by Paul Farmer
The prayer began with just the two nuns, but soon many voices joined in the rhythmic flow of words that I didn’t understand but found comforting. They came from every corner of the room. The prayer transitioned into a song the women knew well and sang enthusiastically. I was amazed by the strength they found to sing.
Suddenly, a deep, almost haunting voice joined in, much louder than all the others. It was from the woman in the cot next to me, the one I thought might be dead a few days earlier, whose body was wrapped from head to toe in a sheet cocoon. I’d glanced over at her throughout the morning as I held my friend’s hand. I’d watched the outline of her body in the sheet, trying to discern breathing. Nothing. She had been deadly quiet. But her voice was now the strongest in the infirmary. She belted out each Creole word with a force and intensity that made the small room feel like a cathedral.
When the song ended, the nuns slipped out, and the room quickly quieted. I could hear the soft, shallow breathing of my friend, her hand in mine. One by one, each patient closed her eyes. Only one woman was unable to rest—the deep-voiced woman lying an arm’s length away.
Her back faced me, but I could see she was in significant pain. I wondered if I should reach out as I watched her fidget and wince, struggling to get comfortable. Slowly she rolled in my direction. Her chestnut eyes, wet with tears, stared at me through a small slit in the sheet. She pulled the sheet tight around her shoulders and face, revealing the skin on her swollen hands. It was raw—light pink, infected. It looked like it was peeling off—even on her fingertips. A fly circled the opening around her eyes, and she moaned as she tried to shoo it away. I leaned over and waved my hand, relieved to be able to do something more than stare.
I wanted to go to another part of the room where her pain couldn’t be seen or felt, but I forced myself to stay put. Our eyes were locked. She whispered something urgent in Creole. I didn’t understand, but I was sure she asked for help. I was afraid to touch her—partly because I thought I’d hurt her and partly because I was afraid of catching whatever it was that she had. I should have taken those gloves.
Thankfully, the doctor came back in the room and walked over to her cot. He nodded hello to me and then knelt by the woman, quietly talking to her as he carefully peeled back the sheet to examine her. She cried out in agony. I held my breath as I looked at her skin. Her whole body was covered in sores. She was bald. Maybe she’d been burned. As he gently wrapped her back up, I heard him say to his assistant that she had some kind of skin disease. Untreatable at Son Fils. There was nothing they could do.
The rest of the morning passed slowly. I felt the weight of every minute. Why did she have to suffer like this? Couldn’t she be put out of her misery, either with painkillers or—I wasn’t sure I should even think it—with death? What’s the point of someone suffering so much without hope or help? I thought of how quickly Rich died. Five minutes. This woman had been suffering for days, months, maybe her whole life, and who knew how long she’d live?
As I watched her try to sleep, I noticed that the sheet she was wrapped in had a butterfly pattern. It wasn’t white like all the others. Printed all over it were blue butterflies, yellow butterflies, pink butterflies. She was wrapped in butterflies—my favorite sign of hope and transformation. How ironic. Where was her hope? She was left on her cot to peel away, one piece of skin at a time.
I stared at her sheet, wondering if there was a message hidden in it for her or for me. My thoughts drifted to the days after Rich’s funeral, when butterflies were my comfort. They became a sign of God’s presence in my grief, appearing frequently outside my kitchen window and at Rich’s gravesite. I even discovered one inside my home. Now butterflies were in Son Fils. But did she feel God’s presence? At that moment, I didn’t.
Beads of sweat rolled down my forehead. The heat and stale air started to get to me. I held my stomach, afraid I might throw up. As I watched her shiver and moan, my body started to tremble too, with anger that rose to my throat. I wanted to scream—at God, at the world.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. Wrapped in my own sheet, I cried in the darkness and prayed for help—for the butterfly woman, the mother of three, the woman who wanted to brush her teeth, the residents of Cité Soleil, and all the children. Their situation was so overwhelming, I felt weighed down with a sense of hopelessness. Suddenly, in the silence of the night, my head filled with the singing of morning prayers at Son Fils. I heard the deep, rich voice of the butterfly woman. I pulled my sheet tightly around me and shuddered as I thought of her peeling skin and sores. But her singing, her voice. In it was a strength and power that called out from her dark cocoon and clung fiercely to life. I felt how deeply she had looked into my eyes, how urgently she’d whispered something. She hadn’t given up hope, and as I thought about her wrapped in her butterfly sheet, whispering to me, I heard her urging me not to give up either.
