The Gospel of Trees

by Apricot Irving

  I offered him the benediction that an irreverent and holy vicar in London had given me: Forgive yourself. Forgive others. Go in peace.

  We clinked glasses.

  The missionary mantle, prickly with expectation, was not easily shaken off, and yet it had been our baptism into sorrow and beauty.

  * * *

  On our last night in Haut-Limbé, Meadow and I cupped in our hands fledgling parakeets that had fallen out of a nest in a royal palm tree and were being syringe-fed by Nancy. I sat up late to write, perched on the end of a twin bed in our shared room. The moon behind the clouds was so breathtaking that I didn’t want to sleep. My pen scratched against the page as I tried to set down the wind in the leaves, the distant voices through the trees, tinny music from a radio.

  Suddenly, Meadow sat bolt upright in bed. Without her glasses, I was only a dim blur in the shadows. —Is that you? she asked, her voice worried, then she leaned back against the pillow, still woozy from half-sleep. —Shouldn’t you be writing in the closet for old times’ sake?

  * * *

  I had not seen Suzette, the unstoppable ringleader of the Jericho School Circus, since I was nine years old, but she was exactly as I remembered her: a human being fully alive. Her laugh loud, her compassion quick, her insights bracing.

  At her home in the mountains, above Port-au-Prince, we sipped Haitian coffee and caught up on stories. After dinner, she brought out the good stuff: homemade kremas, raw coconut washed with klerin, saved for special occasions.

  Willys Geffrard, her husband, was from an old Haitian family, and the two had spent years running development projects across Africa and Haiti. We stayed up until midnight in a passionate conversation with a friend of theirs, a young Haitian economist and business owner. Daniel Jean-Louis explained to me why the missionary habit of hosting volunteer church groups on their properties—without paying hotel taxes—undercut the local economy. Worse yet was when volunteer groups brought their own carpenters and imported supplies; their well-meaning benevolence put local builders and merchants out of work.

  He cited a particularly egregious example from after the earthquake: hundreds of jars of donated peanut butter, purchased in the U.S. and shipped to Haiti for the people in the tent cities.

  —Peanut butter! he repeated, shaking his head. —We grow our own peanuts here.

  Jean-Louis explained that money entered the economy every time a transaction took place: when the peanuts were purchased from the farmers; when the jars of peanut butter were sold. However, when the peanut butter was donated, not only did money fail to enter the local economy, but Haitian farmers could not even sell their produce because the market was flooded.

  —No nation has ever pulled itself out of poverty through charity, he insisted.

  Suzette raised her eyebrows at me. She would always be my favorite teacher, pushing me to think harder, to ask better questions. Had we stayed up all night, we still wouldn’t have run out of stories, but she had an early flight to catch. We drifted onto the porch to watch the stars emerge over the mountains.

  As we drove back down the mountains into Port-au-Prince in the dark, Willys felt a tug at the wheel and got out to check the tires but, seeing nothing amiss, kept driving. He drove carefully around the potholes. Schoolchildren congregated under streetlamps, bent over their homework. Flickering kerosene lamps illuminated charcoal rechos. Suddenly, without warning, the entire front-left wheel of the vehicle bumped loose and rolled across the road, narrowly missing a line of food vendors seated beside the road.

  An overloaded tap tap laid on its horn and swerved to avoid an accident. We jumped out of the car and were immediately surrounded.

  The missing wheel was already being rolled back across the street by teenagers. Within minutes, they had helped Willys jack up the car and were searching the gutters for the missing lug nuts by the light of their cell phones. One young man was standing in the dark, waving a tree branch to slow the oncoming vehicles.

  Suzette and I stood behind the car, taking turns swinging a tiny flashlight, noting the absurdity of our situation. How was it that in a city clogged with earthquake debris—a place too often viewed only with pity or fear—complete strangers had dropped everything to help us without asking anything in return?

  Schoolgirls walked past us, singing in the dark.

