Snails sale
posted by chiamaka at 10 janvier
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lundi, janvier 10, 2005
Listening to Purpose-B Johnston
Part I: Storytellers
“ I can only answer the question, ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the question, ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”
— Alasdair MacIntyre (as quoted by Robert Fulford)
In the summer of 1926 Walt Sternenberg joined his two brothers on a journey he would never forget: a short trip to the jewelry store in Trenton, New Jersey to buy a bracelet for his mother. He was eight years old. Whether the bracelet was in step with the latest fashions was, of course, happily irrelevant. Love, magic and the outer limits of a modest allowance were the arbiters of taste, and the ingredients of a delicious memory. He tells this story simply, rather quickly, stops, pauses puts his hands on the table and with a quiet, joyful gaze, lets the rest of the memory unwind in silence before us.
Friends at the table ask a few questions, “What did she think of the gift?” or “How did the three of you get to the jewelry store?” He smiles a little, to let us know that he hears the questions, but his gaze remains unperturbed, and lingers a few moments longer, then he says: “No, that’s it, that’s the story I want to tell.” It is as if he wants to tell us not to weigh his story down with too many details, that the power of a story is in its essence, and that true power comes from knowing what is essential.
Walt and I are part of a group that meets every Thursday afternoon to play a board game that I have been designing for the past two years. At 90, most of the group is more than double my age; and though the size of our group sometimes varies, there is usually at least a half dozen of us. The game is about sharing memories—storytelling is a central element of the game—and it is a tool for memory enhancement. The workings of memory are especially important to our group—as we age, the inconveniences of forgetting increase, and of course the scourge of Alzheimer’s disease is something to dread. So we play the game to stay sharp, and we have a lot of fun; but the most satisfying part of Thursday afternoons is sharing stories.
Since we started over a year ago, our group has shared hundreds of stories, from ordinary everydays, to extraordinary once-in-a-life-times: Last week, for example, Jim told a story about singing in a choir, about the deep satisfaction of singing with friends; and his momentous decision to join the seminary, the struggle of deciding. Valda told a story about watching a parade of marching soldiers who had just returned home from World War I. She was very young, but the memory of so many young men marching with “empty shirt sleeves and pants legs” has never left her. Eileen sang a popular song from the 1930’s “that has to be part of the soundtrack of my life”. (We all wanted to hear more songs from her “soundtrack”, but she is making us wait.) Caroleen shared a story about her fascinating journey to the remote territories of New Guinea, north of Australia, in the 1960’s, just after the death of her husband. She signed on as a volunteer school teacher there and stayed for two years.
I have often heard that when we get old, we have nothing left but our memories—as if living is over. Indeed, in modern America, what is the purpose of a person retired, at age 90, without family obligations, and fading health? The easy answers that most of us count on are no longer available: there are no job titles to hide behind; few friends are left; and the busy-ness of life that often forms a veneer of purpose is taken away.
So much demands our attention when we are younger, we often don’t bother with questions of purpose—there are countless details vying for our attention; and as the Information Age gives way to the Too Much Information Age, details just keep piling up. Advertising is literally everywhere: newspapers, magazines, twenty-four hour news channels, talk radio, the internet…it seems impossible that America’s founding fathers didn’t even have a daily paper! Computers now give us the ability to generate and process nearly infinite masses of data, with astonishing accuracy and detail; but as anyone who has ever had to cope with mountains of junk mail and spam will tell you, more isn’t necessarily better; and accuracy doesn’t always bring clarity. Clarity can be described as a state of being that allows what is essential and most meaningful to arise. Clarity comes from listening with discernment and patience. Processing data is not the same as listening—we don’t listen to data, we interpret and label it like a specimen in a jar.
The only way to know something truly worthwhile about a person is through their stories. If we rely only on personal data—where they live, what they do for work, who their friends are—we may gather some useful information, but we won’t learn much more than a census taker or a credit bureau can. Reports analyze and decipher random stuff—stories make sense out of life. Stories capture essence. When we share personal stories, we share part of ourselves. When someone listens to our stories they are listening to who we are.
Attention Deficit Disorder has become a pervasive symptom of the Too Much Information Age; both a dilemma and a metaphor of living in a society too busy and too distracted to listen. There is a word for people who don’t listen to each other—they are called strangers. Personal stories create inner connections between people and these inner connections are the necessary glue that ultimately holds communities together. Without shared stories we don’t have communities; we merely have collections of proximate strangers, unacknowledged and disengaged.
We have vast untapped resources of meaning and understanding in every senior center and nursing home in America. With our increasing tendency to segregate ourselves by age, we have committed ourselves to a course once unthinkable in civilized society: we are attempting to form communities without common legacies, without the bonds and sense of common destiny that the stories of our elders can provide; and we are thereby preparing a new legacy for future generations with a less steady foundation to stand on. The absence of their stories is an absence of essential perspective—and ultimately an absence of grace.
Part II: America the Distracted
“ We define ourselves, our lives, and our well being by what we consume….Consumers crave brands…that help provide meaning and order in their lives.”
— Laurence Vincent, marketing executive
Stories are a basic need that emanates from the heart—it is impossible to feel human without them—for life experiences are narrative experiences; and there is no other way to convey who we are as individuals, or collectively as a community and as a nation. So it marked a tremendous change in American life when—with the ascendancy of television, long commutes and general busy-ness—we started becoming story-consumers, rather than story-tellers. Our story-telling muscles have begun to atrophy; and as our habit of telling stories fades, so to our sense of purpose. This may sound like bad news to most of us, but it has been good news for at least one segment of American society: the advertising industry.
Advertising is now a $117 billion dollar business in the United States, with international corporate consultants, and experts in every mode of business, psychology, and the arts; all dedicated to get you to fall in love with their products and their brands. The sophistication of the enterprise is breathtaking. A new sub-industry within the advertising industry called neuro-marketing uses some of the most advanced technology in brain science: the magnetic resonance imaging machine known as the MRI. A machine that costs about $2.5 million dollars, an MRI is able to detect radio signals from chemicals in the brain and can map collections of neurological synapses that fire around a particular thought, or type of thought. This amazing tool allows scientists to identify particular areas of the brain that are dedicated to different types of experiences and memories. For instance, only certain regions of the brain are used to recall mundane, but important memories such as your vocabulary, numbers and the way that words and numbers go together. A different set of synapses are engaged around our personal life experiences. It turns out that the things which are most intimate, personal and meaningful to us—our stories, our purpose—use unique regions of the brain. When you share a personal story about yourself, you engage this part of your brain; and it is this part of your mind that neuro-marketers are most interested in. They want their stories to be included in your life story.
The new science of advertising is aiming for your personal narrative—the very ground from which purpose grows—which, if not looked after, revered and protected, can be paved over with brand logos, useless information and emptiness. They want you to care so deeply about their products that your inner purpose becomes aligned with theirs—what better way could there be to increase sales?
It is still not completely clear whether these new technologies will work as effectively for advertisers as they hope; and this is not meant as a diatribe against advertising. It is meant instead as a call to awareness. We are constantly exposed to a flood of relatively unimportant information everyday, in the form of advertising, television, radio and other media programming; but we still have the power to choose where our attention goes. Turn down the volume. Use the mute button. Give time and attention to what is important to you and your loved ones. Work with your own stories and the stories of your community, not commercial fabrications. A purposeful life can never be constructed from the themes of our inadequacies that the advertising industry thrives on.
In our Thursday afternoon group, even the simplest questions provoke unforgettable life stories. I asked Trudy to “tell a story about the smell of something cooking.” She sat back in her chair and seemed to focus on something far away. “The smell of lentil soup. February 13, 1945,” she said. “I grew up in Berlin. By that time the war was winding down, and I was sent to Dresden, hoping to be in a safer, more peaceful place. It was such a beautiful city….” She paused for a moment. “The city was fire bombed for two days and nights. Everything was reduced to rubble; tens of thousands of people were killed overnight.” She stopped again, then, “I was alone and when it was finally over, I wandered out into the rubble. The city was quiet. I could smell lentil soup cooking, somewhere. I followed the smell and found a woman cooking. Strangers were gathered around, without saying a word, we ate together. I can smell that soup still.”
Part III: Listening to the Elders
“ In order that the court shall understand the frame of mind which leads me to action such as this, it is necessary for me to explain…the factors which influenced me in deciding to act as I did. Many years ago, when I was a boy brought up in my village in the Transkei, I listened to the elders of the tribe telling stories....”
— Nelson Mandela, excerpt from his first court statement after his arrest for leading a non-violent stay-at-home strike in 1961.
Sometimes we stumble into purpose when we least expect it. I didn’t intend to spend more than a few afternoons at the senior center. I simply wanted to test the game that I had designed on a group of older adults. I certainly had no idea that Thursday afternoons would become one of the most important and jealously guarded times on my weekly schedule. Like everyone else that I know, I felt too busy and over-extended to imagine such a commitment. Even so, I found myself deeply attracted to the elders. What an honor it is to be with them and to listen to their stories!
They have shown me that, like a story, purpose is always meant to be shared; that purpose is brought to life in community. Those of us who are suffering from a sense of purposelessness almost always feel isolated from the inner connections of authentic community. Among the greatest gifts any of us will ever receive is the personal attention and genuine interest of others. After all, it is hard, perhaps impossible, to find your true voice if no one is listening.
Cultivation is a word akin to listening. It implies devotion and caring. Cultivating soil means more than simply growing something in it. A good farmer listens to the land with his eyes, hands, mouth and nose—the smell of soil, its look and feel, even the taste—noticing and knowing these things is part of true listening. Cultivation implies an individual effort, rooted in devotion to a larger ideal, with a long view of things, which is why we speak of cultivating the arts or a person. It is a deep knowing that comes from sustained, loving effort. “Love does not dominate, it cultivates.” And just so, love listens.
I have been learning from the elders to cultivate listening. They have taught me that true listening has the power to reveal purpose and that purpose is not necessarily found in what we do, but in how we do what we do and why. I have learned that any task, no matter how mundane or trivial can be filled with purpose. When you are really listening, everything in your life becomes a part of the story you were born to tell—and every part of that story reveals who you truly are.
