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Welcome to the Desert of the Real... |
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Written by Jason Brink
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Sunday, 23 May 2010 05:57 |
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There is something about women who are within a certain age group. The group seems to begin at about 75, and continue on upwards until roughly the age of the concept of the wheel and other such inventions. One of the characteristics of this age group is the irrepressible desire to feed people. I don't know if it is some sort of super-martiarchal instinct that kicks in, but the universal constants are the need to feed people and the ability to "cook like a grandmother."
I have just returned from a small bar down the street, called The Détante Bar, on Diquini Street in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. I went there with a few members of the ER and surgical staff after a day out at Jacmel, a local beach. The Détante Bar, or The "Easing of Strained Relations" Bar is just a hop skip and a jump down the street from the Hospital. We all went in the middle of a full fledged tropical storm, and despite the fact we went less than 100 yards, we all arrived SOAKED to the bone. The bar itself is a tiny little place, maybe 8'x12', and could fit all of us in a pinch. The hosts were delighted to see us, and in short order we had run clear through their supply of beer (the native Haitian beer, Prestige, plus a handful of Dominican beers)...much to their delight, as we were paying the "American Price" which seems to be a minimum of 20% higher. It was a wonderful way to end a long day.
The woman who is the cook at this little place reminded me of every incredibly old grandmother I have ever met. Beautiful in only the way an ancient woman can be, her face sharing with the world the weight of her years of life. She came out of the tiny kitchen, crooked and bent with age, wearing a massive chapeau. She hobbled over to us on ruined feet and shook our hands, smiling through missing teeth. I am going back with a friend of mine tomorrow for lunch so she can cook us spaghetti, her specialty. It is hard for me to see an old woman like this without thinking of my own Grossa Oma, my great grandmother. Her gnarled thick hands and thicker accent, her garden, her kinda frizzy hair she was always so particular about, her garden, and most of all...her cooking. There is something about food that is cooked with love, something that makes it more than just food for the body. There is no restaurant in the world that can compete with my great-grandmothers cooking.
Today was a day filled with bitter observations and irritating realizations. As the Hospital I am staying at is a Seventh Day Adventist hospital, there was a church service this morning. I poked my head in momentarily, took a couple pictures, and went and sat on the steps in front of the hospital with the translators and the daily herd of children who live in the tent-city on hospital grounds. One of the little girls, whose name was French and seemed as long as my arm, brought a book up to me. It was one of the normal SDA bible story books you see in great abundance within any SDA church, but it had one subtle difference. Inside the front cover someone had written, "I am hungry, please give me money, (5 dollars US)." This is verbatim, with brackets and everything. There are several conflicting reactions I feel upon reading this...and I am not comfortable with any of them; 1. The girl IS hungry, and there isn't enough food to go around. While people are sending millions of dollars to Haiti, most of it is being eaten up by corruption, and the people in the street are literally STARVING. I would LOVE to help this little girl, but I cannot just give her money, or we will have a riot on our hands. This makes me feel like a stingy bastard...but what else can I do? I cannot directly give her anything without giving EVERYONE on the hospital grounds the same thing. 2. The girl is maybe 8, tops...she didn't write this. This tells me that someone, one of her family members most likely, wrote it for her and sent her out to hustle the Americans. While this whole business of being hustled is kinda par for the course here (and often I go along without complaint because I know the people are desperate), I really don't like the fact they are using a little girl to do it. Even if I did give her something, she would probably go give it to whoever her 'handler' is and probably get little or nothing for her efforts...not that I support them in the first place.
What does one do? I don't speak Haitian Creole, so I couldn't articulate my internal conflict with the entire issue to her, nor could I express my displeasure in any form other than being mean...so I did what I think most people would do, patted her on the head, smiled, and pretended like I didn't see it. She didn't seem to think ill of me for it. It bothers men that the situation existed at all, and I don't know what to do about it.
We took a trip to Jacmel today, a beach about three hours southwest of Port-au-Prince. It was quite an experience to travel inland, out of the city and through the mountains to the other side of the peninsula. As it is in the rest of Haiti, the drivers grasp of the concept of 'safe driving' was incredibly tenuous. Outside of Tartarus-like pit that is Port-au-Prince the rest of the country is incredibly beautiful. The hillsides are festooned with tropical trees and blooms. Coconut and banana trees grow like weeds, overhanging the road in places with their fruits. We were also able to see some direct UN presence in the form of SriLankan troops wielding massive earth movers.
