The museum housed a collection of artifacts from the pre-Columbian era to the present. Meadow and I pressed our noses against glass display cases full of carved talismans of the zemi spirits, elliptical grinding stones, a tiny bronze hawk’s bell, and a delicate beaded necklace which the Doctor had reconstructed with feathers from his own parrot, alongside a quotation from Bartolomé de las Casas: pierced with such delicacy that it seems to be a marvel.
Hand-drawn maps detailed the Casimiroid and Meillac migrations, and a large display showed the three different cultures represented in Hispaniola: an Arawak-speaking Taíno man with earrings and a headband; an African man with a drum; and a bearded, blue-eyed European. We learned what the Old World had to offer the New and vice versa: churches, Bibles, and a cross; parrots, bananas, corn, and potatoes.
Later display cases held more disturbing artifacts: preserved in a clay brick, the clawed footprint of a giant dog, imported by the Spanish to hunt runaway slaves; a heavy iron collar attached to a thick metal chain; a broken clay hand and the decapitated head of Jesus from a destroyed colonial church; the ancient bones of a dead child, curled in the fetal position.
My father knelt beside Meadow and me and pointed up at the paintings, done by Barbara, of the caciques’ first encounters with Christendom. The faces in the oil paintings were rapturous and unreal, like figures in a Sunday school flannel board. Sunlight streamed over the Admiral’s squared shoulders as he knelt on the sand, holding aloft a cross. Taíno Indians clustered in the background. It was very heroic.
On the way out, I signed my name in the official museum guest book in careful, lopsided cursive. I was visitor number seven. Under place of residence I wrote Thermal, CA; Meadow wrote HBS, Limbé; my father wrote Idyllwild. We had already lost track of which world to call home.
As we emerged from the dim interior into the bright afternoon, my father shook the Doctor’s hand and told him how much he appreciated all the hard work that had gone into the museum. The Doctor adjusted his thumbs under his suspenders and repeated his assertion—in his opinion, the history of Haiti was actually a microcosm of the whole human race.
Meadow and I, released from the obligatory history lesson, raced down the steps to twirl mahogany seeds on the grass.
A grand occasion, my father summarized to the grandparents after Meadow and I had skipped back across the highway to the compound. Though Dr. Hodges did it in his humble style, with no announcement or formality, just opened the doors one afternoon.
* * *
On the same weekend that the Guahaba Museum officially opened, Jean-Claude Duvalier, the president for life, roared down the national highway in a polished convertible. Baby Doc’s glamorous lifestyle had done little to endear him to his people—his wedding was rumored to have cost $3 million and his wife flew to Paris for shopping sprees while bone-thin Haitian farmers eked out a living in the ruins of former French colonial estates—but few citizens were foolish enough to show their dislike when the president made an appearance.
For hours, there had been no one on the roads—not even the tap taps. I jammed my knees through the back gate of the compound to wait with the throngs that lined the highway. Then the crowd roared, and a sleek motorcade gunned through the festooned palm branches. A chubby man in a suit tossed five- and twenty-five-gourde notes to citizens who dove to catch the fluttering bills.
The gleaming vehicles swept past to the next cheering village, heedless of the bodies trapped and torn by the spinning wheels. Dr. Hodges was left to splint the broken legs and stitch the head wounds of those who had been struck down by the man who should have been responsible for their welfare. After such presidential drive-bys, the wails of mourning lasted deep into the night.
Hôpital le Bon Samaritain
Limbé, 1984
HUNDREDS LINED UP daily to seek medical attention at the missionary hospital, some of whom had walked or been carried miles in the rain or the blistering heat. In 1984, 87,936 patients received consultations: for malaria, intestinal parasites, meningitis, respiratory infection, and severe burns; separate clinics were held for diabetes and tuberculosis, which required ongoing treatment. And yet, as Dr. Hodges explained in his newsletter on triage, it was impossible to treat everyone—there were not enough hours in a day.
