by Paul Farmer
We turned onto Jean-Jacques Dessalines Boulevard, the main road in downtown Port-au-Prince, named after a leader of the Haitian Revolution and the first ruler of independent Haiti. Gridlock surrounded us. A woman drenched in sweat, balancing a large basket of fruit on her head, with buckets of water in each hand, walked in front of us. The muscles on her shoulders and arms were well defined, her posture straight, her walk graceful. She looked my age.
“It’s a matter of every day surviving.” Fr. Gerry suddenly continued. “So, every day, we expect God will make miracles. And indeed He does. I’ve met some families, and I don’t know how they feed themselves. People eat whenever they find food. They drink whenever they find water. Suppose there is a party someplace. When we go to parties, we fill our plates like a pyramid in case it is a long time before we eat again.”
“So each time they find food, it’s considered a miracle from God?” I asked.
He nodded.
I watched the wall-to-wall street vendors we passed, wondering if they’d experience a miracle that day. An exchange of a mango for a bowl of rice? A piece of chicken for a yard of cloth? Up until that moment, I’d always thought of miracles as rare and mysterious events you might miss if you weren’t watching closely. I’d counted only a handful in my life experiences. Eating a meal had not been one of them. But that $5,000 check? That was a miracle.
And now I was beginning to understand how a plate of food is just as much a miracle.
Paint for Jezi
After two hours of inching through Port-au-Prince traffic, Father Gerry pulled over and parked on a congested street in the shopping district to buy paint. The buildings were simple, but they were packed with stores featuring imported appliances, expensive furniture, televisions, and stereos. There were shops displaying colorful party dresses and hats. Shoe stores with the latest styles. One of the storefront windows had a mannequin dressed in a flowing, white-lace bridal dress. Who had the money to buy all this stuff? Then I remembered the tiny percentage of wealthy Haitians who lived in the villas on the hills overlooking Port-au-Prince.
When we entered the small fine arts store, Fr. Gerry casually asked what type of paint Paul needed. I stopped and gulped, looking at rows and rows of paint. It hadn’t occurred to me to ask Paul this obvious question before we left. I didn’t have a clue. Fr. Gerry laughed that hearty laugh I’d heard at the hotel months earlier. He walked up to the sales clerk and explained the project.
“What colors, Margaret?”
“Ah ... White and black,” I guessed.
“Rouge et verte aussi,”Fr. Gerry added. Red and green. We left the store a few minutes later with one paintbrush and four tubes of paint.
By midafternoon, we were back at St. Clare’s. Paul and Ber ry Philippe were on the front steps watching a half-court basketball game. The outline was finished! Paul, himself amazed, described how it had practically drawn itself. He’d started with the eyes. Standing on the top step of the ladder, inches from the wall, without a tape measure, sketch, or grid, he guessed where the right eye should go. Because the wall was so big, he only knew that he’d guessed right after he climbed down the ladder, went down the spiral steps, walked to the front of the church, and looked back at the wall. The right eye was in the perfect place. It was the perfect size. Then he walked back to draw the left eye. Another guess. Perfect. Back and forth all afternoon, checking every stroke he made. Each one was in perfect proportion. At this rate, he said, he might finish the whole painting over the weekend.
Paul and Berry led the way up the balcony’s creaky spiral staircase to show us the outline. Jesus was huge—at least 15 feet tall. His waist started at the floor and the top of his head hit the ceiling. He was naked, with a slash at his ribs and round holes in his hands. His arms were outstretched, as if embracing the congregation. He had a wide nose, long thick black hair, and a beard. He looked like many of the other Jesuses Paul had painted over the years.
Father Gerry stared at the outline in silence for what seemed like ages. Maybe he expected a blond-haired, blue-eyed, ivory-skinned Jesus. Not one who looked Middle Eastern or Hispanic or Haitian.
“I can make changes if you want, Father Gerry,” Paul said.
Still silence. Then finally, “No, Paul. I like it. I like it.” He walked from one side of the balcony to the other, never taking his eyes off Jesus. Then he added, “There’s only one thing.” He paused. “Can you put a robe or cloth on him?”
