The first time I saw Senel was in Cayes. He was drenched in sweat, walking through streets filled with pedestrians and small motorcycles.

Blan, ba’m di dolà pou’m ka ale lòpital
Frè’m, mwen pa kònn bay ti-moun yo.

We talked. He asked me for money several times, and I refused him. My excuse, which is the truth, was that I never give to children. His intellectual disability, though slight, struck me as an odd kind of difference. How old was he; what was his life like; where did he live? These were the burning questions I had about this colourful character.

He took my arm, his own covered in sores and scabs; he spoke quickly, sweating profusely in great big drops. He needed money to go to the hospital; he needed money to buy food; he needed money for shoes. He did, in fact, need money. The scene seems so insignificant to me today, so small, so, so brief! But on that wet Tuesday morning, my eyes were opened once again to the reality of intellectual disabilities in my adoptive home.

I saw Senel again a number of times in the busy streets of Cayes. He was always there, asking for money. Finally, I asked him to take me home with him to meet his mother, and that is how my friendship with Senel and his family began.

Last weekend, I put on my reporter's hat and went to stay with Senel's family, in their home, for two-and-a-half days. My goal was to discover how eight of them managed to live in a small house, with neither parent working outside the home. I especially wanted to understand how this family lives with a child affected by an intellectual disability. As always, I hope that the photographs truly reflect the reality.

"The value of each human being is greater than the sum total of a society."

Senel and his family are poor. So what, you might say. In a country like Haiti, this is common, even banal. But you would be deceiving yourself. Poverty is not collective; it is first of all individual. Only then does it become collective.When we realize this, that change in our thinking also changes the way we look at collective poverty. We no longer see it as too big, as bigger than ourselves; we see it in the lives of isolated individuals, who try somehow or other, to emerge from it. So the generalized compassion we might have originally felt for a society at large we now must feel for the individual in front of us. To see something writ small is also to see it writ large - and the story of the condition of people living with a disability is also - and perhaps even more so in our time - a story of money. Or rather, a story of the trivializing of the individual in the face of the whole of a society. And we trivialize their situation when we try to explain it as a stroke of genetic misfortune, or as a a blow inflicted by the sadness of poverty.

Senel has never been to school; he does not have the capacity to do so - at least not to a so-called "normal" school. And the lack of specialized schools in the region (as in the country as a whole) means that children like Senel stay at home, or find such ways as they can to help their families.

My friend is 18 years old. He looks 14 on these rain-soaked days, 13 on the bright, sunny days that make him squint. Money is the word that is his constant companion. Sometimes a friend of his who is a mason gives him a bit of work, such as fetching water to make cement or carrying mortar to a worksite; sometimes he walks the streets of the city, looking for money. In the city that is somewhat his own, he knows the alleys and slums better than many and he zigzags through them, happy, lively. After all, who would want to walk through all the dark corners of the city unless he had to? A small creature, gifted with sensitivity and curiousity. Yes, Senel knows the city better than others do, maybe even better than the mayor does - who knows?

I said that money rules his life. What I mean is that we are always looking for that which we lack most. Love, power, wealth, wisdom ... Senel's parents, his brothers, his sisters, they are all conscious of their own poverty. Or, as their father, Bertonie, puts it, of their place in life. They talk about it with embarrassment, without pride or shame. It is a tolerable situation, since we still have energy in the evenings to take the broom and chase out the cockroaches from the floor. It is worse here than it is elsewhere. So we dream of elsewhere in order to forget what is here. When we close the doors of the four-room house, as the sun sets; voices rise in the light of a white candle. We speak of the family, the lottery, football, money. Especially money. What we would like to buy, what we bought, what we couldn't buy, what we will buy one day.
On Saturday morning, Rosemene, Senel's mother, told me that they have almost no debts. A meagre consolation this "almost," considering that the two aging parents have no work. He, for more than 24 years, wheeled his gigantic wheelbarrow, made of wood and two car tires, along the sidewalks of the city. Several years ago, he was involved in an accident. A reckless driver hit him from behind and pushed him into a ravine outside the city, while he was transporting a steel barrier forged for a prominent person living there. The consequences? A fractured left arm, dislocation of the left shoulder, crushed vertebral disk, dislocation of several vertebrae. In short, for a man with no education, who made a living from the sweat of his brow and his muscles, it was the end: he had to stop working. The wooden wheelbarrow still sits in front of the house, forlorn, like a dead body withering a little more each day.