By Dr. Hodges’s reckoning, there were only thirty-eight hospitals in all of Haiti in the 1980s, more than half of which centered around Port-au-Prince. This grim ratio afforded, on average, one doctor for every sixty-six hundred people.
An average of a hundred and fifty Haitian staff were on payroll at the hospital, most of whom had completed only a high school or a grade school education but had been trained to administer medication, bandage wounds, sterilize needles, put broken bones into traction, and set up intravenous fluids under the watchful supervision of Belle and Joanna, the nursing supervisor. Haitian lab technicians ran slides for malaria and meningitis, supervised by Herb Rogers. Haitian midwives, overseen by the sturdy, white-haired Dorothy Lincoln, tube-fed premature babies and dressed newborn umbilical cords with clean bandages torn from old sheets by Baptist women’s groups in the States and flown in on the missionary plane.
Still others were hired for short-term contract work, such as the diabetics who could not otherwise afford their daily insulin shots, or unemployed townspeople who asked for help to pay their children’s school fees. Cardboard boxes could be cut into tickets for triage; recycled baby-food jars arrived in clanking burlap sacks to be sanitized, filled with medicine, and redistributed as the Balm of Gilead.
Gardeners raked the brown fallen leaves and trimmed the wiry St. Augustine grass with hand clippers. Cooks cleaned the rice and hung out the laundry. Carpenters, masons, and ironworkers repaired roofs and built storage depots and furniture. Nursery workers bent over the trays of seedlings. Guards slept by the front gate at night.
Joanna worried that fewer and fewer expatriate nurses and medical students—who paid five dollars a day, room and board, for the privilege of studying tropical diseases up close and personal—were signing up to volunteer at the missionary hospital; she blamed the AIDS epidemic. A 1983 U.S. Centers for Disease Control report had given Haiti top billing in its scaremonger list of what to avoid—along with homosexuals, hemophiliacs, and heroin addicts. But even before AIDS, a medical internship in Limbé was a tough sell. Hospital staff worked long hours under stressful conditions and were susceptible to the same diseases as their patients: yellow-eyed hepatitis, hookworm, malaria, pneumonia, depression. One fair-haired volunteer from Illinois confessed that after two years in the pediatric ward, she had more freckles but smiled less often. Never had she struggled with sadness like this, though at the same time, never had she felt Jesus to be so close and comforting.
In the early years of the missionary hospital, Dr. Hodges had been able to consult with everyone who came for treatment, even if their ailments were beyond his aid. But although consultations had increased to as many as 400 patients per day, by the 1980s, a triage system had become necessary. Dr. Hodges considered the torturous sorting ritual the world’s worst job.
Even before he entered the covered porch to begin the process, high-standing members of the community—a soldier in uniform, government functionaries, a Baptist pastor, or a Vodou priest—often waited to accost him.
—I know that you have many problems, Doktè, but I have a very sick child. You will have to see him for me.
The negotiation required diplomacy.
—But Monsieur, the Doctor might demur tactfully in Kreyòl or French, —you know that all of these people are sick; some of them very sick.
In the ensuing argument, if he deemed it necessary, the Doctor might eventually clear his throat and reach into his coat pocket to retrieve a crooked cardboard triage ticket, which guaranteed that the official’s child would be seen in the clinic later that day. After this, there would be more handshakes. Only then did the true sorting process begin.
Not even a Bible verse read aloud and a morning
prayer to invoke the presence of a merciful God could quell the anxiety in the room. For those without powerful advocates, triage was a high-stakes gamble. Women held rheumy-eyed children to their breasts. Men with bent skeletal chests coughed into their fists. The injustice of the situation created an unhealthy drama: Patients were obliged to prove their desperation.
The unsolvable agony was that in a perfect world, each person on the triage porch should have received treatment, but even if every IV and pill bottle in the pharmacy had been emptied, by the next morning, the lineup of sorrow would have been just as long. Dr. Hodges considered it a humiliating indictment of the modern world that so few people had devoted their lives to the alleviation of human misery.