  Li Sanble Ou

  Artibonite, 2012

  LIKE ME, MY parents kept finding excuses to return to Haiti. They spent a month in a tiny village above Saint-Marc as volunteers with Mercy Corps, helping to build fuel-efficient stoves made of clay and organic material (rotting mangoes worked well as a binding agent when they were in season). The combustion chamber burned off excess carbon monoxide as well as particulate matter, and small sticks could be used instead of charcoal to boil water and cook meals—a strike against deforestation. It was also, for the first time in a long while, a collaboration that suited both of my parents: my mother got to roll clay between her fingers and talk while she cooked; my father had people’s attention while he talked about saving the trees. They were thrilled when their YouTube videos about the stoves got hits from refugee camps and eco-lodges around the world (the videos were even more popular with doomsday preppers).

  Just before I set out to join them, my father emailed to say that he needed me to call a warehouse in the Midwest, order ten to fifteen plastic feed tubs, have them shipped to a farm supply store a forty-five-minute drive from my house, then hand-carry them to Ti Bwa. I tried to imagine myself lugging a four-foot-tall stack of brightly colored plastic buckets through the airport in West Palm Beach, where I would be staying with Olynda for a few nights, then tapped out a terse reply—perhaps they should find a Haitian importer who could procure the tubs and sell them locally for a small profit to make the project sustainable. I was trying to be diplomatic.

  When my unsatisfactory reply kicked off a tense round of emails with my father, I confided to my husband: I’m not even sure he likes me.

  David shook his head. —I don’t think either of you realizes how much you admire each other.

  The night before I left, I reminded my two boys to please chew with their mouths closed and not to drop their food on the floor; they told me that the saddest part of their day was that I was leaving for Haiti in the morning.

  I threw on my backpack at four-forty-five a.m. David dragged himself out of bed, bleary-eyed and warm from sleep, to put his arms around me. —Don’t forget to come home again, he said, and tightened his grip around my shoulders.

  A taxi-driver friend was waiting in the driveway. As we raced to the airport in the dark, a thousand frogs hurtled through the rain in the glare of the headlights. In my bag, I’d tucked a hoard of Snickers bars for my mother. Stacked beside me in the backseat, like an ungainly peace offering, were half a dozen plastic feed tubs for my father.

  My parents had not yet made it down the mountain from the village of Ti Bwa when I arrived, so the manager at the Mercy Corps office put me through on a cell phone.

  After I hung up she asked: Did you tell them that you brought the tubs?

  I hadn’t.

  She laughed. —Because when I asked them if you were going to bring any tubs, your dad said: No, she didn’t want to bring them; she’s really stubborn, and it’s our fault because we made her that way.

  It was nice, at least, to be able to laugh about it.

  * * *

  By the time my parents arrived, exhausted and fractious, my mother was on the verge of laryngitis. My father just worked until he collapsed—body sprawled out on the concrete floor, hat over his eyes, sound asleep—and then got up and kept going, no matter how painfully his muscles ached. The other expats in the office were surprised that he didn’t like to take time off and relax; no trips to the beach, no downtime. My mother sighed melodramatically. —He’s not a normal husband.

  They spent the better part of the afternoon arguing over the format of an upcoming class on how to build the stoves. My father was in his stubbo
rn obstructionist mode, determined to poke a hole into every suggestion.

  —That’s not true, Jon, and you and I both know it! I overheard from the next room. And yet, despite the grumbling and inflammatory statements, the raised voices and the worst-case scenarios, they emerged from the negotiation perfectly cheerful.

  —You’re my good-luck charm, Jonny, she told him with a winsome smile when he got the water purifier to work.

  In Ti Bwa, they shared a single bed in a narrow room off an unused classroom, a box pushed up against the door of the leaking bathroom to keep the resident rat from going through their backpacks while they slept. There was no electricity, but my mother hung a solar lamp out the window to charge each day. The lack of amenities didn’t appear to bother them overly much; it was a bit like backpacking—they both knew how to travel light. Even in the States, they did not indulge themselves with undue luxuries, which we three girls had always pined for; we couldn’t wait to escape their frugality. In Ti Bwa, they stored shallots and peppers in a cupboard, along with bags of spaghetti and beans, which they brought as gifts to households who invited them over for a meal. By the end of their stay, they knew half the people in the village by name.