Sometimes, when there is money, Rosemene runs a small business selling coal. But it's never enough to support them on an ongoing basis. She too has had no education; she decided last year to take some adult education courses. They are offered, for free, here and there in the larger cities of the country.

She finally started her courses in April 2010. Her weak eyes, in need of glasses that cost about 2000 gourdes (about $55 Canadian), tear up when she talks about the progress she has made. She is lovely, in her fifties, smiling - a strong presence, and just as strong in her absence.

Poukisa ou deside ale lekol?
Mwen ta renmen kapab sinyen!

She wanted to be able to sign her name - that's why she wanted to take courses. The pride of an individual, in a collectivity.

One night, Senel, his younger brother Mikelson, and their cousin Peterson took me to the neighbourhood beach. Senel's intellectual disability allows him - free of self-consciousness - to wiggle his hips and sway to the music when he walks by the disco. His intellectual disability, his openness of heart (an explosive mix of love and curiousity, of difference and indifference) pushes him to greet as many people as he can, even if - more often than not - they make fun of him. Mikelson, on the other hand, is not living with an intellectual disability. Instead, what affects him is adolescence, that stage of evolution when everything is about ME (to be sure, some people never emerge from this phase of evolution!), and he understands what it means to always think about how one looks to others.

The individual against society

The small difference in age - 18 versus 16 - between the two brothers plays a large role in how they act toward one another. Interviewing them, alone on the beach, under the setting sun perfumed by the odour of garbage, Mikelson tells me about what makes him angriest about his brother - it's his inability to recognize that people are laughing at him. Between the lines, under the tones of the creole accent, I perceive his real love for his brother who is "not norma.l" But above all, I feel all the violence of the gaze of others in Mikelson's personality. He wants to please them, but at the same time finds them superficial. He also recognizes that his brother goes too far when he throws rocks at those who tease him in the street. And as is the role of the younger brother (I know, I am one!), he doesn't hesitate, at home, to tease his brother who has such a hot temperament. Senel gets angry faster than his shadow, says his sister Maudelaine! But he never stays angry. Especially if someone offers him food as a way of asking for forgiveness!

I rub my hand across my forehead; it's barely 7:30 in the evening and yet we are all getting ready to go to bed. My hand comes back covered with salt water. It is so hot in these little cement and sheet metal houses. In fact, after only about an hour lying on-my-back-because-each-movement-makes-me-hotter, I can feel the sweat pouring from my pores. Salty-sweet. the rainy season is also the season of sticky heat and early rising. Tomorrow, I will enjoy a cold shower, behind the toilet (some would call it an outhouse).

Senel and I are going to church tomorrow morning. There where he will introduce me - it seems to me - to the whole city. The songs harmonize tenderly with half-closed eyes of my friend. God, for a moment, replaces money.

After the celebration, Senel keeps me waiting several minutes. The pastor always gives him some money from the collection ...

My weekend included much more. I'm probably forgetting the most important things. But for today, these are the essentials. You now have the backdrop on which to place these images of the life of Senel and his family.

All things considered, this is what life is like for someone who is handicapped, in a country of rising unemployment and a setting sun: Subjected to refusal after refusal on the pretext that he is incapable of working, it finally happens, and then no one talks about his disability any more at all!

Bruno, what surprises you most about Jean Gérald?

Hi Hi … Bruno has the greatest laugh I’ve heard in a long time. Jean Gérald is the most open person I know! He always wants to talk to everybody, to ask questions, to welcome people at the door with a smile. … Sometimes, when strangers come, I scowl and say we don’t have time to see them; they should come back another day. But Jean Gérald - he asks them how they are. How their families are doing; whether they are sleeping under a tent. ... It’s crazy to see that a person with disabilities is more sympathetic to strangers than I am, when I’m supposed to welcome people! Hi hi! …

Bruno is a very simple man, the guard at the gate, who let Jean Gérald onto the grounds of the AVSI (an international humanitarian aid organization) to ask for a job. In a way, he is the instigator of the good news included in this blog.

