Perhaps – indeed, almost certainly – they were romanticizing those times, but it is nonetheless an indication that there is a perception among some that the quality of their lives has declined. The roads were maintained and the telephones rang and were answered and people still had the dignity of work. You often hear that the old days were better. It strikes down the fragile and deposits them at our doorstep where it is incumbent upon us to pick up these rejected spirit bundles and pull from them the humanity wrapped inside.įan Fan’s generation – and those who came before them, all the way back to 1804 – has struggled to survive in a country led by men of varying degrees of ability. It is a ghostlike horse born of apathy and misery that gallops alongside those too weak to escape its flaring nostrils and burgeoning hooves. Poverty is a cruel partner to the human condition. In my case and on occasion, I have performed a sort of compromise between my own failures to meaningfully alter events in this troubled land and the determination to feed success with the tools and skills to sustain it. Those of us who work here, often see only that which is wrong and fail to see these bright glints of possibility, pathways to the future solutions and fervent resolve. I often think of that young woman as Hope, unblemished by the abject failure that permeates a country rife with disappointment. Her father’s broad smile revealed that she was his treasure, an investment worthy of his labor. She bore a carriage of promise and moved about with confidence, a human work rooted in a hard bought education worn outside for all to see. She was bringing her father his lunch, a small clump of rice and a few slices of fried plantains. I met Fan Fan’s daughter one day, a lovely woman of about twenty. But just beyond the crude concrete walls that surround the hospital, there are so many forgotten souls that will never have such opportunity a blurring multitude of hungry need that spends the days wandering the landscape looking for food or work or some meager flint to strike the fire of opportunity, a means by which to survive. He has a rake and his leaves to provide sustenance for him and his family. There is no rush, no pending deadline no need to impress for the potential is only another rendezvous tomorrow with Nature’s debris.įan Fan is an unusually lucky man. There is a quiet determination in his movements, urging each leaf and twig into careful piles, as though a wood stork was building its nest. A man well into his fifties, Fan Fan’s arms flex in a pedestrian motion blood and sweat course toward receptive muscles, while he labors under the heated and airless canopy. I often wonder what he thinks about while scraping the little stones and packed earth that uphold my view. And like that mythical character, each morning the gods rain more leaves on the dusty earth as if to torment him as the sun mounts the sultry, Haitian sky. His head is bent down, staring at his endless task, like Sisyphus trudging up the hillside with his familiar burden. By Tim Traynor, Director of HSC FacilitiesĮvery day, there is an older man who rakes the leaves at Hôpital Sacré Coeur, in the courtyard outside my small room at the compound where I spend nine months of the year.
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