In the past I acted as if my own stories didn’t matter—that they weren’t good enough, or interesting enough, or that they were somehow just too out of place to bother sharing with others. Probably all of us have known the feeling that, “No one is really interested in what I have to say”, or “What I have to share isn’t all that important”. This pervasive sense of inadequacy is learned; and it is likely that if you believe it about your own stories, others around you believe it about theirs as well. Our “comfort zone” in America is becoming a place where no one listens, and nothing worthwhile is ever said—where the thoughtless commerce of everyday life seems to take up all of our time and is gradually mistaken for what is genuine and most vital
in American culture.
Stories are the true foundation of culture. Societies of purpose are founded on stories of meeting challenges, embracing sacrifices and serving our fellow man. Thankfully, most of these stories are too messy to be packaged for television and corporate advertising which usually rely on mindless entertainment, instant gratification and easy comforts—and encourage us to avoid anything else. The Book of Job, for instance, may have little commercial appeal, but it is an essential story of faith and purpose. The stories of our founding fathers; of Black Elk, Chief Seattle and Crazy Horse; of the civil rights movement and our ancestors who sacrificed everything for our freedom, are among countless stories that orient us as a society of purpose.
The stories our elders share are just as essential. In the sharing of their life experiences, even the simplest story becomes a moment of perfection—it is as if in each story they are saying exactly what needs to be said, in just the right way, at just the right time. These are moments brought to life, opened into fullness and the promise of possibility. These are moments without dead ends, connected to and a part of a larger story that belongs to all of us.
It is here, in these everyday magical moments, that our little group has found purpose—in stories of real life; in stories that cannot be shrunk to the size of commercial gestures and the thoughtless assumptions of a world stunned by busy-ness. Every time we meet our purpose grows, nourished by our listening, our sharing, and our stories.
I asked Harry to tell a story about a time when he was very cold. He grew up on a farm in Northern Minnesota, so I knew that he would have something to say on the subject. He stooped his shoulders a bit, and crossed his arms, as if to turn his energy inward against the misery of the cold. “I have never been so desperately cold as I was one December night during the Great Depression”, he began. “There was a brutal wind that I will never forget. We didn’t dare go outside; and everything, everywhere was completely frozen. We had a fire, but we needed to stay in bed under a pile of blankets to stay warm.” “Man, that must have been awful,” I said. He looked at me and smiled, “No, not at all, it was one of the best times of my life. My wife and I were together in a lonely little cabin in the middle of nowhere on our honeymoon. I guess we were crazy to be up there so alone in all that cold. We didn’t have any money; but we were in love, and I have never forgotten what I learned then: that nothing is ever as bad as it is good, as long as there is love.”
Copyright © 2004 Bennett Johnston
“ I can only answer the question, ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the question, ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”
— Alasdair MacIntyre (as quoted by Robert Fulford)
In the summer of 1926 Walt Sternenberg joined his two brothers on a journey he would never forget: a short trip to the jewelry store in Trenton, New Jersey to buy a bracelet for his mother. He was eight years old. Whether the bracelet was in step with the latest fashions was, of course, happily irrelevant. Love, magic and the outer limits of a modest allowance were the arbiters of taste, and the ingredients of a delicious memory. He tells this story simply, rather quickly, stops, pauses puts his hands on the table and with a quiet, joyful gaze, lets the rest of the memory unwind in silence before us.
Friends at the table ask a few questions, “What did she think of the gift?” or “How did the three of you get to the jewelry store?” He smiles a little, to let us know that he hears the questions, but his gaze remains unperturbed, and lingers a few moments longer, then he says: “No, that’s it, that’s the story I want to tell.” It is as if he wants to tell us not to weigh his story down with too many details, that the power of a story is in its essence, and that true power comes from knowing what is essential.
Walt and I are part of a group that meets every Thursday afternoon to play a board game that I have been designing for the past two years. At 90, most of the group is more than double my age; and though the size of our group sometimes varies, there is usually at least a half dozen of us. The game is about sharing memories—storytelling is a central element of the game—and it is a tool for memory enhancement. The workings of memory are especially important to our group—as we age, the inconveniences of forgetting increase, and of course the scourge of Alzheimer’s disease is something to dread. So we play the game to stay sharp, and we have a lot of fun; but the most satisfying part of Thursday afternoons is sharing stories.
Since we started over a year ago, our group has shared hundreds of stories, from ordinary everydays, to extraordinary once-in-a-life-times: Last week, for example, Jim told a story about singing in a choir, about the deep satisfaction of singing with friends; and his momentous decision to join the seminary, the struggle of deciding. Valda told a story about watching a parade of marching soldiers who had just returned home from World War I. She was very young, but the memory of so many young men marching with “empty shirt sleeves and pants legs” has never left her. Eileen sang a popular song from the 1930’s “that has to be part of the soundtrack of my life”. (We all wanted to hear more songs from her “soundtrack”, but she is making us wait.) Caroleen shared a story about her fascinating journey to the remote territories of New Guinea, north of Australia, in the 1960’s, just after the death of her husband. She signed on as a volunteer school teacher there and stayed for two years.
I have often heard that when we get old, we have nothing left but our memories—as if living is over. Indeed, in modern America, what is the purpose of a person retired, at age 90, without family obligations, and fading health? The easy answers that most of us count on are no longer available: there are no job titles to hide behind; few friends are left; and the busy-ness of life that often forms a veneer of purpose is taken away.
So much demands our attention when we are younger, we often don’t bother with questions of purpose—there are countless details vying for our attention; and as the Information Age gives way to the Too Much Information Age, details just keep piling up. Advertising is literally everywhere: newspapers, magazines, twenty-four hour news channels, talk radio, the internet…it seems impossible that America’s founding fathers didn’t even have a daily paper! Computers now give us the ability to generate and process nearly infinite masses of data, with astonishing accuracy and detail; but as anyone who has ever had to cope with mountains of junk mail and spam will tell you, more isn’t necessarily better; and accuracy doesn’t always bring clarity. Clarity can be described as a state of being that allows what is essential and most meaningful to arise. Clarity comes from listening with discernment and patience. Processing data is not the same as listening—we don’t listen to data, we interpret and label it like a specimen in a jar.
The only way to know something truly worthwhile about a person is through their stories. If we rely only on personal data—where they live, what they do for work, who their friends are—we may gather some useful information, but we won’t learn much more than a census taker or a credit bureau can. Reports analyze and decipher random stuff—stories make sense out of life. Stories capture essence. When we share personal stories, we share part of ourselves. When someone listens to our stories they are listening to who we are.
Attention Deficit Disorder has become a pervasive symptom of the Too Much Information Age; both a dilemma and a metaphor of living in a society too busy and too distracted to listen. There is a word for people who don’t listen to each other—they are called strangers. Personal stories create inner connections between people and these inner connections are the necessary glue that ultimately holds communities together. Without shared stories we don’t have communities; we merely have collections of proximate strangers, unacknowledged and disengaged.
We have vast untapped resources of meaning and understanding in every senior center and nursing home in America. With our increasing tendency to segregate ourselves by age, we have committed ourselves to a course once unthinkable in civilized society: we are attempting to form communities without common legacies, without the bonds and sense of common destiny that the stories of our elders can provide; and we are thereby preparing a new legacy for future generations with a less steady foundation to stand on. The absence of their stories is an absence of essential perspective—and ultimately an absence of grace.
Part II: America the Distracted
“ We define ourselves, our lives, and our well being by what we consume….Consumers crave brands…that help provide meaning and order in their lives.”
— Laurence Vincent, marketing executive
Stories are a basic need that emanates from the heart—it is impossible to feel human without them—for life experiences are narrative experiences; and there is no other way to convey who we are as individuals, or collectively as a community and as a nation. So it marked a tremendous change in American life when—with the ascendancy of television, long commutes and general busy-ness—we started becoming story-consumers, rather than story-tellers. Our story-telling muscles have begun to atrophy; and as our habit of telling stories fades, so to our sense of purpose. This may sound like bad news to most of us, but it has been good news for at least one segment of American society: the advertising industry.
Advertising is now a $117 billion dollar business in the United States, with international corporate consultants, and experts in every mode of business, psychology, and the arts; all dedicated to get you to fall in love with their products and their brands. The sophistication of the enterprise is breathtaking. A new sub-industry within the advertising industry called neuro-marketing uses some of the most advanced technology in brain science: the magnetic resonance imaging machine known as the MRI. A machine that costs about $2.5 million dollars, an MRI is able to detect radio signals from chemicals in the brain and can map collections of neurological synapses that fire around a particular thought, or type of thought. This amazing tool allows scientists to identify particular areas of the brain that are dedicated to different types of experiences and memories. For instance, only certain regions of the brain are used to recall mundane, but important memories such as your vocabulary, numbers and the way that words and numbers go together. A different set of synapses are engaged around our personal life experiences. It turns out that the things which are most intimate, personal and meaningful to us—our stories, our purpose—use unique regions of the brain. When you share a personal story about yourself, you engage this part of your brain; and it is this part of your mind that neuro-marketers are most interested in. They want their stories to be included in your life story.
The new science of advertising is aiming for your personal narrative—the very ground from which purpose grows—which, if not looked after, revered and protected, can be paved over with brand logos, useless information and emptiness. They want you to care so deeply about their products that your inner purpose becomes aligned with theirs—what better way could there be to increase sales?
It is still not completely clear whether these new technologies will work as effectively for advertisers as they hope; and this is not meant as a diatribe against advertising. It is meant instead as a call to awareness. We are constantly exposed to a flood of relatively unimportant information everyday, in the form of advertising, television, radio and other media programming; but we still have the power to choose where our attention goes. Turn down the volume. Use the mute button. Give time and attention to what is important to you and your loved ones. Work with your own stories and the stories of your community, not commercial fabrications. A purposeful life can never be constructed from the themes of our inadequacies that the advertising industry thrives on.
In our Thursday afternoon group, even the simplest questions provoke unforgettable life stories. I asked Trudy to “tell a story about the smell of something cooking.” She sat back in her chair and seemed to focus on something far away. “The smell of lentil soup. February 13, 1945,” she said. “I grew up in Berlin. By that time the war was winding down, and I was sent to Dresden, hoping to be in a safer, more peaceful place. It was such a beautiful city….” She paused for a moment. “The city was fire bombed for two days and nights. Everything was reduced to rubble; tens of thousands of people were killed overnight.” She stopped again, then, “I was alone and when it was finally over, I wandered out into the rubble. The city was quiet. I could smell lentil soup cooking, somewhere. I followed the smell and found a woman cooking. Strangers were gathered around, without saying a word, we ate together. I can smell that soup still.”
