Of course I remembered. She had been the translator for the talk I was asked to give at that event and I had a vivid memory of how she had embellished everything I said, making the crowd of young people laugh in a way that was a little disconcerting. For a while I felt like a stand-up comedian except that I didn’t understand any of my own jokes.
‘I’ve just been to Haiti doing some humanitarian aid work – I really need to talk to you about it!’ she said. ‘It is terrible what is happening there. Everywhere I went I kept thinking “what these children really need is Mary’s Meals”.’
We walked over to the Mary’s Meals Centre, our little cafe in the heart of the village, where we served tea and coffee to pilgrims and told them about our work. This was Milona’s base and here people from every corner of the globe learnt about Mary’s Meals and often became the people who returned home to start Mary’s Meals fund-raising organizations. As usual we arrived to find a hive of activity where several concurrent conversations were taking place in different languages. Once again I marvelled at Milona’s ability to flit from one language to another and give her full attention to every single visitor who turned up. Over a coffee Anka asked me if we might be interested in setting up Mary’s Meals in Haiti, showing me her pictures and pointing out it was now the poorest country in the western hemisphere. I explained to her that we would love to help the suffering children there but our available funding was already committed to other projects.
‘Let’s pray about it and think about it and see what happens,’ I suggested to her as I took my leave before heading to the airport. I said this sincerely as I already knew a little about the extreme poverty in that Caribbean island and certainly felt moved by Anka’s graphic descriptions of suffering children there, but I travelled home without any great hope that we could do anything in Haiti soon. Almost every week we received new requests for help, more than we could ever keep up with.
When I arrived home I popped into my shed to check my emails. In my inbox was a message from a lady called Cecilia from the north of England, who had just returned from a holiday in the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean. At that point I had never met Cecilia, but had heard of her because she was one of those tireless volunteers who seemed to spend her life telling every person she met about Mary’s Meals! Often new supporters from the north of England would contact us and tell us that Cecilia had introduced them to our work. Her email to me explained that while in the Caribbean, she and her husband got talking to a man in a restaurant and, of course, she told him about Mary’s Meals. He was very moved and explained that he sat on the board of a grant-making Foundation that was currently looking for the best way to help the poorest children in Haiti. I realized that about the time they were having this encounter in the Cayman Islands, I must have been in the cafe listening to Anka’s request to start Mary’s Meals in Haiti. The email ended with a phone number and a request for me to phone this gentleman. When I did, he confirmed Cecilia’s story and asked in-depth questions about how Mary’s Meals worked. He told me that if we sent a funding proposal for setting up Mary’s Meals in Haiti, he would present it to the board of his Foundation, who were likely to regard it favourably. By now I was in no doubt that we were meant to do this and we began serious research on the needs in Haiti – child malnutrition rates, school enrolment data, current providers of school meals and so on. It was clear there was an overwhelming need for Mary’s Meals in the country. Then we began to look at various organizations working in Haiti – particularly those working in education – that might be potential partners for us, and we began talking with some of them.
By September I made my first visit to Haiti, accompanied by Maria Byars, a bright young member of our now growing team who had spent much of the previous two years working with us in Malawi and Liberia. I had known Maria since she was a young girl, first because she used to come with her parents to Craig Lodge on retreat, and then later when she joined the little youth community there. She developed a passion for the work of Mary’s Meals and, after completing her Masters at the London School of Economics, she came back to join our small growing team – something that delighted me given she was one of the most thoughtful and intelligent people I knew. She had started to write down our model as it developed, articulating things such as community engagement and our approach to long-term sustainability, as well as leading our first efforts to monitor and evaluate our projects in a meaningful way. She was also a deeply spiritual and private person who, after a few years of working closely with me, left me speechless by announcing out of the blue one day that she had decided to become a nun. Today she is a Franciscan Sister of Renewal, working with the poor in New York.
