The Gospel of Trees

by Apricot Irving

  There wasn’t much time to linger over breakfast. Steve read aloud from a book of prayers as parrots squawked on the porch. Nancy passed around a bowl of mangoes and homemade yogurt and poured steaming mugs of Haitian coffee, then they excused themselves—there were boxes of donated medicines to sort on the patio and earthquake refugees waiting to be treated.

  * * *

  I found Meadow’s old classmate from Jericho School, Tony Casséus, at his parents’ home, his six-foot-four frame hunched behind a cluttered desk trying to fix the campus computer network. The small Baptist seminary, under Casso’s leadership, had expanded into a university, the Université Chrétienne du Nord, with degrees offered in theology, business, agriculture, and fine arts, and Tony was frequently enlisted to solve networking issues.

  Tony had spent the weeks immediately following the earthquake setting up satellite telecommunications systems for the Red Cross and Médicins Sans Frontières. Rescue workers relied on functioning communication systems to coordinate airlifts and distribute supplies, which meant the faster the equipment could be installed, the more lives could be saved. Tony had little time to rest. He smoked cigarettes, he confessed, to mask the scent of the decomposing bodies.

  Tony remained haunted by the afternoon when, shoveling aside the concrete and twisted rebar in the ruined walls of a former elementary school in search of a flat concrete slab wide enough to install a satellite dish, he saw an arm trapped beneath the rubble. A blue-and-white notebook lay beside the lifeless fingers. Tony, heartbroken, brought the notebook home to his mother. The French lessons had been painstakingly traced in a child’s deliberate cursive: My cat is named Mimi. He has a long thick tail. He is very adroit and flexible. He likes to fight with the neighbor’s dog.

  * * *

  Laurie worried over the grief in her son’s eyes. When she joined him on one of his trips to the capital, a lifetime in Haiti had not prepared her for the devastation. She had written about it after she returned. Her voice wavered as she recounted the stories. Houses perched on hillsides had slid down the face of the mountains, crushing the homes beneath them, an avalanche of loss. Proud historical landmarks like the Cathédrale Saint Trinité and the Palais National looked as if they had been torn apart by a bomb. But it was the senselessness that broke her: fissured buildings surrounded by untouched buildings.

  Above a church, a cross hung limp, its left arm dangling. Gaping cracks split the road where a five-story school once stood. Laurie thought of the children who had sung and laughed and recited their lessons within those walls.

  She looked south toward the neighborhood where one of her nieces had been attending university. Her niece’s body had been lost under the building’s collapsing weight. She lifted one hand toward the darkening skyline and spoke silently: I know you’re not there anymore, but I love you. You were beautiful.

  As Tony inched the vehicle through the crowded streets of Port-au-Prince, Laurie could no longer bear to look only at the destruction; signs of life demanded her gaze. Vendors peddled their wares through the bogged-down traffic: plantain chips and fritters, spicy akra, peanuts, sandals, ribbons, water, flashlight batteries.

  A crushed car was being dragged out of the city, with a small boy astride the useless driver’s seat, grinning as he pretended to steer the wreck, his hands turning the empty air.

  An old man cupped water in his hands to rinse the dust from his tired body; his shelter was a two-foot-wide cardboard lean-to in the median.

  A plant in a tin can sat beside a fluttering tarp, dusty green leaves pushing toward the light.

  Defiant beauty in the midst of so much chaos.

  Laurie longed to write a requiem, to set to music all that had been lost, a tribute to those who must continue: A woman with only one leg balanced sideways on the back of a motorcycle, a pair of shiny crutches clutched to her breast. Dignity on crutches. Life stumbling on.

  * * *

  Like most homes in Haut-Limbé, Laurie and Casso’s house was crowded with cousins, nieces, and grand-nephews who had fled the ruined capital. Another of Laurie’s nieces, Jenni, had been in a university lab class at the time of the earthquake. The ceiling had collapsed above her, and when she regained consciousness, she realized that she was trapped under the fallen masonry. Her head was pinned under a slab of concrete, and cement dust was choking her lungs. Then she heard the sound of someone else coughing and crying and realized that others had also survived. She was not alone. The trapped students stretched their hands out until their fingers touched in the dark. Jenni recited every Scripture she could think of. She told the others: If God wants to take us, let Him take us singing.