Father Gerry
His hearty laugh filled the hotel courtyard. Laughter had been rare on our trip. The sound of it was quite refreshing and instantly made me smile. I looked up and saw our evening speaker, Father Gérard Jean-Juste, also known as Fr. Gerry, standing on the balcony. He was the priest of St. Clare’s Church, where we’d worshipped a few days earlier. I remembered the packed pews and his powerful presence as he led the congregation in the St. Jude prayer. I was looking forward to hearing him speak.
Each night after volunteering at Son Fils, our group gathered to hear a guest speaker discuss aspects of Haiti’s culture, spirituality, and history. We also learned about development programs that were working: a bank, called Fonkoze, that gave microloans to groups of women who wanted to start their own businesses. Reforestation projects in the countryside. A bakery in a rural town that helped the residents become self-sufficient. A solar cooking project that helped Haitians move away from charcoal fuel. These evening sessions were a good balance to the intensity of the rest of the day.
I settled into one of the chairs arranged in a circle on the open-air balcony. The evening was warm and breezy. I immediately felt drawn to Fr. Gerry’s energy and smile. He was in his early 50s and was dressed in a short-sleeved white shirt and black pants, with a pink rosary around his neck. He exuded joy and confidence. Bryan introduced him, saying that he grew up in Cavaillon, a coastal village in southern Haiti. His parents were impoverished farmers. When he was a teenager, friends made it possible for him to go to Canada so he could work his way through school and then seminary near Montréal. He always wanted to be a priest. After graduation, he served the Haitian community in Brooklyn and became the first Haitian Catholic priest ordained in the United States. With the help of a scholarship named after Martin Luther King Jr., he received a civil engineering degree from Northeastern University in Boston. He later moved to “Little Haiti” in northeast Miami and served as Executive Director of the Haitian Refugee Center, advocating for the rights of Haitian refugees who were fleeing the Duvalier regime.
After “Baby Doc” Duvalier fled Haiti, Fr. Gerry returned to Port-au-Prince. His sparkling eyes revealed a love for his country and a hope for its future.
Throughout the evening, Fr. Gerry talked about the struggle of the Haitian people for democracy, human rights, and basic services. He talked about the vast inequities in Haiti and throughout the world and was passionate about the needs and rights of the poor. His charismatic presence drew us in. There was something about him that elicited trust and hope. I could sense his strong leadership and his ability to make things happen. I could understand why the pews were packed on Sundays and knew that’s where I would attend church if I lived in Haiti. He described how he “saw” the roads paved, the people fed, employed, healthy, educated, and housed. He believed in a future for Haiti’s children and was committed to help make it happen.
At the end of his talk, a member of our group asked about the extent of hunger in Haiti. He paused and quietly described Sunday mornings at St. Clare’s Church. “Every week, the children come to me. They point to their bellies
and then their lips. ‘My Father, do you have any food in your cupboard for me to eat?’ I give them what I can, but it is not close to enough. I have a vision for a food program for the hungry children in my community.”
These words touched something inside me. Maybe it was a knowing. Or a “call.” But I instantly felt a part of me leap at his vision of a food program. From head to toe, my body tingled with energy. My heartbeat quickened. Throughout the trip, Bryan had told us not to rush into the “What can I do to fix this?” mentality. Instead he continued to remind us to allow our experience to open our hearts. As we explored the feelings that surfaced and looked deeply into our faith, the answers about how to respond would reveal themselves. I felt that my answer had revealed itself right there on the balcony.
When I left Haiti two days later, the despair I’d felt after my day with the butterfly lady had started to lift. The possibility of finding a way to respond to what I’d experienced at Son Fils and Cité Soleil captured my heart and gave me hope.