Part III: Listening to the Elders
“ In order that the court shall understand the frame of mind which leads me to action such as this, it is necessary for me to explain…the factors which influenced me in deciding to act as I did. Many years ago, when I was a boy brought up in my village in the Transkei, I listened to the elders of the tribe telling stories....”
— Nelson Mandela, excerpt from his first court statement after his arrest for leading a non-violent stay-at-home strike in 1961.
Sometimes we stumble into purpose when we least expect it. I didn’t intend to spend more than a few afternoons at the senior center. I simply wanted to test the game that I had designed on a group of older adults. I certainly had no idea that Thursday afternoons would become one of the most important and jealously guarded times on my weekly schedule. Like everyone else that I know, I felt too busy and over-extended to imagine such a commitment. Even so, I found myself deeply attracted to the elders. What an honor it is to be with them and to listen to their stories!
They have shown me that, like a story, purpose is always meant to be shared; that purpose is brought to life in community. Those of us who are suffering from a sense of purposelessness almost always feel isolated from the inner connections of authentic community. Among the greatest gifts any of us will ever receive is the personal attention and genuine interest of others. After all, it is hard, perhaps impossible, to find your true voice if no one is listening.
Cultivation is a word akin to listening. It implies devotion and caring. Cultivating soil means more than simply growing something in it. A good farmer listens to the land with his eyes, hands, mouth and nose—the smell of soil, its look and feel, even the taste—noticing and knowing these things is part of true listening. Cultivation implies an individual effort, rooted in devotion to a larger ideal, with a long view of things, which is why we speak of cultivating the arts or a person. It is a deep knowing that comes from sustained, loving effort. “Love does not dominate, it cultivates.” And just so, love listens.
I have been learning from the elders to cultivate listening. They have taught me that true listening has the power to reveal purpose and that purpose is not necessarily found in what we do, but in how we do what we do and why. I have learned that any task, no matter how mundane or trivial can be filled with purpose. When you are really listening, everything in your life becomes a part of the story you were born to tell—and every part of that story reveals who you truly are.
In the past I acted as if my own stories didn’t matter—that they weren’t good enough, or interesting enough, or that they were somehow just too out of place to bother sharing with others. Probably all of us have known the feeling that, “No one is really interested in what I have to say”, or “What I have to share isn’t all that important”. This pervasive sense of inadequacy is learned; and it is likely that if you believe it about your own stories, others around you believe it about theirs as well. Our “comfort zone” in America is becoming a place where no one listens, and nothing worthwhile is ever said—where the thoughtless commerce of everyday life seems to take up all of our time and is gradually mistaken for what is genuine and most vital
in American culture.
Stories are the true foundation of culture. Societies of purpose are founded on stories of meeting challenges, embracing sacrifices and serving our fellow man. Thankfully, most of these stories are too messy to be packaged for television and corporate advertising which usually rely on mindless entertainment, instant gratification and easy comforts—and encourage us to avoid anything else. The Book of Job, for instance, may have little commercial appeal, but it is an essential story of faith and purpose. The stories of our founding fathers; of Black Elk, Chief Seattle and Crazy Horse; of the civil rights movement and our ancestors who sacrificed everything for our freedom, are among countless stories that orient us as a society of purpose.
The stories our elders share are just as essential. In the sharing of their life experiences, even the simplest story becomes a moment of perfection—it is as if in each story they are saying exactly what needs to be said, in just the right way, at just the right time. These are moments brought to life, opened into fullness and the promise of possibility. These are moments without dead ends, connected to and a part of a larger story that belongs to all of us.
It is here, in these everyday magical moments, that our little group has found purpose—in stories of real life; in stories that cannot be shrunk to the size of commercial gestures and the thoughtless assumptions of a world stunned by busy-ness. Every time we meet our purpose grows, nourished by our listening, our sharing, and our stories.
I asked Harry to tell a story about a time when he was very cold. He grew up on a farm in Northern Minnesota, so I knew that he would have something to say on the subject. He stooped his shoulders a bit, and crossed his arms, as if to turn his energy inward against the misery of the cold. “I have never been so desperately cold as I was one December night during the Great Depression”, he began. “There was a brutal wind that I will never forget. We didn’t dare go outside; and everything, everywhere was completely frozen. We had a fire, but we needed to stay in bed under a pile of blankets to stay warm.” “Man, that must have been awful,” I said. He looked at me and smiled, “No, not at all, it was one of the best times of my life. My wife and I were together in a lonely little cabin in the middle of nowhere on our honeymoon. I guess we were crazy to be up there so alone in all that cold. We didn’t have any money; but we were in love, and I have never forgotten what I learned then: that nothing is ever as bad as it is good, as long as there is love.”
Copyright © 2004 Bennett Johnston
posted by chiamaka at 10 janvier
0 comments
The Face Collector - Mitch Abblett
The therapist at my Vietnam veterans’ therapy group said if I were really an “animal”
like I used to say, then I wouldn’t have carried so much pain around for the past thirty years. “Animals” don’t have a conscience. They don’t hurt at the recollection of past wrongs. I told myself at the time—ten years ago—that she never stepped foot inside Vietnam, so she didn’t know what she was talking about. All her psycho-babble would never stop that girl’s face from rising up from the murderous muck of my nightmares. Her soft, empathic shrink’s voice could never sponge away that look from my mind.
A silent face with large, wet unblinking eyes on the verge of tears, but watching me. The crying on hold. She’s waiting. She’s alone, standing on the edge of a rice paddy. Her clothes are tattered and the wind creates whipped chaos with her hair. She stands there staring at me with dewy eyes. For years, I called them “girl-gook eyes.” Now, they look different even though I don’t see her much anymore in my dreams. Things changed after I became a face collector.
I drifted from job to job and marriage to marriage after my tour was up in Vietnam. After I was “recycled” back into society. Like a crushed can of soda, I was deposited back home in hopes I might still be of some use. But just like an empty can, once you’ve been crushed, obliterated — you can no longer do what you were originally intended for. You’re just a piece of trash to be kicked around, for people to cut themselves on. You’re in for a good long rusting.
And then I happened upon a decent camera at a flea market. I grabbed it up and started snapping shots in my free time. And since I couldn’t hold a job, and kept alienating my family and friends with all my boozing and bar fighting, I had quite a bit of time to myself. My therapist, and the other guys from my group prodded me on, told me I had an “eye” for photography.
I laughed them off in public, but kept it up in private. Got myself a better camera. Took pictures like a madman.
I found myself drawn to taking face shots of people. Catching them at the split second their emotions drew them down a new path. The freshness of the moment fluttering across their expressions like breeze across a bed of flowers. These are the faces I collect. Moments I try to render through the contours of shadow, light and hue. And my restlessness keeps me on the move, always searching for more. Never tiring of it, because I’m always learning from these faces. I’m an emotional archeologist, unearthing peoples’ pasts and giving evidence of their pain, sorrow, jubilation and joy in the present. In the angle of their lips, position of their bodies, the way their eyes hold or retreat from the light.
And now I get paid for these pictures. Not a lot, but enough to travel the world to collect faces. And the people I meet have their likenesses displayed in magazines across the world. A couple even landed on the cover of National Geographic. Haunting shots of children’s eyes. Their innocence lost in the wake of war, famine or disease. Faces finding their own soundless, motionless language. Pain captured and imprisoned behind the hard line of their lips. I’m also a teacher of sorts. When I’m in the States for any length of time, I’m usually busy traveling around the country speaking to auditoriums full of junior high and high school kids. Sometimes, I even speak in places of higher learning. Places where you’d think my basic message would be well-engrained in students by that point. It’s not. They bill me as a warrior. A “hero” who has come to talk to kids about how service and sacrifice for God and country has shaped me into the man I am today. And the kids show up excited over the possibility of hearing stories of real-life combat. Like something daring and
dangerous they have come to expect after a lifetime of gorging on a Hollywood diet.
Kids are usually excited to see me. They have shining, smile-filled looks as they watch me from their seats. Like I’m an astronaut or a Super-Bowl-winning quarterback. It helps that I always show up in my old Marine dress uniform. I’ve had to log a lot of miles jogging to fit into it, but it seems to add something to my message. I walk up to the podium with my white cap tucked neatly under my left arm. My pressed dark blue gabardine coat with its gleaming gold buttons commanding their attention. My ribbons, sergeant’s stripes and medals soliciting their admiration. Except for the graying hair, it’s like I stepped off the recruitment poster.
It’s the same uniform I wore just prior to hopping the transport to Vietnam. Only now, it feels different, heavier. More than medals, it has thousands of echoes pinned to it. Though it’s spotless and crisp, there are stains and tattering in the material. In the process of its donning before one of my talks to kids, it serves as my reminder. The dark coat as my own portable marble war memorial, with dozens of dead names invisibly etched there.
And today is no different from any of the hundreds of talks I’ve given. I’m standing at a podium on a high school stage. I’m jet-lagged from my flight in from Hong Kong, so I’m a bit foggy on the details. I know I’m in Washington, outside Seattle. I couldn’t tell you the specific name of the place. The school’s mascot is the Grizzly bear. And I only know this because I’m staring up at a huge banner emblazoned with one of these clawed beasts, on the back wall of the auditorium. I’m betting these kids are taught just like I was at their age. That winning is crucial and
losing is unacceptable. That with enough determined effort, victory will be at hand. Somehow these values didn’t carry the day in Vietnam. But I don’t get into these issues during my talks, not even if I’m asked. The teachers sometimes try to draw me into political debates about the war. That’s not my point. “Others have much more to say about the big, political picture regarding Vietnam,” I say to them. “It’s impossible to focus on the forest when you spent your time in Vietnam lost in among the trees.”
I’ve seen thousands of kid faces during my talks. The mass of their eyes and lips is too much for me to capture. I have a pre-talk ritual where I pick out one or two faces to focus on. To serve as representatives for the rest. Someone to judge my progress by. A young Asian girl seizes my attention. Pretty, with long, dark hair. She’s in the second row. A faint, nervous smile quickly emerges and retreats across her face in mouse-like fashion as my gaze meets hers.
I close my eyes for a moment and flash to her face. The face I conjured that should be forty years old by now. But it’s not. It’s young, a baby-san’s face, about to be streaked with crying. For years I would tell myself that the slanting of her gook-eyes made it harder for the tears to break loose and fall. That it was her fault, her race’s fault, she couldn’t get on with the crying.