“No problem.” Paul smiled, relieved.
I handed Paul the bag of paints. White, black, red, green, he pulled them out and placed them on the pew. They were the right kind and the right colors.
“Is there yellow?” Paul whispered so Fr. Gerry couldn’t hear.
“Why do you need yellow? The whole wall is yellow,” I whispered back.
“In case I make a mistake.” I hadn’t thought about that. Paul smiled, looking a little concerned. “No mistakes.”
Paul pulled the one brush we’d bought out of the bag. “Is this the only brush?”
I nodded, realizing it was much too small for the job. In that tiny paint store, I’d forgotten how huge the wall was. He needed the kind of brush you paint a house with. “Sorry.” I whispered.
“This’ll work. I think.” Paul smiled. “Thank you, Father Gerry, for the supplies.” Fr. Gerry was still staring at Jesus.
Berry Philippe and Paul got back to work. They made a great team. Paul squeezed paint from each tube onto his palette—a small section of cardboard—and climbed back up the ladder. It creaked with each step. With Paul balancing on the top step, Berry slowly let go of the ladder’s legs, picked up the cardboard, climbed on a pew he’d positioned next to Paul, and held it over his head. Berry was the perfect height so Paul didn’t have to lean too far to dip his brush. As I left the church for Manmi Dèt’s house, I thought if we got through the weekend without an accident, and with enough paint, it would be another Haitian miracle.
Poudre d’Amour
When Fr. Gerry dropped me off at Manmi Dèt’s, preparations for the Sunday food program had already begun. It was only Friday, but Manmi Dèt’s daughter Nennenn, who was in charge of the meal, had something special in mind.
After changing out of my sweat-drenched clothes, I walked down a rocky path to Nennenn’s to help. She lived only 25 yards from Manmi Dèt in a rectangular cement house. “Bonjou, Margo,” Nennenn called, waving from her red iron door. She was dressed in a checked muumuu and had a bright red scarf wrapped around her head. “We’re making a treat for the children. Come inside.”
The sweet smell of coconut filled her kitchen. Nennenn lifted a heavy pot full of what looked like Granola off the burner and put it on the table. “It’s good. Try some.” She put a spoonful in my hand and motioned for me to lick it off, watching me eagerly, awaiting my reaction. Coconut, sugar, butter, maybe some oats. Delicious! Crunchy.
“This is for Sunday?”
“Yes,” she said with her expressive, happy eyes, and a big smile. She had a ton of energy. I guessed she was in her mid-to late 40s. I was thrilled she spoke English.
Nennenn’s 12-year-old adopted daughter, Nancy, came in to the room and greeted me with a shy smile and a kiss on the cheek. Nennenn said that Nancy’s mother, a good friend of hers, had died a few years ago and Nancy had lived with her since then. Nennenn had three other children—two were stu dents in Cuba. Her son Kiko was getting a degree in math ema tics. Her daughter, Romi, was a first-year medical student. Her other son, Luigi, worked in a furniture store down town. Her husband had died of cancer.
Nennenn worked full-time as a high school administrator. She’d taken the afternoon off to cook up the coconut dessert. I guessed from the simplicity of her home that she spent most of her income on her children’s tuition. The walls were unpainted. The main room had only one table and three chairs. When I went to use her bathroom, I peeked in her bedroom and saw that it had a dresser covered with pictures of her children and a mattress on the floor.
Nennenn turned on the radio, immersing the room with hip-shaking Haitian music, handed me a spoon, smiling, and pointed to the pot. I sat down next to Nancy on the tile floor, and we got to work. Three spoonfuls filled a bag and left room at the top for a knot, which Manmi Dèt volunteered to tie. Manmi Dèt pulled up a wicker chair next to where I was sitting, and I handed her my first bag. One down, 499 to go. The room was hot and muggy. Mosquitoes were circling. I had a hard time sitting still and wondered if there wasn’t an easier way to do this. How about spooning it into each child’s hands, or placing big bowls of it on each table at the end of the meal? I imagined the scene and decided that this was definitely not a good idea.