  —This is my daughter, my mother would explain when she stopped to introduce me. —She is thirty-six years old. She is married. I have grandchildren.

  —Oh! Li sanble ou! She looks just like you! was the inevitable reply.

  At which my father jumped in, right on cue. —She’s my daughter, too! What, she doesn’t look like me? What are you saying?

  One woman agreed that I had my father’s nose. Someone else retorted: That’s not your daughter, she’s too pretty.

  —Oh! Pa fè m sa! my father declared in mock offense, playing to the crowd. —Don’t accuse my wife of that!

  My mother was filming a low-budget video to promote the innovations of the local stove-makers, and I followed from courtyard to courtyard to see the progress. My parents’ proudest accomplishment was the clay oven they’d engineered to rest on top of the combustion chamber, creating a miniature bakery—a valuable side business in a village that had relied for centuries on three-rock fires.

  Remy, a local schoolteacher, had painted the silhouette of a bird in flight on the side of his stove and had written in elegant script: Ann bay yo yon chans pou yo kabab viv. Let’s give the birds a chance to live.

  Neighbors told stories of birds that they remembered:

  —There was a bird that used to wake me up at four a.m. I always knew what time it was by the sound of that bird. Now it is gone.

  —We cut down the trees where they built their nests.

  —The kids caught them all with their little traps; now you never see them anymore.

  My father insisted that the stoves were the key to reforestation, the beginning of a possible environmental revolution in Ti Bwa. My mother filmed footage of charming children singing in squeaky, high-pitched voices a song about the Recho Ti Bwa—although she got in trouble afterward because she didn’t insist that one of the boys go home and wash the dust off his face; his parents were mortified that he had been shown to the world without the dignity of a clean-scrubbed face.

  Neighbors crowded around to watch the proceedings. Everyone whom I hadn’t already met asked my name and whether I was Agwonòm Jon’s daughter. When a little girl hollered: Blan! Blan! I knelt down and introduced myself. —My name is not blan, my name is Apricot. These are my mom and dad. Do we look alike? She grinned up at me.

  On Sunday, I joined my parents for the local Baptist church service, though I didn’t last long. A woman in a starched white dress pointed to a hand-painted Bible verse on the wall, Lamentations 3:26, and informed the parents in a strident voice that God wanted silence in the church, and if their children misbehaved, then they should beat them. I elbowed my mother. She looked sheepish. Was it the fault of the missionaries, I wondered, that churches were so often legalistic and conservative? Or was legalism a universal human impulse—a cheap bid for power? My father furrowed his eyebrows in disappointment when I slipped out of the pew before the sermon had even started, but my mother smiled and whispered: Enjoy yourself.

  I grabbed a broom and dusted off a corner of the porch behind the room where we slept, slipped off my sandals, and bent forward in a sun salutation. Tinder-dry hills spread out red and brown against the sky, the bare courtyards edged by cactus. Within minutes, half a dozen girls had joined the yoga practice. We swept out our arms together in warrior pose, our wide-planted feet powdery with dust.

  * * *

  Just a few miles away as the crow flies, in another village nestled against a dry mountain, I had sat down under a zanmann tree a few days earlier with two of the founding members of an òganizasyon peyizan, a peasant cooperative, that had grown, over its twenty-five year existence, to 2,225 members.

  —We wanted this to be a place where people would want to live, Ronick St. George explained. —We didn’t want everyone with an education to leave.

  Members paid small monthly dues and logged hours in the communal gardens, and the proceeds went to fund educational initiatives. Concerned by the high infant mortality rate in the area, a member of the cooperative had been sent to take a course on hygiene. Latrines, vaccinations for children, and attention to protein and diet had all been initiatives funded by the cooperative.