Now, I’m a little like Jean Gérald’s big brother. We talk, we give each other advice, we laugh, and we work together. I didn’t know anyone with disabilities before I met him. Hi hi … He serves up his wonderful laugh again, a laugh that lights up the interview.

In this brief article, I won’t go on at great length about the importance of work in people’s lives. You all probably know better than I do how important it is. But to know that my good friend Jean Gérald no longer worries about doing nothing with his days is one of those small joys I savour. I met Jean Gérald, who is 25, on December 3rd last year.

On the occasion of the International Day for Persons with Disabilities, the Secretariat of State for the Integration of Persons with Disabilities (SEIPH) had organized an open house for different organizations working in this field in Haiti. I was there with L'Arche, to sell products produced in our workshops and to show the display of photographs that made the rounds of communities in Quebec and Haiti.

Are you the photographer?

Yes, and hello there, I said. Turning around to see the person who had been speaking to my back, I found myself looking at the worried smile of Jean Gérald. Handsome, with a muscular, long neck, eyes full of curiosity and a direct gaze, he was standing about half a metre away from me. Your pictures are beautiful, but people are smiling too much. Life isn’t as easy as that for me, you know. He said all of these words – thoughtful, speaking of his own experience and particular reality – in French, impeccable French. Jean Gérald completed a classical education; he even studied philosophy, I learned a little later. But, as with most of the young people of his age (and there are many – remember that the median age in the country is 18 …), a bench at school was rapidly replaced by a park bench, or by the front steps of a house. Sitting is what one does here, when there is nothing to do almost every day. I am looking for work. Do you know anyone who might hire me? Those were his first words when we met on December 3rd.

He had been looking a long time, well before January 12. Sometimes, the clouds of catastrophes have silver linings that can be found if you look hard enough. My friend had knocked on quite a few doors before finding one that opened. Bruno summarizes it best:

When I started to work with Jean Gérald, I believed that I would have to handle him carefully, not let him be manipulated, that he would be limited – hi hi (hmmm, again that laugh!) – I quickly learned otherwise!

Clearly, not everyone affected by a form of disability (Jean Gérald has cerebral palsy, the result of typhoid contracted when he was three) has the same physical abilities, but it is equally clear that most of the time, all the disabled are put in the same box. Whatever the handicap, the truth is that we must sometimes be patient with the person who has one, when this person takes on his or her first job.

I am curious to see, in the coming years, how the job market (already very restricted) opens up for people with disabilities. Will we treat the newly physically handicapped, those who have lost limbs, in the same way we treat their colleagues without handicaps? Will salaries vary according to the task accomplished? Will there be more room for sensorial handicaps, for the blind, the deaf, the mute? Will we think to create workshops for people living with intellectual disabilities? In Haiti, we still talk, albeit timidly, of the reconstruction of the country. Hope, cynicism, individual realities, the desire for power – just what is this rebuilding going to look like?

People should give us more opportunities, Jean Gérald told me at the end of the interview. This is a good opportunity for us (people with disabilities) to demonstrate our ability to adapt and our desire to be something other than beggars. Me, I have much to learn at work, and I am proud of that.

And Bruno adds:

Practically speaking, it takes money to build a life, to dream, to reinvent life every day, to see it blossom. It takes money – to drink, to eat, to buy jeans, to send my kids to school. To do these things, I need money. I don’t see that the needs of the handicapped are any different.

In my imagination, a picture gives a voice to those who have none, because the media tells the “news” and media conglomerates too often ignore a true story. It’s a little like the moon and the stars. The full moon is so beautiful, seen from here, but it is so bright that we aren’t able to admire the thousands of stars that surround it … Sometimes, we concentrate on what shines, and we forget all these people in the dark.

