoHI Sunday singer, lost her third baby in four pregnancies.  The baby was full term, yet born dead.

I hoped that September would break the pattern; but all kinds of odd disease flourished. Toto had a wound on his arm that blistered and sent him to the hospital; he missed three weeks of work.  Ble, the painter, got a cut on his leg that festered into an ugly infection. He limped around the site for days with his pants leg rolled up so fresh air could scab over the oozing pus, but with so much plaster dust in the air his leg healed slowly.  Fanes came down with a stomach bug, the front end version of what plagued me, but in a more severe form.  He could not keep any food down, lost sixty pounds and moved to Les Cayes where his family could care for him.  Two days after I returned to the States Fanes died.  Dysentery?  Worms?  Whatever took this healthy man in his middle forties was likely something that could have been diagnosed and treated in any industrial nation.

When I return this month a banner in the crew’s lunch tent honors Boss Fanes, but in truth, I have not heard his name mentioned even once.  Two weeks after passing, life without Fanes is the new normal; everyone has moved on.

There is no time to grieve for Fanes, or the drowned girl, or Pepe’s father-in-law, or Dieunison’s mother because today we have a new tragedy, five bodies lying together wrapped in a USAID tarp.  Lex prays over them while a crowd of Haitians in ponchos and ripped garbage bags witness their passing before Hurricane Sandy even departs our shores.

At least half these people who died this year could have been saved by elementary public health measures – clean water, safe houses, vehicle inspections, maternity care, life guards.  We take these for granted in the United States and other developed countries.  But for nine million Haitians, and a billion others around the planet, these simple safeguards do not exist.  So people continue to die from landslides and labor; dysentery and drowning; and as long as we allow these conditions to prevail for our fellow humans, our society is much less ‘developed’ than we pretend.

Posted in Haiti | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Guardrails

Posted on 10/26/2012 by paulefallon

Ah, those halcyon days of sitting around the main conference room at our office on Monday nights, reviewing sketches of elaborate ironwork railings with curliqued ‘B’s to ornament the orphanage.  At the end stages of construction, all of that is illusion.  We have a budget crunch and a surplus of wood – over 800 sheets of cut-up plywood and hundreds of 2×4’s left over from all the concrete work, so despite a desire not to use wood in a country prone to rot, we are building the courtyard stairs, the secondary partitions, furniture, and now guardrails out of wood.  These elements won’t last the life of the building, but they do not compromise its integrity and can be updated over time.

We have 21 guardrails around the courtyard’s second floor, each ten feet six inches long. Although we have a lot of wood, we don’t have much that long, and I want the top rail to be one piece, so first thing I do is ask Williere, the furniture maker, how many 2×4’s we have that are long enough to create continuous handrails.  “None’ he replies.  I doubt this, so we go find a few and I design a guardrail with one long top and a series of shorter horizontal and vertical elements, plus some plywood infill and a trio of stars.  It has design integrity, if not elegance, and can be built with what we have on hand.  I review the drawing with Williere, mark it on the wall at full scale and when I return two hours later he has made a pretty good facsimile of the idea, using four long 2×4’s!  Miraculous how a guy who said we had none this morning found plenty to save a few cuts.  I explain that we have to use the pieces as I drew them because we do not have enough long 2×4’s to make every guardrail the same.  He gives me an inscrutable look, dubious of such advance planning.

Although I like to give the crews autonomy in how they work, I realize the only way to get this built the way I want is to become Williere’s shadow. I spend three hours with him, measuring, cutting, nailing, making sure that the mock-up reflects not only what I want, but materials we have available.  This is a challenge for Williere because, as a furniture maker, he thinks of free standing objects, but the way I designed the guardrail it has to be built incrementally out from the columns.  He is a pleasant fellow, much brighter than most of the crew.  He knows how to find the centerline of a board and when I set a dimension on one side of the rail, he understands its counterpart.  He is skilled with a saw; his cuts are accurate.  We work well together.

Considering that the material in the guardrail have already been used three or four times, supported concrete for months and been exposed to Haiti’s severe weather, it is bit of a haggard piece of construction.  But we will prime and paint it up in a bright color and the children will love peering through its stars.  Maybe there is elaborate iron work in the orphanage’s future, but this will get us off to a safe and satisfactory start.

