I have several memories of Madanm Marino that will, I think, endure. My strongest impression is of her energy. It was apparent the first time I met her, when she was visiting Pòtoprens with her fourth son. Though a fully-grown young man, he was quite sick, seriously anemic. He had been a promising student, but had been forced to drop out of school. He just didn’t have the strength for it. She was tireless, leading Ronal around, hovering over him, ensuring that he got the attention he needed. He’s fine now.

It was apparent, too, the first time I visited her at her home in Ench. She was a cyclone, working and making an array of other people work to ensure that I, as her guest, had everything I wanted, needed, or could be imagined to want or need.

The memory of that first visit made my visit in October with Papouch especially striking. She was in tears as we said our goodbyes because her failing health had not, in her eyes, permitted her to receive us – this although the son still at home, her two visiting daughters, her son and daughter-in-law next door, another daughter-in-law around the block, and the young boy that lives in her house were all minutely attentive to us, very lavishly hospitable. She was nonetheless unhappy because she herself hadn’t been the one.

But I think that the single image of her that I will always carry with me will be of the last time I saw her. She was in a hospital bed and had known for over a month that she was dying. She was in a lot of pain. The various medications that her family was buying for her when they were able were becoming less and less effective.

It was early evening, just after dark, and a friend and I had come to the medium-sized hospital ward she was in for a last visit before we would head back from Ench to Pòtoprens. As we stood, awkwardly trying to make some kind of conversation, a group of well-dressed women filed into the ward. Most of them were in their 50s, I suppose. They were members of a church choir that she had been part of. The group began to sing slow, soft gospel music, and Madanm Marino, who had been lying down, wanted to sit.

But she didn’t have the strength to hold herself up, so she called her daughter-in-law, Anna, over, and asked her to sit on her bed. Anna very gently raised Madanm Marino and sat directly behind her so Madanm Marino could lean on her. Madanm Marino closed her eyes as she listened to her group’s song, her full weight propped up by Anna’s side. The combination of the grace she exhibited as she faced death and of Anna’s devoted service as her support will be with me always.

That was in January. Madanm Marino passed away on March 3rd. Ronal, the son she had fought so hard to save, was the one who found her in her room, where she had returned from the hospital to spend her last weeks.

The funeral was on the 6th. I didn’t hear about her death until the 4th, so it was something of a rush to get to Ench for it, but I couldn’t be happier that I decided to go. I went with a group of Saül’s Pòtoprens friends. Saül is Madanm Marino’s oldest son, the father of my first Haitian godchild. He’s the live-in custodian in the office of an NGO. Two other of the NGO’s Haitian employees were part of the group: Eklann, who is the housekeeper, and Joseph, who runs errands. Daniel, the custodian for a wealthy doctor who lives next door to the NGO’s office, went with us as well. We slept at the NGO’s office on Saturday night so we could get an early start Sunday morning. We would be going to Ench on the 5th, attending the funeral on the morning of the 6th, and trying to return to Pòtoprens that same day. Ench is a hard five-ten hour journey from Pòtoprens, but I’ve written enough recently about traveling in Haiti, so I’ll leave out those details.

When we arrived in Ench, we were led directly to Rosemond’s house. Rosemond is Saül’s cousin, but he’s also much more. He is Marino’s – that’s Saül’s father – godson, he’s Saul’s godfather, and Saül is godfather to one of his son’s. The two families have thus made a series of decisions over the years that weave them together as closely as could be.

Rosemond is a successful gasoline merchant. Ench doesn’t have a functioning gas station, so gas is sold in gallon jugs by merchants that bring barrels full of it in trucks from Pòtoprens. He has a large house, just around the corner from Madanm Marino’s, and for the days around the funeral, that house became a simple extension of Madanm Marino’s home. It’s where her children put the four of us that came together from Pòtoprens up, and its where not only we four but also where all her immediate family and an array of other guests took their meals.

The night before the funeral, there was a wake. It began with a service at Madanm Marino’s church, a memorial of sorts. It involved lots of singing, both by a choir and by those in attendance, a fair amount on prayer, and a sermon. It wasn’t much more than two hours long – a short service by Haitian standards – and it was well-attended. After the service, everyone went back to Madanm Marino’s home, where her husband and children and daughters-in-law and a few other near relations received them as best as they could. They put out chairs, and offered drinks and snacks.