  They sang every song they could remember, until they heard shouts from outside. Others had heard the singing and had come to pry away the rubble.

  An aftershock sent small rocks rattling down onto their heads, and Jenni imagined that the end had come. But instead of crushing her, the slab that had pinned her head shifted loose, and she was able to wriggle free. Four students emerged alive from the four-story building. The entire structure, folded in on itself like a collapsed accordion, was now no more than five feet high. None of the other nursing students had survived.

  —If God saved me for a reason, I want to find out what it is, said Jenni. —There has to be a reason.

  Her voice broke when she tried to talk about those who had been lost.

  * * *

  Six-year-old Kiki had stumbled out of the earthquake, along with his brother and mother, carrying only the clothes on their backs, but as they slowly made their way north, Kiki understood that their eventual destination was the U.S., where his grandfather lived. Kiki knew that in America, people spoke English, so when he finally arrived in Haut-Limbé, exhausted and confused, and woke up on a green, peaceful campus surrounded by hibiscus blossoms and fishponds, and heard his aunt and uncle speaking to each other in English, he assumed that they must have arrived at the mythical United States of America.

  Within days, Kiki had found the rabbit cages in the field behind the agronomy classrooms, and figured out how to lift the latch to pet the soft downy fur of the baby bunnies. He poked at the fish and checked the back gate by the soccer field to see if it had been left unlocked. He invited a hundred university students to his seventh birthday party one month after the earthquake. But when he opened his presents—Matchbox cars, half a dozen new shirts and pants, books in English to help him practice—he looked up at his mother, stricken, and said: There is too much. I don’t need all this stuff. Can’t we send some of it back to the poor children in Haiti?

  He didn’t understand why everyone laughed.

  Kiki didn’t complain that there were eleven people wedged into three bedrooms at his aunt and uncle’s house, but Casso paced the campus with a worried frown. As president of the university, Casso did not regret his decision to take in 100 new students after the earthquake—without charge, as an act of faith—though it meant that 450 students were now crowded onto a campus designed for 350.

  To make the situation even more complicated, students who had survived the tranbleman de tè were now crowded forty to a floor in the multistory dorms, haunted by nightmares of walls and floors collapsing beneath them. The university did not have the funds to build new dormitories, but Casso did not want his students to sleep in fear.

  He was deep in conference with two technicians about the university’s electrical supply when Kiki grabbed my hand and led me down the path to look for the bunnies.

  —This place is a paradise for a seven-year-old, I said to Casso as Kiki skittered ahead of me, glancing over his shoulder to make sure I was following. He took a running leap over a muddy puddle, glorying in what his uncle agonized to maintain.

  —Not so much for the adults, Casso replied with a dry laugh, his voice slipping into the worried cadence of an administrator. He shook his head. —We have all kinds of headaches. It’s a day-to-day challenge.

  * * *

  When I followed Dr. Steve James out
of the university gates to visit Ebenezer Clinic with my microphone in hand, on assignment for This American Life, Steve explained with what I suspected was relief: I’m not a program director, I don’t run anything, I just stand by and ask questions and encourage.

  For a few years after Dr. Hodges died, Steve had stepped in as the director of Hôpital le Bon Samaritain, but the experience had nearly broken him. His return to Haut-Limbé as support staff, rather than as an administrator, had marked a new beginning.

  In the dirt courtyard of the clinic, not far from where my sisters and I once lived, refugees from the earthquake waited under a mango tree. Steve paused to greet each of his coworkers with a kiss on each cheek, a custom I did not remember from the hospital in Limbé.

  His eyes twinkled behind his spectacles as he led me upstairs to see the tiny dental clinic and pointed out the pressurized drill and water spray operated by a bicycle pump. It was the embodiment of degaje: the Haitian principle of using what you have to make what you need.