Wood guardrail at BLB with sea beyond

 

 

Posted in Haiti | Tagged | Leave a comment

Brother Red, Brother Blue

Posted on 10/20/2012 by paulefallon

The adage about the more things change they more them remain the same is particularly apt this election cycle.  I found this essay I wrote two rounds ago; after the 2004 Bush / Kerry election.  It is  as relevant, or even more so, in the partison sniping that characterizes our current election.  I urge everyone to participate in the process yet remain respectful to each other’s opinion, for that is democracy at its most sublime.

_____November 5, 2004__________

The electoral collage map from November 2 displayed the country as cohesive blocks of Red and Blue, more cleanly drawn than in any recent election.  Red claimed the center of the land, Blue held the edges.  Blue triumphed in the cities; Red prevailed in the suburbs.  Blue won the richest states while Red took the poorest.  The most highly educated states went Blue, the less educated went Red.  One can interpret this map of a country divided through reasoned analysis, or spin the division into shrill hyperbole.  Was this brawn besting brains, as the hard scrapple workers of the Heartland trumped the Coastal intellectual elites?  Did the fearful clinging to the land vanquish the urban hip?  Have the God-inspired core of this great nation beaten back the evil heathen fringe?

I don’t have to understand the Bush/Kerry electoral map to understand the division.  It thrives in my own family.  My brother lives in Oklahoma, a state with a fully Republican Congressional delegation and a 66% voter share for George W. Bush.  A state so Red, it has a river by that name.  I live in Massachusetts, a state with a correspondingly Democratic Congressional delegation and a 63% plurality for John Kerry, an enduring legacy for the term Boston Blue-Blood. The colors of the electoral map are mere abstractions of the opposing realities we live every day, my brother and me.

More than 40% of Oklahomans are Evangelical Christians, and my brother is one.  He left Catholicism some twenty years ago, found his true Jesus, and has lived by His Word ever since.  The Word has moved him into and out of several Evangelical congregations, spoken to him in tongues, prompted him to visit Creationist sites that ‘prove’ the world was made just 6,000 years ago, and inspired him to hose down his house to ward off the fire of Lucifer. The Word has also given him a firm rudder from which to navigate his life.  He is more stable, more productive, more complete since he found the Way.  He spends his Sunday mornings in church praising this vital force in his life.

Less then three percent of people in Massachusetts are Evangelical Christians.  When I left the Catholic church twenty-five years ago, I did not replace it with another institution to define my morals.  My life is governed by personal conscience and the Golden Rule, a system that acknowledges the grayness of human behavior rather seeking absolute truths.  I’m sure there is something out there bigger than us, but I don’t believe any religion knows what it is, or how it should be honored, any better than I can celebrate on a Sunday morning walk in the park.

Just over 20 % of Oklahomans have college degrees, below the national average.  My brother didn’t need one to build a successful cable television business. He started with a pick-up truck and a ladder and a quick shimmy up poles.  Now he has 20 contract installers.  He travels the country in his pick-up supervising their work, gets a cut rate for extended stays at Doubletree Suites, and always finds a place that has good draft and fast burgers.

More than 35% of the people in Massachusetts have a college degree, the highest percent in the nation.  I went even further, collecting a pair Master’s Degrees to become an architect.  I travel to major medical centers to design hospitals, stay at boutique hotels and after a day of travel I usually skip dinner to go to the gym.

Despite living in the state with the third highest divorce rate, my brother is married to a devoted wife who stays home and lends a hand in running his business.  When he’s on the road, they call each other five or six times a day.  When he’s home, they are inseparable.  They have five children and six grandchildren, none of whom graduated college, all of whom live in Oklahoma and are involved in the family business.

Even though I live in the state with the lowest divorce rate, my marriage failed.  My former wife is a physician and our two children shuttle between our houses.  We talk on the phone five or six times a month, coordinating our work, travel, and child care schedules.  We see each other at school concerts and baseball games with the ease of old acquaintances that have long since moved past love or rancor.  Our children plan to go to college, and it often seems the main criterion is that college be far from home.

Oklahoma spends $5,533 per student on public education. My brother bypasses the public schools and sends his children to a Christian Academy, where they learn how to live by the Bible.    Even though Massachusetts spends a whooping $14,840 per student, the most important thing my children learn at their urban public high school, is how to live by their wits.

