Edwa has what could reasonably be described as a strong preference for driving on the right-hand side of the road. In Haiti, the right-hand side is the right side, too. He drives on the right most of the time, but sometimes he drives on the left. Traffic on Avenue John Brown heading into Pòtoprens has been heavy lately, so one day recently he was on the left most of the way down. What’s most striking is that my confidence in him is so complete that I wasn’t giving it a second thought. I was still sore from working on the
konbit the day before, so that’s what was on my mind.

There are several things I’ve learned to do in Haiti that I might never otherwise have learned. The most obvious is that I can speak some Kreyol, enough at least to get by. But there’s more. I can grind corn into cornmeal. I can iron a shirt with a coal-heated iron. I can ride a moderately feisty donkey of average size, bareback. And there are larger things, too. The sorts of things that are harder to describe. None of these new skills, large or small, prepared me for work as part of the konbit. That’s ok, though. As it turns out, I didn’t need any skills.

A konbit is a group that gets together to do work that can better be accomplished by a team. I’m told that much of the farming in the countryside depends on them. Several men will get together and go from farm to farm, tilling or planting or weeding or reaping. Each day they work a different plot of land. They can be cooperatives, working land which the individual konbit members own. Or they can be a kind of team for hire. Even if it is a cooperative, the owner of the land provides a meal. There are standard fees if the group is a professional team.

Our konbit had nothing to do with agriculture, except that we were working on land where Mèt Anténor used to plant corn. We were a construction team, laying the beginnings of a foundation for a Seventh Day Adventist Church in Ka Glo.

Ka Glo has had an Adventist community since the mid-nineties. Until then, it was largely Catholic. I’m still unclear as to what brought Mèt Anténor and the others to turn to Adventism, but by the time I arrived for the first time in the summer of 1997, Adventists were a large majority. There remained then, as now, only a few Catholics and a few members of an intensely charismatic Protestant group. Our neighborhood of Ka Glo has no Voudoun, or at least none that I’ve ever seen. There are a several practitioners of Voudoun down the hill in Mabanbou, several more across the road in upper Ka Glo, and lots of them just up the hill in Ba Osya.

That first summer, and through the summer that followed, the whole community would go down to Bwa Moket or to Pènye every Saturday for Adventist services. But by the time I arrived in August of 1999, that had changed. They were meeting each Saturday on benches and chairs arranged outdoors, right inside the entrance to our yard, in front of the porch where I like to sit and read. Two or three members of the community in Bwa Moket come up the hill each week to share leadership of their Sabbath service, but for the most part they themselves lead it-Mèt Anténor, Jean-Reynald, and Toto.

For some time now they’ve had plans to build a church on a small piece of land that belongs to Mèt Anténor right beneath the great mapou tree. But even to start a building project is a major undertaking here in semi-rural Haiti, not to speak of getting it finished. Thanks to Mèt Anténor, they had the land. And for months now they’ve had some of the material they would need: a large pile of rocks of various sizes. Several weeks ago, a small group of teenagers was hired to dig the trenches that we would lay the foundations in, but more was needed. We had to have both cement and sandy gravel to mix it with. In addition, we needed labor. And labor was briefly in short supply, because the rains had just started, and it was critical for everyone to get their corn planted quickly. Crops were already about a month late.

But the crops are in the ground, and last week a truck brought a load of gravel and ten sacks of cement up the hill. We were ready to start.

Now, organizing a konbit for farmwork is probably pretty simple: You gather together a bunch of guys with hoes or machetes or shovels or whatever the appropriate tool is, and they get to work. But our construction team was more complex. For one thing, it depended on some real skill. We were to start a foundation. More specifically, our first day’s task was to build a wall about six feet high and twenty-five or thirty feet long, set into a trench about four feet deep on a steep incline. That meant we needed experienced stonemasons. For another, though there would be a bunch of us doing the unskilled lifting and carrying the masons needed all day, there was one aspect of the job that required more consistent, more dependable strength than any of us could supply: mixing the sand with water and the cement to make the concrete. It’s very heavy work, and it would need to continue without pause all day. So there were about 15 unskilled volunteers from Ka Glo, lifting, carrying, arguing, complaining, joking, and chatting all day, but there were also four professional stonemasons, plus two more who were members of the church working as volunteers, and two professional mason’s assistants. Madanm Anténor led a team of six women who made the meal and hauled water-both rainwater for the cement and drinking water for the laborers.

