Rocks in the Water, Rocks in the Sun: A Memoir from the Heart of Haiti

by Vilmond Joegodson Déralciné

  I awoke with a cough. A second cough. Then a coughing fit. With each cough, my mouth filled a little more until it was full. I got up and went outside. Next to the banana tree, I spat out what was filling my mouth. It was blood.

  The coughing continued. My cough was a pump pumping blood from my lungs to my mouth to water the soil. Jelo came to stand next to me with his hand over his mouth, silent. It was the first time he had encountered this. He asked me what he should do. I continued to cough and to spit up blood each time. Jelo looked for water to douse me, trying anything to stop the pump. After I did stop, he took me away from the pool of blood around the banana tree. He was afraid; I could see that he saw death in me. He didn’t want me to die. Even more, he didn’t want me to die on his watch. We say Responsab se chaj — the person responsible is also accountable. Finally, he decided to call my father in Simon.

  After a few hours, Dad arrived. Jelo brought him to me and told him what he had witnessed. Seeing Dad leave his work for me, I understood that something really serious was happening. I felt the tears flowing down my cheeks. Dad looked at me tenderly and asked why I was crying. He insisted that I would recover. He said, with the help of God, I would not die. But I couldn’t stop crying. My tears weren’t just because of my fears, but because of the trouble I was causing. My father had no money to spend on a hospital. Or a funeral.

  Jelo made some soup, calculating that I had to replace the blood I had lost. Sak vid pa kanpe — an empty sack (as I was) cannot stand upright. After the soup, Dad asked if I could walk back to Simon with him. I said I would try. And I made it back.

  When I arrived in Simon, I saw the neighbours lined up in two rows. Dad and I passed through the gauntlet. They asked Dad all kinds of questions, but he was too overwhelmed to answer. His immediate goal was to get me to bed so I could rest. As soon as I lay down, the cough came back and offered a demonstration for everyone. I asked for a pan to collect the blood. Then the neighbours started muttering among themselves, saying that I wouldn’t live. Everyone was an expert. No one wanted to be left out by not having a good tuberculosis story, so even if they didn’t have any experience, they made something up. All that medical talk started to have a terrible effect on my father. Everyone had advice and no two people had the same idea. Everyone was willing to play the role of doctor with me as patient. I wasn’t playing a role, though; I was really, actually sick. Also, they never asked Dad if he could afford what the free advice would cost.

  Later, they advised Dad to go to a hospital that treated tuberculosis. Dad tried to raise money. Meanwhile, our neighbour Darlin took me to Gheskio medical clinic. I was so weak, I couldn’t stand in the line-up to enter the hospital. Darlin saved me a place while I sat on a rock until she arrived at the front of the line.

  The doctors gave me tests and said that the results would be available in three days. The tests were meaningless because I knew I wouldn’t last three days. The next morning, I felt very weak. I coughed blood all night. I couldn’t sleep. Very early in the morning, I wanted to go to the toilet. I got out of bed to go to the bucket. But I fell down, blind. I spent about twenty minutes with my eyes wide open, but I could see absolutely nothing. I had lost too much blood. I called my sister Roselèn to take my hand because I couldn’t walk the ten metres to the toilet. I asked Roselèn to bring a pan for me to do my business, since I couldn’t see and couldn’t walk. From time to time, I could see little flashes of light. Roselèn stayed next to me after I did my business. But after twenty minutes, I could see again. Then she took me back to bed.

  Even the rats sensed my weakness as I lay on my makeshift mattress. We have an expression, rat mode soufle, referring to the way that rats blow on the bite they make on sleeping people to keep them from waking. The blowing soothes the wound. I incorporated the experience of the pleasure of the gentle breeze on my arms into my dreams. But when I awoke, I would find that the cloth I was sleeping on had turned red with my own blood. I was becoming rat food.

  chapter eleven

  I CHRISTENED THE NEIGHBOURS who offered free and foolish advice Doctors Without Diplomas. They counselled Dad every which way. They advised a bath with various leaves, a kind of universal remedy. They counselled him to first rub salt into my hands and feet. I was ready to die, but I didn’t want to enter into magic. I assumed that everything that was silly or complicated was magic. Dad told me that the bath salt remedy came from the neighbours. I said it sounded like magic, so he agreed to leave out the salt. I saw that Dad, under stress, was vulnerable to any advice, good or bad.