My brother lives the American dream in a sprawling ranch house with a pool on a golf course.  But because Oklahoma has the lowest home appreciation in the country, he doesn’t have much of a nest egg.  I live a much older American dream, one born of immigrant families piling into multiple unit houses to gain their foothold. My old house is on a tiny lot, but because Massachusetts has the highest real estate appreciation in the nation, I am swimming in paper wealth.

My brother has one son who has traveled abroad.  He served our country with honor in Iraq.  My children have been to Europe, to Canada, and to the Caribbean.  Next summer we plan to go to Mexico.  We don’t know anyone from our town serving in Iraq.

My brother drives a full-size pick-up to work, his wife takes the SUV to Wal-Mart, and he has a Corvette in the garage for tooling around on the weekends.  I ride my bicycle to work, I’ve never been in a Wal-Mart, and do weekend errands in my Corolla.

My brother is a compelling storyteller and rock steady after a bottle of wine.  I can never remember a punch line and have learned that it’s wise for me to stop after the first beer.

My brother donates his money to his Church.  I donate mine to the Public Library and the ACLU.

My brother unwinds by playing golf and watching football, where screaming at the television is mandatory.  I unwind by running five miles and attending the theater, where the best performances are met with captivated silence.

We share the same genes, my brother and me, so science informs me that we must have something in common.  Our everyday habits reveal none.  But deeper down, the similarities exist.  We both love and support our families, even as he pulls his close and I set mine loose.  We both work hard, putting more into our country’s resources than we withdraw.  We are both patriotic, whether by offering our son to support our country’s policies, or offering our voice to question those policies.  And we both love each other, thanks to the bond of family.  Being brothers is more important than any shared viewpoints or interests.

When I go to Oklahoma to visit my brother and his clan, we talk and laugh and hug.  When his family comes to Massachusetts we do the same.  Sometimes we talk politics and values.  We never change each other’s minds, but we listen politely and even if I don’t believe what he believes, I respect his positions because I know my brother to be a man worth respecting.

My brother saves me from being an erudite Eastern snob.  Whenever I find myself in a circle of thin people in black clothes bemoaning how the East Coast should shrug off the rest of the country, I am the voice that argues we cannot dismiss the red center of our country.  I get the occasional jeer and have been labeled a defender of redneck religious extremists.  But none of these people have ever discussed the Book of Revelation with someone who truly believes, or stood hard against a red clay expanse so wide that it simultaneously humbles and empowers you, or savored the simple joy of a Sonic burger hanging off a tray from the driver’s side window.

I do not pretned to know how we might bridge the gap between the Red States and the Blue States.  The differences between us are fundamental. One side believes it knows the truth and the rest of us only need to embrace it; the other side believes in no single truth and is wary of anyone with such simplistic notions.  This doesn’t offer us much middle ground.  So we must look for what we share more than what divides us.  Our freedoms, our efforts, our heritage, our future.  These make us family and form the bond that can transcend political sniping. I am less worried about the differences between the Red States and the Blue States than I am about the animosity each holds towards the other.  I wish everyone in Massachusetts, or Vermont, or New York, or Connecticut could have a brother in Oklahoma, or Utah, or Idaho, or Nebraska.  Then it would be harder for each color to denigrate the other, because each color would be a part of us all.

Posted in United States | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Death with Dignity

Posted on 10/14/2012 by paulefallon

The Awkward Poser is not inclined towards politics, but there is a question on the Massachusetts ballot in November that I believe transcends politics and goes to America’s core identity as a land of free choice; I hope that all eligible voters will support the proposed Death with Dignity law in Massachusetts.

A similar law, which allows people of sound mind with terminal illness to self-administer life-ending drugs, has been in effect in Washington state for about a decade.  During that time a few hundred people have availed themselves of the opportunity to terminate their lives in the face of debilitating and painful deaths.  There has been no evidence of anyone being coerced into ending their lives, or any cases where people who do not fit the strict requirements of sound mind have been allowed to access life ending drugs.  In fact, the majority of people who go through the process to qualify and receive the drugs never take them, they are simply a peace of mind placebo.