The work that we actually did was pretty uninteresting. I spent the day hauling buckets of concrete and moving rocks. By mid-afternoon, I was sunburnt, but my shoulders were less red than my soft, professorial hands. My awkwardness was enjoyed by all. Passing neighbors stopped to watch. I made, in fact, quite a spectacle of myself. I was, as they say, a “conversation piece.” Finishing the church will require many more such days. I hope I’m part of some of them.

For Ellen and Carol

Sometimes I wonder, “What were those people thinking?” The “those” might be almost anyone. It’s a type of thought that occurs to me often enough, a sort of formula-half harshly judgmental, half genuinely mystified. Friday, “those people” were whoever brought the jawbreakers to the orphanage.

I’ve been visiting an orphanage every Friday morning. I call it an orphanage, but that misses the mark. It’s a facility that receives abandoned and desperately needy children. The sisters who run it organize food and medical care for infants and young toddlers on the brink of starvation and dehydration. The children-if they live-might be adopted. They might be placed in what would more properly be called an orphanage. Or their parents themselves might take them back.

Jawbreakers seemed a terrible idea. There weren’t nearly enough for all the toddlers and older children. The children, to their credit, are devoted to sharing. This is especially striking because they have so little to share. Jawbreakers, however, are not easy to share. So the kids were taking turns sucking on the ones they had. Then someone figured out that you can shatter a jawbreaker if you throw it hard enough against a bare concrete floor. I should say that the sisters and their staff work hard to keep the place minimally clean, but even so the floor seemed not quite sterile. The shards of wet candy that the kids were passing around didn’t appeal to me. Several were offered. I declined. In addition, as the kids threw the jawbreakers around, someone discovered their military value. They became projectile weapons in the kind of playful fighting that is common among kids.

I go to the place each week because I like the children. For example, there’s Charles. He’s a small boy who must be eight or so. He strolls around the facility, watching the sisters and their staff at work, chatting with various adults and children, always in good cheer. His demeanor, his posture, the way he has about him suggest more than anything that of a “hands-off” administrator, make his or her presence felt in the place where he or she is
the boss. Charles’s twisted, crooked, discolored teeth do little to make his constant smile anything but beautiful. It’s a big smile, above a little chin that rests above a large, bulging goiter. Another example: There’s a little boy of about two perhaps, not quite toddling yet, who does little but point his finger to show that he’d like to leave his crib in your arms. He glowers when you don’t pick him up, and he screams when you put him back. There’s a mute little boy or girl or five or six -I’m not sure about the gender-who walks around smiling and cooing. Other children warn me not to take food from his or her hands, not to let her touch me at all. They say he or she handles his or her own excrement. I don’t know whether that’s true. There are girls and boys who want nothing but to be held, or be carried, or be paid attention to for a short while.

In fact, there are dozens of such children, thirsting desperately for attention. Those of them who can walk around struggle to cling to me as soon as they see me. They want to be touched, want to be held, want to be spoken to. The sisters and their staff have enough to do to keep the children clean and fed. With the best of intentions, they can’t do much more than that. And it’s not clear that they should do much more. The nicer the facility is, the more it might encourage people on the edge of despair to choose not to raise their children.

So I stroll in, and then I sit on the floor, as out of the staff’s way as I possibly can. I don’t try to stand, because standing I can only hold two kids, and I’m too tall to relate well to those I am standing above. Chairs don’t help much. Only three or four can make their way around me if I’m in a chair. If I sit on the floor, and stretch out my legs, five or six or seven can climb on me at once. I can be chatting and joking with them face-to-face,
eye-to-eye. One consequence of their terrible, terrible need for attention is that they pay more attention to me than anyone ever has. I ought to admit that I like them for that, too.

