Where women go to pray

Lessons of resistance in Haiti

“I have been to the mountaintop.”

Martin Luther King Jr

All over Haiti, at sunset, women go to Prayer Hills. They stand arms towards the sky in worship.  They lie on the ground and pray to a God that one might think had forgotten them.  They sing.  They sit alone or with others.   Their faith, against all odds, mixes with the beauty of the surrounding countryside.   

These churches have no walls or creeds or priests.   The churches of Haiti; the ones the mission groups often support, are exclusive.   A poor woman with no church clothes or shoes would not be welcome there.  Being able to afford to go to church is a status symbol.  

The poorest little girls in a village are never invited to dance for the priest.  The little girls from “better” families are imported for the occasion.   A poor disable boy in rags is removed from church. 

But the women, their hearts so close to God, find a way.  After hours of work in gardens and yard and walking to get water, they go to a hill where the spirit of God welcomes them with love and grace. 

As the sun sets, in my country, we are in cars or on buses.  We head for bars or coffee shops or cafes.  We go to gyms or classes or out for a run.  I try to find the “prayer” hill in my community.   I try to find that collective “yes”.

Our churches are mostly locked. 

People say they are spiritual but not religious. 

Our views; the places to inspire and comfort us are covered by high rises. 

Praying in public is not exactly encouraged. 

In Haiti, the church tried to deny women prayer but they resisted and found places of prayer and community anyway.  These women, on the Prayer Hills of Haiti are so inspirational.  They defied all the class barriers and the priests and found a way to pray.  No building. No stained class windows or priests.    Just women on a hill about as close to God as one can be. 

In my city, I try to find my Prayer Hill.  The thing about a Prayer Hill is that it is public.  You’re with other people.   Its outdoors.  I find myself heading to this one dog park at sunset.   I could walk my dog in the forest but I want the Prayer Hill so I walk quietly surrounded by dog owners and their dogs.  It’s the closest I can get. 

Voodoo

Some may think the women on the hill are practicing voodoo. because they are outside and are not in a formal church.   It is hard for any non-Haitien to ever understand voodoo.  Simply put, it was the religion the African people brought with them during slavery.  It later became infused with Christianity.     

Here’s something to consider.   Imagine you are a young man in Africa and someone captures you and sells you to Europeans because their Dad is mad at your Dad.   The slave trade, I learned in Ghana, was filled with revenges between people who were mad at each other.  And so it seemed that a person could really put a bad curse on you – so bad that you were put in a ship and never saw your family again.  If Haitians believe people can hurt them when they are mad at them, they have centuries of evidence.  

Currently the Republicans have waged a war of fear.  They want us to believe that certain people are a curse; that healthcare for all is a curse.  They fill our screens with fear and revenge.  They have filled us with fear about not having enough, even though we are piled high with things.  The Republicans have used hate to control and curse us, even as slave owners used fear and retaliation.

RESIST

When Haitien women were denied access to churches, they made their own.    Their faith more powerful than the fear. 

Footpaths of Resistance

The Coming of the Road

Lessons of Resistance

Lespwa fe’ viv

Hope makes one live

Haitian woman walking the familiar paths of her community.  How far would we walk?  What would be willing to do without to resist the destruction of our earth by large corporations?   How does resistance lead to liberation

I grew up on a dirt road in rural Pennsylvania.   I prided myself on my ability to cross that rocky, dirty road in my bare feet without slowing down or flinching.  We went days without seeing a car that belonged to a stranger.  It took us where we needed to go; the creek, the fields, the barn, the hill for sledding.   You walked to the paved road to get the school bus or to go to Friends Meeting on Sunday but otherwise the dirt road, little more than an expanded tractor path was our domain.

Today I live on a dirt road within the city of Portland.   More than the house or even the forest, living on a dirt road again endeared me to this

House.  The road has flooded out, as it does every winter.  There are huge ruts and ravines that I must maneuver as I make my way down the hill.

Dirt roads make me feel safe and protected.   

But I know in the case of an emergency my little community is not in a good situation.  We have bad, dirt roads and no one to get out.   Fire engines struggle to make their way up here.  We are barricaded from the forest roads by locked gates.   We talk about building a bridge so a stretcher could at least be carried across a ravine. 

In rural Haiti, we become familiar with the many footpaths that wind their way from village to village.  The paths that have become roads are dirt and filled with large washed out ravines.  A 60-mile drive takes 7 hours on treacherous mountain roads.   Even the major highways connecting cities and regional capitols are not paved.   There are rarely bridges to cross-streams.  If you are driving, you drive through them and hope for the best.

But most people, in Haiti, do not have cars.   Cars and trucks come from the outside- sometimes to do good and sometimes to take natural resources or disrupt their close-knit communities.  

It is true, that in the event of a medical emergency, community members must carry women down miles of footpaths to get help.   The paths wash out and are slippery and difficult.

What I did not see, at first, was that a path, was and is a form of resistance.  If you live on a path, it is more difficult for the rich and powerful to steal your land, cut your trees and mine your mountains. 