We Americans take pride in our individuality and the right to make our own decisions. For the vast number of Americans the provisions of this law violate their religious or moral code, but citizenship requires us not only to secure the freedoms we cherish, but also to safeguard the freedoms of others.  Even if conscience prohibits you from considering such a means to end life, please be tolerant of others with a different point of view and give them the opportunity to take control of their death with the same security with which we take control of our rights in life.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 2 Comments

The Magic Island

Posted on 10/06/2012 by paulefallon

Eighty years ago an adventurer in a parallel epoch arrived in Haiti with the intent to document his impressions unbiased by the polarizing attitudes of his day.  W.B. Seabrook is a little known member of the lost generation. While Hemingway was making his literary mark in Paris, the epicenter of Western civilization, Seabrook explored colonialism’s collateral damage; Arabia, Haiti and Africa, with a passion for the occult that led him well beyond the pale of acceptable taste.  One could craft a respectable resume for this gifted writer, a war hero gassed at Verdun and recipient of the Croix de Guerre, a New York Times reporter, contributing writer to Cosmopolitan and Vanity Fair as well as author of eleven books.  Yet a full reporting reveals a man immersed in life’s extremes however measured.  He indulged in cannibalism, sexual adventurism, and his books address witchcraft, Satanism, sorcery, and voodoo as well as a harrowing personal recount of his extended stay in a mental institution.

In the 1920’s Seabrook inculcated himself in Haiti’s culture at the time when this ‘free republic’ was under military rule of the United States.  He travelled easily between the American power elite who lived as princes in the impoverished country, the black and mulatto aristocracy stymied under the thumb of Washington D.C., and the country peasants whom he befriends with warm affinity.  He infiltrates each sector to explore how the pulse of voodoo and black sorcery resonate in thatched huts as well as the Presidential Palace and recounts his experiences eloquently in The Magic Island.

I am hesitant to draw too many parallels between Mr. Seabrook and myself.  I have no intention of eating human meat, seeking a psychiatric commitment or committing a drug induced suicide, which Mr. Seabrook did in 1945.  Nor do I presume to turn a phrase with his insight and grace.  Still I find a consonance of perspective in our adventures here.  Both Seabrook and I come to Haiti to witness rather than to judge; to accept the country rather than try to change it, to value what Haiti has to offer rather than condemn it for what it lacks.

Although the names and details change, Haiti vs. US circa 1920 and Haiti vs. US circa 2012 recount the same story.  Fiercely proud of its independence, Haiti is reduced to the pitiful embodiment of that well-worn lyric, ‘freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose’.  Set apart from a world run by white men, Haiti is so racked by poverty and corruption that it becomes their ward.  At the beginning of the last century the marines played governess here; in this century it is the hundreds, thousands of NGO’s and missionary organizations who keep the dependent nation afloat.  Like medieval fiefdoms of goodwill they each lend a hand, but lack the encompassing ability to teach Haiti to swim on its own, let alone discover the wind that could fill its sails. Seabrook’s succinct summation of the American occupation ends by acknowledging, ‘Our attitude now in Haiti is superior, but kindly.’  Unfortunately that same sentiment is widespread today.

The Magic Island includes fantastic descriptions of Voodoo rites and customs which Mr. Seabrook, simultaneously reporter and ready participant, presents with the same legitimacy of any world religion.  The climax of his night long blood baptism centers around a young virgin and a goat channeling each other’s sprit, chanting in each other’s tongue, merging their identities before the sacrificial knife slashes through the goat’s throat, sparing the girl, to release the baptismal fluid.  Anyone who knows the Old Testament tale of Abraham and Isaac must recognize the parallels.  The point for Seabrook is not whether Christianity or Voodoo is ‘correct’ but in acknowledging that each satisfies a fundamental craving that eclipses mere survival.  Humans are driven to link our past, present, and future selves; to bond with our ancestors, to shape the context to our existence and envision continuity for those to follow.  “I believe in such ceremonies … in some form or another they answer a deep need of the universal human soul.”

As Seabrook describes the details of Voodoo practice, which include dedicated ritual structures, elaborate vestments, long simmering concoctions and sacrificial livestock, I marvel at the sacrifices poor Haitians make to expend their meager resources for spiritual pursuits. They remind me of the medieval serfs who lived in squalor while erecting Gothic Cathedrals.  Those with the least among us are the most heavily invested in the life after this.

