For a variety of reasons, seen and unforseen, our latest trip to Haiti allowed us to see and learn more about the country than on past trips. We enjoyed plentiful time with the girls and boys of Kay Papa Nou and Unity House. In addition, we saw more of downtown Port-au-Prince, drove through more upscale suburbs, and traveled into a very rural section of Haiti.
Compared to previous trips, my impressions were similar or even confirmed. Haiti always makes me think of chaos. However, let me be clear that I’m not saying Haitian culture is chaotic. As an outsider, it seemed chaotic to me upon arrival, but it takes only a few days to notice the ordering of everyday life rising to the surface. People go about their business each day: They do jobs if they can find them. They gather things to sell and take to market. They exchange goods or services for money. They wash their clothes, themselves, their homes and their little spaces of business. Even the harrowing Haitian traffic follows an order that moves people through intersections without traffic lights and gets the elderly across streets without crosswalks. So it is not cultural chaos that keeps rising to my consciousness when I visit Haiti. It is a more existential chaos common to all people of the earth, every culture, every nation. In Haiti, this chaos of existence is more visible and oppressive. The culture developed from the chaos in ways that kept it transparent.
I would compare this existential chaos to an ocean where human culture is a system of rafts tied together floating on the surface. Religion. Family. Friendships. Homes. Jobs. Government. Values—These are the rafts that people tie together to stay afloat on the chaotic ocean of existence. In Haiti, many of these rafts are minimal. They are mere sticks and branches tied together with twine. The chaotic water of life sometimes seeps through and swamps them. The rafts sink perilously beneath the surface and then rise again and again. The lines tying one raft to another that make up the culture are thin and worn. Yet, even this tenuous existence functions to serve the purpose of ordering life, giving it meaning and carrying it forward. This rickety, impoverished structure of the cultural flotilla is not the real issue. The issue is that in Haiti, the flotilla of impoverished rafts are thwarted by larger, stronger, well-built boats crushing through them. In addition, a few luxurious yachts smash about in the midst of the flotilla without concern. The issue is the social and economic disparity. Disparities that exist globally, usually behind a veil of geographic separation, are exposed in terrifying nakedness within the confines of that half an island in the Caribbean called Haiti. The disparity exposes the chaos.
Let me illustrate this deeper reality by talking about some real and hypothetical births of different children in Haiti. Here is the question that haunts me as I reflect on this existential chaos: what reason dictates the circumstances in which any given Haitian child will be born? Working with the children at Kay Papa Nou and Unity House sensitizes me to the place of children in particular. These children are happy and cared for. They are fed, sheltered, loved and educated by David and Dani. Though, as you heard recently, education is becoming more expensive, so they may not be able to send the older children to higher grades unless they have more resources. Nevertheless, the children who somehow managed to get into Kay Papa Nou and Unity House have the things they need to survive and grow.
But, we also went to visit another orphanage to see what life was like there, (the one where we stayed during Govans’ first trip to Haiti, St. Joseph’s). Since that first visit, it was destroyed in the earthquake and has been replaced with a multi-million-dollar facility. St. Joseph’s is well connected to generous Catholic benefactors and skillfully administered by its founder who has a flair for telling their story and opening people’s pocketbooks. And can you imagine how many boys live at St. Joseph’s new multi-million dollar facility? Sixteen. Only 16 boys live in these multi-story, relatively luxurious accommodations—while 40 boys and girls at Kay Papa Nou scrape by without enough to educate all the children. For me, that’s where the chaos comes in. Who decides which child will be accepted into St. Joseph’s? Who decides which child will get into Kay Papa Nou? Who decides which children will grow up on the street? This existential chaos quickly moves us toward disturbing theological implications.
Another child is born to a family that can barely support her. She is born in a bare one-room cinderblock house; it has no windows or door. In a run-down part of Port-au-Prince, it is not the worst slum, but it is very poor. The child’s mother has no job but sells a few things from a basket on the side of an unpaved dusty road. This child will one day do exactly what her mother does, perhaps with the same basket on the same dusty road. Education is not a possibility for her. Even sufficient food is uncertain. Life is lived on a tightrope. Who decided she would be born in these circumstances?
