Resolve to Love Larger

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This is part of a larger story in the Miami Herald, but there are a couple of things that I found very thought provoking…..

  • It picks up on quite well the juxtaposition (how’s that for a $5 word?) between the tragedy, sorrow and pain that is felt in Haiti and the inner beauty, strength and kindness that their people and the country as a whole feel.
  • I really like the phrase “Resolve to Love Larger.”    May we all find the strength, determination and courage to love larger.

So, read the article, think about the cab driver who lost his 8 year old daughter and ask yourself, “How is God calling me to Love Larger?”  

I’ll be asking myself the same question.

Tom

A visitor finds sorrow and pain — and beauty and kindness — in Haiti – Haiti – MiamiHerald.com

Yesterday we took a taxi to go visit Marise. Marise with the high-pitched voice who calls Deb every day. Marise, who when I first got here said to Deb “please put her on the phone” even though she knew I didn’t speak a word of Creole. She rattled away greetings in Creole and I rattled them back in English and we talked like this for a few minutes on the phone, back and forth, our introductions and warm greetings and laughter, even though we had no idea what the other was saying.

Marise is part of an organization in Port-au-Prince called KOFAVIV, working to ensure women’s rights. She is the mother of five, the three youngest of whom she is now living with in a home built out of sticks and tarps.

We got in the taxi on the way to visit her, and a few minutes into the drive we were laughing with the driver about some little thing. And then Deb asked him, as she does of most everyone she talks to, if he lost anyone in the earthquake.

He pulled out a tiny picture, the size you get for school pictures of his beautiful little 8-year-old girl.

She was out playing in the yard near a wall when the earthquake happened and the wall fell on her. He dug her out himself and she had already passed. He wanted to take her to the countryside to bury her and was trying to gather the money to arrange getting there.

He waited three days, but after three days he could not wait any longer. So he had to wrap her carefully in a sheet and carry her into the street. Front-end loaders were coming through the streets to scoop up the bodies left on the curbs. He could not stand to leave her in the street to be scooped up by a machine. The only thing he could do was wrap her in a sheet and place her gently in the bucket of the front end loader himself — to be driven away and buried in a mass grave. He says he thinks of her every minute. “I am resigned,” he says.

I hesitate repeating this story. This story that is not mine, but only witnessed, knowing that I, who am writing it, and you who are reading it, can be touched and then move on through the day, while someone else forever lives the depths of it. I wonder what greater purpose it serves, or if it numbs people to suffering to hear people’s hard stories.

My hope is that maybe, in some complex configuration that connects strangers across the world . . . some steady simple equation of ripple effects. . . that a heart hurting for this little girl will connect to some resolve to love larger. The strength to nurture some other precious life.

And maybe this little girl could not have been spared by the slipping of the earth. Or maybe, in fact, she could have been. If the wall had been built stronger, or if her family hadn’t been driven by forces out of their control into the city to try and make a living off of driving a cab, but instead had been somewhere else, anywhere else –

Marise gets in the cab with us with kisses for everyone including the driver, whom she has never met. I imagine there is an undercurrent of understanding that they don’t yet know about.

We drive only a couple of minutes, pull over to get out, he turns off the car and we all just sit for a few minutes. They are talking about the kids they have lost. His 9-year-old girl and her 20-year-old son who disappeared that day, lost within the rubble. She says, “Everyone tells me he is fine, that I’ll find him, but I know I won’t.” He says, “Don’t believe them, it’s false hope.”

He says, “I see my daughter all the time, especially when I am eating.” She says, “I cannot eat.”

We walk down the road to the house Marise has created. She is lovely and dignified and full of grief. I won’t tell you her story right now. Only so much heartbreak can fit in one letter.

And though the heartbreak seems endless, there is so much more to be told. Endless gifts and lessons and beauty.

Like Sylvie’s smile and Marise’s children and little kids with kites and genius toys they have made out of scraps of nothing, and sunshine to dry clothes in (which means the rain is not falling through people’s bedsheet roofs), and the hummingbird I saw feeding from bright red ginger flowers.

FRIENDS, NEIGHBORS

Beauty like friendships that persist without spoken language, like the warmth and kindness I have been shown every day I have been here. Beauty like neighbors who daily watch out for each other, like doctors who do their work in the streets and clinics each day because their hearts demand it.

Like the group of approximately 1,600 doctors, trained at Cuba’s medical school, who have been sent at Cuba’s expense to provide free healthcare for a year, spread out through Port-au-Prince and small towns around the country. They are joined by a mental health artist’s brigade complete with magicians, dancers and puppeteers to heal spirits along with bodies. Beauty like the strength of so many Haitian people who despite countless reasons to feel hopeless are coming together hopeful and determined to rebuild something beautiful.

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