Seabrook accepts everything he encounters at face value, he explains what he can through reason, ascribes the faith to the rest, and does not speculate on motivation simply to present a tidy tale.  When the Haitian President Antoine-Simone installs his daughter, a Black Sorceress, as First Lady in 1910, legend describes a midnight rendezvous where a military guard presents itself for inspection and after a convoluted dance, she anoints one soldier to have his heart removed, which she carries off on a silver tray.   The story is reported without the soldier’s perspective.  Is it a tragic story of an unwilling victim or, the celebration of a Jihadist-style martyr destined for eternal glory?  We have no clue.

Seabrook is a man ahead of his time yet trapped by it.  When he describes Voodoo rituals working themselves into frenzy through ethereal spirits, sexual passion, drugs and hypnosis, his hallucinations are straight out of the 1970’s.  Yet, he is appalled by the sensuality of male dancers and admits a deep personal discomfort with male sexuality.  Ultimately he does not differentiate energy derived from drugs and alcohol from energy bestowed by the spirits, for he does not want to elevate one and diminish the other.  “We live surrounded by mysteries and imagine that by inventing names we explain them.”

As a person always seeking to find Haiti’s contributions to the wider world, perhaps the most surprising discovery in The Magic Island is that zombies originated in Haiti.  The tales of the walking dead are fantastic, most serving in chalky silence, a few fomenting a path back to eternal rest. Yet, in the context of this extraordinary book the idea that zombies exist in a parallel reality plane is not too wide a stretch.

Voodoo is not a regular part of my Haiti experience, the evangelical crowd does not tinker with it.  Riding home one midnight with Gama we come upon a group of eight people draped in white, standing in a circle around an altar of flowers and objects and candles at a street intersection.  I am reminded of those altars people erect in the US to commemorate roadside accident victims, though this is both more elaborate and more ephemeral.  Gama acknowledges it is voodoo, but he does not want to discuss it.  “Have you ever been involved in voodoo?’  “No, I am a church goer.”  “Do you have any interest in it?”  “No.”  When you are Gama, when you believe the direct channel to God runs through the prophesies you accept and the tongues you speak, there is no need for other paths to the supernatural.  But when you are me, a heathen voyager on this magic island, all forms of mysticism are equally fascinating, and equally welcome.

Posted in Haiti | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

A Tale of Two Babies Delivered

Posted on 09/29/2012 by paulefallon

A few months ago I considered the different circumstances of my pregnant yoga teacher in Boston and the pregnant woman who lives at the bottom of the hill from Be Like Brit in Grand Goave, Haiti. I am happy to report that both of them delivered healthy offspring.

Isamu, which means brave in Japanese, is a flawless one month old. His dad paces the studio and cradles him while his mother, Tomo, teaches my usual Monday morning class, while the baby nurses quietly in the massage room when his dad teaches on Sunday morning. During Brad’s ninety minute dialogue he always tosses in some quip about his son and fatherhood, Brad’s lack of sleep, Isamu’s abundance of gas.  After class Tomo brings Isamu out for everyone to ogle and some of the women take turns holding him.  I have a trio of nephews with Isamu’s same Japanese-German-Irish ancestry.  They are remarkably varied in their looks; one is blond and blue eyed, another has distinctly almond features while the third is a burly boy who looks Hispanic more than anything.  It is too soon to tell exactly what Isamu will look like.  His skin color is the perfect amalgam of his parents.  He is a bit Asian, a bit Caucasian, an ambiguous ethnicity that is characteristically American.  As he moves placidly from arm to arm after class, it is easy to envision him at home most anyplace the world.

Back in Haiti a pitch black bundle sits in the alley where her mother used to moan.  Since delivery the mother is more social; other women share her breeze.  I am happy that what seemed a very difficult pregnancy is past; I am gratified to witness the child’s tender calm.  Neighborhood children peak into her blankets and tickle the newborn as children are prone to do the world over.  The little girl, incongruously named Sandy, has found a welcome home, firmly routed to this particular patch of dirt and shelter.