Another child is born to a family in the middle-class neighborhood of Petionville in Port-au-Prince. Her father provides for his family with a job as a customs agent at the airport. Her mother runs a store that sells drinks and household goods. The child born to this family will be well fed and educated. She will have some expendable income for a few luxuries. She will also have access to the family’s connections and, therefore, one day will get a job to support her own family. Who decides she would be born into this kind of family?
Another child is born three hours from Port-au-Prince in the rural Haitian countryside in a one-room house made of sticks with mud walls, a dirt floor, and a rusty metal roof. He will enjoy the richness of the natural world and the bounty of the land, at least when it rains. But, limited access to markets or education will define this child’s life. He will mostly eat when the land produces, supplemented by what little they can sell in far-off marketplaces. Who decides that this child and the millions like him should have these challenges?
Another child is born in the uppermost class of Haitian society—the one-tenth of one percent. His family owns a large company. He will have expendable income all his life and will spend it on luxuries like brand-name clothing, expensive phones, and cars. He will live most of his days walled off from the poor neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince and protected by armed guards. Sometimes he is driven through those poor neighborhoods, but the car windows are closed, doors locked, and air conditioning on. His family will have access to the highest offices of government so they can insure their continued prosperity through public policy decisions. Who decides which child gets into the highest one-tenth of one percent?
This offensive disparity is the chaos I’m talking about. The universe at a deep level seems to be totally chaotic, so we try to order our little part of it on the surface by tying together our little rafts of jobs and religion and families and culture just above the tumultuous depths below. We all do this. But in places like Haiti, the contrasts are jarring. Around every corner some new injustice vomits itself onto our consciousness. The rafts provide minimal sustenance as they float beside strong boats which occasionally cross paths with elaborate yachts. And the oceans of injustice heave and lurch beneath it all as everyone tries to hold it together.
Many people believe that our fortunes and prosperity are determined by some divine will. God blesses some with wealth. Money is a blessing, and every level of society believes this. Even the most impoverished person can believe that God gives blessings with dollar signs or an extra meal. But, if that is how God operates, then that God appears to me to be a master of injustice. Such a God would seem to be a sadistic distributor of blessings given the injustice of the world. I don’t believe in such a God. Given the evidence made so plain in places like Haiti, I don’t always know what kind of God I do believe in, but it is not one who decides one child will be born into extreme wealth, a few will be born into the upper class and multitudes will be born into extreme poverty. I attribute those things to chaos.
However, one thing is clear. The choices we make as individuals, communities, and societies define how we will float together on the surface of the chaos. It is true that we don’t need that much to stay afloat and stay together—some logs tied together, some strong lines to bind us to one another. But, though we don’t need that much, we should all have access to the same raft-building materials. And we don’t get that access by our birth. Therefore, our choices do matter. We can choose generosity. We can choose to share our raft-building materials. We can choose compassion and selflessness and the common good. We can choose to govern ourselves by laws that protect the most vulnerable, so that those in the yachts don’t pull sticks out of the most rickety rafts sinking into the chaos. But, that is the really tough part. Governing and organizing is not easy. It takes courage. It takes hope. It takes faith. It takes all of these to believe that such efforts can work, that such choices can make a better, more orderly life for all of us as we float along the surface of the chaos.
We may be mistaken when we think that God is the ocean that is the universe. We may be mistaken that God is the all powerful divine will behind it all. We may be mistaken to think that there really is some order to the chaos that we just can’t discern.
Maybe our thinking about God is too big for our britches. Instead, maybe God is here on the surface of the chaos with us, in the sharing we choose, in the way we protect and honor those born with no raft. God is in the way we pull together and stand up to the yachts and require them to share even when they refuse.
God is not the chaos. God is the order we create by our choices. God is great when we choose order and fairness, generosity and sharing. God is great when we choose justice. For the Haitian people, we can’t choose those things for them; they have to make those choices; but we can help supply good rope and logs for their rafts. At the same time. We can choose that kind of order and justice for ourselves. We start right here in our own lives, our own church, our own community. God is great when we all have access to the same raft-building materials. We do have a choice.
Posted by tomharris1972 
Govans Presbyterian Church 