Nancy and Manmi Dèt chatted happily in Creole, obviously enjoying the project. Nennenn danced between the pots, tasting and stirring, adding sugar and vanilla when needed. I was clearly the only one thinking about time and efficiency issues.
“Tell me about the food program, Nennenn,” I said. “It must be a lot of work to prepare all the food.”
“Yes. It takes time.” She smiled as she stirred and shook her hips to the music.
“And you volunteer?” I knew the answer to this, but asked anyway because part of me couldn’t believe she’d give such a huge chunk of her time every weekend. Especially since she worked full-time and had Nancy to raise.
“Yes. I do ... Because I love the children.”
“How long does the meal usually take to prepare?”
“All day Saturday. And Sunday until two or three, because the pots need to be washed.”
She seemed unfazed by this, but I counted up the hours. I thought of week after week after week—sixteen weeks so far since the first meal was served in March. And this weekend, she’d added the work of shredding coconuts. Plus, the hours of bag-spooning.
As I scooped and sweated, settling into the monotonous task, I looked at each bag and thought of the hungry child it represented. Thanks to the patience and heart of these women, the children would have the choice of opening their bags and pouring the delicious contents immediately into their mouths. Or maybe they’d choose to sprinkle the coconut chunks into the palms of their hands. Or they might take their treats home and savor them bit by bit.
“What’s the name of this dessert, Nennenn?” I asked, as I crunched on another handful. It was addictive.
“Poudre d’amour.”
Powder of love.
The Market
I heard a gentle beep on the horn, signaling it was time to leave for the market. Toto, one of Fr. Gerry’s assistants, had arrived to pick us up. He and Nennenn went to the downtown Port-au-Prince farmers’ market every Saturday morning to buy the food needed for Sunday’s meal. We threw empty vegetable sacks into the backseat of the jeep and climbed in.
As we backed out of her driveway, Nennenn counted the money Fr. Gerry had given her for the meal. She recorded everything she bought and how much it cost in a Mickey Mouse spiral notebook. I thumbed through it and saw page after page of notes. Garlic, carrots, cabbage, beans, rice, chicken, goat—each ingredient was listed with the date, quantity purchased, and the total price down to the penny. I found it a total mystery how she knew how much to buy to feed that many children.
The market was about 5 miles away, near Cité Soleil. It stretched for blocks. After we parked, Nennenn took my hand and led me into the congested jumble of stalls squeezed next to each other as far as my eyes could see. I held on tight, feeling out of place and uneasy walking into what seemed an endless maze of people and produce. Women with baskets on their heads walked about looking for customers. Others sat in stalls displaying vegetables and fruit—cabbage, carrots, onions, yams, eggplant, mangoes, pineapple, plantains, bananas—all grown by peasants in the countryside. They were stacked in piles on the ground. Some piles were fresh: a few piles were spoiling in the heat. There was no electricity or refrigeration. Seeing that food go to waste, with Cité Soleil right next door, made my heart sink.
Nennenn told me that many of the vendors slept in their stalls at night. It wasn’t safe to leave their produce unattended, and it was also too far to go back and forth to their homes in the countryside. The stalls were made of cardboard and corrugated metal, or wooden poles with cloth for a roof. A rat skirted past my toes, and I jumped back, stepping on the toes of the young woman behind me. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live and work at the market day and night. I already felt claustrophobic, and we’d been here five minutes.
Nennenn knew the market intimately and had her favorite places to shop. The first stall we went to was run by a mother and teenage daughter. They’d been expecting Nennenn and had huge bags of rice and beans set aside for her. Mother and daughter greeted us with a kiss on the cheek and motioned for me to sit down and relax on one of the rice sacks, under their cloth roof. Nennenn told me to stay there while she and Toto went deeper into the market to buy vegetables. I was nervous when she left, not wanting to let go of her hand and wishing I spoke Creole, but the smiles and gentle manner of my two guardians put me at ease.