  I felt really calm and free after the bath. But I was still sick. The Doctors Without Diplomas advised that I go to the Children’s Care Hospital in Delmas 31. They told Dad that it was better than Gheskio. They would say that a brother or cousin had been there and been cured, and so on. I couldn’t walk, so Dad paid for a motorbike to drive me. James went with me. When I arrived there, I filled out the admitting form and I paid seventy-five gourdes ($1.92 US) for a consultation. After that, they sent me to a technician who could test my phlegm. When I arrived, there were fifty people waiting for this specialist. I saw each person trying to produce phlegm to fill a little receptacle they each held in their hands. I coughed and coughed until I managed to produce a little, mixed with blood. The specialist gave me a rendezvous in three days.

  When I returned with James to Simon, I couldn’t stand the bumps of the motorbike. I thought I would die because I couldn’t breathe. I breathed little air between Delmas and Simon. What I did breathe was the dust mixed with all the pollution that passes for air in Port-au-Prince. I arrived closer to death than ever.

  I returned to bed. The Doctors Without Diplomas were waiting for juicy news. They never stopped diagnosing and prescribing. They next told Deland that there was another hospital nearby, Lakou Trankilite. They said that the treatment was free there and it was run by Catholic brothers. They had new stories now to show that this was the place I should go: anecdotes about people who left the hospital cured.

  I was sick of the Doctors Without Diplomas and the way they were using Dad. I had just enough force to tell Dad, “If they are going to advise fifty hospitals a day, are you going to send me to all fifty? There are people who are happy to see someone fall. Some of them are more interested in their advice than in my health. You can listen to them all, but judge for yourself which advice is wise.”

  Sometimes, while lying on my bed of Dad’s fabrics, I was content to see my brothers from church come to pray with my family for me. But I wasn’t happy to hear them ask God to heal me. Because God is no child. It’s His will that will be done. When I heard, “Heal Joegodson so that he can work again,” I intervened in their prayers, saying, “God, I put myself in Your hands. If it is Your will that I die, so be it.” How did my friends know what God wanted? How did they dare tell Him what to do? I was ready to die if that was the will of God.

  But, really, I was almost relieved. My disillusionment with life on earth had only grown since my encounter with the old man on the taptap. I didn’t tell anyone that I was thinking like this. Maybe they could sense it.

  Dad decided that Lakou Trankilite was the best option. We had no more money to pay for tests. I said okay but that this was the last hospital that I was going to visit. This was the third in three days. Each wanted me to return for my tests after three days. I never went back for any of them.

  James and Roselèn went with me, because they already knew Lakou Trankilite. I arrived on the same day that the doctor was there. There was only one doctor for Lakou Trankilite. He had a contract with several hospitals. Once a week, he spent a maximum of an hour to diagnose and prescribe for all of the patients in the hospital. He left instructions for the brothers. He consulted with me the day I entered and said I needed an x-ray to check my lungs. After the x-ray, during his next visit, he would decide on a treatment. He left. After the consultation, the cough wanted to make a demonstration. I coughed until my mouth was full like the first time in Jelo’s yard. A
s I was close to the room where the most serious cases were, I motioned to a patient to hand me his bedpan. I coughed a mouthful of blood into it. The patient said, “Look, this one isn’t going to last.”

  When the brother came to see the blood that I had coughed up, he said that I shouldn’t go home to wait, but that I should have a bed in Lakou Trankilite. He gave me bed number twenty-four in the room for incurables. The beds were numbered in order from one to fifty around the room. The patient whose receptacle I had filled with blood was in bed twenty-five.