Their need for attention seems infinite. It’s not just that there are too many children, even though there are. Even with six or seven climbing on me, they’ll be others crying because they can’t get as close to me as they need to. But it’s more than just the number of kids. Many of the individual kids seem so needy that one could hardly ever do enough for them. There’s one girl who’s always crying anytime she’s not the only child I’m holding. She needs someone all to herself, and needs that someone to give her much more than I
have.

This brings me to my point. Or points. I have two.

First, I’m in awe of the women who work there. Each one of them might be responsible for a room which has 15-20 cribs, each with a young child who is surely always needy in one way or another. In a sense, the most reasonable response to the situation they’re in would be to leave it. They have, as we say, “only two hands.” And 15-20 kids need food, need water, need to have their diapers changed. And those are only their simplest needs. But the women don’t give up. They keep working, walking from crib to crib, doing what they can for each child in turn. Generally, in good cheer. They seem to know something that I’d like to learn and to learn well: that hopelessness is a luxury, and a stupid one at that. In the face of continual, particular needs, larger questions, global questions, such as “What’s the use?” are trivial.

Second: I do enjoy my visits, and I think the kids enjoy my visits, too. And even the staff seems amused by my presence. Or at least they seem not to mind. But it’s perfectly clear that what each child needs is not a small share of a middle-aged bachelor’s attention during the few hours a week he can drop by. Each of the children needs parents, totally committed to him or to her forever. Whether those parents must be Haitians or should be Haitians or whether any parents will do is an important question that I can’t answer, but that is, I think, what each child needs and deserves. I’m smart enough to know that that is not what I have to give.

Which brings me to my cousins, to two in particular, a couple who have raised two magnificent young men, men on the verge of going out on their own. This couple has decided to start all over again, to adopt two infant girls. Cambodian girls, it so happens. They’ve chosen to make a life-long commitment to two more kids. Instead of wallowing in the infinity of needy children, or in any individual child’s infinity of need, my cousins have chosen to assume specific and unlimited responsibility for two particular kids right now. I am in awe of these cousins, too.

As for the jawbreakers, I doubt whether that foolishness really did any harm. I myself am considering a box of superballs. Bouncing off bare concrete floors and walls, they should cause chaos enough.

I love O’Hare Airport. Maybe “love” is too strong, but I certainly admire it. So much is accomplished there all the time. Pòtoprens International Airport is a different story. I spent a fair bit of time there recently, more than I wanted to, waiting for luggage I had checked on the way back to Haiti.

I hadn’t planned to check any baggage. In fact, I had planned not to. But when I went through security at Miami, I was told that I couldn’t carry a hammer onto the plane. So I went back to the line at the counter, and I gave them my backpack. And though I was the very first person off the plane in Pòtoprens, and the very first person through Haitian immigration, I stood waiting for my bag for almost an hour. It was frustrating.

It’s not that I have any particular use for a hammer here in Haiti. I don’t make, or plan to make, anything. The hammer wasn’t for me, but for Byton, who’s a cabinetmaker’s apprentice. He will eventually need his own tools, and acquiring them will be hard. He has very little money, and is unlikely to have more without the tools to earn it with. I thought an old, but perfectly serviceable carpenter’s hammer would give him a start. I
brought a tape measure, too. And I hope to bring a saw and a plane next time I come. So I was trying to do something nice, and here I stood in the sweltering airport heat, paying for my kindness. No good deed goes unpunished. As I stood there, I had time to think about that kindness, about what it really means for a foreigner to give to a Haitian, and I thought I should write about that.

Let me start by talking about a kind of person I sometimes meet here. I meet them most often in Okay, where I have had occasion to overnight at a guesthouse run by a Haitian Protestant denomination. Often there are groups of Americans staying there, usually for about a week. They are “work groups” on “short-term missions.” They have come to Haiti to give their time and energy towards various sorts of development projects. Some are medical or dental teams. Some simply come to build, often a church or a school. They come to serve God by helping those who are in need.