I went around the corner to Rosemond’s house at about 10:00. I was ready for bed. Madanm Marino’s fifth son, a medical student named Job, snuck away with me. He just couldn’t manage any longer. Sleeping space was limited, so the two of us squeezed into the same small bed. I don’t know where the bed’s usual occupant slept.

Job wanted to talk. There was so much on his mind. But he was also exhausted, and knew he had a hard day ahead of him. So he drifted off to sleep soon enough.

The funeral would start with a viewing of the corpse in the church at 7:00 on Monday morning. The service itself would begin at 8:00. So we had to get up and get ourselves ready rather quickly. I felt fortunate that things were starting early, however, because the trip back to Pòtoprens would be long, and I am not accustomed to arriving late.

I wish I had words that could really do the funeral justice. A couple of things seem especially worth mentioning:

First, the yelling. Haitian funerals include a way of displaying grief that is very far from my experience. Mourners, especially women, scream about their loss. They shake. They go into convulsions. They can fall to the floor if unsupported. They shout to the one whom they’ve lost. They shout to other loved ones. They shout to god. They cry. I’ve read about such grieving, but only in Haiti have I seen it. And the sight of it and the sound of it grab every bit of one’s attention.

Second, the ceremony’s length. In my experience, very little of what Haitian’s do in church is brief. Madanm Marino’s funeral was almost four hours long. There was every very long sermon. There were several long, seemingly free-form prayers. But what really made the service long was the third thing I want to mention.

The choirs. By all accounts, Madanm Marino was an enthusiastic member of several churches in her lifetime, from the time she was growing up and then first raising her children in the countryside, to when she moved into the city so her kids could go to secondary school, she was always an active member. She especially loved to be part of her churches’ choirs, and several different churches sent a choir or two to perform in her honor. I think there were seven. Each sang two or three long pieces, and they added up.

The most stunning performances were by her last church’s choir. It was a large group, with maybe 50 members. Not only did they sing beautifully, wonderful pieces in four-six voices. It turned out that their conductor and musical director is her younger brother. He and his wife live next door to her house in Ench, so the brother and sister must have spent very nearly all of his 50-odd years together. She herself was 58 when she died.

His performances were beautiful. He held the choir’s attention without drawing excessive attention to himself. He had been spending much of the funeral walking on and off the stage. Between the choir’s numbers he would walk down to be with his nieces, Madanm Marino’s two daughters, comforting them as best he could. He took a break to give the most unassuming eulogy I have ever heard. It consisted mostly of a short biography of his sister and then a long list of the many loved ones she left behind. At the end of the eulogy he too was overcome but that didn’t keep him from returning a few minutes later to conduct another piece.

We walked from the church to the cemetery, where what had been Madanm Marino was placed in a tomb. From there, Joseph, Daniel, and I ran to get out of our suits and into traveling clothes. We needed to be off. Madanm Rosemond wouldn’t let us go before we had a bite, but we boarded a truck and were on our way to Pòtoprens by 2:00. I was home by 9:00 that night.

Saül contacted me through Job mid-week to ask whether I could return the following weekend to travel back to Pòtoprens wife his wife and their boys. They needed to get back to school – they’d already missed a week – and traveling with both of them was a lot for even Jidit to manage. It was, as always, a long hard ride back from Ench. We left on Monday at about 3:00 AM. The hardest thing for me was not making the trip with Cedrick on my lap. What was hardest was the realization that while I winced and grunted with each painful bump in the road, Cedrick was having a grand time. He seemed to take it as something like a carnival ride.

Here are Madanm Marino’s six grandchildren. The second from the right is my godson, Givens. The second from the left is his brother, Cedrick. I took the photo during my second visit to Ench after her death, when I was there to bring my makomé and her two boys back to Pòtoprens.

Yesterday I was in Cité Soleil for the third time in the last couple of weeks. It seems important to share this fact as a sign of how the country is changing. Just a month ago, I would not have considered entering that part of Port-au-Prince. It has been the center of a kidnapping industry that took off after the removal of former President Aristide in February 2004. It’s been dangerous for outsiders and for those who live there as well.

It is there that Jacob was murdered last August. He was a long-time Cité Soleil resident who founded the group of artists whose other leaders have been living with me since late November. It’s been the base from which very heavily armed gangs have been operating, and it’s where kidnappers have been bringing their victims. And all this doesn’t even mention the most serious, persistent danger: dangerous living conditions, with few jobs or other sources of income, poor sanitation at best, overcrowding, and all the other problems that accompany serious urban poverty.