  I began to worry. This room, it seemed as I looked around from bed twenty-four, was for people ready to die. In my semiconscious state, I could hear the other patients talking. My neighbour in bed twenty-five, named Rènel, told me they had just changed the sheets, since the guy whose bed I now occupied had died that morning. The brothers took my clothes and dressed me in the uniform that all the patients wore and shaved all my hair off. I was now an incurable.

  During the days, I prayed that the night would come. But then, all night long, I lay awake, because my eyes couldn’t stay closed. I heard every little sound: the mosquitoes, the anole lizards biting into insects, everything. Mostly, I couldn’t stand the ceiling fan that chilled me and provoked my cough. I coughed all night long, disrupting the other patients. They didn’t complain because they saw the state I was in. They had to accept it.

  Each day, I saw the other patients eating. I saw it like a miracle, the ability to eat. I could only drink water. Everyone tried to force me to eat, my family and the other patients. I tried, but only vomited. The sick said that someday I would eat more than them, especially with the vitamins that the brothers were forcing me to take. But the medicine was so strong that sometimes I vomited it.

  One day, at sunset, I was in conversation with Rènel, next door, and getting to know other patients. We told each other our stories, how we came to be there. It wasn’t just tuberculosis cases. There were cases of AIDS, victims of accidents, and others. Rènel had been a mechanic who had been sitting under a car that was jacked up. The jack gave way and the entire weight of the car came down on his shoulders. His vertebrae acted as the shock absorber. His spine was crushed. His kidneys no longer functioned. Rodriguèz had been the victim of a bullet while he was trying to sell cosmetics in the city in 2004. He had been fourteen years old. There had been a firefight between MINUSTAH and their enemies. The bullet went through his neck and broke his spine. He was now completely paralyzed. There were some elderly blind people who had no family. They had been in the hospital for decades. And Zakari whom we have already met: he had been the antenna for a gang in Site Solèy who was shot and crippled by MINUSTAH in 2004.

  Zakari delighted in tormenting the elderly. There were a couple of old blind patients named Bòsadriyen and Bòsjoe. One typical incident: Zakari quietly rolled his wheelchair next to Bòsadriyen, hit him on the head with a plastic container and then retreated as quickly as possible. Bòsadriyen demanded to know who had hit him. Zakari, from a distance now, said that he had seen Bòsjoe do it. Bòsadriyen then kicked at the bed of Bòsjoe who was sleeping soundly. Bòsjoe awoke: “Who kicked my bed?” The other patients started to laugh. Only Bòsadriyen remained angry. Zakari, who was directing the scene, quietly returned, hit Bòsadriyen again, and retreated. Bòsadriyen retaliated by striking Bòsjoe with more force. Bòsjoe, for his part, rose, grabbed the railing of Bòsadriyen’s bed, shook it forcefully and demanded an explanation. And so it carried on.

  The other patients, instead of calming the situation, laughed. That encouraged Zakari. Despite my weakness, I asked them to stop this kind of prank. I thought the devil was behind it. It could only lead to anger and finally injury when someone was actually hurt. The devil would be content to see such an outcome. If the show had come from God, He wouldn’t have written it so that the humour should derive from the pain of the old blind men. We are all in the same boat, I said. Instead of spilling blood, it would be better to see how we could help each other. There was only one enemy here and it was death. We needed to unite to fight it together. That was the first time that I had spoken.

  Zakari was unimpressed. “Ya, we know you, pastor. We’re not in church now.” From then on, everyone called me Pastor Pastor. I continued anyway.

  The room was unhappy. It was as though death had everyone in its grasp. Every day, another person died. I wanted to change the way we viewed our situation. So I started a game where we tracked the passage of Death through the room. That way, we knew what bed Death was going to strike next and, by calculating the time, we could know when. It was a game we all played. After all our calculations, we would announce that Death was going to strike bed thirteen at seven o’clock. So, the patient in bed thirteen would tease Death and remain in place until six fifty-nine. Then, he would leap out of the doomed bed just in time. We all came to believe that we were beating Death by making a mockery of it. We could come together in solidarity to outsmart this devious and unseen enemy.

  I didn’t have my balance yet. I could stand, but nothing more. I was as helpless as a baby. James would come to bathe me and take me to the toilet. I was so skinny that you could see all the bones protruding from my body.

