Tablet January 09 "Haiti"

We arrived during the children’s lunchtime. Mother Teresa once visited the orphanage in Port au Prince and, rarely for her, had been taken sick during her stay in Haiti. One Dutch Missionary of Charity has the look of someone in love. She cares for the babies as freshly as if she started as a novice a month ago. She has been here for thirty years. She remembers Mother’s visit but speaks with a secret kind of love not about her foundress but the children who arrive in increasing numbers. Desperate mothers leave some at the door; some are brought temporarily to recover from malnutrition. And this is the nation’s capital. Capital of the poorest and most ignored country in the western hemisphere. In 1803 Haitians became the first slaves in history successfully to revolt against their masters and then bought their freedom in cash from France. Dignity and the elegant courtesies of their language even in Creole strangely characterise this battered and oppressed people.

The babies are kept in cots with high railings, as many as can fit into the rooms and leave space for the carers to pass and give the children as much individual attention as possible. They are lovingly cared for but they cannot belong as a child needs to belong. It can be a home only in the sense of a home for the homeless. They look up from the deep silence of their lonely limbos. How cruelly intellectual was the scholastic idea of God sending the unbaptised child to a perpetual limbo. They wouldn’t even have had Missionaries of Charity there. When they cry, too, the children seem desperately trying to connect but bitterly aware it is too late for the connection they crave. In some cots two siblings lie together, their tiny limbs interlocking, and their worlds seem a little less astronomically remote. On the streets and in the villages but here especially I realize how vast is the gulf between our worlds. As Abraham chillingly told the rich man suffering hellfire for failing to care for the beggar Lazarus during his lifetime: Between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence.

I sit by the cot of a solitary boy of two, or less.He is sitting cross legged as far up against the farthest rail as he can get. He looks at me, his big white eyes contrasting with his shiny, healthy black skin, and he cannot trust. When I put my hand out to touch him he pushes it away with all his slight force. It seems oddly like a symbolic gesture. His wounded heart is not in it. But it is already a reflex he is mastered by. The boy looks at me in pain, defiantly and defensively as I keep trying to bridge that great gulf. When I put my hand into the cot a few inches in front of him he looks at it, considers the options and then slaps it. His little hand striking at something so much bigger seems almost funny. But this is not a momentary sulk from a terrible two. Trauma not tantrum. The traumatic experience that shook his young soul to its core is inaccessible. What can clothe the prelinguistic and preconceptual horror in intelligible words and thoughts? Only love could reach so far back.

He accepts small pieces of food and looks interested in them but those small transactions are not a basis for emotional negotiation. Love is patient, as the sister who has been at it for thirty years discovered. I have to leave with my fellow meditator pilgrims, slowly forming the conviction that only prayer can change all this. Not easy petitionary prayers. But the prayer that painfully changes the one who prays.

It was hard to leave the little boy. It made me feel a failure – though he was probably relieved I had left. It might take years of enduring his rejection before the desperate pattern of his mind could be dissolved. Like the children being bombed this week in Gaza, he is another innocent sacrifice on the ancient altar of violence, economic, social or military, by whose dogma the world is still run. An Israeli defence spokesman talked sincerely last night of his regret at the collateral damage. He blamed Hamas. There is always someone to blame to justify the inexcusable. There are always victims, too, and some victims – although only about fifty percent in Haiti – grow up.

Laurence Freeman OSB
-- http://www.wccm.org

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