United Nations trucks and police and occupying armies will struggle to get to your hamlet.   You are protected by bad terrain.

During the United States occupation, it became a badge of honor to live and work on your own land and never sell your land to large farming operations.  Communities worked together to grow their own food; helping each other within local organizations.   Land was sacred. It held within it the spirits of ancestors.   Trees were sacred.  The footpath was a symbol of resistance against the rich and powerful.

In a small community where I once lived in Haiti, an American brags about the road.  I watched for many days.  Exactly two people had a car; the birth center and the priest.  Not one other person had any need for an improved road.  The people still walked or used animals to get to market.   The unimproved road was good enough for the occasional motto.  How had the road changed their life?

Each day truckloads of food were taken from the land, while children suffered from sever malnutrition.   Land was taken.   On the flip side, the women have emergency transport in case of an emergency;  more women and babies will survive childbirth.   I consider the choice; death by starvation or childbirth. 

The coming of the road.  It also means brining in diseases the community had not known before such as HIV and cholera.  They mean more deforestation and more erosion.

Roads mean climate change, even for a small rural farmer on a footpath in Haiti.  An elder looks up at the sky and says, “ I use to be able to feed my family but it never rains. “   How do I say that we in the United States, paved our roads and made super highways and bigger faster cars that is changing your rainfall and your ability to grow your own food.   That the coming of our roads is impacting every island community in the world.   Your carbon footprint is so small and ours is so large.

On OPB, someone says the new congress wants to open up more roads in our public forestland. These roads were closed to stop logging and mining.   There was a deep understanding that areas without roads are protected form devastating clear cutting. 

I also understand that the paths in Haiti are extraordinarily social places.   People sit in front yards, doing chores and welcome visitors and anyone passing by.  It’s how news is shared and how neighbors help one another.  They are a face- to- face network of community.   

When I was a child, I feared the “coming of the road” more than anything else.  I vowed to lie down and stop the bulldozers.  I pulled up stakes and burned them in our wood stove.   I and my little gang of mischief-makers resisted as long as we could but on the day they buried my road I was far away in college.  

RESIST

When the Taino Indians in Haiti could not beat the Spanish, the moved up into the mountains.  They built a resistance before they joined the Africans who escaped from the plantations.  

I tell you this story today to give you faith and inspiration.  For hundreds of years now, the Haitians have lived a subsistence life style in small cooperative communities without roads and many other things rather than be made slaves again by the French or by imperialism.  

I can see the paths as terrible poverty or I can see them for what they were – resistance and protection of their land and culture. 

My country is in so much pain.   I close my eyes and I am walking on a footpath in Haiti.  Someone offers me a chair or digs a root vegetable for me to take with me.   Each day, in my country, I work on community organizing.   I try to recreate the paths between houses that make us strong and resilient.   The highways are full of traffic jams.   But in my heart, I try to create paths of resistance.

Rural Haitians go without a great deal to maintain independence and self-reliance.   As we dig into our own resistance, we too will be called upon to

Learning to resist in hard times - lessons from Haiti's women

Learning to resist in hard times - lessons from Haiti's women

The night calls to me with songs from neighboring lakou-s; songs that drift through our open doors and windows.  I am packing to go home; unsure for the first time in my life what stepping onto US soil means.  The country of my birth, deeply torn by its inability to unite in a common definition of democracy rips at the core of our beliefs.   But this last night in Haiti, I am rocked to sleep, by the songs that have accompanied their struggle for centuries.  I try to hold these songs deep within me, so that when I return to my own country, I will be strong.

I am in Haiti during the Women’s March on Washington D.C.   I sit with women,  at the table and watch on a telephone.  We feel pride as well as confusion and fear.  The house is quiet.  Later we take a photo so Haiti is represented in the global support for women.  We write “Womens Rights are Human Right’s “ on a dry erase board and stand in front of the old pink mobile clinic jeep.  

When I first came to Haiti, I was overwhelmed by the death and despair and inequity.   But then I began to see the strength, the cooperation and the remarkable tools of resistance created, over time, of Haiti's women.  I began to see. 

Over the years, I have watched and learned about how Haiti’s women resist and declare their independence in the midst of the most difficult circumstances.  I am a student of Haiti’s resistance and collective empowerment.   It is not easy to grasp because, out of necessity, it has become woven into the day to day life of women who each day cover well worn mountain paths and cross countless streams on the way to market and farm.

As I try to chart a path of resistance, in my own country, I wander down the path of Haiti’s history and the women who created it.  

My granddaughter says I want to hug Grandma because she will smell like Haiti when she first comes home.  She tells her mother, "I want to smell the Haiti on her."  I cannot bare to loose the smell of Haiti and so before it slips away, I am going to try to share with you the lessons I have learned about how women can resist under impossible odds.  Lessons that I hope will stay with me, long after the delicious fragrances of food and farm and road and air are gone.