We travelled first of all up into the central plateaux, climbing on very bumpy roads over two mountain ranges to a town called Hinche. Much of what we saw reminded us of West Africa, but there were many differences too. Donkeys were the most common form of transport and the little houses by the roadside were painted in pretty blues and greens. The crumpled mountains were extraordinarily beautiful, although totally denuded of trees. In places the erosion was so severe they looked as if they were about to crumble and disintegrate completely before our very eyes. And a crushing, ugly poverty was all too evident. Men pulled crude wooden carts piled high with heavy loads. Under a wooden market stall by the road, I noticed a dreadfully skinny child squatting in the dust and realized that he was painstakingly picking up tiny shards of charcoal and placing them in a little plastic bag.
Before my visit I had been reading about Haiti’s appalling history of tragedy and injustice. The French colonialists had once administered a particularly brutal slave regime here. A third of the slaves, imported in huge numbers from West Africa to work the lucrative sugar plantations, died within a few years of their arrival. In 1791 the slaves rebelled, and by 1804 they had won a victory against Napoleon’s France that shook the world. In 1825, the French, supported by the USA, Britain and Canada, demanded reparation payments for their ‘lost property’ such as slaves, land and equipment. To attain international recognition, and escape political and economic isolation, Haiti was forced to pay 150 million gold francs. This would be the equivalent of around 12.7 billion US dollars today, and although that amount was later reduced, Haiti was unable to finish paying this debt until 1947. After that date Haiti suffered at the hands of a series of notorious dictators such as Papa Doc and his son Baby Doc. I also read some other depressing current facts about Haiti and the legacy bequeathed by that horrible history. Around 80 per cent of the population now lived on less than two US dollars per day, 50 per cent of children under five were malnourished, while eighty of every 1,000 babies born did not live to see their first birthday. And less than half of the kids ever enrolled in a school.
Our first day in Hinche, 5 September 2006, was a happy one. Four months after that conversation with Anka in Medjugorje, we witnessed the first ever serving of Mary’s Meals in Haiti. In a little orphanage called Maison Fortune, smiling children, in startling pink school uniforms, queued under towering green trees to collect their plates of rice and vegetables. Later that day we met some Missionaries of Charity (Mother Teresa nuns), who reminded us it was the anniversary of Mother Teresa’s death. I was delighted that we had begun our work in Haiti on this day as I had a very deep devotion to Mother Teresa, whose words and approach to serving the poor had a huge influence on the way we worked. Her sisters, in their striking blue and white habits, invited us back to their house where they introduced us to the malnourished children they cared for – stick-thin, shockingly shrunken kids, only just clinging to life, so tiny and fragile-looking that at first I was afraid to hold them. But when eventually I did so it was hard to let them go, and by the time I placed the last one back in her cot I felt almost envious of those nuns who spent their days caring for those beautiful, precious little human beings. We also spent some time with another local organization, Caritas Hinche, discussing the desperate need for meals in the many schools that they were runnin
g in the central plateaux, and we agreed to form a partnership with them too. In time, they became our largest partner in Haiti and across many village schools in the central plateaux – some of them very remote and accessible only on foot or by donkey – volunteers began to cook rice and beans every school day for their children.
From Hinche we travelled down to Port-au-Prince to meet a Father Tom Hagan and, with him, visit a notorious slum called Cité Soleil. Since arriving in Haiti, every time we had mentioned our intention to visit that place, we had prompted laughter and then, after a realization that we were serious, a solemn statement that this, in fact, was just not possible. The situation there was currently in daily news bulletins. A UN peacekeeping force was positioned round the edge of Cité Soleil, effectively placing its 400,000 inhabitants under a kind of siege, while skirmishes with the 12,000 armed gang members who controlled the slum were ongoing. These gangs had been kidnapping people recently on the roads leading to their territory and most in Port-au-Prince were wary of travelling even into adjacent areas of the city, let alone Cité Soleil itself. Our ‘pass’ into Cité Soleil and our reason for wanting to visit, was Father Tom Hagan, an American priest who had been working there for many years. I had been in regular contact with him for some months after learning about his work in Cité Soleil through his organization, Hands Together. In particular I was interested in the schools he had built there and the desperate need the children had for school meals.
