My job is to provide you with some of the details; I'll leave the impressions and sentiments to the Haiti Four (as Liz has named them.) This morning was one of the most delightful weatherwise ever, warm, sunny and breezy. Great practice weather.
Yesterday, partly as a help to us in obtaining local currency, Bernadette Williams invited us to join her on a car trip to Mirebalais to make the exchange. Our driver of the church's Nissan SUV took us first to the dam that has created a huge lake out of the Arbonite River, of which Tracy Kidder makes much mention in his MOUNTAINS BEYOND MOUNTAINS. The lake is beautiful and the dam provides much needed electrical power, but when Tracy wrote the book the community-at-large was still reeling from the effects of being displaced from their land with little or no compensation and the electricity was mainly used to power a few American factories. It seems that the benefits are now being shared by local Haitians.
We also visited a beautiful new music and education center being built with funds provided by the Episcopal Church of South Carolina, which also provided much of the funds for Bon Saveur Church and its water supply. The pastor of this church at the time was Pere Lefontant (sp?) and it was he who built the first clinic here in Cange that Paul Farmer worked at and then built into the fabulous facility it now is. Bernadette tells us that this new facility will host next year's Holy Trinity Music Camp.
The new, state-of-the-art medical facility and teaching hospital in Mirebalais was the last quick stop before we returned to Cange. The road nowadays is very good, which makes one marvel at the thought of it taking nearly 11 hours for an ambulance to get to Cange back in the day when Tracy was doing his on-site research into his subject back in the latter part of the 1990s. It took us a lot less time in 2012.
This morning, bright and early, before the sun was up, we rose to find the dew on each shining buttercup. Buttercup?? OK, I stole that line from Robert Louis Stevenson, but we did get up early to climb to the very top of the campus called Golgotha by the locals, to view the sunrise. It was worth it.
As you know, many photos are being posted on this blog; the sunrise is included. Stephen
Thank you, Stephen...for sharing some of the details of what you are doing...it is great to have a description of what you are doing as well as the responses our musicians are having to their experience. We hope this is fulfilling all of your dreams and expectations. Hugh
ReplyDeleteStephen, thanks for putting some of the Haitian story in perspective. We were chatting at home before you all left about the effects of the dam, especially the displacement situation. How very interesting that after a ten+ year period that positive outcomes are being realized. In our own world we often take for granted our access to electricity. How often do we, during power outage, continue to turn on light switches that will do nothing during the outage? Beyond that, how may of us have resorted to automatic generators that switch on immediately following an outage? We also take for granted our infrastructure which many feel needs some serious attention. I wonder what the Haitian people would think of all of our snow removal efforts in the height of a Maine winter.
ReplyDeletePlease keep the blog going and the pictures are fantastic. Ken Williams