He cut an imposing figure, brisk and professional, as he wove through the bodies sprawled across the concrete floor. Patients with tuberculosis were comparatively easy to diagnose due to severe weight loss. Chronically ill children were identifiable by their sunken eyes and reduced skin turgor, dehydrated from diarrhea. But if a child showed no outward signs of distress and he felt no fever when he leaned his hand against the small forehead, he might pause, knowing that there might yet be reasonable cause to run a lab test for typhoid or malaria. Forced, however, to weigh this possible risk against needs even more urgent, he sometimes felt compelled to move on. His weathered hands scrawled names and preliminary observations on the flimsy cardboard tickets.
Occasionally, a mother thrust a child into his face and protested: Doktè, my child is dying! Look at him! I haven’t slept in a week.
—Madame, he might explain, the child doesn’t look bad. —See, he only has a runny nose and a cold.
Patients who had already been turned aside might jump ahead of him in the queue in a frustrated bid for a second opinion. Dramatic threats were sometimes made to tip the scale of justice: If you don’t see my baby today, I’m going to leave him for you in the clinic! I can’t take care of him anymore. If my baby dies tonight, it will be your fault!
Others solicited the crowd for sympathy as triage tickets dwindled: Do you see this woman? Would I leave Plaisance and sit here for four days if she wasn’t sick? This woman has been crying for nine days!
Another shouted: Dr. Hodges, you used to be more kind! You’ve changed since you first came to Haiti. You always took care of my family. Now you hate me!
When the last of the tickets had been dispensed, Dr. Hodges bowed his head and turned to go. The daily purgatory was at an end. To heed his inner conviction to love his neighbors as he loved himself required a condition of complete attentiveness to their pain, costing not less than everything. Triage, he confessed, was the acid test of his Christian faith. Disappointed voices followed him as he trudged up the path to the clinic, where he would, alongside the Haitian staff, the visiting medical students, and his fellow missionaries, resume the long, slow work of treatment, refusing to give up the fight against an unconquerable enemy.
* * *
My sisters and I, who otherwise had little interaction with the hospital, understood, at least, the agony of the pediatric ward. Like everything else in the hospital, it was patched together on a shoestring budget and held together by prayer. Staff sometimes placed two children in one bed in an attempt to turn no one away, which meant that no matter how often the nurses picked up the wailing little ones, it seemed impossible to offer truly undivided attention.
My father stopped by the pediatric ward whenever possible. As the oldest of six children, he had acquired a reputation as a baby whisperer, and he frequently brought home orphans for an afternoon or an evening. There was no formal system for this improvised foster care, but no one complained when the missionaries developed favorites. Unclaimed orphans over a year old and in stable health were usually taken to an orphanage in Port-au-Prince, but when my father heard that adorable, round-faced Eva was to be adopted by former volunteers at the hospital, he suspected that the prospective parents would be relieved if their child received extra attention.
Meadow, Rosie, and I helped give roly-poly Eva baths in the sink and giggled when she reached for our faces with soapy hands. If we stuck our faces close to hers and said: Boo!, she shrieked with laughter. Rosie cried when we had to take her back to the pediatric ward to sleep for the night. We tied a ribbon under her chin and dressed her in gingham and a sun hat for photographs before she disappeared into her new life, cooing into the faces of her adoptive parents in Canada.
When I was in first grade, a third of my classmates at Jericho School had been adopted by missionary parents after being abandoned at the hospital. We understood that we were supposed to be Good Samaritans—it was our job to rescue those left for dead on the road to Jericho, just like in the Bible story. We were missionary kids. We carried our benevolence like a crown, balanced delicately on our small heads. It was our obligation to be generous.
* * *
Bent over our desks at the missionary school, we always knew when someone had died at the hospital.
—Anmwe, Anmwe! Woy! Woy! the voices would shout, a bruised lament that echoed off the walls like gunfire. We tried not to think of them as we solved our arithmetic problems, the crumpled bodies of the mourners slack and heavy, bereft as broken Madonnas.