That, while I may have killed her, I had nothing to do with anything else the war had done to her or her family. I wasn’t to blame for the sorrow she always shoves at me in my dreams. I open my eyes and face the students. “My name is John. I’m 55 years old, and I am a veteran of the Vietnam War.”
The kids don’t care what my name is, how old I am, or that I was in Vietnam. They see
my uniform and the medals, and they follow the word “war” with applause. They offer it up to me freely. And it’s this part that is always the hardest. Having to stand and listen to them cheering for someone about whom they know nothing real. I’m merely a clothes hanger on which they drape their stereotyped dreams and ideals. And that’s why I’m here. To teach them to really see people. That just as easily as they assumed to know and love me with their applause, they can come to hate and destroy others. They have to learn to spend the time looking beneath the surface.
Collecting details and hints of others’ depth of being. Like how I do so by collecting faces.
“I was awarded a Purple Heart and a Congressional Medal of Honor for my actions on
one particular day during my tour of duty in Vietnam. May 25th, 1969.” I’m pointing to the medals on my chest. The kids settle into a respectful calm. They are waiting for the story.
“I was 20 years old, and a marine sergeant. I had been in Vietnam for 8 months, and saw enough violence and death to last the rest of my life.” I tell them about seeing buddies killed and mutilated by the enemy. Vietnamese villagers whose skin had been charred and peeled away by napalm. How I had trained my rifle on a Viet-Cong soldier running across a field in the distance, lead him a bit with my aim, fired and watched him crumple forward in a heap as if tackled from behind by some invisible lineman during a football game. I tell them about the thunderous noise of helicopters and artillery. The silence of a terrified night of waiting for the
enemy’s arrival. The unearthly smells. The heat, the damp, the blisters, the crying during unrelenting downpours so no one noticed.
“That was the typical Vietnam,” I say to my quiet, staring audience. “The typical war
experience. Nothing really unique about it.” It’s at this point that the kids are always silent. They are receptive because I’ve stepped outside the pep rally mentality that usually kicks off my presentations. They’re waiting for me
to clean things up. To pull them up from the raw description of war I’ve just delivered. To lift them up with a story of bravery and happy endings. Something appropriately followed by a commercial for sugary breakfast cereal.
“I want to tell you about what happened on the day I earned these medals,” I say, the
spotlight they have trained on me, temporarily blinding me from my focus on the young Asian student’s face. “But first, I want to show some of my work. I’m a photographer now, and I want to share some of my pictures with you before I continue the story.”
I cue the teacher who is manning the slide projector, and he flashes the first of my snapshots on the large screen over my head. It’s one of my favorites. A three-year-old boy from Colombia. He’s holding a piece of bread to his lips with pudgy, mud-caked fingers. Recent teary riverbeds are clearly visible, streaked through the dirt on his cheeks. “This is my collection. The faces I’ve found from all over the world.” I nod toward the light of the projector, and the parade of pictures begins. A new face every few seconds. And, as is my habit, I just stand and watch
my audience as they scan these foreign faces. I do not give any description. No instructions for the viewing. The clicking of the slide projector breaks the silence, which continues for several minutes until the slides end and the screen is left awash in white light.
“What do you make of these? All these faces?” I ask. “Anyone have a comment?” This
talk is like most. No hands. No comments. The kids don’t know what I’m looking for. They don’t see the point. “It’s alright,” I say. “I’ll come back to these in a moment.” I find the Asian student’s face, watching me intently, ignoring the whispering of the restless friend sitting next to her, and I continue. “May 25th, 1969.” I tell them I was driving a large truck that day, heavily loaded with artillery munitions. My unit’s 2nd Lieutenant was riding shotgun. We were under orders to deliver our load to a forward artillery emplacement for an
attack scheduled that evening. Intelligence had forecast a significant surge of North Vietnamese army activity in our area, so a swift response was necessary in order to prevent the decimation of our hard-won positions. “Get these munitions there on time, or else many of our boys are going to die,” the Major had said.
I hesitate for a moment. I hold onto the Asian student’s eyes. Closing mine, I focus on that familiar, young, war-swept girl’s face.
“For you,” I whisper to myself, and I watch her tears break free. Falling forward like two miniature translucent boulders. I look out at my audience and point to my Purple Heart pinned to my uniform. “We came under heavy sniper fire as we neared our destination. I got this for the shrapnel I took in my arm, leg and abdomen.” I point out the locations of my old wounds and then I point to the Medal of Honor. “I got this because I kept the truck moving despite the barrage of enemy fire. I
almost passed out a couple of times, but I kept my foot on the gas, and we got there. The artillery attack commenced as scheduled.”
A few kids start clapping. “Way to go,” one of them calls from the back. Applause ripples across the auditorium, but weaker, less intense than upon my introduction. To some of these kids, I’d gone all the way. Scored one for the team. And maybe, as I have told myself thousands of times since that day, I did save some lives.
I cue the projector once again, and the face of the young Colombian boy reemerges.
“Can someone tell me about this picture? What do you see here?”
Several seconds of book bag-shuffling and a few dry, bored coughs. “The kid’s been
starving. He’s probably from one of those poor countries,” some voice calls out.
“You’re right,” I say. “But what you don’t see, unless you really look, is how he’s been crying because both of his parents are dead. Murdered by a local drug lord. He ate the piece of bread I gave him, but he never stopped crying while he ate it.”
“What does this have to do with Vietnam?” another voice calls out after a moment’s
pause. A few kids laugh. I nod silently, taking my cue.
“I need to tell you the beginning of the story. About that day in the truck.” I tell them how my Lieutenant and I were speeding down the narrow dirt road with our load of artillery shells. How we came up quickly on a bend in the road. Too quick to do much about the young girl riding her bicycle along the right-hand shoulder. Nowhere for the truck to go. No time to swerve. I saw a white flash—her shirt—and heard the impact with the right front of the truck. I caught only a glimpse of her in the rear-view mirror. Just enough to see her bloodied body, limbs twisting at unnatural angles, as she and her bent bike were hurled by the force of contact
toward the ditch. No scream. No words. Just the dull thud. Like we’d merely hit a bump in the road. Although all that blood arcing up into the air was all I needed to see to know she was going to die.
“I told the Lieutenant I was going to stop the truck. Go back and see,” I say to the kids. “But the Lieutenant told me to keep it moving. ‘Didi mau,’ I remember him yelling at me. Take off. Scram.”
I remind my audience that I was under orders. There was the risk of G.I.’s killed if we didn’t make our delivery on time. Our soldiers. Real casualties.
“Just a gook kid, anyway, the Lieutenant said to me after her bloodied image had disappeared. And we knew it was a young girl because Vietnamese girls wore white. Older, marriageage women wore dark colors. I told myself she was probably Charlie — the enemy — anyway. Probably one of those kids who’d smile while walking up to you holding a live grenade behind their backs.”
I tell them I didn’t really want to stop the truck. Even though death was not new to me, I didn’t want to see her body. “And so, I never saw her face,” I say to these kids. “And then what cinched it for me was that I got medals for getting the truck there on time. When the General pinned them on me, no one knew that I wasn’t speeding toward my fellow marines in need of ammunition for the battle, but away from the murder I’d committed.”
The high school kids are staring at me with empty faces. The ticker-tape parade looks of jubilant adoration are gone. They are finally seeing past my uniform. Into pieces of the real me. Or at least the real man I was. I tell them that for years after that day in 1969, I convinced myself the young girl wasn’t really a human being. “Just a gook,” like the Lieutenant had said. I told myself she was not a
life worth caring about. Like running over a cat or dog, someone would come along sooner or later and lift her up off the road and discard her. Clean things up for me. “So for years, I let alcohol, drugs, sex, and back alley brawling keep things clean.”
“But your mind keeps a record. It reminds you of what’s real. And that girl was real, and I had to go back and find her. But since I never saw her face. Never knew her name, I’ve had to find her face wherever I can. And so I find her in pictures like these. So now, I’m a face collector.
And in these faces, I discover bits and pieces of the people beneath.”
The slide projector advances. With each slide, I tell them a snippet about the person I met. The girl in Kenya who carries water from the river to her village where her grandmother is dying; the grandmother who always sang to her about their ancestors. The boy from China whose mother died the week before of SARS and now is crying because he can’t understand how such a strong woman could die so quickly. The old man from Florida who suffers from Alzheimer’s and, just before snapping the shot, told me, in a rare moment of clarity, that he missed the smell of his long-deceased wife’s hair. To my surprise, the young Asian student I’ve been using as my focal point, the fulcrum for my talk, raises her hand. “I don’t understand why you’ve blamed yourself all these years for that girl’s death. I mean, it was an accident. You didn’t intend to hit her, and you couldn’t have prevented it.”
I smile at her, and at the face that has been crying in my mind for decades. “You’re right, but I could have prevented myself from killing her memory all these years. Covering it up and burying myself, my soul, with her in that unmarked grave somewhere in Vietnam.”
I point up to the huge face hovering above us on the screen. “These are faces worth collecting. They are my human bookmarks. They help me remember that we can only kill and discard someone once we have convinced ourselves they are not worthy of our caring.” “Find a way to see what’s real, deeply human, about everyone around you—find these things and collect them. We need to hold onto these details so we don’t lose contact with one another.”
And with the audience’s applause, I close my eyes, and feel the warmth of the spotlight on my sweaty face. The baby-san is wiping at her tears as she watches me. She bows her head slightly, closes her eyes as the wind dies around her.
Copyright © 2004 Mitch Abblett
like I used to say, then I wouldn’t have carried so much pain around for the past thirty years. “Animals” don’t have a conscience. They don’t hurt at the recollection of past wrongs. I told myself at the time—ten years ago—that she never stepped foot inside Vietnam, so she didn’t know what she was talking about. All her psycho-babble would never stop that girl’s face from rising up from the murderous muck of my nightmares. Her soft, empathic shrink’s voice could never sponge away that look from my mind.
A silent face with large, wet unblinking eyes on the verge of tears, but watching me. The crying on hold. She’s waiting. She’s alone, standing on the edge of a rice paddy. Her clothes are tattered and the wind creates whipped chaos with her hair. She stands there staring at me with dewy eyes. For years, I called them “girl-gook eyes.” Now, they look different even though I don’t see her much anymore in my dreams. Things changed after I became a face collector.