We arrived at his house in Port-au-Prince and very soon the diminutive streetwise Philadelphian had us laughing. Over a cold drink he began telling us his story and the situation in which he was working, but each time he started to explain a serious, troubling and often macabre situation that he was dealing with, he would make a sudden diversion into a hilarious anecdote. Given the amount of violence and death around him I wondered if it was a way to cope – or at least to help us cope – with the reality of his life. He was humble, and disarmingly insecure, often questioning whether he had done any good at all for anyone in the time he was in Haiti.
Father Tom explained to us that after leading a group of students from Lafayette College to Haiti in 1986, he felt called to give up his post as Chaplain to Princeton University and eventually moved to Port-au-Prince in 1997, where he founded Hands Together. They set up education, agriculture and health projects in an area called Goniaves, but their biggest focus became Cité Soleil where they built eight large school campuses to provide free education for the first time there. He also described the current, extremely tense situation in Cité Soleil. He knew the various gang leaders well and was trying to find a way to broker peace there. Once again, while recounting some recent atrocities that had taken place, he veered off to a hilarious anecdote about the Indian Missionaries of Charity who lived nearby, and for whom he said Mass every morning.
‘Many days when I go to say Mass for them they will have written on a little blackboard in their chapel a prayer intention for me to announce. Very often this will be one of the sister’s birthdays or an anniversary of some sort. This one morning I get there and on the board they’ve written “Sister Horshit’s birthday!” I composed myself and tried my best to pronounce it in a less obvious way. “Let’s pray for Sister Horseeeet on her birthday,” I said, but no, they all immediately corrected me.
“No, no, Father! It’s Sister Horshit …”’
By now he had us doubled up in laughter, and moved back to finish a story about a gang leader who had recently beheaded a rival. He answered our many questions and reassured us that it was safe for us to travel with him to visit the schools in Cité Soleil the next day.
And so, the next morning, after Mass with the Missionaries of Charity, feeling relieved that no one had introduced me to Sister Horshit, we headed for Cité Soleil. The main highway that led there from Haiti’s international airport was alarmingly empty. Eventually a colourful bus roared past us, down the central lane, its horn blaring an unremitting message that this terrified driver was going to stop for no one. Like everyone else in Port-au-Prince, he was presumably aware of the kidnappings that had taken place on this stretch of road in recent weeks. As we turned off the highway on to a smaller road leading towards Cité Soleil we passed a huddle of white UN tanks, out of which peeked soldiers who trained their guns directly upon us. I thought of the incredulous reaction we had provoked since arriving in Haiti, every time we had mentioned to someone that we planned to visit Cité Soleil, and I glanced at Maria to see if she was OK. She looked a lot calmer and less troubled than I felt. I had in fact begun to ask myself how wise I was to place our lives in the hands of this eccentric priest who we had only just met the previous evening. Meanwhile Father Tom gave us a running commentary, explaining that since 2004, when the elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was ousted from power by a coup, a UN force had been controversially present. Ostensibly here to keep the peace, many Haitians saw the 6,000 UN troops as agents of international powers, who they believed supported the overthrow of Aristide. Many of the gangs within Cité Soleil remained loyal to the former president and accused the UN of brutalities against them and the impoverished people of Cité Soleil. In July 2006, the UN failed in an attempt to ‘invade’ Cité Soleil but up to eighty civilians were killed in the process. Since then they had become entrenched round the perimeter from where they launched sporadic attacks. They stood accused by local inhabitants of turning Cité Soleil into a concentration camp. A recent article published by the Lancet claimed that 8,000 people had been murdered and 35,000 women sexually abused in Haiti in the twenty-two months since the deployment of the UN force. It became clear by now that we had driven into what was in effect a war zone. The shelled buildings and walls riddled with bullet holes were no different from scenes I had become familiar with in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Liberia.