In any case, I’ve been there recently. The first visit occurred a few weeks ago when I was on my way back from Lagonav. I was on a bus, and when it got to the edge of Cité Soleil it did something no bus I had taken in over a year had done: it continued. Busses have been avoiding the area completely, taking various detours to do so. This bus went right along the edge of the Cité, and what was most striking was that none of the passengers complained. Haitian passengers feel free to speak up if the route a driver takes is not quite to their liking, but these passengers had no qualms about passing along a neighborhood they have scrupulously avoided for many months. I asked several who were sitting near me, and they affirmed that there was no longer anything to worry about.

My third visit to the area was a similar instance. I was on a bus headed to Lagonav, and it not only passed along the edge of the Cité, it drove right through. It took the express road to the north that has been all but abandoned since the beginning of the troubles here. Drivers have instead taken a much longer and more congested road through very crowded areas called Croix de Mission and Bon Repos. That detour can easily add an hour to the trip.

The second visit is the one I want to talk about, however. I spent Saturday afternoon walking around Cité Soleil with Jethro, one of the artists who have been staying with me. The main purpose of our visit was to see his grandmother, but we used the chance to wander a little. The comfort we felt was striking.

I had gone to Cité Soleil with him once before. That was in the summer of 2001. I was partly responsible for a Wonn Refleksyon workshop to be led by two of my Haitian colleagues. They had never led a workshop before, so my role was to provide them with support during the workshop and to help them evaluate their work afterwards. It’s a neighborhood that can be confusing, so I had asked Jacob whether he could send someone to help me find my way, and he sent Jethro. Jethro was a teenager at the time. He led me to the workshop the first day, and met me at the end of the second day so we could walk over to where he and Jacob and the others were making banana bark cards and other crafts.

When Jethro asked me a few weeks ago to visit his grandmother with him, I was pleased but a little surprised. He had been staying with me because he himself was in great danger in Cité Soleil. The night that Jacob was murdered, he had to hide with another friend under a neighbor’s bed while their workshop was ransacked. They fled during the night and spent several months hiding in the countryside before they moved in with me. During their first weeks with me they had been wary of getting to close to Cité Soleil, preferring to spend as much time as possible up on the mountain, going down to Pétion-Ville only on the most necessary errands.

But Jethro finally entered Cité Soleil on the day of city-wide demonstrations that brought supporters of René Préval into the streets to protest what appeared to be efforts to manipulate ballot counting. The demonstration Jethro was part of passed right through Cité Soleil. There, Jethro crossed paths with gang members close to those who had killed Jacob, and they assured him that he would now be safe if he wanted to return. The main murderers had themselves been murdered, and new gang leadership not only wanted, in a general way, to respond to Préval’s announced efforts to end the violence, but also felt that the murder of Jacob in particular had been unfair. They recognized that he had never done any of them any harm and attributed their predecessors’ decision to murder him to simple jealously.

The day Jethro told me all this, he was jubilant. We were hiking down to Pétion-Ville from Ka Glo. He had his arm wrapped around me as we walked, and he went on and on about how Haiti is starting to change. For all his exuberance, he could easily have been excited about a new girl friend. He was giddy. I don’t want to give the wrong impression: he’s prudent. He’s said that he’ll never live in Cité Soleil again. He understands things can change there as quickly as one gang leader is murdered and replaced by another. But he’s convinced that things in Haiti are moving forward, and he’s very excited about that.

It was important to him that his grandmother meet me, and I found that fact intensely flattering. His parents both passed away long ago. It was his grandmother raised him. She was the one who fed him, clothed him, and sent him to school. He calls her “//manman//”, or “mom”. She was worried about him, he knew, and he wanted her to meet the person he’s staying with, as a way to help her feel that he’s alright.

We took a tap-tap down Delmas to the intersection with the airport road and then took a second truck a little of the way towards the airport. We got off at an intersection that had been particularly notorious as a place of kidnappings. It was convenient for kidnappers because they could pick up victims from the heavily-traveled airport road and whisk them straight into Cité Soleil.

The intersection could not have been less exciting when we got there, and we strolled along the very road into the Cité that the kidnappers had been using. Jethro exchanged greetings with various people he knew, and I spoke to the children who amused themselves by calling out “//Blan! Blan!//” as Haitian children who see a foreigner often do.

After we crossed the street that defines where Cité Soleil begins, we walked along it for awhile. Then we came to a door. It was really just a rectangular piece of tin roofing, nailed to hinges attached to a scrap wood frame, but it appeared to be the entrance to a private residence.