It’s not done out of malice; it’s done inadvertently. So I turn to photos to capture, in shades of light, an ordinary daily life which is not at all ordinary.

The photo shows Vinvince, a friend of the L’Arche Chantal community. There’s a strong light between two coconut trees, grey smoke, and a body that dances in his imagination.

The moment doesn’t ever last more than an instant--then it’s gone. That’s the sad reality of a photographer, all those photos that exist only in our heads because we didn’t have the camera with us at those moments. The sadness, and yet, perhaps, at the same time the small joy of daily life. Because we know that the photo is there. All it takes to capture the magic is a bit of luck.

Can a photo ever really replace words OR conversation?

Joy is invisible and non-existent to those who don’t want to see it. We see above all by our eyes, then we allow our hearts to be touched.  Life is in fact nothing but Polaroid snapshot moments - ten billion strong.

Jonathan

I am afraid, again, always.
Like an invisible weight
I do not see the day
Will my heart live free?

A rose amidst the gravel
The heat overcomes me
I drank to his path
And saw all the tombs

(Ancient Greek poem (personal translation))

International Workers Day, May 1st

What work? It’s not here yet!  But it won’t be long, because the heat arrives, then the rains; someone will put me to work, that’s certain.

A man in a suit and tie, big gold-tinted glasses, a watch with no numbers, came to see us this morning, me and my three brothers. Fifteen hundred dollars to clean away rubble for him. That would give us $45 US a day each, because his $1500 are Haitian dollars. Seventy-five hundred gourdes, it’s not all that much to sweat my life away. But we had said we would do it; the man with the gold glasses wouldn’t come there alone, he would not want to end up getting dirty.

I do not know the end of this story or whether there is one, but I know today that Workers Day in Haiti is not for everyone to celebrate.

I met Manoucheka at 1230 on Saturday, the most important day of her life. The only day of her life on which she would have the opportunity to say “Yes” to Jacques! That in itself is a big thing. Last Saturday, she was washing clothes. Next Saturday, she will do laundry once again, if it doesn’t rain all day. But on this Saturday, life is something different. So you can understand that when Jacques and his fiancée asked me to take photos of this marvellous day, I said yes without a second’s hesitation!

I belong to the generation that is unsure. Unsure about the future of the planet, unsure about the religion of my country, unsure about whether we’re doing the right thing in life, unsure about marriage. Jacques and Manoucheka are themselves members of this unsure generation. In Haiti today, however, uncertainty is intergenerational. ... But in the uncertainties through which the country is wading, doubt is unacceptable.

Do you follow me?

Obviously, no one here knows how and how much it will take, but no one allows himself or herself to doubt. How many years of reconstruction will be needed? The uncertainty of life means that no one can answer this question. But is there anyone who doubts that the rebuilding will be done? No, since it is inevitable. We are uncertain in the face of the future, but we cannot doubt that the future will come. All that is left to us is faith.

Faith in God, faith in the spirits, faith in the international community, faith that the sun will follow the rain. The faith we want to choose to have is the faith that allows us to survive.

Faith in Others

Jacques chose to honour the promise he made long before the 12th of January in this year of misfortune. Manoucheka chose to honour the promise she made well before the 12th of January in this year of catastrophes. Together, they are stunning proof of what faith in another person can do. No miracle, no saviour, just a quiet faith that life, together, will bring a gentler tomorrow. They wanted to say “Yes.”

Yes to Jacques; Yes to Manoucheka; Yes to life; Yes to making it up as they go along. Yes to rebuilding – together.

Yes, under the rain. Because the rainy season is starting, and the beauty of this event doesn’t stop the rain from falling on us ordinary mortals. I drive through alleys full of abandoned concrete, looking for the hairdresser’s house. Here, under a blue canvas, under perfect light, Manoucheka gets ready. And how is she today? Today, which isn’t yesterday or tomorrow; today, which won’t come again. She is calm. Calm – as if she has been preparing for this moment since she was two years old.

- Depi kilè w avèk Jak?
- Nou prèske gen 2 ane ansanm. W te konè depi kilè ke w tap maye avèk li?  Depi ke mwen te wè li.