Though I don’t know what to think of dental or medical teams, I have to say that I find the teams that come to build things curious. After all, there are plenty of skilled builders in Haiti, and Haitian unemployment, among builders as among others, is very high-higher, perhaps, than most of us Americans can easily imagine. So if there’s a need to build a school, I wonder whether it wouldn’t make more sense for Haitians to build it. Perhaps the money to buy materials is short here, but there isn’t much in the way of planks, cement, concrete, and roofing that you couldn’t buy for the price of the airfare for a group of eight to ten Americans to fly to Haiti and back. So I do wonder who is giving what to whom.

But I don’t mean to point a finger. For me, the question is a general one. There are a lot of foreigners here in Haiti. Many of us come to help in some way. Haiti is attractive because it combines all the neediness of poor African or Asian countries with a convenient location, but has an exotic quality that impoverished areas of the States generally lack. The question is: When we think we’re doing something good here, when we think we’re giving a gift, who is giving what to whom?

Such questions arise for me around the notion of giving almost every day. Take Byton’s hammer. He thanked me profusely. That’s how he is. But I didn’t give him the hammer. My father did, and I told Byton this. Both the hammer and the tape measure belonged to Dad, both for a long time. I could be-and to a degree am-sentimental about the fact that they are the tools I remember my father using when I was a little boy, but if anyone deserves thanks, it’s my father, not me. I myself thanked him, and thanked him sincerely. I was grateful.

Let’s be clear, though. My father has other hammers and another tape measure. He was giving from excess. What he gave, he didn’t really need. That’s not to deny that his gift was genuine and generous. My father’s as generous a person as I’ve ever known. But it’s important nonetheless to see it for what it was: a thoughtful way to dispose of stuff he didn’t need.

Every day I have chances to give. Whatever “give” finally means. People come up to me and ask for a few cents or a soccer ball or my book bag or my watch. And a lot of people who don’t ask for anything could make good use of such things as well. Sometimes they are asking for things that, for whatever reason, I feel I need. Often they aren’t. Sometimes I give such people something. Often I don’t. When I do, I feel good. For a moment, anyway.

Giving is an act I was always taught to value. Sharing is a good thing. Generosity is a virtue.

But those good feelings are also a temptation of sorts. A kind of trap. I don’t especially think that I deserve what I have. Nor that others deserve to lack what they lack. If I give from my excess to meet some else’s need, am I doing something good or something obvious? Shouldn’t I be looking harder and more often for ways to give away the goods that I have? I’m not a Christian, but there’s something about St. Anthony that’s hard not to admire.

And that assumes that the distribution of goods between Haiti and the wealthy nations is innocent. The situation of Europeans and Americans who would give to Haiti or Haitians is, however, more strained than that. Years of our policies have done a lot to impoverish this place: from the annihilation of its natives, to the import and the exploitation of slaves, to the insistence on indemnities, to brutal occupation, to the extermination of Creole pigs. And that’s a very limited list. So that what I have, and what Byton, for example, lacks may have much less to do with luck or fate or the hand of God than it has to do with theft. And here “theft” is a euphemism for what is, in the end, much, much worse. So maybe we should be pouring resources through governmental and non-governmental channels, into this land. Maybe we owe Haiti some of what we have, and ought to give it back.

I’d rather avoid such larger questions. Even if I was sure that such steps were the right ones, they are ones I don’t know much about taking. I’m neither a policy maker nor a policy analyst, neither an economist nor a historian. It’s hard for me to guess just what consequences such larger projects would have. I don’t know much about the kinds of projects that do-and the kind that don’t-improve people’s lives.

