The Women's Group- Haiti

THE WOMEN’S GROUP- Jacmel, Haiti- Summer of 2013

We run a women’s group for the local women. Anywhere from 20 to 40 women show up every day. Alexandra and Sophianna are assigned to work with me. We are scheduled to run the group from 10 to noon every day.  But they show up at 830 along with the camp children.  They sit under the tree, in the shade, with the other adults who are waiting for the medical clinic.

At ten we go in to our small, musty, hot room and everyone finds some place to sit.  The opportunity to sit in a room with more breeze than the streets is a welcomed relief to them.  And other then church, there is really no other place to congregate.  However, I don’t remember seeing any of them at the Salvation Army church service on Sunday. So this is their only social network.

We start with a prayer. Sonia leads us with her booming voice.  She silences everyone.  We bow our heads and they recite a few prayers.  Then the singing begins.  They have one song in particular that just resonates with me.  I don’t understand the words but the tone is so sweet, so hopeful that I usually sit and hold back tears.  I am saddened by all of their troubles and wonder what are their hopes in their world of so much despair.

After prayer, we move on to a lecture run by Alexandra, a bright, young woman filled with confidence, poise and personality.  She needs a mentor because she has so much potential for her future.

She picks a topic and reads from a printout she retrieved from the internet. She doesn’t fully understand what she is reading but she speaks with such authority that everything she says sounds as if it is the absolute truth. So I was in a dilemma as to what to do when she told the group that alcohol consumption causes cancer.

When she told the group that you will not get cancer if you eat right, exercise, regularly and minimize you alcohol consumption, I was torn.  I didn’t want to jump in and shake her confidence. But bad information is just as dangerous as no information.  So I decided to tell her about my mother who lived a life of moderation and still got cancer.  I put a twist on my story:  I indicated that my mother was negligent in recognizing the early signs of cancer.

I think it surprised the women that I, a white woman, could also suffer heart break.

They shoot all sorts of questions at me:

“Can you get cancer in the heart?”

“What does it look like?”

“What do you do when you have cancer?”

“What do you do if you can’t afford a doctor?”

“Does it hurt?”

“What foods do you have to eat when you have cancer?”

“Can you get cancer from your father if he had it?”

I start talking about breast cancer and the importance of self-examinations.  Instantly, everyone started shouting out that they have lumps and hard spots all over their breast, torso and arm pits.  They want me to touch all of these spots. I ask them if they wanted me to get the nurse to show them how to do self-examination and they all cheered.

So I go to Beth, our nurse volunteer, but she is busy with a very sick infant who is dehydrated and lifeless.  The mother is also dehydrated and not producing any milk.  Needless to say, Beth is very busy.

So I go back to the group and tell them we will have to wait for a few minutes.  So we resort to singing and dancing as a way to pass the time. No one is shy.  Women get up individually and in pairs and dance as everyone sings along.

After our lecture we move on at a project.  The first project: purses.  When I was unpacking the barrels of supplies a few days ago, I discovered sixty pieces of upholstery fabric samples from Lazy Boy.  Each pattern was more garish than the last one.  I remember thinking “who packed this shit and what are we going to do with it.”  Then as I stared at all this ugliness, a thought occurred to me.  We could make purses.  I ask Adeline, our cook, if she could sew.  "Oui", she can so I gave her several pieces of cloth and asked her if she can make a purse with all this ugly fabric.  She is delighted to be asked.  So I equip her with the thread, needles and ribbon for the handles.  Off she goes and she comes back the next day with a great looking, sturdy purse.  She is very proud of herself and I am pleasantly surprised at how great the purse looks.

So now I am distributing this ugly fabric to the rest of the women and they are pushing and shoving.  Everyone is hell bent to get as much fabric as possible.  I tell everyone to take just two pieces but some women have taken 8 pieces and others only have 1 piece. I go to each woman individually and ask her to surrender the excess.  Every one of them lies to me.  I stand there and reach behind their backs and retrieve these ugly swatches of fabric.

Now everyone has two pieces but most of them do not have two matching pieces.  This does not seem to matter to any of them.  They are just thankful to have enough fabric.

We distribute needles and tell everyone that they have to return the needles.  But at the end of the class, only four needles are returned to us. But every woman leaves with a new bag that is a source of pride for all of them.

The next day we are going to crochet.  But before we hand out materials I give a little speech about honesty, sharing and hoarding.  Everyone agrees to play nice.  We don’t have enough crochet hooks because it appears as if one of our packets of crochet hooks were stolen yesterday.

A woman tells me she knows where to buy these hooks for only 50 cents apiece.  In front of the entire group, she volunteers to get them for us.  We clap for her. In front of the entire group, I praise her for her generous effort, and then I do the math in front of everyone.  If I give her $10, she should come back with 20 needles, just enough for everyone in the class to have a hook.  I also write out exactly what we expect to receive from her.  Feeling confident that I covered my entire basis, I leave camp that day thinking that the women are going to learn a new skill tomorrow, something that they will carry through life because I am going to let them keep the crochet needles. They can begin to make things, sell them and support their families with some degree of modest income.

But what a surprise!  I got taken.  She arrived with only 10 hooks and told us that the price had gone up.  This is all she could buy with the $10.  Now we don’t have enough for everyone so everyone is going to have to pair up and take turns watching each other.

I am really annoyed. I recognize that poverty and self-perseveration can challenge anyone’s ethics.  I am really more disappointed in my own naiveté than annoyed by her cunning behavior.

For at least the first three days we hold on tightly to these crochet hooks.  We lock them up at night. Then the next day, two are missing.  Then the next day, some the stolen needles show up. 

 “You gave them to us last year” is the response we get when we ask the women, “Where did you get these crochet hooks?”

A mother daughter team comes every day.  They sit together and work in unison to hoard everything we give out.  They take more than their share and then tell me, “No get Madame.”  This daughter asked me repeatedly for my shoes.  The translator tells her that I need them.  These are the only pair of shoes I brought with me.  She suggests that I go buy another pair and give these shoes to her.

We discourage women from bringing their children to our meetings.  But their kids come along regardless.  The women tell us that they cannot leave the children alone.  But this just isn’t true.  Small children roam the streets all day long.  No one attends to them.  The truth of the matter is the women know we will feed their children.  So some mothers come in with three or four children who sit quietly in the corner, waiting for their small bowl of rice, beans and sardines.

Two older women sit in the back, almost invisible to the rest of us.  The do not add to the conversation.  But they seem to enjoy every craft project.  They work with a steadfast focus regardless of their poor vision and twisted arthritic fingers.

When they leave each day and thank me, “Merci Madame.”  Sometimes they kiss me on the cheek.  Today, as they left, they both said “thank you, Madame” and giggled with delight at their English skills.

The young women come to socialize.  They laugh and call to each other.  They can be disruptive and speak out regardless of who may be presenting a topic or demonstrating a skill.

With the first whiff of lunch, more all of their children and grandchild appear out of nowhere.  Lucien must let them in along with the two cooks who bring in the buckets of food.  Now, there are an extra  half dozen or more toddlers, small boys and other extraneous people who are with us, in hopes of a free handout. 

The cook’s daughter is in the women’s group.  She runs back and forth from here to her mother’s house as the lunch hour approaches.  She finds the spoons.  Then she helps serve the food.  She stops for a short break and quickly eats a bowl and then scurries around and picks up everyone’s dirty bowls.  Feeding all of us is a family effort.

Some of the women arrive late, leave for a while and roam back in when the food is ready.  If something was given out while they were gone, they can become indignant if they did not get the free sample of lotion or the spool of thread or the bar of soap.

But everyone is here for lunch.  They also make sure they are here for a cup of cool water.  But then these same women just don’t want to leave at the end of the day.  They hang around and chat up the translators.  They are usually the last to leave the compound, showing no interest in returning to their mundane life and homes across the street.

For more stories about my summer in Haiti, go to: bridgetkellyinhaiti.blogspot.com