It was sad to see the cane and fruit plantations, each with their collapsed brick houses. However sad that was, sadder still it is to note that while the people are rebuilding, they are building their new structures in the exact same fashion as their old ones had been. They are even rebuilding them using the materials from their destroyed domiciles. Its very sad to see that no matter how great the effort to assist the people materially is, they will not be any better off unless they change.
I think a friend of mine is correct in saying that the foundation of a successful society is a successful education for the members of that society. Here, the people build like this because they don't know any better. They don't see that their own shoddy construction directly lead to the deaths of thousands, they only see the fact that mother nature whomped on them. Things won't really change until the nation as a whole can pull itself together and educate itself to the nature of the world in which we live.
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Written by Jason Brink
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Saturday, 22 May 2010 00:00 |
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Somewhere, beneath the pregnant tropic sky, lies a roof covered with cribs. Dozens of cribs, rusting away in the mind numbing humidity of early summer Port-au-Prince. Nobody seems to know how the cribs arrived on the roof, scattered in a kind of organized disorder. Clearly, they have been there for a long time, some rusted nearly through, but their purpose and origin are something of a mystery. Without rhyme, without reason, but a very solid sense of dystopian reality, the cribs rust on through the days.
The more time you spend on the streets of Haiti, the less it makes sense. One of the interpreters working at the Hospital Adventiste d'Haiti said, "Haiti is not a country, Haiti is a project." It takes only ten minutes of hair-raising driving through what passes for streets in this city to see that this is true. What was once a major thoroughfare, is now a cracked and broken linear tent city. Houses, exactly the size of four USAID tarps wired together with a sheet for a door, house thousands immediately outside the airport. Many thousands more live in the sprawling tent cities that occupy the city center, where nearly all of the buildings met their demise at the hands of an angry titan.
I met a woman in the stairwell yesterday. One of the tasks we were performing was the repainting of the hospital interior, and to do this we needed to scrape the old paint off the stair railing. One of the volunteers, the surgical anesthesiologist, was helping to scrape the railing. As we stood there, sheeting sweat in the tropic heat, a woman approached and began speaking creole. I was able to catch some of what she was saying, as creole is an odd amalgamation between English and French, but the finer details were not getting through. The woman was dressed very elegantly, in a purple dress with a black hat, and earrings, she was maybe 50 or so. As I struggled to understand her creole, the Haitian hospital administrator heard her speaking, and came to see what she needed. As it turns out, the woman is from the other side of Haiti and had come to find her daughter who was a nurse at the hospital. She had not heard from her daughter since the earthquake, and had finally gotten enough money saved up to come see her...only to be told by the administrator that her daughter had been killed when her house collapsed on the day of the earthquake. The woman stood in the stairwell, hands hanging as loosely as a dangling noose at her side, and stared at the administrator for a moment as the leaden weight of the words sunk in...she stood as her face was slowly distorted by searing anguish, her soul torn by the loss of her child. Not just her child, but the last remaining living out of six. She ran down the stairs sobbing and fled the hospital. My heart broke as I watched the grief wash over this woman in waves.
So much tragedy, so much loss. A friend asked me why I do this, why I would come to a place like this to help when there is still so much need in the US. To this, there is no response in words. If I could take you, for just a few minutes, and walk you through this hospital, drive you through these streets, show you the patients. The two year old boy who was brought in with a bad case of dehydration, whose heart began to go tachy and who could not be stabilized with the meager supplies that exist within this country. The departing nurses who have worked the floors tell the incoming volunteers to be prepared for a patient to die right before their eyes who would have easily been saved in the US...this little boy was one of those cases.
For me, my work has been varied. Yesterday, I spent a good portion of the day repairing cots. The average American thinks of a shining hallway with bright stainless steel hospital beds when they think of a hospital. They never think of a crumbling hallway lined on both sides with broken army cots. They think of rooms filled with beeping equipment, high tech machines giving up to the second readouts on vitals. They never think of the massive piles of wrecked and rusted equipment. They think of well stocked maintenance departments, with clean equipment and everything needed to keep the hospital in a state of repair. They never think of a room filled with broken sinks, or a stinking sub-basement that looks, feels, and smells like Mordor.