Reentry
The Miami airport was like another world—clean, carpeted, air-conditioned, with toilets that flushed and the smell of fresh donuts and coffee. It was a welcome sight, familiar and comfortable. But it was also disturbing. I watched well-dressed passengers hurry through the airport on their way to Caribbean destinations carrying cell phones and laptops, fast food and lattes. Healthy toddlers holding toys and sippy cups in their strollers contrasted with the children I’d seen in Cité Soleil playing in the dirt. I doubted that anyone in the airport had any idea what was happening on one of the islands they were about to fly over on their way to their vacation. I wanted to scream, “HELP! There’s an emergency and it’s only a few hundred miles from here. We have to do something, change something. Quick. People are dying!”
Everywhere I looked there were stores filled with clothes, toiletries, magazines, toys, and food!—burgers and ice cream, burritos and grilled cheese. Food and more food—food everywhere. Half-eaten sandwiches left in the waiting area. Garbage cans stuffed with wrappers and unfinished meals. Kids too full to finish their Happy Meals. I thought of the mothers in Cité Soleil. I was relieved to be back in the States, where the comforts and convenience and abundance overflowed. But at the same time, I felt nauseated.
When I got home and jumped back into my daily routine of carpooling, laundry, work, and taking care of Luke, the fast pace of my life consumed me. I raced from one thing to the next, but the women at Son Fils and the people in Cité Soleil were never far from my thoughts. At every meal, and especially when I scraped food we were too full to finish into the garbage or threw out wilted lettuce I never got around to eating, I remembered the children on the street saying “M’grangou,” and Fr. Gerry’s vision. I saw their faces, the eyes of the mother of three and the butterfly lady—but I was so far away, and I didn’t know what I could do from such a distance.
Shortly after I got back, I went to Costco to buy some things for an ice cream social at Luke’s school. I hadn’t been there in ages, and I’d forgotten how massive it is. Rows and rows and rows of supersized cereal, candy, chips, and soda, everything in bulk. I wheeled my cart through the aisles, struck by the fact that most of the food on the shelves had no nutritional value. It was luxury food, fun food, unhealthy food. I wondered how much money I spent on food that offered no benefit to my body. I was sure it had to be hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars a year.
The cashier rang up the ice cream, hot fudge, and whipped cream for the school social and then the strip of AA batteries for Luke’s Game Boy, a case of sparkling water, a gigantic bag of chocolate chips, blank videos, and other things I’d thrown in the cart for my home. When she processed my credit card, I knew I could have fed dozens and dozens of children for the same amount.
I couldn’t ignore my discomfort with the consumerism I was so much a part of. I felt restless and guilty, but not sure how to address my feelings about the difference between my life and the lives of those I’d seen in Port-au-Prince. Like the women with the cotton ball, I knew I had to discover what was enough for me and Luke—enough food, enough clothes, enough toys, enough stuff. My closets were packed with pants and tops I didn’t wear. My refrigerator was filled with food I didn’t eat. Luke’s shelves overflowed with toys he didn’t play with. My house was bursting with excess. I decided to go through it all, clean it out, and give away everything I didn’t use or love.
When I shopped at the grocery store, every time I reached for something, I paused to think about whether it would actually be eaten or would end up in my garbage or on my shelf until it expired. Whenever I passed a homeless person on the street, I stopped, made an effort to look them in the eye, and took the time to reach into my purse for a dollar. Giving felt so much better than ignoring.
But the feeling of restlessness continued.
One night, a recurring nightmare woke me up. It was a dream I had once or twice a year during times of stress—tornadoes swirling toward me from all directions, threatening to blow me away. Sweaty and trembling, I lay awake until dawn thinking about how the shade that had once separated me from the suffering of the world had been blown away as a result of the “reverse mission.” I couldn’t reenter my life as it was—all about me and Luke. My heart wouldn’t close up. It ached, and it pleaded for a response.