So I would rather just think about the little things that I can choose to do on any given day. I can choose to give a little money to a street beggar or a larger sum to someone who knows me well enough to ask for it. I can give a hammer to a friend. Even such decisions can be complicated when I let them be. I can be haunted by the worry that I am encouraging dependence, or fearful that I’m only adding to the tendency to ask for things. I can doubt someone’s need. These are thoughts I have often enough, even if I have no right to them. To worry that I’m making someone dependent is to assume I know what someone should be like. To fear that I am encouraging people to ask, is to want to avoid the responsibility to think about what I have. To doubt another person’s need is to pretend I know more than I can know. I have, I repeat, no right to these thoughts.

Sometimes I give. Other times I don’t. Often I’m glad when I do. That’s not because I’m confident that such gifts make anyone’s life better-except perhaps my own. I try not to take myself too seriously.

The first thing I need to explain is this: Just what was I doing, squished onto the back of a motorcycle behind John and a driver, flying up Canape Vert, with two screaming, scratching cats squirming in a borrowed, ventilated pillowcase on my lap?

I had just spent Saturday morning at Coleen’s place, and she gave me the cats. It seemed like a good thing for her and a good thing for them. She lives in a small apartment, above the owners of several large dogs. These dogs are given free reign in the yard in front of the building. This effectively means that the cats can’t go outside. They also never learned to use a litter box. The combination of those two facts is stressful for Coleen
and for those who live with her. The presence of the dogs is by itself stressful for the cats. We have no dogs in our corner of Ka Glo right now, and we thought that the cats would be better off up there-at least after an initial adjustment. So we chose the fastest way to get them up there-a motorcycle-and accepted the consequence: The cats would need to make the trip confined in a pillowcase. I cut them some breathing holes.

We hadn’t expected to spend the morning at Coleen’s. Normally, we would have had our Saturday class at the Fakilte Syans Imèn. On that day, however, a funeral for Jean Domenique and his guard was scheduled. The funeral was a major public event, to be held in the soccer stadium, and demonstrations were expected to follow. Businesses were closed out of respect, and, just maybe, out of the fear of the consequences of opening. Our class couldn’t be held.

Jean Domenique was a Haitian journalist who had been assassinated the previous Monday. I don’t want to talk about him. I have no right to. I’m too ignorant. I will, however, say this: He has been widely and wildly praised in my presence since his death as someone honest, serious, and courageous. Lot’s of different people speak well of him. He’s described as just the sort of journalist, just the sort of person, that this country-or any other, for that matter-badly needs. And apart from any praise for him, and apart from any
particular sense of loss related specifically to his death, many of my Haitian friends think in depressed and depressing terms about his murder as something of a “sign of the times.” Thugs are free to murder with impunity for whatever sick reason. I have heard no one suggest that any “they” will catch the murderers. No one has, to my knowledge, “taken responsibility” for the killing, as certain sorts of political forces sometimes do.

Politics are darkness here these days. It says too little to say that the public realm is under stress. Scheduled elections-people I know seem to want very much to vote-have been postponed. Some say it’s because the electoral commission hasn’t yet managed to register all voters; some say that there are other forces of various sorts at work. Most people speak of both, even those-and there are many-who agree with the postponement. In any case, bad-faith beltway temper tantrums about these postponements only add to inflation here, as the US and others cut the flow of aid dollars into the country, and so reduce the already-falling value of the Haitian gourde.

So prices are rising, fast. Madanm Mèt, among many others, has been on edge, under stress. She’s more inclined, for example, to reach for a belt when frustrated with her children at night. Let me be clear. Let me be fair to her. She never beats her children badly, but she strikes them. She continues to work hard all day, every day, and is struggling with her sense that they are irresponsible in ways that range from their resistance to doing prescribed chores, to their unwillingness to eat what they’re served, or to eat enough, to their poor performance in school. And it’s worse than all that. She was loudly worrying the other night that no one would be able to run the house if she were to die.