It wasn’t. It opened onto a small yard that led us directly into an alley. Cité Soleil has some streets, but is mainly an irregular web of narrow alleys. Those who know me will agree that I am not wide. Even so, there were alleys that I could only pass by turning sideways. And they are crooked, winding through puddles and around houses and walls, with intersections popping up at the oddest moments. That’s one reason that gangs can function so well within it. There’s really no way to pursue them. I had some trouble keeping up with Jethro, and he was trying hard not to lose me.

We finally got to his grandmother’s house. It’s a one-room shack made of scraps of wood and roofing. She was there. He had said that she rarely goes anywhere anymore. She had worked for years at what had been a large, mission-run hospital across town. When she retired, they gave her a pension in the form of one lump-sum and occasional smaller payments. The hospital had been taken over by the government, however, the payments had stopped, and I wasn’t exactly clear when she was living from. Nevertheless, she immediately offered us coffee and apologized, saying that if she had known that we were coming there would have been bread for us as well. She was obviously delighted to see Jethro, saying over and over again how worried she had been.

We chatted a little, but Jethro had various people he wanted to see, so he asked me whether I would mind staying with his grandmother for awhile while he wandered. That was fine with me. I was, frankly, tired and glad of the chance to rest. He went off.

This is where things got interesting. His grandmother told me that she was sorry Jethro had come to see her. As lonely as she is without him – she has no one else with her now – she’s just not convinced that he’s safe. I told her how careful he seemed to me to be, and also what Jethro had reported about the gang members’ assurances that he could safely come to visit, but she was not convinced. She pointed to holes in her tin roof, and explained that they were bullet holes. She talked about days spent alone under her bed as shooting went on outside her door. Her story was more frightening and more miserable than anything I hope to ever know. It’s not that she was ever a target. Jethro had often told me that the gangs in Cité Soleil leave old people alone, and his grandmother’s explanation seemed to confirm that. But bullets fly off and do damage they were not supposed to do. My own grandmother passed away only recently, and I struggled as I imagined her at 80 or 90, trying to find a way to hide from heavily armed young men.

The last thing she asked me before Jethro rejoined us was whether he had been going to church. I explained that I couldn’t be sure, that I myself am not home very much, but that I had seen him go a couple of times and that he read his Bible a lot. She seemed satisfied.
When Jethro got back, it was almost time for us to go. We exchanged a few more words, and then promised to return.

Jethro and I talked a lot all the way home, partly about the various people he had spoken to and his impressions of the day, but mainly about his hopes and plans for the future. He doesn’t expect to be staying with me much longer, but when he moves out it will be into an apartment where, he hopes, his grandmother with come to live as well. He’s anxious to find her a place where they will be together and where she will feel truly safe.

Here’s a photo of Jethro in front of his grandmother’s house.

One measure of the importance of conversation is how willing people are to fight through obstacles to make their conversations possible. Our first meeting with Kofaviv was a case in point.

Kofaviv is the Creole acronym for the Commission of Women Victims for Victims. Its members are women who suffered violence of the worst kinds against themselves and their families under the regime that ruled Haiti after an U.S.-supported coup d’état overthrew Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991. The women organized themselves to form a support network for other women who’ve suffered as they have. They provide rape counseling, a health clinic, educational programs, and other services. They have an office not too far from downtown Pòtoprens, but do much of their work through field agents who are scattered through the city’s poorer neighborhoods, bringing many of the services right to the women who need them in places like La Saline, Martissant, Cité de Dieu, and the famous Cité Soleil.

Frémy and I had been trying to arrange to meet with the group for quite some time. They had been sending representatives to annual meetings of Open Space practitioners in Haiti for several years, and consistently impressed us when they spoke of their accomplishments. Funding from BIA, an international lawyers’ group, had enabled colleagues of ours to provide them with an introduction to Wonn Refleksyon a couple of years ago, but we were curious as to what they were doing with the experience.

When we finally were able to sit down with their leadership team in February, they talked about how much they had enjoyed participating in their Wonn Refleksyon group and how it had benefited those who participated with them. The experience had, they said, made them better at talking and at working together. What their field agents lacked, however, was the sense of how to lead groups of their own. They asked us whether we could organize a weekly group for Kofaviv field agents that would have as its goal to prepare them to be discussion leaders. Each agent works with a group of roughly twenty women, and the leadership team thought that these groups might accomplish more if they could learn to talk together more effectively.