Posted in Haiti, United States | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Cambridge Ladies

Posted on 09/22/2012 by paulefallon

Cambridge is a fine, fine place to live; its shortcomings barely worth mentioning.  We have efficient and clean government and excellent municipal services, even if there are a few odd positions like a Ranger and a Peace Commissioner that seem indulgent.  Our tax rate is lower than all of our neighboring cities, yet gleaming civic buildings sprout everywhere, including an immense teen center in my neighborhood, where adolescents are scarce. We have bustling urban centers, though Harvard Square has forfeited quirkiness for high rent chain stores. We have two remarkable universities that elevate our civic discourse, though provincial forces discourage their development so much that the city denied Harvard’s proposal to build a Renzo Piano museum along the river and built a (very fancy) housing project instead. When I ride to work, underwear dries in the huge glass windows where perhaps something more uplifting might have been displayed.  Most famously, Cambridge has a reputation for left leaning politics that earned it the moniker ’The People’s Republic’.  Unfortunately we suffer the same political dizziness that affects any far left point on the political compass when the peoples’ voice grows so shrill it becomes fascist

The guardians of our left leaning reputation who are most likely to adopt police state tactics are not Cambridge’s men and women in blue; they are uniformly cordial.  The watchdogs are the Cambridge Ladies, a distinct breed of women.  Mostly single, mostly greying, mostly energetic and fit in sensible shoes and scant make-up, Cambridge Ladies patrol our fair city enforcing their strict vision of what is allowed in paradise.  These women won their liberation and weathered its backlash, they got what they wanted by being aggressive and smart and they refuse to accept the intolerable result of their effort- that we are privileged enough to leave each other alone.

There is a saying that academic arguments are so virulent because so little is at stake, and Cambridge Ladies pick their battles the same way.  My house mate Paul’s lovable, chubby chocolate Lab, Silas, is friendly to every creature along the path around Fresh Pond.  Most people ignore his heft, a few call him a bear or a koala, but this fat and happy canine gets under the Cambridge Ladies skins.  “Your dog is fat,” the least articulate will say.  “Your dog is too fat.” is the more common scold, implying they have the authority to monitor how hefty Silas should be. Some comments ooze superiority.  “That is the Botero of dogs,” one woman proclaimed, obviously proud of her knowledge of both art and obese pets.

I received a memorable Cambridge Lady lashing last weekend, riding my bicycle along Brattle Street en route to yoga on a brilliant Sunday morning.  Nothing could detract from the splendor of the moment as I approached the intersection of Brattle and Fayerweather.  There is a light here, but no traffic on Sunday morning.  The light was red for Brattle but the pedestrian walk sign was green.  I slowed, looked both ways and headed across.  No cyclist worth his salt will stand at an intersection with no one moving in any direction. “You have to wait for the light!”  A sharp voice called from the brown Volvo station wagon idling on my left.  I smiled at the cliché of a Cambridge Lady in a brown Volvo station wagon.  The light changed, she pulled aside me, and as I anticipated, slowed her vehicle to continue the rant. “You are supposed to stop for the light!”  I did not respond or even look her way.  She accelerated and then cut me off with a right turn onto Channing Street. I continued down Brattle, laughing out loud at the ridiculous woman.  She was right of course; I am supposed to stop at the light.  Cambridge Ladies are always right, right to the point of being miserable.  I am not a reckless cyclist; I stop at lights when there is oncoming traffic or any question as to right of way.  But I refuse to stop just because it is the rule. Rules are necessary to guide our behavior and make things run smooth, but they are also made to be broken.

I saw a wonderful production of The Mikado recently; I love that operetta, in particular the Mikado’s ‘object all sublime…to make the punishment fit the crime.’  I thought of my law break and my Cambridge Lady and decided that each of us got a punishment well fit to our crimes. I disobeyed a law; a law barely relevant on a quiet Sunday morning.  I got scolded but ultimately found a great laugh in the whole thing.  The Cambridge Lady did not violate any crime scripted into law, though I consider being a sanctimonious prig in a hulking gas guzzler on a beautiful day a crime of sorts.  Her punishment is self-evident; she is sentenced to being a Cambridge Lady, petty and frustrated.

My punishment vanished the moment her car turned the corner. Her sentence, I fear, is for life, though the optimist in me would be generous on parole.  I hope that one day she might loosen up and realize that her unsolicited direction is unwelcome and unkind; it brings no positive energy to her or the object of her rebuke.  The beauty of life in a liberal city does not come from telling others we are wrong; it comes from a generous allowance that so long as we do not harm others, we have the privilege to do what feels right.

 

 

Posted in United States | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment