To pretend that there’s not moments of despair would be crazy. But that’s where we here in the Boston office, all my colleagues in Haiti or colleagues in Lesotho and Rwanda, that’s where we support one another. We had Rwanda, Lesotho, Malawi, and Peru, and all of our other sites send money to Haiti. The collective group of people putting their heads together around this is very comforting. We all have very difficult, dark moments. And finding support through one another is very imporPARTNERS IN HEALTH tant. And I’m not blindly optimistic, Partners In Health is a nonprofit healthI hope. But again, I just go back to care organization based in Boston, Mass., this idea that to not have faith that and started in 1987 by a group that inwe can make a difference at this cludes Ophelia Dahl CE/DS ’94, PIH execpoint is a privilege that most of our utive director, and Paul Farmer, a colleagues don’t have. Finding a physician, anthropologist, and currently way to do this feels like the only United Nations Deputy Special Envoy to way forward. I don’t feel like Haiti. PIH’s mission, which it calls both there’s an option. I really don’t. And medical and moral, is to “provide a prefI get to go back to my family and I erential option for the poor in health get to have a glass of wine, and I get care.” Its model of care focuses on partto have some downtime in lots of nering with poor communities to comways that many people, almost bat infectious disease and address the everyone in Haiti, does not. w root causes of poverty. The organization serves poor people in Haiti and around the world, including Peru, Rwanda, Russia, Lesotho, Malawi, and the US. To find information about Partners In Health, go to http://www.pih.org/ or http://www.standwithhaiti.org/.
30
Wellesley Summer 2010
Gerdes Fleurant
MOURNING ALL THAT IS LOST The loss of life was catastrophic. And for many of the living, the wounds can feel like death sentences unto themselves. Next to the human toll Haiti suffered on Jan. 12, the damage to its structures and cultural symbols can’t compare. And yet, when he arrived in the capital in February, Gerdes Fleurant found himself drawn to the ruins of Holy Trinity Cathedral. He needed to see what was left of the place that had defined much of his youth—a place that stood not only as a house of worship, but as a shrine to Haiti’s cultural heritage. “In spite of all the problems Haiti has had, there has always been a vibrant cultural life—the art, the painting, the song, the dance,”says Fleurant, professor of music emeritus, who lives part-time in Florida and runs a school and cultural center in Mirebalais, 30 miles outside Port-au-Prince. “Now, the material culture of Haiti has been dealt a fantastic blow.” Holy Trinity was home to murals painted by the giants of Haitian modern art, monumental frescoes that recast stories from the Bible with distinctly Haitian subjects and landscapes. It was also home to a pristine, 40-rank Rieger pipe organ, considered the largest in the Caribbean. In 1963, on that instrument, a young Fleurant performed the first organ recital by a Haitian in the country’s history. The cathedral was leveled in the earthquake. “When I entered that place, and saw that beautiful organ under the rubble—that was shocking,” says Fleurant, who served as Holy Trinity’s organist and still
JOHN SCOFIELD/NATIONALGEOGRAPHIC
Our conversation seems to flip-flop between your commitment and optimism and hope, and the reality of just devastation and raging poverty. And it’s such a hard thing to wrap your head around.
Holy Trinity Cathedral after the quake
RICHARD HOWARD
You’re not living in them, but you’re trying to help the people who are. Everyone who works here and in Haiti has gone or is going through their own private—or not so private—sorting of this. Because it seeps into you in ways that the rest of our work had not. I don’t want to be too depressing and morose, but I think what keeps us going at this point is the idea of actually working as a team, a big team. And when I say team, I mean with partners and people perhaps we haven’t even found yet, and communities like Wellesley, that came together and offered all kinds of support. That was inspiring to us. And you know, again, when you are lucky enough to work with a group of people that you can shoulder some of this burden with, and when you’re lucky enough to be able to have found some ways forward, you have to keep going, because we don’t really consider it an option to stop. The consequences of that would be worse. The idea of losing faith feels like a privilege that many of our colleagues and friends in Haiti don’t have. It feels like we’ve just got to band together even more closely, do our jobs even better, be better communicators, more efficient leaders, and open the doors wider for more and more people to come into this work. That’s what we’ve seen: more and more interest, not less and less.
PHILIPE QUALO
How do all of you get up each day and confront these terrible conditions?
Holy Trinity Cathedral before the quake
remembers being paid an extra $1 to play its bells on special occasions. “The bells, the organ, the murals . . . it’s completely gone.” In Port-au-Prince’s teeming capital, there are countless losses to mourn. To Fleurant, part of moving forward must include a strategic rebuilding in which Port-au-Prince ceases to be the lopsided center it has become over the last 50 years, partly as a result of US trade policies. Already, the Gawou Ginou Foundation, run by Fleurant and his wife, Florienne, has begun absorbing Port-au-Prince children into its school and is working to build a technical
Amy Mayer ’94, a freelance writer based in Greenfield, Mass., interviewed and wrote about Ophelia Dahl CE/DS ’94 for the first time when Dahl won the Alumnae Achievement Award in 2007.
institute to train adults in engineering, agriculture, and health care. “We are no longer crying,”says Fleurant, who returned to Haiti in April. “We are ready to deal with the long task of reconstruction. We have to look at things systematically, put our shoulders together, and go forward with information and with cool heads. We welcome the solidarity of others, but we know that in the long run, we have to do it ourselves.” —Francie Latour