As I lay in bed thinking about Haiti, images of Fr. Gerry and his church, the boy who collapsed, the prayer to St. Jude, and the S.O.S. that had been spelled out by the elderly lady with the fan played over and over in my mind. The images didn’t haunt me. They called to me.
Another Sign
I shared Fr. Gerry’s vision of a food program with my parents the next day. I thought my dad might have ideas about how to get churches involved or how to start something when you’re thousands of miles away. We brainstormed, but didn’t come up with anything concrete.
Shortly after we hung up, my dad called back. He’d just been to his office and had opened the day’s mail. A few weeks earlier, his church conference had sent a grant for $5,000 to a food pantry. As the conference president, he had just received a letter notifying him that the pantry had closed. The check was returned—unused. Since it was intended for hunger relief, he said it was possible to redirect the money to Haiti.
I listened with amazement. This must be a sign! A huge weight lifted off my heart and, elated, I danced around my kitchen. Five thousand dollars! I called Bryan to get Fr. Ger ry’s e-mail address and wrote him immediately, explaining that I had met him on the hotel balcony, had heard him describe his vision for a food program for the hungry children in his community, and that I wanted to help him make this a reality. He wrote back a few days later, elated as well and already in action. He said the food program would be ready to begin when the check arrived. Dad mailed the check and we waited.
March 26, 2000
Dear Margaret,
The program is wonderful! I just want to let you know that it is working beautifully. From 200 participants last Sunday, it has doubled today. We have been called to a big assignment from God in feeding the hungry brothers and sisters. The news is being spread. Children and their needy parents are pouring on us. I use many volunteers. Many youngsters want to help. I am using the rectory quarters. I need more chairs, more tables, more food, more of everything. The supervisor of the program is a great woman who loves this volunteer task. There is great hope. Now I am exhausted. It is getting late. It is too much, too exciting to count and report all now. God certainly has talked to you today while we were implementing this great inspiration …
Best regards to you and all, Gerry
The speed of the food program’s birth astounded me. I’d been home from Haiti just two months. Fr. Gerry had just received the $5,000 check and already he had lined up the cooks, bought plates and forks, announced the good news, and begun. He told me that food was being purchased from the local farmers’ market, helping to support the Haitian economy. The cost of each meal was about fifty cents.
; Inspired, I shared his e-mail with my friends, and a few checks started to arrive in my mailbox. Ten dollars, $25, $100. I told each person that every dollar fed two children.
I wasn’t sure what I was getting into or where it would lead. Things seemed to have a life of their own, and I felt swept along for the ride. But my heart felt full and happy, and so I didn’t worry.
Dear Margaret,
The children are happy. We served more than 400 today. Good menu. Nothing left. God’s blessing for all of us, always, everywhere …
Dear Margaret,
Jesus is happy we’re implementing one of his main teachings: Feed his people. My team and I love it. We work hard to feed some 400 needy children on Sundays. Let’s hope we can institutionalize this for generations to come…
Dear Margaret,
You should hear what they say about the hot meal they receive on Sundays. They say that Sunday is the best day of the week. They cannot wait to have Sunday. Sunday is too far away sometimes for those who are hungry.
I kept spreading the word, friend to friend. More checks arrived. I opened a separate bank account and started thinking about the need to create a nonprofit organization. I had no idea how to do this, but I was sure I knew someone who knew someone who knew how.
Weeks passed quickly. Every Sunday, I pictured the food program, imagining the dishes of hot food and the smiles on the faces of the children. With each e-mail from Fr. Gerry, I longed to return, to see the meals being served, if only for
a few days. I e-mailed Father Gerry that I wanted to visit, and he wrote back that he had arranged for me to stay with members of his congregation. He’d meet me at the airport. Come anytime.
My parents were nervous about me returning to Haiti alone, so they bought a plane ticket for my younger brother, Paul. We are good friends, so I was thrilled to have his company. Paul was a self-employed artist who lived simply in a 500-square-foot cabin on the outskirts of Sonoma, California. He was just scraping by, selling a painting here and there. He jumped at the chance to go.