I drifted from job to job and marriage to marriage after my tour was up in Vietnam. After I was “recycled” back into society. Like a crushed can of soda, I was deposited back home in hopes I might still be of some use. But just like an empty can, once you’ve been crushed, obliterated — you can no longer do what you were originally intended for. You’re just a piece of trash to be kicked around, for people to cut themselves on. You’re in for a good long rusting.
And then I happened upon a decent camera at a flea market. I grabbed it up and started snapping shots in my free time. And since I couldn’t hold a job, and kept alienating my family and friends with all my boozing and bar fighting, I had quite a bit of time to myself. My therapist, and the other guys from my group prodded me on, told me I had an “eye” for photography.
I laughed them off in public, but kept it up in private. Got myself a better camera. Took pictures like a madman.
I found myself drawn to taking face shots of people. Catching them at the split second their emotions drew them down a new path. The freshness of the moment fluttering across their expressions like breeze across a bed of flowers. These are the faces I collect. Moments I try to render through the contours of shadow, light and hue. And my restlessness keeps me on the move, always searching for more. Never tiring of it, because I’m always learning from these faces. I’m an emotional archeologist, unearthing peoples’ pasts and giving evidence of their pain, sorrow, jubilation and joy in the present. In the angle of their lips, position of their bodies, the way their eyes hold or retreat from the light.
And now I get paid for these pictures. Not a lot, but enough to travel the world to collect faces. And the people I meet have their likenesses displayed in magazines across the world. A couple even landed on the cover of National Geographic. Haunting shots of children’s eyes. Their innocence lost in the wake of war, famine or disease. Faces finding their own soundless, motionless language. Pain captured and imprisoned behind the hard line of their lips. I’m also a teacher of sorts. When I’m in the States for any length of time, I’m usually busy traveling around the country speaking to auditoriums full of junior high and high school kids. Sometimes, I even speak in places of higher learning. Places where you’d think my basic message would be well-engrained in students by that point. It’s not. They bill me as a warrior. A “hero” who has come to talk to kids about how service and sacrifice for God and country has shaped me into the man I am today. And the kids show up excited over the possibility of hearing stories of real-life combat. Like something daring and
dangerous they have come to expect after a lifetime of gorging on a Hollywood diet.
Kids are usually excited to see me. They have shining, smile-filled looks as they watch me from their seats. Like I’m an astronaut or a Super-Bowl-winning quarterback. It helps that I always show up in my old Marine dress uniform. I’ve had to log a lot of miles jogging to fit into it, but it seems to add something to my message. I walk up to the podium with my white cap tucked neatly under my left arm. My pressed dark blue gabardine coat with its gleaming gold buttons commanding their attention. My ribbons, sergeant’s stripes and medals soliciting their admiration. Except for the graying hair, it’s like I stepped off the recruitment poster.
It’s the same uniform I wore just prior to hopping the transport to Vietnam. Only now, it feels different, heavier. More than medals, it has thousands of echoes pinned to it. Though it’s spotless and crisp, there are stains and tattering in the material. In the process of its donning before one of my talks to kids, it serves as my reminder. The dark coat as my own portable marble war memorial, with dozens of dead names invisibly etched there.
And today is no different from any of the hundreds of talks I’ve given. I’m standing at a podium on a high school stage. I’m jet-lagged from my flight in from Hong Kong, so I’m a bit foggy on the details. I know I’m in Washington, outside Seattle. I couldn’t tell you the specific name of the place. The school’s mascot is the Grizzly bear. And I only know this because I’m staring up at a huge banner emblazoned with one of these clawed beasts, on the back wall of the auditorium. I’m betting these kids are taught just like I was at their age. That winning is crucial and
losing is unacceptable. That with enough determined effort, victory will be at hand. Somehow these values didn’t carry the day in Vietnam. But I don’t get into these issues during my talks, not even if I’m asked. The teachers sometimes try to draw me into political debates about the war. That’s not my point. “Others have much more to say about the big, political picture regarding Vietnam,” I say to them. “It’s impossible to focus on the forest when you spent your time in Vietnam lost in among the trees.”
I’ve seen thousands of kid faces during my talks. The mass of their eyes and lips is too much for me to capture. I have a pre-talk ritual where I pick out one or two faces to focus on. To serve as representatives for the rest. Someone to judge my progress by. A young Asian girl seizes my attention. Pretty, with long, dark hair. She’s in the second row. A faint, nervous smile quickly emerges and retreats across her face in mouse-like fashion as my gaze meets hers.
I close my eyes for a moment and flash to her face. The face I conjured that should be forty years old by now. But it’s not. It’s young, a baby-san’s face, about to be streaked with crying. For years I would tell myself that the slanting of her gook-eyes made it harder for the tears to break loose and fall. That it was her fault, her race’s fault, she couldn’t get on with the crying.
That, while I may have killed her, I had nothing to do with anything else the war had done to her or her family. I wasn’t to blame for the sorrow she always shoves at me in my dreams. I open my eyes and face the students. “My name is John. I’m 55 years old, and I am a veteran of the Vietnam War.”
The kids don’t care what my name is, how old I am, or that I was in Vietnam. They see
my uniform and the medals, and they follow the word “war” with applause. They offer it up to me freely. And it’s this part that is always the hardest. Having to stand and listen to them cheering for someone about whom they know nothing real. I’m merely a clothes hanger on which they drape their stereotyped dreams and ideals. And that’s why I’m here. To teach them to really see people. That just as easily as they assumed to know and love me with their applause, they can come to hate and destroy others. They have to learn to spend the time looking beneath the surface.
Collecting details and hints of others’ depth of being. Like how I do so by collecting faces.
“I was awarded a Purple Heart and a Congressional Medal of Honor for my actions on
one particular day during my tour of duty in Vietnam. May 25th, 1969.” I’m pointing to the medals on my chest. The kids settle into a respectful calm. They are waiting for the story.
“I was 20 years old, and a marine sergeant. I had been in Vietnam for 8 months, and saw enough violence and death to last the rest of my life.” I tell them about seeing buddies killed and mutilated by the enemy. Vietnamese villagers whose skin had been charred and peeled away by napalm. How I had trained my rifle on a Viet-Cong soldier running across a field in the distance, lead him a bit with my aim, fired and watched him crumple forward in a heap as if tackled from behind by some invisible lineman during a football game. I tell them about the thunderous noise of helicopters and artillery. The silence of a terrified night of waiting for the
enemy’s arrival. The unearthly smells. The heat, the damp, the blisters, the crying during unrelenting downpours so no one noticed.
“That was the typical Vietnam,” I say to my quiet, staring audience. “The typical war
experience. Nothing really unique about it.” It’s at this point that the kids are always silent. They are receptive because I’ve stepped outside the pep rally mentality that usually kicks off my presentations. They’re waiting for me
to clean things up. To pull them up from the raw description of war I’ve just delivered. To lift them up with a story of bravery and happy endings. Something appropriately followed by a commercial for sugary breakfast cereal.
“I want to tell you about what happened on the day I earned these medals,” I say, the
spotlight they have trained on me, temporarily blinding me from my focus on the young Asian student’s face. “But first, I want to show some of my work. I’m a photographer now, and I want to share some of my pictures with you before I continue the story.”
I cue the teacher who is manning the slide projector, and he flashes the first of my snapshots on the large screen over my head. It’s one of my favorites. A three-year-old boy from Colombia. He’s holding a piece of bread to his lips with pudgy, mud-caked fingers. Recent teary riverbeds are clearly visible, streaked through the dirt on his cheeks. “This is my collection. The faces I’ve found from all over the world.” I nod toward the light of the projector, and the parade of pictures begins. A new face every few seconds. And, as is my habit, I just stand and watch
my audience as they scan these foreign faces. I do not give any description. No instructions for the viewing. The clicking of the slide projector breaks the silence, which continues for several minutes until the slides end and the screen is left awash in white light.
“What do you make of these? All these faces?” I ask. “Anyone have a comment?” This
talk is like most. No hands. No comments. The kids don’t know what I’m looking for. They don’t see the point. “It’s alright,” I say. “I’ll come back to these in a moment.” I find the Asian student’s face, watching me intently, ignoring the whispering of the restless friend sitting next to her, and I continue. “May 25th, 1969.” I tell them I was driving a large truck that day, heavily loaded with artillery munitions. My unit’s 2nd Lieutenant was riding shotgun. We were under orders to deliver our load to a forward artillery emplacement for an
attack scheduled that evening. Intelligence had forecast a significant surge of North Vietnamese army activity in our area, so a swift response was necessary in order to prevent the decimation of our hard-won positions. “Get these munitions there on time, or else many of our boys are going to die,” the Major had said.
I hesitate for a moment. I hold onto the Asian student’s eyes. Closing mine, I focus on that familiar, young, war-swept girl’s face.
“For you,” I whisper to myself, and I watch her tears break free. Falling forward like two miniature translucent boulders. I look out at my audience and point to my Purple Heart pinned to my uniform. “We came under heavy sniper fire as we neared our destination. I got this for the shrapnel I took in my arm, leg and abdomen.” I point out the locations of my old wounds and then I point to the Medal of Honor. “I got this because I kept the truck moving despite the barrage of enemy fire. I
almost passed out a couple of times, but I kept my foot on the gas, and we got there. The artillery attack commenced as scheduled.”
A few kids start clapping. “Way to go,” one of them calls from the back. Applause ripples across the auditorium, but weaker, less intense than upon my introduction. To some of these kids, I’d gone all the way. Scored one for the team. And maybe, as I have told myself thousands of times since that day, I did save some lives.
I cue the projector once again, and the face of the young Colombian boy reemerges.
“Can someone tell me about this picture? What do you see here?”
Several seconds of book bag-shuffling and a few dry, bored coughs. “The kid’s been
starving. He’s probably from one of those poor countries,” some voice calls out.
“You’re right,” I say. “But what you don’t see, unless you really look, is how he’s been crying because both of his parents are dead. Murdered by a local drug lord. He ate the piece of bread I gave him, but he never stopped crying while he ate it.”
“What does this have to do with Vietnam?” another voice calls out after a moment’s
pause. A few kids laugh. I nod silently, taking my cue.
“I need to tell you the beginning of the story. About that day in the truck.” I tell them how my Lieutenant and I were speeding down the narrow dirt road with our load of artillery shells. How we came up quickly on a bend in the road. Too quick to do much about the young girl riding her bicycle along the right-hand shoulder. Nowhere for the truck to go. No time to swerve. I saw a white flash—her shirt—and heard the impact with the right front of the truck. I caught only a glimpse of her in the rear-view mirror. Just enough to see her bloodied body, limbs twisting at unnatural angles, as she and her bent bike were hurled by the force of contact
toward the ditch. No scream. No words. Just the dull thud. Like we’d merely hit a bump in the road. Although all that blood arcing up into the air was all I needed to see to know she was going to die.
