Every American has a dream about the kind of life that would be happy and fulfilling, usually a life that each one can aspire to. The dream may include a home, family, and good income. For immigrants to this country might be freedom and citizenship. Just as individuals have dreams, America also has dreams as enunciated by our prophets and presidents: Martin Luther King dreamed of equality and freedom for all; Franklin Roosevelt talked about the four freedoms; and President Kennedy dreamed of a corps of young volunteers who would go into other countries to share their skills and promote peace in the world.
I was one who volunteered although instead of going into the Peace Corps I joined the Church of the Brethren Volunteer Service (BVS) program. My dream was to do as Ben Franklin recommended: do well by doing good. BVS was a way that I could do that. BVS had been around for about twenty years and had similar goals as the Peace Corps: young people sharing knowledge and skills with the poor and needy. We were not missionaries but demonstrators of peaceful, caring activities.
My assignment was to assist to health care workers in Haiti. I had two years in chemistry and an Associate Degree in electronics so I was supposed to be a lab and x-ray technician. During those two years I had plenty of opportunities help save lives and interact with people who had always been told that blancs (white people) would come back to enslave them as the French colonists had in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. That was one of Haitian nightmares. Another one was their own government. The vast majority of the population was peasants living on a few dollars a week while government officials and the elite who lived in the hills around Port-au-Prince stole from the treasury instead of using the money for infrastructure, education and health care. And then there was the line of presidents from the revolution to the present man.
In the United States, we hold a presidential election every four years. Anyone can run for president and we have elected men who have come from diverse backgrounds, from the richest to the poorest, from slave owners to slaves. We hold the belief that any natural-born citizen can be president. Only three times since George Washington first held office has a bullet ended a presidency while in Haiti, the gun has been the preferred method of getting rid of the president; either though forced exile or assignation. The ballot runs a distant second choice.
Francois Duvalier was one of the few men to be elected. He rallied the black majority to overcome the powerful mulatto elite who had held power for years. After the election, Duvalier, or Papa Doc as he came to be known, replaced the mulatto army generals, civilian administrators and clerics with people from his black supporters.
Duvalier did not trust the army which had often seized power so he formed a militia commonly known as the Tonton Macoute, meaning boogey man in the Haitian Creole language, In April of 1963, Clemont Barbot, the head of the Tonton Macoute, hatched a plan to overthrow the President but Papa Doc threatened a blood bath and mountain of bodies if anyone supported Barbot. The United States government recommended all US citizens leave Haiti until the situation was resolved.
I arrived in Haiti in July of that year. Tensions still ran high but Church World Service staff and missionaries of various denominations thought Papa Doc had things under control. Although Barbot was still at large he had few supporters. Rumors had it that Barbot had not been caught because he had changed himself into a black dog so the army and militia shot every black dog they saw. Finally Barbot was caught and his corpse spent a week tied to a chair and sitting in a park near the presidential palace as warning to black dogs and potential rebels.
I worked most of my two years in Haiti in the American Baptist hospital Le Bon Samaritain in Limbe on the north coast. Rt. 1 (sometimes known as Route Only One) passed in front of the hospital, through the middle of town, and on to the north end of the road at Cap Haitian, fifteen miles east of Limbe. Port-au-Prince was the south end. It was the only paved road between the capitol and the north coast so, even though it was full of pot holes and narrow in the mountains, it was heavily traveled.
The hospital compound occupied about three acres with the hospital building running along the highway. About fifty yards back were a house where the doctor’s family lived, a house for the Haitian caretaker and his family, and a guest house where I lived. At the back of the compound was a house for temporary and short term workers. All the one story buildings were constructed of concrete blocks, white washed and had corrugated metal roofs.
Dr. Bill Hodges and his wife Joanna, a trained nurse, staffed the hospital along with 15 – 20 Haitians that the Hodges had trained. I worked in the laboratory with Celamise Cadet who had been trained by Dr. Hodges. Mostly we did exams on blood, urine and stool samples. Pregnant women and malnourished infants comprised the largest number of patients. In addition the doctor saw a number of new and retuning adult patients. Bill tried to limit the number of people he saw each day to seventy-five but at night there sometimes was a delivery the midwife couldn’t handle or another crisis so he was called and if he needed lab tests I was called too. Whenever a mother had problems with her delivery that needed a higher level of care I put her in the jeep and drove her into the hospital in Cap Haitian. As we bumped over the pot holes I worried that the baby might bounce out but that never happened.
I was in my mid-twenties and a curiosity to the young nurses at the hospital. As they bustled around in their white dresses, pink smocks and plastic sandals, they often stopped by the lab to ask Celamise about me. It wasn’t long before I knew enough Creole to have conversations with them. They wanted to know about my life in the US, if I had a girlfriend there (I did) and things they might expect if they moved there. They knew they weren’t qualified to be nurses so they asked how much domestics were paid. They wanted the American Dream of freedom and the good life.