I don’t live in a poor neighborhood. Folks where I live are, as they say, “pa pi mal,” or “no worse.” In this context, that means that they have access to the money they need to cover necessities. For some, bare necessities, for others something more than that. Even the best off, though, live without any security. Any bit of bad luck-a death or serious illness, a crop failure or a so-called “act of God,” or simply mounting inflation-any such turn could be disastrous. There are no “Plan B’s.” And the rains have been late this year.
Corn should have been in the ground a month ago around Ka Glo, but there hasn’t been enough rain. More stress.

So let me get back to the cats. The two of them, mother and daughter, were warmly received when I got to Ka Glo. I gave one to Madanm Kastra and one to Madanm Jean-Claude, two of my neighbors. Madanm Kastra has the mother, and it’s doing well. Her son, Byton, seems to be taking good care of it.

The kitten didn’t last the night. It was taken by Madanm Jean-Claude’s oldest son, Jean-Reynald. Madanm. Jean-Claude herself is a tireless market women in Petyonvil. She sells plastic sandals, flip-flops. She’s rarely home between four in the morning and eight-thirty at night. Jean-Reynald was in a rush, so he put the kitten in his family’s outdoor kitchen. His grandmother, one of ten people who live in their small house, objected, and told him to put it in the “depot” next door. The depot is the house next to their own. Actually, it’s the old house that Bòs Jean-Claude and Bòs Kastra themselves grew up in. Right now, Bòs Jean-Claude is selling pig feed, and the house is loaded with the 50 kg. sacks. They filled it with sacks-actually, I helped-despite the fact that Bòs Awol lives there on a mat on the floor with his wife and infant daughter. Custom allows that Bòs Jean-Claude, his
parents’ youngest child, has the main claim to the old house. Bòs Awol, his nephew, may live in the house while he builds his own, but he has no larger claim to the space inside of it. So they just moved the mat and a very few other possessions into a corner, and filled the house with big sacks of pig feed, floor to ceiling and nearly wall to wall.

It was dark when Bòs Awol got home, he knew nothing of his home’s newest resident, but knew about the epidemic of rabies we’ve been through on the hill. With his child in mind, he killed the kitten right away, the minute he noticed his presence. He would take no chances. He didn’t think twice or even look twice, not even long enough to realize that the kitten was tied up, as if someone had carefully put it there-as someone had-exactly where it was suppose to be in order to cure mouse problems associated with the pig feed.
He might have looked, but his life is stressed too. For one thing, there’s the drought. He’s poor, poorer than most in our neighborhood, and a relatively high percentage of his family’s sustenance comes from his subsistence farming. In addition, his neighbor and uncle is pushing him out of his small space, and though he recently made some progress on his own house, he’s been working on it for several years. He moves forward in small
spurts, dependant always on his ability to accumulate enough money to buy each successive round of materials: cement, roofing, cinder blocks, doors, whatever.

And then there are my own stresses, cause for a lot of whining, but no real concern, connected mostly to the wonderful but mutually-exclusive alternative life-directions which are before me. Meanwhile, I’m living safely and comfortably among friends and colleagues.

Eddy and I were to leave Okay on a fairly early bus back to Pòtoprens. It would probably leave at around 6:00 a.m. We were staying in downtown Okay, not far from the station, but it was still almost 5:45 when we realized the time. We rushed out of the house, got motorcycles to the station, and were off. We grabbed a quick cup of coffee on the street while we waited for the bus to actually leave, but that’s all the breakfast we had. No problem. The bus would stop at Kafou Dewiso in less than two hours, and there would be
plenty of food there.

Kafou Dewiso is roughly halfway between Okay and Pòtoprens. It’s the usual rest stop for the busses that make the route. There’s hardly a bus, going in either direction, that doesn’t stop there. People get out and use the facilities. For men, that means finding the nearest tree or wall. Women do whatever they can or have to do.