“I told the Lieutenant I was going to stop the truck. Go back and see,” I say to the kids. “But the Lieutenant told me to keep it moving. ‘Didi mau,’ I remember him yelling at me. Take off. Scram.”
I remind my audience that I was under orders. There was the risk of G.I.’s killed if we didn’t make our delivery on time. Our soldiers. Real casualties.
“Just a gook kid, anyway, the Lieutenant said to me after her bloodied image had disappeared. And we knew it was a young girl because Vietnamese girls wore white. Older, marriageage women wore dark colors. I told myself she was probably Charlie — the enemy — anyway. Probably one of those kids who’d smile while walking up to you holding a live grenade behind their backs.”
I tell them I didn’t really want to stop the truck. Even though death was not new to me, I didn’t want to see her body. “And so, I never saw her face,” I say to these kids. “And then what cinched it for me was that I got medals for getting the truck there on time. When the General pinned them on me, no one knew that I wasn’t speeding toward my fellow marines in need of ammunition for the battle, but away from the murder I’d committed.”
The high school kids are staring at me with empty faces. The ticker-tape parade looks of jubilant adoration are gone. They are finally seeing past my uniform. Into pieces of the real me. Or at least the real man I was. I tell them that for years after that day in 1969, I convinced myself the young girl wasn’t really a human being. “Just a gook,” like the Lieutenant had said. I told myself she was not a
life worth caring about. Like running over a cat or dog, someone would come along sooner or later and lift her up off the road and discard her. Clean things up for me. “So for years, I let alcohol, drugs, sex, and back alley brawling keep things clean.”
“But your mind keeps a record. It reminds you of what’s real. And that girl was real, and I had to go back and find her. But since I never saw her face. Never knew her name, I’ve had to find her face wherever I can. And so I find her in pictures like these. So now, I’m a face collector.
And in these faces, I discover bits and pieces of the people beneath.”
The slide projector advances. With each slide, I tell them a snippet about the person I met. The girl in Kenya who carries water from the river to her village where her grandmother is dying; the grandmother who always sang to her about their ancestors. The boy from China whose mother died the week before of SARS and now is crying because he can’t understand how such a strong woman could die so quickly. The old man from Florida who suffers from Alzheimer’s and, just before snapping the shot, told me, in a rare moment of clarity, that he missed the smell of his long-deceased wife’s hair. To my surprise, the young Asian student I’ve been using as my focal point, the fulcrum for my talk, raises her hand. “I don’t understand why you’ve blamed yourself all these years for that girl’s death. I mean, it was an accident. You didn’t intend to hit her, and you couldn’t have prevented it.”
I smile at her, and at the face that has been crying in my mind for decades. “You’re right, but I could have prevented myself from killing her memory all these years. Covering it up and burying myself, my soul, with her in that unmarked grave somewhere in Vietnam.”
I point up to the huge face hovering above us on the screen. “These are faces worth collecting. They are my human bookmarks. They help me remember that we can only kill and discard someone once we have convinced ourselves they are not worthy of our caring.” “Find a way to see what’s real, deeply human, about everyone around you—find these things and collect them. We need to hold onto these details so we don’t lose contact with one another.”
And with the audience’s applause, I close my eyes, and feel the warmth of the spotlight on my sweaty face. The baby-san is wiping at her tears as she watches me. She bows her head slightly, closes her eyes as the wind dies around her.
Copyright © 2004 Mitch Abblett
posted by chiamaka at 10 janvier
0 comments
Fixing Haiti- Randall Frame
I shake my head upon thinking about how I ended up on this muddy road—if one could even call it a road—on the outskirts of Haiti’s capital city in the dark of night. The moon, though not quite full, is more than enough to light my path. But when it hides behind the clouds, I have no choice but to stop, for only a few scattered stars and a handful of campfires that dot the hillsides surrounding Port-au-Prince prevent total blackness.
What a difference a week makes. Seven days previously I’d been sitting in the comfort of the living room of my four-bedroom home in suburban Pittsburgh, anticipating what promised to be an interesting trip—my first—to a country distinguished mainly by its status as the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere. I was part of a team of journalists and business leaders invited by a charitable organization to witness Haiti’s poverty, injustice, lawlessness—some would say its hopelessness—from up close.
Friends who had been to the so-called Third World had warned me that I would be changed, perhaps even disoriented, unable to fend off the emotional and psychological effects of culture shock. I humored them, outwardly acknowledging the accuracy of their predictions. But inwardly, I shook my head. I was, after all, a reporter—a professional who, while not denying his humanity, had been trained to maintain his distance, his objectivity. The truth is that as I examined the itinerary, my biggest concern was whether the return flight would get me home in time to watch my beloved Pittsburgh Steelers play on Sunday night.
For the first four days at least, my assessment of how my emotions would handle Haiti proved on target. This is not to say the experience was easy. It was not. I won’t soon forget the images of skinny dogs and even skinnier people ravaging the same garbage heaps looking for potentially edible scraps. Of naked children who lived in rudimentary tin shacks, whose toys were limited to rocks and whose back yards consisted of mud two inches deep, sometimes more after a heavy rain. Of long lines of people waiting patiently for nothing more than a bowl of rice and beans and a cup of clean water. Elderly looking men and women curled up along the roadsides, sleeping on the hard ground, bony arms their only pillow. Medical clinics that resembled American hospitals of a century or more ago. Crying children with nobody running to meet them.
But this was not a time for emotion. This was a time for problem solving. As a typically pragmatic American, my whole orientation toward what I was witnessing and learning was geared toward how to "fix it." And I was not alone. Each night when our delegation returned to the hotel to process the day’s events, the discussion quickly turned to fixing Haiti.
To do so would not be easy, we acknowledged. Education seemed a logical place to start. After all, how can a country get anywhere if nearly half its adult population can neither read nor write? But we can’t expect children (or adults) to learn on empty stomachs. And no one can afford the luxury of going to school if finding enough food to make it through the day is virtually a full-time job.
So how can we fix this food problem? Arable land is scarce as a result of deforestation and soil erosion. Some people in the countryside are able to grow fruits, vegetables, and grains. But the road system is so obsolete that by the time they get their goods to market, they are spoiled. Maybe building infrastructures is answer. Then again, what would it matter if people could successfully transport their products if no one has any money to buy them? And nobody has any money because there are no jobs. We’d visited one charitable organization whose goal was to keep Haitian teenagers out of trouble by teaching them carpentry. But our host acknowledged that his ministry’s main purpose was to give these young people some small measure of self-respect. Few, if any, of them would ever be able to find work period, let alone as carpenters.
Building Haiti’s economy—maybe that was the place to start. But it seemed no matter where we started, we kept returning to keeping people alive and healthy. And they can’t grow their own food—or raise chickens or become dairy farmers—when they have no land and no possibility of ever owning land, most of which is possessed by a relative handful of the country’s elite who, by Haiti’s standards, are quite wealthy. All of this is not even to mention political and justice systems rife with bias and corruption and a health care “system” that is inaccessible to the overwhelming majority.
Undeterred, our little group of entrepreneurial Americans, in the comfort of our hotel meeting room, went to work each night. As far as we were concerned, there was no problem that could not be solved, though it would take time. Some cited models of projects that had worked in other parts of the developing world to bring, for example, both clean water and jobs to small communities. Others cited advances in biotechnology that would enable people to grow diverse crops on relatively small plots of land. We discussed also the role the U.S. government could play in improving conditions in Haiti.
As we unveiled our plans and proposals, I made it a point to observe our 40ish looking tour guide, Madam Pierre. I was a bit disappointed at her lack of enthusiasm. Though she nodded in apparent affirmation at our grasp of the situation, her silence suggested she was less than excited with our developing vision.
This didn’t stop us from pressing on. Our wide-ranging perspectives and ideas for fixing Haiti were united by a common philosophy, one that emphasized the practical—things that would actually work. We applied an American business mentality to the challenge, placing a premium on such words as “efficiency” and “sustainable.” We were not after quick fixes here—no Band-Aids. We aspired, rather, to permanent solutions.
Though we’d not yet done a single thing, we all came away from these evening gatherings feeling a sense of power and success. Yes, there were problems. But we had answers. Indeed, some of those who gathered in that room each night (myself not included) had access not just to the money but to the human expertise that, if applied intelligently, would likely make an impact on this troubled nation even if it could not completely fix it.
I went to sleep feeling good about myself and also about the future of Haiti. We had come and we had seen Haiti’s problems. Next we would conquer them. Plans were in place—or would be soon. In writing about what I had seen—and the solutions that had been devised—I would be doing my part. I had approached my mission objectively and dispassionately: I had proved my friends wrong. I was content, if not proud. I wondered how the Steelers would fare on Sunday.
Then came day five, the day before our scheduled return to the U.S. Our delegation visited a place called La Cay Espwa, which is Haitian Creole for “House of Hope.” Within this simple, two-room structure, a group of nuns dedicated their lives each day to the weakest and most vulnerable of all: starving children. Severely malnourished children would be brought to La Cay Espwa, and these nuns would do what they could to nurse them back to health. Mostly what they did, however, was to hold the children in their arms, perhaps stroke their hair. A few rocking chairs, rudimentary in design, were scattered around the room. These faithful women sat and rocked these children. Day after day. All day long.
I surveyed the room, at once intrigued and overwhelmed by the contrast. Over here were these wealthy, influential businesspersons whose elaborate job descriptions went on for pages—memos, employee reviews, seminars, meetings with investors, advertising strategies, and on and on and on. And over here this small group of women, each of whose job description boasted essentially one item: holding children.
One of the nuns, Sister Conchita, approached me carrying a child. She spoke very little English, but as she extended her arms, it was clear she was asking me if I would like to hold the baby. Instinctively I shook my head and raised my hands in protest. I had come to Haiti as a reporter, and reporters are not supposed to get personally involved. But neither did I want to be rude or impolite. If ever I was going to make an exception to my journalistic principles, this seemed a good time for it. I reached for the child. “Her name Maria,” the Sister said with broken English and a quiet smile.