  We had a schedule. Every patient had to bathe at five o’clock in the morning, at noon, and in the evening. At five in the morning, the water was cold. Water was the friend of some patients and the enemy of others. Some patients who were really sick died during the morning bath. The water was so cold that the shock pushed them over the edge.

  The patients were bathed by Haitian volunteers who were hoping to escape their poverty by joining the brothers. They took out their frustrations on the patients. The brothers sometimes gave gifts to the Lakou Trankilite patients. Cookies, for example. If they received these things, some patients shared them with the workers. If a patient dirtied himself, he could receive bad treatment from workers who didn’t like him — with whom he hadn’t shared his cookies. They could use the cold morning water as a weapon against a patient they didn’t like.

  I had lots of friends from outside who brought me little things to eat. People from my church came to visit each day. I was like a depot of milk, juices, cookies, and so on. I shared it all with everyone.

  Some of the brothers were mean. One day a blind patient asked a brother for something to eat. The brother picked up off the floor a cookie that had been trampled on and put it in the hands of the blind patient. I looked at him to see his intention. He saw me watching him. He read in my eyes that I was not happy with his gesture. He turned to the blind person and took the cookie back that he was about to eat. Maybe the brother was demonstrating the power he had to control the lives of the patients. My displeasure was like a mirror that reflected the real meaning of his action back to himself. He was ashamed by the humiliation that he was imposing on another. He left the room quickly, trying to get away from me and, perhaps, himself as quickly as possible.

  I asked the patients, “If he was in the place of the blind person, or a member of his family was, would he offer a cookie like that?” The blind person remained innocent of all the discussion that was centred around him. Zakari replied that the same brother had done something similar on another occasion. He had entered the room with a dead mouse. He asked Bòsjoe, “Do you want some meat?” Bòsjoe said yes. Then the brother held the mouse by the tail over the mouth of Bòsjoe. The other patients giggled. He asked the blind man to hold out his hand instead to take the meat. He put the mouse in his hand and told him to eat it. Bòsjoe threw it away, saying it was a mouse. I put myself in the place of the blind man. How could I live surrounded by such nasty people? Or good people behaving maliciously?

  There was a Catholic chapel in the court of the hospital. Everyone had to go to church. If you didn’t agree to go to church, they said that you would need to take your things and return home. So we all went each evening and Sunday morning. At first I was exempt because I was too sick to leave my bed. But afterwards, I had to go. We weren’t allowed to go in
our own clothes, but had to wear our hospital gowns. The services were attended by people from the neighbourhood and even farther away. They were all dressed in their best clothes. We patients stood out. We felt humiliated, because Haitians always wear their best clothes to church. Rodriguèz, Rènel, and Zakari were exempt because they were confined to wheelchairs and there were stairs at the entrance of the church that they couldn’t climb. That was the only blessing that their handicap afforded them.

  chapter twelve

  FRANCHESCA LIVED IN THE NORTH of Haiti in a mountain community called Varettes. She sold the produce from the cultivators in the local market. Carrying heavy baskets on her head under the merciless sun, Franchesca would walk kilometres through mountainous terrain to reach the market. Her goal was to return home each day with the basket empty.

  Franchesca had a cousin named Monique who went to school in Port-au-Prince. After she graduated from secondary school, she studied pharmacology in a professional school.

  One summer, Monique came back from the capital to live with her relatives in Varettes. Franchesca was surprised to see how Monique had changed in the few years that they had been separated. Monique had finely coiffed hair. She wore makeup to accentuate her facial features and her clothes were stylish, clean, and pressed. When Franchesca looked at herself, she saw dirty clothes and the mud of the mountain paths caked into her skin. Her hair was unkempt: what was the use of fussing when she would only carry a heavy load on her head for hours every day? She had no time to apply makeup and no makeup to apply. In any case, she wouldn’t know how.

  Franchesca asked Monique, “Do you think that there would be room for me to live with you and your mother in the capital? I would only stay for a short while until I find a job and can rent a room.”