Amidst all of this chaos and destruction there are bright shining spots of light and life. The small girl, Miele, who is so adorable it hurts, clinging to the small doll my mother sewed for me to give out to the children. Miele smiled and laughed, holding the doll like a baby. Or the mass of children who meet us all at the front steps of the hospital in the morning, babbling in Haitian creole, sitting next to everyone and learning their names. The grateful faces of families whose loved ones have been saved from death by the skilled hands of the doctors in terrible conditions. The stoic understanding of the families whose loved ones have died despite the best efforts of everyone.
Well, that's all for tonight. I have been working on this for two days and not had a chance to post it. It just started thundering and pouring heavy-hot tropic rain...so we will lose power soon. Gotta post before it disappears! Love you all!
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Written by Jason Brink
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Wednesday, 19 May 2010 05:22 |
He tugged at my sleeve, patiently and unobtrusively. There were not many other patients waiting outside the Urgent Care Clinic at the Hospital Adventiste d'Haiti in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. I was there for the purpose of crowd control, but at the moment there was no crowd. Those who had been admitted to the waiting area were waiting in their lines, one for pediatrics and one for adults. Raymond, in his red shirt and shining ebony face, stood outside in the sun. When I turned to him, he stepped back and drew himself up to his full height, standing as if at attention. At maybe 5'5", Raymond, who is in his mid 20s, asked quietly and insistently. "Are you an American?" in heavily accented English. After I spoke to the affirmative, he smiled, "Thank you for coming to Haiti... Americans love Haitians, and we love you too." We spoke, standing there in the sun, about the nature of the national interaction between our countries. I have not met a Haitian yet who was not completely and totally enamored with the United States. The U.S. stands as a beacon of hope to the Haitians, most of which are living in abject poverty. "The big earth-shake was very hard for Haiti," Raymond said, our conversation taking a darker turn. "So many peoples die in the earth-shake." His voice dropped an octave as he recounted a list of his relations, crushed beneath the rubble of his brick home. "My mother, she die. My father, he die. My little sister...she die too." He said, his voice catching at the mention of his sister. "The earth-shake do this to me too," he said, lifting up his shirt to show me some stitches and tattered wound dressings. "The American doctors tell me to come back today to be cleaned," he explained, poking at the dressings with his thin fingers. I asked him to wait, and retreated to the tent to speak to someone about dressing changes. One of the RNs came out to bring him into the hospital to change his dressings. I saw him walking out again later, limping from what was evidently some injury that had been previously invisible to me. Raymond is one of hundreds of thousands in Port-au-Prince, who all share a common story, a common tragedy. Love and dreams, crushed beneath the rubble of a trillion tons of bricks and concrete. Entire city blocks folded up and reshuffled like so many cards. As we drove down the cobble and rubble drives that pass for streets on the way to the hospital for the first time, we were able to see the scale of the tragedy for the first time. Seeing something on the news or reading about it in the paper is nothing compared to the brutal and dusty reality of it all. The official death toll released by the Haitian government, which is itself in tatters, is between 217,000 and 230,000 people. However, a quick drive through the city with its collapsed apartment blocks and domino-tumbled streets leaves the possibility for many more to have been entombed within the rubble. It is impossible to go anywhere without seeing edges of the deep scars within the psyche of the Haitian nation as a whole. The visible wounds, now being restitched by the people themselves, hide well the fissures and tears within the heart of every Haitian. Every single one of us, standing in the hospital wards, surrounded by wounded, sick, and dying Haitians, feel sympathy pains...the sympathy pains of perspective...nothing compared to their ravaged hearts. Through all this pain, this suffering, the Haitian people have hope...deep within the reserves of their hearts, they pull forth a smile. A laugh, a "bonjour!" for the ridiculous American doing whatever he can do to be helpful. A joke, the gift of a painting, a wave or a peace sign from the drivers seat of their merrily painted "Tap taps". We, as a race, will persevere through almost any tragedy...we, collectively, have the strength to carry on despite all opposition...and we, together, will.
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Written by Jason Brink
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Friday, 14 May 2010 05:26 |
 We all feel things, currents and emotions that swirl just beneath the surface of our psyche. Usually, these are hidden, nothing more than eddies in the opaque dark waters of the soul; we cannot see the current itself, but we can see the flotsam of expression and action pushed to and fro across the surface. However, occasionally there will be a flash of illumination, a tiny star of correct expression to illuminate the depths and allow the bottom of the pool of soul to be seen.