I took Maria into my arms, gingerly at first. She seemed so fragile: I could practically see the skeleton beneath her skin. Only her eyes seemed to have escaped the circumstances of her young life. Her eyes were deep brown and as shiny as any healthy child’s ought to be. She focused them not on me, but on Sister Conchita. It was clear I was “second string.” Perhaps my arms were not as soft or comfortable. Yet she didn’t cry. Maybe she was too weak to protest being held by a stranger. Or perhaps she was just glad to be in anyone’s arms. How could I tell?
For the next twenty minutes or so, Madam Pierre and one of the English-speaking nuns talked about the history and the needs of the House of Hope. I wasn’t listening. I was too focused on—too captivated by—this child I was holding. I wondered if Maria had brothers or sisters. Parents. Had any of the people in her small village ever even heard of the Steelers?
The time came for us to leave. I wasn’t ready. At first I’d not wanted to hold this child; now I found it hard to give her back. As I returned Maria to Sister Conchita’s arms, the child, for the first time, turned her eyes to me. Perhaps she was saying “thank you.” Maybe “Thank you for giving me back to the ‘first string.’” Or maybe “Thank you for holding me.” How could I know?
We visited two other sites in the afternoon. I went along in body only. My mind kept going back to La Cay Espwa. Something about that place had jarred me, had upset my mode of thinking. These women were dedicated servants to be sure, their motivation pure as a new day. But their whole approach seemed highly inefficient, impractical, unproductive. These children had little chance of ever being able to help build the country’s infrastructures or to become leaders for political change. These persistent Sisters of Mercy could offer a ray of hope to these children, but little more. Theirs was the ultimate Band-Aid approach. They operated out of a total disregard for the big picture. In fact, it seemed to me they focused on the smallest picture possible. If ever there was a lost cause, this was it.
Still, I could not escape the overwhelming feeling that these women had acquired something—some understanding, some realization—that was unknown to me. And I sensed it was something I wanted. Something that I, perhaps, needed. Their circumstances did not keep these women from smiling. Not happy smiles, for there is nothing happy about seeing starving children every day. Their smiles, rather, reflected a sense of peace that is lodged in the depths of the soul, a sense of contentment that comes from understanding fully—and living out completely—one’s calling in life.
It dawned on me that I, a trained journalist, had been a bit foolish to think that ours was the first delegation ever to visit this troubled land and to determine how to fix it. Over the last five days, I’d witnessed firsthand the results of the grand plans of those who’d gone before. Those results were not impressive. I realized that these women I’d come so quickly to admire did not have the luxury of looking at the big picture. And I wondered if they—in their simple, single-minded approach—were doing more to “fix Haiti” than anyone from our resource-laden delegation could ever do or even hope to do. I wanted to visit with them again. I wanted to see Maria.
At our nightly debriefing session, Madam Pierre reminded us to be ready to leave the hotel for the airport at 7 a.m. Then she reviewed the events of the day. As before, she had my attention only when talking about the House of Hope. “On average,” she told us, “one in four of the children who arrive at La Cay Espwa will die because they got there too late—too much damage to their internal organs.” She added, “The Sisters can usually tell which ones they are.”
When someone asked how they could tell, Madam Pierre pointed to the obvious signs of starvation: withering away of the body and an almost total lack of energy. In addition, she said, the skin becomes pale and rigid. The hair takes on a reddish hue and begins to fall out. She might as well have been describing Maria. Madam Pierre looked to me, surely aware of what I was thinking. “The child you were holding,” she said, “seemed like a baby because she was only sixteen pounds. She was actually almost three years old.”
Whatever inkling of journalistic objectivity remained in me evaporated quickly. I left the group and returned to my room alone. I peered through my window in the direction of La Cay Espwa, unable to shake the image of Maria’s eyes meeting mine as I gave her away too soon. Perhaps she was saying “thank you,” as I’d considered earlier. But perhaps she was saying, “Could you hold me a little bit more?” How could I tell?
I formed my own, personal plan to do my part in fixing Haiti. I estimated La Cay Espwa was no more than two miles from the hotel. And it was almost a straight shot—just one turn, well marked by a sign on the main road. We had been strictly warned against venturing out on our own. If something were to happen, it could put at risk similar trips in the future. But this was a chance I needed to take.
_________
And so here I am. As I forge my way through the dark silence, the night becomes surreal. Each time the moon emerges from the clouds, I hustle down the road as fast as I can to make up for the dark times when I can barely move at all. At first in the darkness I’d slid my feet carefully down the road, but now I just stand still for fear of passing the sign pointing to my destination.
I think of all I have seen and heard these last few days—the suffering, the sense of helplessness, the pain of broken dreams, or worse, no dreams at all. I smile, sadly, as I acknowledge my friends were right after all. I am disoriented, completely off kilter, broken. I think of my world back home, and it seems a completely different world. But there is brokenness there, too. There is brokenness everywhere—crushed and confused spirits all around. But mostly I think of Maria, who has somehow become a symbol—a focal point—both for all that is wrong with the world and for what I can do about it.
I hear footsteps coming up from behind. At first I’m scared, but I assure myself that I am exactly where I ought to be, where I need to be. I find safety in this assurance. As the footsteps get closer, I speak one of the few native expressions I know: “Bon jour.” In the darkness, a man returns my greeting, then adds a few words I don’t understand.
“La Cay Espwa,” I venture.
“La Cay Espwa,” comes the reply. Perhaps his eyes are more accustomed to the dark. Or maybe he knows this stretch of road by heart. He takes my hand and, immune to the darkness, leads me along the path. After about five minutes, we stop. As if right on cue, the moon once again lights the night. The sign appears before me. My new friend—my ship in the night—points toward La Cay Espwa—visible from here, a hundred yards or so away—and then proceeds down the road alone. I’m not sure what to think about angels, but he is what I’d imagined them to be.
I run as fast as I can to the House of Hope. I stand at the door and knock. For the first time, it occurs to me that perhaps no one will answer. After dark, who knows what danger a visitor might bring? But soon, the door opens. One of the Sisters, recognizing me from earlier in the day, invites me inside. Immediately I look around. It doesn’t take long to find Sister Conchita, sitting on her rocker as before. Holding Maria. It’s as if no time has passed.
As I approach Sister Conchita, she stands, sensing exactly why I have returned. She says nothing, but offers me the child. And also her chair. This time there is no protest, no hesitation. I take my seat. A few of the Sisters inquire as to who their late-night visitor might be. But soon the night is silent again. Or nearly so. There remains the weak, rhythmic creaking of an aged rocker that, though old and plain, is fully able to accomplish its mission.
I have arrived at the place where I want to be. And as I live out what I’d earlier in the day envisioned, I am suddenly and fully aware of my weaknesses, my limitations. And aware also of the limitations and shortcomings of humanity, which has somehow failed this child and many others like her.
My four-bedroom house, my physical health and strength, the Steelers—all fade meekly into irrelevance. I am utterly powerless to determine whether this child, who bears the image of God, will live or die this night. But I do have power—complete power—to make certain that if and when her frail body finally yields, she has felt the security, the comfort, of someone’s loving arms. Tonight they are my arms. It’s the least I can do for her, and also, perhaps, the most. Her weak but gracious eyes look up to mine. And hold their gaze. And in the sacred silence of this moment, there is no other power I crave, no other purpose I desire.
Copyright © 2004 Randall Frame
What a difference a week makes. Seven days previously I’d been sitting in the comfort of the living room of my four-bedroom home in suburban Pittsburgh, anticipating what promised to be an interesting trip—my first—to a country distinguished mainly by its status as the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere. I was part of a team of journalists and business leaders invited by a charitable organization to witness Haiti’s poverty, injustice, lawlessness—some would say its hopelessness—from up close.
Friends who had been to the so-called Third World had warned me that I would be changed, perhaps even disoriented, unable to fend off the emotional and psychological effects of culture shock. I humored them, outwardly acknowledging the accuracy of their predictions. But inwardly, I shook my head. I was, after all, a reporter—a professional who, while not denying his humanity, had been trained to maintain his distance, his objectivity. The truth is that as I examined the itinerary, my biggest concern was whether the return flight would get me home in time to watch my beloved Pittsburgh Steelers play on Sunday night.
For the first four days at least, my assessment of how my emotions would handle Haiti proved on target. This is not to say the experience was easy. It was not. I won’t soon forget the images of skinny dogs and even skinnier people ravaging the same garbage heaps looking for potentially edible scraps. Of naked children who lived in rudimentary tin shacks, whose toys were limited to rocks and whose back yards consisted of mud two inches deep, sometimes more after a heavy rain. Of long lines of people waiting patiently for nothing more than a bowl of rice and beans and a cup of clean water. Elderly looking men and women curled up along the roadsides, sleeping on the hard ground, bony arms their only pillow. Medical clinics that resembled American hospitals of a century or more ago. Crying children with nobody running to meet them.
But this was not a time for emotion. This was a time for problem solving. As a typically pragmatic American, my whole orientation toward what I was witnessing and learning was geared toward how to "fix it." And I was not alone. Each night when our delegation returned to the hotel to process the day’s events, the discussion quickly turned to fixing Haiti.
To do so would not be easy, we acknowledged. Education seemed a logical place to start. After all, how can a country get anywhere if nearly half its adult population can neither read nor write? But we can’t expect children (or adults) to learn on empty stomachs. And no one can afford the luxury of going to school if finding enough food to make it through the day is virtually a full-time job.
So how can we fix this food problem? Arable land is scarce as a result of deforestation and soil erosion. Some people in the countryside are able to grow fruits, vegetables, and grains. But the road system is so obsolete that by the time they get their goods to market, they are spoiled. Maybe building infrastructures is answer. Then again, what would it matter if people could successfully transport their products if no one has any money to buy them? And nobody has any money because there are no jobs. We’d visited one charitable organization whose goal was to keep Haitian teenagers out of trouble by teaching them carpentry. But our host acknowledged that his ministry’s main purpose was to give these young people some small measure of self-respect. Few, if any, of them would ever be able to find work period, let alone as carpenters.
Building Haiti’s economy—maybe that was the place to start. But it seemed no matter where we started, we kept returning to keeping people alive and healthy. And they can’t grow their own food—or raise chickens or become dairy farmers—when they have no land and no possibility of ever owning land, most of which is possessed by a relative handful of the country’s elite who, by Haiti’s standards, are quite wealthy. All of this is not even to mention political and justice systems rife with bias and corruption and a health care “system” that is inaccessible to the overwhelming majority.