‘That’s the Daughters of Charity house,’ said Father Tom, pointing at another war-scarred building. ‘They had to move out last week when they started to be fired at which is really sad because those nuns were doing great work here. One of the Mother Teresa nuns was also shot in the arm but is making a full recovery, thank God.’
Apart from the Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières, it seemed Hands Together were the only humanitarian organization still functioning in Cité Soleil. We were now passing burnt-out buildings on which sat rows of young men who stared sullenly at us. I read the remains of a sign on a particularly bullet-scarred empty building and realized I was looking at what was left of a police station. I understood more clearly now that this place really was ruled by the gangs. There was no other authority here any more in this little autonomous state.
Did Father Tom really have a ‘safe pass’ into this place or was he perhaps completely mad? I asked myself again. I felt reassured when we finally arrived outside one of seven school campuses and passed through a gate in its high security walls. Inside was a little oasis of peace. Some men were making little wooden chairs in one classroom in preparation for the new school term, while a UN helicopter buzzed angrily overhead. Father Tom pointed to a neat bullet hole in the blackboard and explained that the children had been in class when it whistled over their heads.
We walked out into the little alleyways and were surrounded immediately by naked skinny children. The smell of sewage and putrid waste was overpowering. Everywhere there were piles of rotting rubbish and pools of stinking black water, through which the barefoot children walked. Tiny, flimsy homes made of rusting tin sheets lined concrete channels full of raw sewage. The children pointed to their mouths and distended stomachs, asking us for something to eat. Many times I had been asked by children for money, but not for food in this way. Huge black pigs rooted in the rubbish as we walked towards the old docks, and here and there children could be seen squatting amid the squalor to do their toilet. The stench and filth and lack of dignity were overwhelming. I could not believe what I was seeing. A small baby was crawling face down in the putrid grime, trying to make its way into a tin shack. I had never anywher
e witnessed such a living hell. And I was scared too. Every now and then as we walked, young men would approach Father Tom and ask to speak to him. As soon as we stopped a crowd of men would start to form round us, many of them wearing angry stares. ‘Time to move on,’ Father Tom would say and on we went. How could anyone live here, like this, and remain human? Around the old wharf men sat mending their fishing nets, while in the harbour old cutters and fishing skiffs bobbed, with their huge sails framed by the emerald sea. The sudden glimpse of beauty startled me. Behind them enormous, hulking cargo ships were moored at the dockside. Nearby I noticed a little boy standing at the edge of the water where the water lapped gently against mounds of plastic detritus. He was flying a home-made kite, made out of thin sticks and plastic bags. He stared up at it, transfixed, as it hovered in the azure sky, oblivious to the foul muck, decomposing waste and the particularly large pig rooting beside him. In fact he looked serene as he marvelled at the beautiful flying machine that he controlled above his head. After watching him for a few minutes we made our way back through some different alleyways, passing a man with a home-made guitar singing while his wife breastfed a baby. She gave us a huge smile. Yes, of course it was possible to live even here and retain your humanity.
And then another unexpected surprise as Father Tom led us into a little, heavily guarded house, inside which was a fully operating radio station. He explained that a group of young men had come to him with the idea and he had helped them get it up and running. We found ourselves looking through the glass wall of the studio, as a young enthusiastic DJ introduced another track. Father Hagan whispered something in his ear and the DJ interrupted the song to tell his listeners he wanted to welcome some unexpected visitors from England. (We teased Father Tom afterwards about the fact we were Scottish not English, and a couple of years later, long after I had forgotten that incident, Father Tom took me to revisit the radio station. This time the DJ dramatically announced his visitors from SCOTLAND and played to his bewildered listeners a recording of ‘O Flower of Scotland’ complete with bagpipes.)
The Shed That Fed a Million Children Page 22