I was speaking to a friend today, and I had one of those moments where I was able to actually express one of my currents that has flowed within my heart for a long time. We were discussing the various polarities of beliefs within our area, and something occurred to me. I will never be "satisfied" with my knowledge of the world. I will never be able to close the book and say, "Well, that's it, that's all I need to know." I came to this conclusion upon the realization that there are two types of people who are "satisfied" with what they know about the world. They are: 1. The apathetic. Nothing matters, they don't care, and no amount of new information will persuade them that anything in life is worth giving a second look at. These people are satisfied with what they do not know...these are the people who care so little for the world surrounding them that the most wondrous sights could be arrayed before their eyes, and they will not even see them. It is not that they are trying not to see them, just that their mindset makes it impossible. 2. The willfully ignorant. These buggers are the ones that really get to me. These people care, sometimes very deeply, but are unwilling to see anything that does not fit the script of the world in which they have chosen to live. Every piece of new information is immediately held to the rubric of their world-view and analyzed for adherence to this often very narrow view. Anything that falls outside this view will either be taken out of context to fit it, or discarded altogether. They choose these scripts because it is a way for them to feel safe and accepted, regardless of the workings of the outside world. Most dogmatic systems, whether political, religious, or otherwise, fall into this category...the willful denial of fact that contradicts the talking points they hold so close to their hearts.
I will never be able to fit into one of these categories. I am too enamored with the light and beauty of the world to be apathetic, and too hungry to truth to hide from the things I see around me. The thought that I might be wrong about something horrifies me, so if I find fact to contradict something I have held to be true, my own beliefs must then be altered to match the observable facts...whether I like them or not. To be able to accept the world as it is, not just as we want it to be. To know that all in the world is not right, and that it is up to us to fix it. To borrow the words from Mahatma Ghandi, to "be the change you want to see in the world." We have the ability to do things, to change things, to take the ugly truths of life in this world and do what we can to tug the balance in the other direction. In each and every thing we do in our lives, we can make tiny differences. A grain of rice is nothing, but with a few trillion of them we can feed a continent.
Last Thursday I went and got immunizations for my upcoming travel plans... HepA/HepB, Tetanus, H1N1, and a Typhoid pill series. I just got wiped out by the things...my body needed to deal with all the hostile forces injected into it...and I began the Typhoid series Friday...and it REALLY kicked my ass. I am feeling fine and dandy now, but that's alot of new and nasty things for the body to deal with all at once. I think I am going to go ahead and get the rabies vaccine too... I just figure that would be the worst and most incredibly stupid way to die. If I get taken out by and earthquake or fire or shark or bear or something...I am ok with that. Don't get me wrong, I am not going to hurry into it or anything like that, but if I go down freezing on the slopes of Everest, or punching a great white in the face...I can deal with that kind of defeat. If I am walking down some jungle path and get bit by a little bat...and die of rabies, I would be pissed.
 I leave for Haiti in 72 hours. It is going to be quite an experience to be back out in the world again. It has been too long since last I have seen the sun rise in other lands. Too long since I have felt the warm wash of foreign voices crashing around me. Too long since I have left the safety of the Hilfiger-clad and McMansion housed all-too-washed American masses. It will be nice to be around people who truly understand what it means to appreciate the small things in life. The tiny things that we as Americans gloss over in our rush to get from cradle to grave and accumulate as much stuff as possible. When was the last time you turned on a light and thought, "Wow...that's cool...light with the slip of a switch...I am one lucky dude. Whats this? You mean clean water comes out of this tap when I turn it? Awesome!!!"
We really are incredibly fortunate to be where we are. Chances are, if you are reading this, you are better off than huge chunks of the global population...and good for you...but don't ever let yourself take it for granted. It is all too tempting to fall into the complacency that luxury affords us. I know I do, and I hate myself for it sometimes. Don't just soak up the world around you...get out there and change it...make it better...be worth the life you live.
If you have a second, check this link out. It will be a bit of an eye opener for you. Put a ballpark of what you made last year in there, and hit the button...its kinda eye opening, I was blown away by it.