No doubt about it. There is a lot of uncertainty day to day, but there is no doubt in her voice. Ever since they have known one another, she has known that they would marry. And today, feet in the mud, clean pants no longer so clean, my ears tingle with pleasure to hear these words. No doubt about it, Haitians are sages in the making,  I tell myself, rescuing my memory card from a puddle of brown water.

So, she’s getting ready. I’m helping with everything, and we laugh about the impossible life facing two newlyweds in this hot country. Jacques and Manoucheka share a tent on the L’Arche grounds with Daniel and Monique; each couple has a side of the tent. They have become friends; Manoucheka asked Daniel to recite the prayer to end the ceremony. They are truly friends.

The young woman slips into her dress: I capture the moment - the singular moment that asks only to be frozen in the infinity of pixels. I love taking pictures because it allows me to live in and share people’s daily lives. Some journeys are just perfect, mine is one among them.

Then I speed off toward the house of Jacques’ friend, to find there the groom in his suit and tie, not to mention white gloves. I love the small details. I love it that Jacques takes time to position the flower on his black vest, that he has gone to the trouble of perfuming the white cotton gloves that are a shade too small. They are the kind of sweet, small gestures only a groom can make. Looking at himself in the mirror and thinking about words, thinking about her, thinking about his life, the life no one else may live.

Now, a guy is not a girl. A woman who is getting married might spend three hours fixing her hair, and three more hours painting her eyes mauve, and dressing herself in white. The guy? – he takes three minutes to get dressed. Then he spends five hours and 57 minutes waiting for life to take its course. All the same, it’s funny: it doesn’t matter that we take the time we need to get ready, it’s the bride who decides when to arrive.

Manoucheka decided that she would be an hour and a half late. That was okay, because some of the guests arrived even later than that. One lovely couple even arrived at the exact moment the bride and groom were leaving in the car that took them to the reception. Here, more than elsewhere, there is no such thing as a fixed time.

The ceremony was lovely, simple, held in a schoolyard-become-church-of-God, resisting yet welcoming. The blue canvas over our heads, we felt like in a dream, and the rain stopped for a while. Too late, my mother would have said, your shoes are mud-stained, so are your pants. My mother is right sometimes. But she wasn’t there, so I wandered around anyway, smile on my lips, camera to my eye – and with happy and bare! How do you do it, you Haitian women? How do you keep your dress immaculately white while the water pouring from the sky transforms the asphalt into multicoloured canvas? I must figure this out some day ...

Then they embrace. There is great beauty in their closed eyes as the bride and groom give themselves to one another. Hand in hand, souls at peace. They have said “Yes,” and it is the most beautiful thing in the world– this silent vow to go on, to never stop. They had one of the best reasons in the world for not getting married now, in the wake of the earthquake. But when you live here, you don’t doubt. You simply do. Maybe so that you can recapture some semblance of meaning in the midst of daily life that is so difficult.

This Saturday, the drops of rain were sweet, gentle, a blessing. Balm for the spirit. Even if the wedding’s marraine, leaving the church, had to run from the drops falling from the sky, her dress hitched up almost to her hips, to get to the couple’s car. They couldn’t leave without the bouquet, no matter what!

------------------------------- 

The rain is falling heavily, like a burden, on the narrow, steep streets, full of the concrete debris of Port-au-Prince. With troubled spirits, we are headed to Marie-Cécile’s funeral. Born in France, a Haitian by adoption, she had given her life to this country, to L’Arche (as a member of the Board of Directors), and to education (as a trainer of teachers).

It is strange that she had to die in order for me to write about her here. Strange that the rain on this day is heavy with meaning; it no longer feels like Saturday’s sweet rain, but something monstrously cruel and pitiless that ravages the country with each new downpour.

Marie-Cécile loved this country with all her heart, and she loved its people even more. Perhaps we must do the same: love this country, its people, its land and its ancestors, in order to get to a place where we can give without reward. A single tear courses down my gray face; a reflection of the sky, it seems.

And – to restore the sun of your smiles – here are some photographs from the wedding ...