  —We have no more children with cheve wouj, Célestin Léopold told me proudly. No more children whose red-tinged hair was a sign of protein-deficient kwashiorkor.

  Occasionally over the years, the cooperative had partnered with NGOs to subsidize projects that otherwise would have proved unaffordable for the community, but even the long-term success of these projects was, arguably, due to the fact that the òganizasyon peyizan remained active long after the NGOs had moved on. Ninety-eight percent of the households in the village had recently agreed to pay two hundred gourdes each for buried cement cisterns attached to new tin roofs, allowing rainwater to be harvested and stored for later use; a German not-for-profit organization had covered the remaining cost of the water catchment systems.

  —We wanted to make it so that the peyizan didn’t feel that the people in the city could look down on them. We wanted to make it so people didn’t want to live anywhere else, Ronick explained.

  He and Célestin cited examples of children who had left the village for secondary school but had returned to share what they’d learned. And the organization was not religious, they insisted: Vodouisants, Baptists, Adventists, Catholics all worked together.

  Zanmann leaves rustled overhead as we spoke, the hidden too-whoo of pigeons in its branches. Hand-cut boards leaned against a wall. Flies buzzed. A pig squealed in the underbrush, followed by the scolding timbre of a woman’s voice. Painted across the doorway of a house, a hand-lettered Bible verse announced: Tout est posible à celui qui croit. All things are possible for those who believe.

  The members of the cooperative did not assume that their work was finished; they wanted to see the road improved and to find a more reliable water source, and they hoped to convince people to plant more trees—when the last hurricane hit, entire gardens had washed away, scouring deep ravines into the sides of the mountain. They did not mention, however, a television for every home or a motorcycle for every family.

  To a well-heeled philanthropist, the village might have appeared deceptively impoverished. Chickens scratched in the dirt, and I saw broken glass and a pair of underwear stuck in the crotch of a tree, and tattered plastic bags and candy wrappers in the dust. But when asked to gauge their success on a scale of one to ten, Célestin Léopold smiled and said that he would give it a seven. I thought of Bessel van der Kolk, the Dutch psychiatrist who has explained that trauma is compounded when people are prevented from being agents in their own recovery.

  The òganizasyon peyizan had not escaped the attention of potential donors. A Mercy Corps officer was quick to point out to me that a dime invested in a community that was self-organized was equal to a
dollar spent in less organized communities: less corruption, less likelihood of failure.

  —We don’t want to be the cane that supports a sick body. That’s not functional. But if people are already walking on their own and they get to a ravine, we help to build a bridge so that they can get across.

  It sounded so persuasive, and yet while I was there, the NGO, under pressure from a million-dollar donor, decided that it did not have time to schedule yet another preliminary meeting to discuss the terms of the work agreement with the elected leaders of the peasant cooperative—some of whom lived so far up the mountains that it required a full day’s walk to reach the meeting place.

  Impatient with the slow pace of negotiations, the NGO had issued an ultimatum: either accept the terms or lose the project. The leaders of the cooperative had walked out in protest.

  It remained to be seen whether the òganizasyon peyizan would be able to withstand the NGO’s rushed timeline and maintain their autonomy. I hoped they could pull it off, but I left with a sinking feeling in my gut. Communities perceived as being in need of outside assistance can quickly become pawns in the hands of would-be altruists. How much have we already destroyed in our earnest desire to help?

  * * *

  A tattered poster in faded blue calligraphy was pasted to a door in the village—L’Eternel est Grand: God Is Great—beneath which had been scrawled: Don’t steak your Nose in my buissness.

  Piti pa Piti, Zwazo fè Nich

  Camp Coq, 2012

  EVEN IN THE age of cell phones, the coverage was spotty and my father seemed reluctant to set up a visit ahead of time, so, as usual, we showed up at Zo’s house unannounced. My mother wanted to get video footage of Zo’s gardens to show the farmers back in Ti Bwa, but my father felt trapped by long-range plans; he preferred to wait and see how things developed.