For our part, Frémy and I were excited about the opportunity to work with a group that was already accomplishing so much. We also looked to it as a way to begin to establish more of a presence in Pòtoprens, especially in its so-called “popular neighborhoods”, or slums, and to bring more women into the network of our collaborators.

When we got to the Kofaviv office, we knew it would be a hard morning. The least of the problems was that there weren’t enough chairs. That was easy enough to solve: We’d simply sit on the floor.

The room they chose for us was dark which made reading a little bit of a challenge, but it wasn’t too bad. Its shape was more of an issue. It was long and narrow. We had to sit in an oval, rather than a circle, and this can be a real difficulty. Members of a group learning to talk with one another need to be able to see each other well. Any shape they sit in, other than a reasonably good circle, creates blind spots, places for participants to sit in where they are, at least partially, unseen. This is a bigger deal than might at first appear, because part of the challenge is to nurture the participation of those who are more comfortable with silence, and having spaces where they can sit more or less unseen only facilitates their silence. It cuts them off from the group. Nevertheless, the space we were in was the one the group had. Wishing for a room shaped differently would accomplish nothing.

With a large gasoline generator running in the building next door, listening would also be a real challenge. And when the office’s own generator joined in, I began to wonder whether I’d be able to hear at all. My Creole is constantly improving, but listening can still be hard, especially the first few times I work with a group, when inexperienced participants are still a little shy about speaking up and participants are unaccustomed to my limitations and I to their voices.

This can force me to make a hard choice. If I ask participants over and over to speak up or repeat themselves, I put myself at the very center of the conversation, which is what I most of all want to avoid. If, on the other hand, I settle for partial understandings of what’s said, I cannot support the conversation they way I’d like to.

In my first years in Haiti, I always chose the second course, settling for partial understandings, and adapted by minimizing my participation. But that had a consequence: Many of the discussion leaders who worked with me during that period came to think that they should be saying hardly anything at all. Their near-silence was helpful as a remedy for the way group leaders here traditionally dominate in meetings, but it’s a poor solution indeed because it robs a group of contributions of the one who is often the most experienced member.

But asking the office to turn off the generator was not an option. It was powering a water pump, working because of the third, most serious problem. The smell. They were emptying the rainwater cistern under the house. Some poor soul had fallen in. They weren’t found right away. The smell was thick and horrible, not least because one knew its source. The water itself was a real hazard and had to be eliminated, as quickly as possible. The pump, and therefore the generator, had to run.

Frémy and I had a simple plan for the two-hour session. During the first hour, I would run a discussion using the first Wonn Refleksyon text in the first of the participants’ books. That text is an introduction to Wonn Refleksyon, its rules and its objectives. I would lead it roughly according to the instructions in the guidebook for discussion leaders that our team created to accompany that first book of texts. Frémy would then use the second hour to introduce the guidebook and invite the participants to talk about the way I had led the class.

This is our favorite approach to developing discussion leaders. Ideally, we’ll be able to go through the entire guidebook with them by meeting weekly during the next couple of months. Sometime before we finish, we’ll them to start meeting weekly with their own groups, and at that point we’ll set aside time each week for them to talk with one another about their experience leading those groups.

From the moment we started, it was clear that these women were not the sort of participants we are accustomed to. They responded immediately to instructions, asking for additional explanations if they were unclear about anything. We I asked them to separate into small groups, they divided themselves quickly, working with energy and focus on the question that I had asked them to address. When I brought the small groups together to report, they had a lot to say, and they gave their reports clearly and concisely. Later Frémy divided them into small groups again to ask them to identify and think about ways that I had strayed from the lesson plan in leading the class, and they picked up the changes I made and had interesting comments and questions for me. As far as Frémy and I could tell, every one of them participated actively in the small group work.

But in another sense, they were very much like the groups we work with all the time. At this first meeting, when they tried to work in the large group that included all sixteen of them, only seven of them managed to speak up. Four participants whispered to the women next to them, but only two of these shared what they were thinking with the group as a whole, and one of them did so only at my prompting. Speakers interrupted other speakers several times, and almost everything said was directed to me. None made any effort to encourage quieter participants to join in. This is all typical of a meeting early in the history of a group’s development.

So, notwithstanding the talents and skills that the women already show, they will have a lot of work to do as they learn to speak together and to take responsibility for helping groups of other women learn to speak and work together as well. Frémy and I are thrilled to be able to be part of their work because the work they already know how to do and the strength of character they show as they do it promises a lot.