I watched the activity of the market from my rice sack. It was packed and loud with hundreds of people shopping, selling, and bartering. I was surprised to see that the rice sacks that surrounded me in the stall had “U.S.A.” stamped on them. I assumed we’d be buying Haitian-grown rice for the food program. Later, when I asked why it was U.S. rice, Fr. Gerry told me that there wasn’t much rice production in Haiti anymore. In the 1980s, international lending agencies began requiring that in order to receive loans, Haiti had to reduce tariff protections for its own rice and other agricultural products, opening up the country’s markets to competi tion from outside countries. This led to the importing of heavily subsidized U.S. rice, which was cheaper than Hai tian rice. After a few years, Haiti’s peasant farmers could not compete and most went out of business.
More and more farmers and agricultural workers were leaving the countryside for the city in search of employment. But most never found any. The sprawl of Cité Soleil was a reminder of the life many faced in Port-au-Prince. Those who remained in the countryside struggled to eke out a living on tiny plots of land, the soil becoming more and more depleted and water hard to find. Feeding their families and then having extra produce to sell at the market was becoming harder every year.
Still, I saw a glimmer of hope at the market. When Paul and I had flown over the parched countryside a couple of days earlier, it looked impossible to grow anything. Even Nennenn’s little garden next to her house had dried up in the summer heat. But the eggplants here were a gorgeous purple, the avocados were gigantic, the oranges looked succulent. There were still some areas that had fertile soil and enough rain to produce these beautiful crops.
We loaded sacks filled with carrots, green beans, peppers, and onions into the back of the jeep. Nennenn had also bought thyme and rosemary and a few other herbs I didn’t recognize. As we were about to pull out, a woman carrying a basket of garlic on her head walked by. Nennenn stopped her and they negotiated a price. Two dozen heads of garlic were added to one of our sacks. When Nennenn handed the vendor the coins and thanked her, the young woman’s face lit up with excitement as she proudly put the coins in her skirt pocket and the basket back on her head.
Watching her walk gracefully down the dusty street, looking for her next customer, I thought of my friends who had trusted me with their $10, $20, or $50 bills for the food program. Now I’d seen where the money goes—to these hardworking farmers. To that woman. Not only would children at St. Clare’s be fed tomorrow, but a few farmers’ families would have food for the week as well.
Time to Share
As we drove into Manmi Dèt’s driveway, we were
greeted by the beautiful sound of children singing. Four boys from the neighborhood were belting out a church hymn as they raked the yard. A windstorm had blown through the night before, and Manmi Dèt’s property was covered with broken branches and leaves. She was singing, too, supervising with her smile and enthusiasm. The kids clearly loved her and were eager to help in any way they could. When they saw us pull up, they dropped their rakes to help unload.
Two by two, the boys carried the heavy sacks to a spot under an awning adjacent to Manmi Dèt’s house. This was where the cooking took place. Manmi Dèt had a large stove-top with two gas burners that could support the huge pots needed for the rice and stew. The stove was positioned under the awning, shaded from the sun, against the side of the house. Next to it on the ground was an old, blue vinyl seat from the back of a car, ripped, with the foam coming out, that served as a couch. It looked like a comfortable place to sit for the huge task of preparing the vegetables.
The boys poured a sack of carrots onto the concrete floor, got knives from Manmi Dèt, sat on cement blocks, and began peeling. They motioned for me to sit on the couch. Using the dull peeler Manmi Dèt gave me, I settled in. We were surrounded by sacks of produce, and I realized even more what an enormous task it was to prepare a meal for 500.
Manmi Dèt sat next to me with a pile of green beans and started breaking off the ends. She chatted with the boys, who ranged in age from 8 to 13. They laughed and sang more songs as they worked through the piles. Through her limited English and my limited French, I learned that these altar boys from St. Clare’s Church visited almost every day. She helped them with their homework, as an old chalkboard, covered with math problems and spelling exercises, revealed. The boys were thin and dressed in tattered clothes. I was sure they were among the children who would be eating tomorrow. When Manmi Dèt brought out rice and beans for lunch, they devoured it with delight.