Each bus is swamped by merchants selling snack foods and drinks. There’s sugar cane, fried plantain and meat, candies, cakes, crackers, breads, and nuts. Eddy and I were hungry when we arrived, so we quickly bought some fried plantain with the spicy coleslaw-like condiment it’s served with. We ate it fast, but the bus lingered, and the longer it lingered the more we realized that we were still hungry. We wanted more plantain, but all we had were a couple of hundred-goud notes. The plantain would run us about ten gouds. So Eddy called out the window of the bus to ask the merchant we wanted to buy from whether she had change. She didn’t, but she immediately talked to
another merchant, and then another, and soon she had our change for us. We bought more plantain and then a couple of drinks. Presumably, the woman who sold us the plantain would settle with the other merchants later.

These events struck me, but in order to explain why I probably need to say more about the scene. When the busses arrive, they really are swamped. There might easily be a dozen merchants just selling plantain. And as many more who are fighting to make each other kind of sale. The point is this: Competition is fierce, really fierce. Merchants run and push to get to advantageous positions. They shout over one another, too. Money is short all over this country, and every one of these merchants badly needs to make every
single sale that he or she can make.

So what struck me when our plantain merchant went looking for change is that she went to other plantain merchants. And they, instead of taking advantage of her situation, gave her the change she needed to make her sale. They may strain hard to compete for every sale they can make, but they have their struggle in common, and they’re not averse to helping one another out.

One of the most consistent impressions I have of the people that I live and work around in Haiti is of the solidarity they show one another. A quick example: Though traffic here is awful, and though everyone is always in a hurry to get through it as fast as they can, professional drivers are, on the whole, quite courteous. Private individuals, driving their private cars, may have all the worst qualities of the Boston drivers I grew up around, but many of the taxi and tap-tap drivers are remarkably quick to give up the right of way, to let another driver cut in, to make space for u-turns and various sorts of stops and starts. That doesn’t mean that they’re not anxious to get through. Nor does it mean they won’t press hard to make their way. It doesn’t keep them from yelling and cursing at one another. They’ll still ride their horn if they feel as though someone is holding them up. But they also seem to understand that their fellow-drivers, their colleagues, are in a hurry too. If I ever have a car again, I hope I’ll remember that.

I see the solidarity in other places, too. I’ve already written about the way the street boys work together at the Bwa Moket station, the way they share what they have. And sharing is an enormous part of Haitian life. There are, for example, two donkeys in our nine-family neighborhood, but all nine families seem to have nearly equal access to them. Frenel has a pretty good ax, but he’s only rarely the one whom I see using it. There are three water cisterns, but Toto’s, the most biggest and most reliable among them, is open
to all. Everyone grinds his corn in Kasnel’s mill. Transistor radios and headphones appear and disappear from the young people I live around as they borrow them or lend them to others. And then there are the exchanges of labor.

It’s among Haitian children, however, that sharing is especially striking. For example, I occasional buy candy in Malik on my way home. I always give it to Kasann, and she always parcels it out. I’ve never heard the slightest complaint. I can bring four or five pieces, and the children manage well with that. But I can bring one piece, and they still make do. The candy is about one inch by two, and has a consistency slightly stiffer than fudge. Kasann breaks it into smaller pieces-two or three or four or five or six-and however small the pieces finally are, everyone seems happy. I can’t help but think that a lot of people back home would think that there wasn’t enough to go around.

Sometimes I bring little balls up the hill with me, balls that the smaller children can use to play soccer. If I brought a hundred up the hill, there would be a hundred more children who would ask me, but we all make due. What’s so striking about it to me is that as much as each child badly wants his or her own ball, I might end up seeing any given ball that I bring up the hill in almost any child’s hands. I recognize this especially with regard to the couple of inflatable, higher quality balls that I carried back from Germany with me. Since I’m the only one around with a pump, I see each and every one of these balls pretty regularly. And the probability that the child who brings the ball to me is the child I gave it to just isn’t very great. It might mean a lot to each child to own his or her own little ball, but such questions of ownership seem to have little to do with who plays with one or when.

This sharing and that solidarity seem to me to be one and the same thing. And it’s striking that they are so prevalent in a place where resources of all sorts are so scarce, where the pressures on everyone’s lives are so great. There’s a lesson in that, and it’s worth taking home with me.