"Oh, How We All Love a Nice Hot Bath"

Yowza!  When was the last time you drove down a road and there was so much dust you could barely see the vehicle in front of you even when it was only 15 feet away?  Talk about dust, this summer has been hot, hot, hot and dry, dry, dry.  So much so that people

Selling water on the street

have been wearing those little paper construction masks or covering their faces with handkerchiefs or wet wash cloths as they ride in local open-air taxis called tap-taps. These air-born, grimy little particles even have Tim taking wet rags and wiping down the potted plants on our veranda because they look so pitiful and scraggly (thanks, sweetie!)

But now, at last, the wonderful, refreshing and cleansing rains that come at night are becoming more and more frequent.  "Lapli a" (the rain) not only helps to keep the dust down but it also cools our nights to the point where on occasion we need not even use a fan.  And the children sing about giving the rain candy if only it will come:

"Lapli vini, vini, m ap ba w bon bon"

Water.  It is amazing how this precious commodity has become such an important part of our lives as we make certain we have a daily supply of purified H2O for cooking, drinking,

making coffee or tea, brushing our teeth, washing our faces and the list goes on.  We are truly grateful for this life-sustaining liquid, but we learned many years ago that it holds an even greater value than we could ever have imagined.  The lesson comes from a story shared by a friend about her powerful experience with water while living in Haiti as a missionary.  

Little water bags sold on the street

Deana is a Methodist pastor and was living here during the early 1980's as part of a program that helped with housing. Normally, she is a pretty even-keeled person but one day she wakened and for whatever reason felt "grumbly"; nothing was right that morning. She growled that she did not have milk for her coffee, she murmured about being all sweaty from the night's heat and complained that she "could not even take a nice, hot bath".  Even as she left for work that day, she was still muttering under her breath.

When Deana came home some 8 hours later, she was astounded to see a good-sized metal tub on her kitchen floor and it was filled with steaming, hot water.  The woman for whom Deana was helping to build a home had heard her complaining that morning about not being able to take a hot bath and decided to do something about it.  To accomplish this feat, the woman had to travel on foot for 1 1/2 hours one-way to a water site to get two full buckets of water. She made the trip twice and carried those heavy buckets for a total of 6 hours. When Deana learned of the woman's sacrificial gift, she began weeping until the future homeowner said "I know how you Americans love a nice hot bath and because you are building my home I wanted to do something nice for you."  Deana said she could never again take water for granted and you know what?  Her story changed our way of thinking, too.

Tim and I are well aware of the countless lives that struggle to have even the most basic

of necessities to meet each day's challenges; and realize, too, that while the amenities

Well dug by Living Waters

we enjoy might seem primitive to those elsewhere they still permit us a decent quality of life. We have learned to greatly appreciate the resourcefulness of those with whom we live and work.  We stand in awe of God's creation of the human mind and its ability to design the most imaginative of innovations.  Perhaps most importantly, we have come to understand that the world is filled with hearts that desire to give as well as receive.

“Kay koule twonpe soley, men li pa ka twonpe lapli” – A leaky house can fool the sun, but it can’t fool the rain.

                                                                                                                                       -          Haitian Proverb

                                                                                           

Granny, You Would Have Loved Haiti

We had just passed a cemetery and our interpreter was saying, "I don't know why you want to go into a cemetery.  You need to stay away from there because there are zombies

(zome-bies) in there!"  Our laughter prompted Fritz Marc to say, "Hey!  Haiti is a mysterious country. We are different from other countries."  Courtesy kept me from saying aloud what I was thinking but it was something along the line of, "Yeah, yeah. It's not so different from other countries we have known who have their own unique histories."  

But you know what?  The more we spend time here, the more we realize that Fritz Marc was right.  Haiti is like an onion and what you see on the surface is not always the reality. Indeed, one has to peel back the layers to even begin to understand the people of this Caribbean nation.

As Tim and I have become immersed in folklore tales ("kont") and songs during our Creole studies, our eyes have opened to the challenges, joy, concerns, spirituality, and fears of Haiti's denizens.  Both words and music stem from an "oral tradition" which has been passed

down from generation to generation and in a time when people in the countryside would sit on their steps on a Saturday evening and chat, gossip and relax after a hard week of work.  Soon some off-hand comment might prompt a thought which would inspire a story and adults, teenagers, children and toddlers would gather around.

The storyteller would call out "krik!" (creek) and if the audience wanted to hear her or him they would respond with "krak!" (crack).  However, if the audience did not want to hear that particular storyteller they would withhold their shout of "krak!" and the storyteller could not continue.  

It was not that the audience was trying to be rude but rather their commitment to a story and its teller was so great they would shout out remarks about characters and events; sing songs that were a part of the story; and encourage the teller with comments about their talent.*

Such times are not too different from my own childhood when our "Granny" would gather us in the kitchen to make a sweet, doughnut-like treat which she called "Hungarian donuts" (nope, we are not Hungarian).  Each of us had an assigned task and as we set about doing those tasks we would talk about our day at school or about some activity in which we were

involved and soon our Granny was telling us a story from her own childhood or one she had learned from a friend.  We were simply entranced by her vivid accounts of swimming across the Ohio River with her brothers in the early 1900s; of the time she and one of her sisters were trapped in the basement of a funeral home with a corpse; and how the gypsies came to town one day and her family was afraid they would kidnap her youngest black-haired and brown-eyed sister and how they set about to hide her.

Yes, we can learn a lot about people (and ourselves!) through stories and, perhaps, that is why Jesus used parables.  Although His hearers oftentimes could not figure out what the story was saying (the Disciples, too, had to occasionally ask what they meant) I think Jesus gathered followers and would-be followers around Him in an effort to get them thinking and to begin peeling away the layers that would ultimately lead them to a sense of Whose they are.  For once we know Whose we are, we will know what we are to do.

*Thanks to "The Magic Orange Tree: and Other Haitian Folktales" by Diane Wolkstein