Day 8 Benick's Toilet

Day 8 Monday January 12

Benick is a handsome 16 year old who works after school at the SOIL office/house. He cleans and helps Tony with maintenance. SOIL pays Benick's school fees, for his uniform and books and gives him some cash each week. Benick is lucky to work for SOIL but he's also a teenager and on Monday, his first day of school this semester, he neither shows up for school or for work at SOIL. Today this is especially disconcerting for Sasha and the SOIL staff as we are headed to his house to build SOIL's first private (household) toilet. (All the other toilets are communal, even if they are kept locked, they are shared by many families).

We prepare the building materials on the SOIL roof. This includes cutting and sanding PVC pipe and building the wooden toilet box. We charter a private tap-tap easily and eight of us pile in. We stop and buy corrugated aluminum, a ring of thin wire and a 16 foot piece of rebar bent into a U shape which we drag from the bumper of the tap-tap. I am still not eating and not feeling well but I don't want to miss anything else. I am taking Imodium and Pepto Bismal but have not eaten since Saturday night.

Benick's neighborhood, Petit Anse, is across the water from where the SOIL office and "downtown" Cap, and to me, seems worse than Shada. The houses are farther apart for sure and the ocean is steps away (though it is visibly polluted); there are flowers and trees around Benick's small yard. But there is garbage and standing water everywhere. Everywhere there are foundations for homes never built. Most "windows" are concrete blocks with holes in them, in the shape of a heart or a sun perhaps; everyone sleeps locked in their homes at night. The memory of moonlight beheadings is not lost to the elders and the accounts surely stick with the youth. Everything about this country seems strange, if not outrageous, unless you know some history. Then, it's simply tragic. Or criminal, depending on your view. That Americans know little and care less about Haiti is disturbing to me, especially because the U.S. is not an innocent bystander in Haiti's history of violence, imperialist bullying, excessive (and truly inhumane) foreign debt accumulation and false democracy. Not even close. But back to my own story.

Benick's house is "stick-built" which means sticks of about 15 to 20 inches are woven together to form the walls (the patterning is delicate and beautiful), then concrete, or more often mud, is plastered on the exterior. It is a single room, about 15' x 15' and ten people live within. No one in Petit Anse has running water or a toilet. People bathe in the ocean, I suppose. They fish there, the children play. They reliev themselves wherever they can find a bit of privacy. There are skeletons of wooden boats there, rotting yet colorful, their names ring of hope or misery. These are the boats that "boat people" would try to reach America in- usually they drowned along the way or were refused entry to the U.S. and died on the return trip. You can't open one eye for a second in Haiti and not see one of its "flowers".

I feel I am getting off track. I want to write about the incredible and daunting work SOIL is doing and their many successes and my own small part. But the situation is past desperate (what is beyond desperate?) and it makes me angry. I cried the first three days here. Then I stayed strong and just tried to take it all in, watching, listening, smelling. Then I was sick. Now I am pissed.

I want to finish my blog here in Haiti so it is fresh and not washed over by a hot shower, a cold glass of water and clean sheets. But my mind has been racing for a couple days now. The center for street children has closed suddenly (though not unexpectedly) and every day there are boys and young men in the street outside calling, Saaaa-cha! They are hungry. They want food, water, interaction, a smile, anything. That children have to fend for themselves, sleep on filthy stoops and go without eating sickens me. It doesn't have to be this way. That's the travesty. Participatory ignorance and holier-than-thou denial are modern American plagues, they eat the heart and the mind. I hope this trip has cured me forever.

I will come back to Benick's toilet- which turned out beautifully! And there is, of course, still more to tell. 

Working for peace and justice, if in the smallest way, is the only way I can go on living without dying inside.

Yours, 

Corinne