On another note, after having been asked by a friend where time goes, I have determined, after careful calculation and observation, that missing time actually goes to the house of a small widow living in the district of Rogaland in Norway. She was married to a man named Bjorn, who built her a fantastically large closet. When he died in an unfortunate clock-building accident (these things are best left to the Swiss) she decided to get vengeance on the world by taking trips to Greenwich and stealing extra minutes, packing them away in small multicolored boxes, and stacking them in her huge closet. She has been known to focus on snatching time away from students attempting to finish papers before deadlines the next morning. She recently signed a deal with Facebook, promising to assist them in the silent thievery of our lives in the form of inane posts, pointless status updates, and those damn quizzes. ;)
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Last Updated on Friday, 14 May 2010 05:51 |
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Written by Jason Brink
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Sunday, 25 April 2010 07:11 |
 We walk alone; in the beginning and at the end we walk alone. From whence we came, and wheresoever we shall go, we do it alone. Along the path we will meet people, holding them within our eyes and our minds for a moment, and then onwards once more into the dark. Through our journey, we stumble across others, some fallen in the path unable to carry on, we might try to help but unless they wish to climb on of their own volition, there they will lay. The raving mad, shouting incoherently at their own gods and demons, unable to follow any sort of path and finding themselves mired in the brambles of the forest around them. Those who fear everything, hiding within their cardboard fortresses by the side of the road, their fearful faces smeared by their own dirtied palms as they cover their eyes to hide the world. The angry, lashing out at all those who pass too close, or stoop to help those who stumble. The greedy, trudging endlessly towards their grave, pulling the sack laden with their own riches behind them. The foolish, turning their eyes and closing their ears to the warnings of those who see farther ahead. The unthinking fanatics, wearing the bloodied banners of their assumed cause. All trudging on through the murk, wholly alone.
They all trudge onward alone. From time to time, they will interact, but as a whole humanity acts as enthusiastically and predictably as mud sliding down the wet banks of a river into the swirling black below. Occasionally though, one sees something...a flash of gold in a river of grey. A pair of bright-proud eyes among a room full of uniform disinterest. A flash of emotion, inquisitiveness...light in the darkness. Those who carry the torch of humanity and intellect into the darkness of a world of those not-yet-dead.
Why is it that so few people really feel alive? So many people act as if they are just waiting to die, so few people seem to take that extra step, to walk outside of themselves, to hold their head high to face the sun. People just seem to exist, but rarely to live. These past few months have been wonderful for meeting people whose eyes are more open, and even more amazing to watch the process of the unveiling of the mind take place. I think back to the first day of my critical thinking class this semester, this room of sleepy-eyed students...irritated to be forced to sit through a class at 0800. Through this semester, I feel as if the back of my own head has been blown off in slow-motion. Not all at once, I cannot point to a "Eureka!" moment, but as if I have something growing within me, within my heart and within my mind. I feel myself changing, transformed for the better, by this mysterious force within. I feel something that I think so few members of my generation feel...I feel like I can change the world for the better, and I going to do what I can to make it happen.
Next month I am traveling to Haiti with some of the same people I worked with in Peru. We are going to do reconstruction work in Port au Prince. It should be an interesting experience, and its always good to do things that take you outside your normal realm of travel. I remember being a child, watching the news with my parents, as the US Army made incursions into Haiti to support Aristide. I vividly remember watching a man get gunned down on the news...I don't know who it was or who was shooting him, but I remember seeing the mist of blood on the lens of the camera, and the way the man staggered and fell in the dusty street. It was so far away, so...irrelevant. It will be interesting to be in the same country, the same city, working to help rebuild a part of a country shattered by the great rocky fist of an enraged earth.
That about all I have for tonight...I end with a piece of wisdom shared with my by one of those wonderful seekers of wisdom I got to spend time with this weekend. It is a poem by a woman named Oriah Mountain Dreamer, it is called The Invitation. Oriah's website can be found here.
It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.
It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love for your dream for the adventure of being alive. It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon... I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shrivelled and closed from fear of further pain. I want to know if you can sit with pain mine or your own without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it. I want to know if you can be with joy mine or your own if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful to be realistic to remember the limitations of being human. It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself. If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul. If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy. I want to know if you can see Beauty even when it is not pretty every day. And if you can source your own life from its presence. I want to know if you can live with failure yours and mine and still stand at the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes.” It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children. It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back. It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away. I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.
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Last Updated on Sunday, 25 April 2010 07:20 |
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Crimson Cannonball: The Non-Blog of Jason Brink