There was more loss in Haiti than could be wept for in a lifetime: death for the three-pound infants in the pediatric ward and for their mothers and grandmothers; death on the highway, decapitated by a hurtling kamyon bus or swept away by the floods that came roaring down from the treeless mountains, bodies tangled together with the bloodred topsoil, the tin roofs, the bloated dead cows, and the bicycles all spewn out together at the mouth of the sea.
Marvels in the Marketplace
Limbé, 1984
THAT THERE WAS grief in Haiti was incontestable, but what was to be done about it often felt unclear. According to Dr. Hodges, ships in the colonial era could sail as far as fifteen miles up the Limbé River, but by the 1980s, the once proud port city boasted only poverty and a receding water table.
In the dry season, women waded across the Limbé River with bundles balanced expertly on their heads, the water barely coming up to their knees. But when the rains began, the river reawakened. Pelting rain moved across the tin roofs like pebbles thrown hard against a can. Entire hillsides washed downstream, staining the water like blood. After a truly notable storm roared down the mountains, the churning soil could turn the ocean itself an alarming shade of red a full mile out to sea from its mouth.
The only time that the Limbé River was deep enough to navigate by boat was at flood stage, when the graveled bed, usually fifty feet wide and roughly a foot deep, rose to a torrent half a mile across and up to twelve feet deep. When this happened, my parents hauled out the inflatable rafts and rode the river, bucking and hollering like rodeo cowboys (item #175544JVR from the Best Catalog, shipped in on the missionary plane and a steal at $39.97). Dr. Hodges, concerned about typhus and other waterborne diseases, did not approve, but this did not prevent my parents from recruiting the visiting medical students. After much lobbying, I, too, was allowed to join the fun. We promised to keep our mouths closed if we tipped over.
My father was in charge of our raft and put me in the middle next to Ti Cabo. Ti Cabo was one of his favorite workers at the tree nursery. He was short, like my father, and strong; he had once ridden his bike twenty miles to Cap-Haïtien to line up for the start of a bike race, then pedaled all the way back the same distance to win first prize.
I cinched my life jacket around my rib cage as Ti Cabo pushed us away from shore, one of my mother’s cooking pots in his other hand to help bail. Off we sailed—a minor flotilla of yellow rafts plummeting downstream on the roiling brown current, past half-submerged vegetable gardens and banana stalks, around woven snags of mud houses that had been ripped from their foundations, until our oarsman lost control of the paddle and the raft hit a log jam, snagged, and went under. I came up spluttering, but Ti Cabo grabbed my arm so I didn’t get swept downstream. My father was proud that I didn
’t cry.
A baffled onlooker caught the paddle and handed it back to us as we clambered onto the bank, but what he made of our gleeful idiocy was anyone’s guess. We hiked back through a farmer’s field, our squelching shoes leaving indentations in the carefully mounded beds of sweet potato and manioc. We laughed to hide our embarrassment.
* * *
Columbus, the very same man whose arrival in the Caribbean touched off a landslide of deforestation from which Ayiti has never recovered, may be credited with the first recorded observation that forests and precipitation are, in fact, interdependent. He noted that the daily showers which fell in the West Indies seemed to be caused by the great forests and trees—a cause and effect that he had observed in the Azores as a young sailor—though he noted that now that the many woods and trees that covered them have been felled, there are not produced so many clouds and rains as before.
These observations were, however, insufficient to protect Ayiti’s magnificent hardwoods, which were pillaged by the shipload to grace the vaulted ceilings of European cathedrals, or carved into elaborate thrones for disinterested kings to lean their drinks upon.
The conquistadores, when they discovered more prosperous civilizations to plunder on the mainland, left the colony of Hispaniola to founder (French pirates helped encourage their retreat). The Spanish colonizers retreated over the mountains to the more sparsely populated Dominican Republic while French plantation owners on the western half of the island felled what remained of the lowland forests, planting slave labor–intensive crops of indigo, coffee, and sugarcane. Cedar and mahogany, resistant to insect rot, were valued by the French as bois incorruptibles and cut down to make the wooden beams for sugar mills.
The Gospel of Trees Page 10