  —It’s fascinating technology, Steve explained. —He can do pretty major reconstructive dental work; he’s even made dentures. Very high-quality care here.

  The dentist glanced up from his patient and nodded hello.

  As we stepped behind a thin curtain in the consulting room, Steve saw his first glimpse of the three-month-old baby who had been brought back by Dr. Manno from the epicenter. Kwensykaïra was cradled in the arms of one of her aunts and her chest rose and fell gently. She had been trapped beneath the rubble for two days; her mother, who had been buried with her, had not survived.

  The aunts, as bidden, had brought in an X-ray from another rural clinic. Without functioning electricity, Steve had to hold the image against the window to study the bone structure. Kwensykaïra’s arm twisted hazardously at the elbow, and Steve thought he detected a bone fragment, although it was difficult to tell; the image was blurrier than it should have been.

  When Dr. Manno arrived, Steve asked for his recommendation.

  Manno frowned. —We can help her with expenses, he offered. —But it’s best to ask the opinion of the orthopedic specialists.

  Manno was called out of the consulting room a moment later to solve another emergency, and Steve smiled and shook his head.

  —Whoever heard of health care centers giving out money to people? I think most health center administrators would have nightmares over that.

  He grinned like a schoolboy who had just gotten away with a prank. —The goal is to try to give to the poorest of the poor what the rich have to pay for, he confided, like Saint Francis giving an altar call.

  Hôpital le Bon Samaritain, too, had been founded on these principles, but try as I might, I couldn’t imagine Dr. Hodges humbly soliciting the opinion of a Haitian doctor years his junior.

  —It’s not a great difference, Steve conceded, but there is more participatory decision-making in the small clinics. It used to be more top-down, and decisions were made by a few people, whereas this is more of a dialogue instead of a monologue. It’s a lot more fun—and a lot less stress, he added.

  Steve explained that what he had come to realize during his years as the medical director in Limbé was that while the institutional model produced efficiency, security, goods, and services, it didn’t create community.

  —It doesn’t allow people to feel empowered. It creates, in a way, a new slave-plantation mentality, where the slaves become dependent on their masters, and in the end, one reaps the fruit of slavery: discontent, anger, violence, joylessness, non-love. The other extreme, to break down the citadel, is to purposefully work hard at not becoming a dictator. But it means that people are going to suffer, people are going to die. Goods will not be provided. There’s a terrible choice when one chooses community over the citadel. Both carry a price.

  Strengthening the skills and resources of local communities—known as “capacity building” among foreign aid workers—was a slow process. Had Steve still been the director at Hôpital le Bon Samaritain, X-rays, surgery, and an overnight room all could have been provided under one roof. Instead, baby Kwensykaïra had to be sent to three different clinics, over terrible roads. Steve conceded that at times it could look very passive—a pie-in-the-sky, apathetic approach to dire need. The limitations could be hard to accept.

  He laughed. —That’s probably the height of evil to Americans: when you can see the problem right in front of you and you don’t fix it. We’re a fix-it culture.

  He smiled at me, his gray eyebrows lifted. —But what I’m constantly amazed at is the resources, resiliency, and strength of the Haitian people in solving their own problems. These have been the best years of my life in Haiti, these past five years—not that the other years were not wonderful years, but these have been holy years.

  As we walked back along the dirt road toward the university campus, Steve pulled me aside protectively as a motorcycle gunned past, stones scattering in its wake. He meditated on the fading cloud of dust.

  —Can you imagine wheelchairs on these bumpy roads? He met my eyes with a weary smile. —Nothing is handicapped-accessible in Haiti.

  * * *

  Kiki was waiting when we returned, chewing on a rubber band and clearly satisfied by the noisy squeaks against his teeth. Steve had work to do, but Kiki asked to wear my sunglasses and sang “We Are the World” into my microphone. I let him put on my earphones so he could hear his own strong, clear voice. Piano notes tumbled over our heads as we descended through pale white orchids to look for shimmering fish in the university ponds. One of the beaux arts students was practicing scales in Laurie and Casso’s living room.