Undeterred, our little group of entrepreneurial Americans, in the comfort of our hotel meeting room, went to work each night. As far as we were concerned, there was no problem that could not be solved, though it would take time. Some cited models of projects that had worked in other parts of the developing world to bring, for example, both clean water and jobs to small communities. Others cited advances in biotechnology that would enable people to grow diverse crops on relatively small plots of land. We discussed also the role the U.S. government could play in improving conditions in Haiti.
As we unveiled our plans and proposals, I made it a point to observe our 40ish looking tour guide, Madam Pierre. I was a bit disappointed at her lack of enthusiasm. Though she nodded in apparent affirmation at our grasp of the situation, her silence suggested she was less than excited with our developing vision.
This didn’t stop us from pressing on. Our wide-ranging perspectives and ideas for fixing Haiti were united by a common philosophy, one that emphasized the practical—things that would actually work. We applied an American business mentality to the challenge, placing a premium on such words as “efficiency” and “sustainable.” We were not after quick fixes here—no Band-Aids. We aspired, rather, to permanent solutions.
Though we’d not yet done a single thing, we all came away from these evening gatherings feeling a sense of power and success. Yes, there were problems. But we had answers. Indeed, some of those who gathered in that room each night (myself not included) had access not just to the money but to the human expertise that, if applied intelligently, would likely make an impact on this troubled nation even if it could not completely fix it.
I went to sleep feeling good about myself and also about the future of Haiti. We had come and we had seen Haiti’s problems. Next we would conquer them. Plans were in place—or would be soon. In writing about what I had seen—and the solutions that had been devised—I would be doing my part. I had approached my mission objectively and dispassionately: I had proved my friends wrong. I was content, if not proud. I wondered how the Steelers would fare on Sunday.
Then came day five, the day before our scheduled return to the U.S. Our delegation visited a place called La Cay Espwa, which is Haitian Creole for “House of Hope.” Within this simple, two-room structure, a group of nuns dedicated their lives each day to the weakest and most vulnerable of all: starving children. Severely malnourished children would be brought to La Cay Espwa, and these nuns would do what they could to nurse them back to health. Mostly what they did, however, was to hold the children in their arms, perhaps stroke their hair. A few rocking chairs, rudimentary in design, were scattered around the room. These faithful women sat and rocked these children. Day after day. All day long.
I surveyed the room, at once intrigued and overwhelmed by the contrast. Over here were these wealthy, influential businesspersons whose elaborate job descriptions went on for pages—memos, employee reviews, seminars, meetings with investors, advertising strategies, and on and on and on. And over here this small group of women, each of whose job description boasted essentially one item: holding children.
One of the nuns, Sister Conchita, approached me carrying a child. She spoke very little English, but as she extended her arms, it was clear she was asking me if I would like to hold the baby. Instinctively I shook my head and raised my hands in protest. I had come to Haiti as a reporter, and reporters are not supposed to get personally involved. But neither did I want to be rude or impolite. If ever I was going to make an exception to my journalistic principles, this seemed a good time for it. I reached for the child. “Her name Maria,” the Sister said with broken English and a quiet smile.
I took Maria into my arms, gingerly at first. She seemed so fragile: I could practically see the skeleton beneath her skin. Only her eyes seemed to have escaped the circumstances of her young life. Her eyes were deep brown and as shiny as any healthy child’s ought to be. She focused them not on me, but on Sister Conchita. It was clear I was “second string.” Perhaps my arms were not as soft or comfortable. Yet she didn’t cry. Maybe she was too weak to protest being held by a stranger. Or perhaps she was just glad to be in anyone’s arms. How could I tell?
For the next twenty minutes or so, Madam Pierre and one of the English-speaking nuns talked about the history and the needs of the House of Hope. I wasn’t listening. I was too focused on—too captivated by—this child I was holding. I wondered if Maria had brothers or sisters. Parents. Had any of the people in her small village ever even heard of the Steelers?
The time came for us to leave. I wasn’t ready. At first I’d not wanted to hold this child; now I found it hard to give her back. As I returned Maria to Sister Conchita’s arms, the child, for the first time, turned her eyes to me. Perhaps she was saying “thank you.” Maybe “Thank you for giving me back to the ‘first string.’” Or maybe “Thank you for holding me.” How could I know?
We visited two other sites in the afternoon. I went along in body only. My mind kept going back to La Cay Espwa. Something about that place had jarred me, had upset my mode of thinking. These women were dedicated servants to be sure, their motivation pure as a new day. But their whole approach seemed highly inefficient, impractical, unproductive. These children had little chance of ever being able to help build the country’s infrastructures or to become leaders for political change. These persistent Sisters of Mercy could offer a ray of hope to these children, but little more. Theirs was the ultimate Band-Aid approach. They operated out of a total disregard for the big picture. In fact, it seemed to me they focused on the smallest picture possible. If ever there was a lost cause, this was it.
Still, I could not escape the overwhelming feeling that these women had acquired something—some understanding, some realization—that was unknown to me. And I sensed it was something I wanted. Something that I, perhaps, needed. Their circumstances did not keep these women from smiling. Not happy smiles, for there is nothing happy about seeing starving children every day. Their smiles, rather, reflected a sense of peace that is lodged in the depths of the soul, a sense of contentment that comes from understanding fully—and living out completely—one’s calling in life.
It dawned on me that I, a trained journalist, had been a bit foolish to think that ours was the first delegation ever to visit this troubled land and to determine how to fix it. Over the last five days, I’d witnessed firsthand the results of the grand plans of those who’d gone before. Those results were not impressive. I realized that these women I’d come so quickly to admire did not have the luxury of looking at the big picture. And I wondered if they—in their simple, single-minded approach—were doing more to “fix Haiti” than anyone from our resource-laden delegation could ever do or even hope to do. I wanted to visit with them again. I wanted to see Maria.
At our nightly debriefing session, Madam Pierre reminded us to be ready to leave the hotel for the airport at 7 a.m. Then she reviewed the events of the day. As before, she had my attention only when talking about the House of Hope. “On average,” she told us, “one in four of the children who arrive at La Cay Espwa will die because they got there too late—too much damage to their internal organs.” She added, “The Sisters can usually tell which ones they are.”
When someone asked how they could tell, Madam Pierre pointed to the obvious signs of starvation: withering away of the body and an almost total lack of energy. In addition, she said, the skin becomes pale and rigid. The hair takes on a reddish hue and begins to fall out. She might as well have been describing Maria. Madam Pierre looked to me, surely aware of what I was thinking. “The child you were holding,” she said, “seemed like a baby because she was only sixteen pounds. She was actually almost three years old.”
Whatever inkling of journalistic objectivity remained in me evaporated quickly. I left the group and returned to my room alone. I peered through my window in the direction of La Cay Espwa, unable to shake the image of Maria’s eyes meeting mine as I gave her away too soon. Perhaps she was saying “thank you,” as I’d considered earlier. But perhaps she was saying, “Could you hold me a little bit more?” How could I tell?
I formed my own, personal plan to do my part in fixing Haiti. I estimated La Cay Espwa was no more than two miles from the hotel. And it was almost a straight shot—just one turn, well marked by a sign on the main road. We had been strictly warned against venturing out on our own. If something were to happen, it could put at risk similar trips in the future. But this was a chance I needed to take.
_________
And so here I am. As I forge my way through the dark silence, the night becomes surreal. Each time the moon emerges from the clouds, I hustle down the road as fast as I can to make up for the dark times when I can barely move at all. At first in the darkness I’d slid my feet carefully down the road, but now I just stand still for fear of passing the sign pointing to my destination.
I think of all I have seen and heard these last few days—the suffering, the sense of helplessness, the pain of broken dreams, or worse, no dreams at all. I smile, sadly, as I acknowledge my friends were right after all. I am disoriented, completely off kilter, broken. I think of my world back home, and it seems a completely different world. But there is brokenness there, too. There is brokenness everywhere—crushed and confused spirits all around. But mostly I think of Maria, who has somehow become a symbol—a focal point—both for all that is wrong with the world and for what I can do about it.
I hear footsteps coming up from behind. At first I’m scared, but I assure myself that I am exactly where I ought to be, where I need to be. I find safety in this assurance. As the footsteps get closer, I speak one of the few native expressions I know: “Bon jour.” In the darkness, a man returns my greeting, then adds a few words I don’t understand.
“La Cay Espwa,” I venture.
“La Cay Espwa,” comes the reply. Perhaps his eyes are more accustomed to the dark. Or maybe he knows this stretch of road by heart. He takes my hand and, immune to the darkness, leads me along the path. After about five minutes, we stop. As if right on cue, the moon once again lights the night. The sign appears before me. My new friend—my ship in the night—points toward La Cay Espwa—visible from here, a hundred yards or so away—and then proceeds down the road alone. I’m not sure what to think about angels, but he is what I’d imagined them to be.
I run as fast as I can to the House of Hope. I stand at the door and knock. For the first time, it occurs to me that perhaps no one will answer. After dark, who knows what danger a visitor might bring? But soon, the door opens. One of the Sisters, recognizing me from earlier in the day, invites me inside. Immediately I look around. It doesn’t take long to find Sister Conchita, sitting on her rocker as before. Holding Maria. It’s as if no time has passed.
As I approach Sister Conchita, she stands, sensing exactly why I have returned. She says nothing, but offers me the child. And also her chair. This time there is no protest, no hesitation. I take my seat. A few of the Sisters inquire as to who their late-night visitor might be. But soon the night is silent again. Or nearly so. There remains the weak, rhythmic creaking of an aged rocker that, though old and plain, is fully able to accomplish its mission.
I have arrived at the place where I want to be. And as I live out what I’d earlier in the day envisioned, I am suddenly and fully aware of my weaknesses, my limitations. And aware also of the limitations and shortcomings of humanity, which has somehow failed this child and many others like her.
My four-bedroom house, my physical health and strength, the Steelers—all fade meekly into irrelevance. I am utterly powerless to determine whether this child, who bears the image of God, will live or die this night. But I do have power—complete power—to make certain that if and when her frail body finally yields, she has felt the security, the comfort, of someone’s loving arms. Tonight they are my arms. It’s the least I can do for her, and also, perhaps, the most. Her weak but gracious eyes look up to mine. And hold their gaze. And in the sacred silence of this moment, there is no other power I crave, no other purpose I desire.
Copyright © 2004 Randall Frame
posted by chiamaka at 10 janvier
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