At that time, I was concerned about the lack of letters from my girlfriend. Mail service on the north coast was pretty good excerpt on rainy days when the planes didn’t fly up from the capitol.
Travel in Haiti was always and adventure. We had to go to Port-au-Prince periodically and the only way to go was to drive over the mountains and along the coast. When Hurricane Flora devastated the southern peninsula, I went with a group of Mennonite volunteers from their compound in Grande Riviere down to the capitol to see if we could give assistance. When we left Limbe about nine o’clock in the evening, storm clouds still hung of the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti. We had only the lights of the jeep to see by. On the way up the mountains we had to cut away a fallen tree that had blown across the road. The rain was heavy at times, often filling ravines with water that gushed across the road so we had the constant worry about being swept down the mountainside.
We reached the coast and conditions were a little better until we reached the outskirts of Port just at first light. The capitol is at the end of a cul-de-sac that reaches up into the mountains toward the Dominican Republic so all the water that falls in the mountains is channeled down to the sea. We had to cross the torrent by pushing water up ahead of us. Finally we reached higher ground near the airport just in time to see a line of six US helicopters heading south with relief supplies. We were thrilled to be Americans as that time when, despite the rift between the two governments because of Duvalier’s overthrow of the democratic process and his civil rights abuses, the US was sending aide to people who had lost everything. We had come through a nightmare to see another version of the American Dream: Americans using our bounty and technology to help others in times of crises.
Later that fall after the presidential elections in the States, one of the nurses at Bon Sam’ asked me where the loser Richard Nixon was. “He went to his home in California,” I told them.
“Why doesn’t Kennedy kill him?” One of them asked. “Won’t he start a revolt?”
I tried to tell them that we don’t do that in America. We change presidents through elections and the person who loses accepts that. The loser can always run again and often does. Soon after that conversation the President was shot and the hospital staff were dismayed that we had an orderly process for replacing the president and Nixon couldn’t take over.
The Limbe River flows east of the town unless there is a big rain which results in the river flowing through the town. When the river rises, cries of “dlo, dlo,” (water, water) and the moans of conch shell horns, the Haitian version of danger warnings and cries for help, can be heard from the lower parts of town. Alongside the hospital compound ran a ten foot high dyke built by the French sometime before 1804. One night while I was there was the dyke was breeched, somewhere behind the hospital compound. The maternity and pediatric wings were above the flowing water but the lab, records office and x-ray unit sat at ground level. Bill and I along with hospital staff waded around moving the equipment and records to table tops and work benches while Joanna and the children worked in their house. My little house was higher but still had some water. Then around two o’clock that morning the water started to recede and we could get some rest before getting up to start the cleanup.
The hospital and surrounding homes were in southern and highest part of town so that area escaped the worst of the flooding. People lower down in the main part of town lost everything including several lives. Since this was a recurring problem, Bill went to the town leaders with a plan to prevent the worst of the flooding. I forget the details but the plan would require the efforts of the towns’ people. When asked how much they would be paid, he said there was no money for the work but their efforts would protect them from the floods. The leaders’ response was that the workers would say that they are not Henri Cristophe’s slaves and they do not would without pay.
When the slaves threw out their former masters they worried that the French army would come and retake the country so they built fortifications around the ports. General Cristophe constructed the Citadele, a massive fort with 365 canons on a mountain overlooking Cap Haitian and a palace below modeled after one in Europe. The Citadele is still one of the wonders of the modern world but today Henri Cristope is notorious in Haiti for enslaving thousands of his own people to do the work. Several times when I asked hospital staff to do something they wouldn’t ordinarily do, I was told, “You’re not Henri Cristophe and I’m not a slave.” Although the Haitian peasants claim they are free, they are slaves to a system that holds them to one of the lowest annual incomes in the world and at a level from which most cannot rise.
At the beginning of 1963, the Hodges family left for a six month vacation in the States so I took over management of the hospital and Dr. Bob Masters filled in for Bill. A volunteer lab tech from California filled in for me.
One afternoon I sat in the pharmacy talking to Mme. Dessinex, Celamise’ mother, who had run the pharmacy for years. The hospital waiting room in front of us had only a few people waiting to see the doctor. The others had gone home and most would return the next day, hoping to get an appointment.
As I looked at Mme. Des I saw a few gray hairs. She was in her fifties but she had no wrinkles and she had the energy of a younger person.
I said to her, “Mme. Des, Haitians seem to look young longer than white people do. Most people laugh and joke a lot even though they have hard lives. Why is that?”
She replied, “Bon Dieu knew what he was doing when he put white people in a cold climate where harder to get food and stay warm. He also made them rich where they can buy houses and coats to keep them war. We have a warm climate so we don’t have to worry about staying warm.”
Mrs. Hodges once told me that Haitians are fatalistic optimists. They know that “behind the mountains are mountains” or as we say “it’s one thing after another” but they also say Bon Dieu bon, God is good. The Haitians have their nightmares but they also believe that things will work out and as William Faulkner put it, they endure.