  At three a.m. the next morning I was awoken by another unseen piano student, the determined notes filling the darkness, a counterpoint to the call-and-response roosters and the shrill buzz of the mosquitoes.

  Fireflies for Jesus

  Limbé, 2010

  WHEN THE METAL gate clanged shut behind me at Hôpital le Bon Samaritain, the silence, save for the generator, was notable. Bamboo brushed against the roofs of the empty volunteer cottages. Most of the Haitian doctors and nurses now took a bus from Cap-Haïtien.

  The nursery that my father once managed had reverted to a jungle. Gangly Leucaena trees and a few stray bananas reached for the sun where tens of thousands of seedlings had sprouted in plastic trays, waiting to be transplanted. Weeds had overtaken the bare ground.

  The yard workers, whose faces I remembered from childhood but whose names I had forgotten, greeted my father with smiles and handshakes. They told me I looked just like him, then pointed us toward the tiny Rose Cottage in the middle of the compound, where Ma Doktè, the Doctor’s wife, was waiting. (Most rooms in the Hodges home had been boarded up, although a church from Canada was in the process of converting the Doctor’s old study into an improvised orphanage.)

  Joanna hobbled to the screen door as I approached. My parents excused themselves to visit a friend in Limbé, a former employee from the compound who had started his own tree nursery.

  —You look pretty good, Joanna informed me, her gravelly voice every bit as commanding as I remembered. —I’m getting old. My bones are creaking. I’m going to be eighty-seven next year, and next week it will be fifty-three years that I’ve lived in Haiti—longer than I’ve lived in the United States!

  She had flirted with the idea of retiring in 2004, when her house at Chateau Neuf was broken into. The men had worn T-shirts over their heads and waved guns. —But they were old guns, she explained. She leaned forward in her chair, warming to the tale. —I told them that if they wanted to kill me, that was okay, because I knew that God would take care of me.

  —Do you know about God? she had asked her attackers. —Because I don’t think he would want you to be doing what you’re doing!

  She chuckled at the memory.

  Joanna had already fought off cancer, and still kept the keys to the hospital storage depots; once, in a rainstorm, Haitian doctors had carried her over the mud puddles in the middle of the n
ight to obtain supplies for an emergency surgery. It was a story she told with a laugh. She liked to feel useful.

  She hoped to be buried alongside her husband in the small graveyard overlooking Mòn De Tèt, so that when the trumpet sounded and the Lord came back to claim them, they could go up together. Her daughters Barbara and Tamara were already buried beside him.

  I hadn’t been able to say goodbye to Tamara, as she had died of a seizure in her early twenties, when I was still in college. But on a previous trip to Haiti I had seen Barbara. Joni had pushed her gently across the compound in a wheelchair. She was almost unrecognizable. Her long black hair fell loose around her face and her eyes were vacant. She had developed chronic fatigue syndrome, and the medical explanation was that self-prescribed medication from the hospital pharmacy had caused irreversible neurological damage.

  Joanna had hired Haitian nurses to care for her daughter round-the-clock and had hung Barbara’s oil paintings on the walls of the Rose Cottage. On the afternoon I’d visited, Joanna had leaned over the bed to stroke her daughter’s bruised arms and exhorted in a chipper voice: You can do it, Barb, you’ve got lots of friends here to help you!

  One of the Haitian nurses stood behind them in the doorway, her lips tight with worry.

  —The sun is shining, it rained last night, Joanna told the unresponsive Barbara, her voice bouyant. —Be happy that you’re here in Haiti. You have to get well so that you can help me run the hospital!

  Barbara appeared to be the one chink in Joanna’s armor of optimism. She had confided to me that some nights she went home so discouraged, she just wanted to cry. But then she’d lifted her chin and smiled at me. She said that to cheer herself up she would pray: Lord, this was a bad day. Help me to remember what the Haitians say: Maybe tomorrow will be a better day.