Adeline Aladin is a young woman, just 24 years old. She has two children, three sisters, a strong mother and, for just about a year now, she has had a disability. It’s awkward to call this a “disability” or a “handicap” - she contracted a very high fever soon after giving birth, and from that moment she has been in a terrible state. Unable to walk, to speak, to drink or to eat, she was hospitalized for four months. The costs of that stay wiped out what little savings her family had managed to put aside. I mention this because poverty is a reason for rejection and marginalization here: Even here, in one of the poorest countries on the planet, people connect poverty with fault – if you are poor, it’s because you are at fault in some way. You must bear it, own up to it, and try to redeem yourself from it.

It’s 2:27 a.m. Is it night? Morning? I don’t know any more. Screaming cries woke us up, me and the eight other occupants of this two-room house. The ninth occupant of this thatched-roof house is Adeline, and the screams are coming from her. Her voice bounces off the cement and stone walls, reverberating ever more loudly and desperately. This will go on for an hour, and I say to myself that these are hours in which each second lasts longer than I could ever have imagined. Suggestions erupt from all sides: Make her sleep outside, hit her with a stick, sprinkle water on her face … but her mother, Yfany, holding Adeline tight against her own body, resting against her heart, is unshaken. Patience, fatigue, and love – that’s what will help her tonight. Adeline, cradled in her mother’s arms, finally falls asleep to a Creole tune offered to Jesus, hummed by her mother, a recent convert to Protestantism.

No doubt, if you were to ask if Adeline takes medication, her mother would respond, “Yes – but not today.” Yfany forgot to buy her daughter’s medication at the village market. The fact is, even for a mother as loving and prudent as she is, medication is not a priority. What can you do, in a world where your neighbours have avoided you since your daughter became “sick”? Do you get rid of her by abandoning her at the door of an asylum? Or do you silence her by hitting her with sticks? You might want to consult the ougan (the Voodoo priest) in the neighbouring village, but it costs too much. So you try to see to the needs of the other members of the family, all the while keeping an eye on Adeline. Yfany has recently converted to Protestantism – to save her daughter, she tells us later, when everyone has gone back to sleep:

When I was at the hospital with Adeline, no one paid any attention to us, not to me or to my daughter. Days passed and no one came to see us, and no one explained what was going on. They ran tests on my daughter – I don’t know why they did them – and they never came to tell us the results. All they came with, again and again, were bills for products from the pharmacy, products they needed to be able to continue their tests. Gloves, needles, bandages … and other things I’ve never heard of.

One day, a group of women came to the hospital to visit and comfort people. They spent a lot of time with Adeline and me. They explained to me that perhaps Adeline or someone else in the family had sinned and that God wished to punish us. But they also said that I, together with Adeline, could make up for our family’s sins. I still go to church many times every week. Adeline isn’t strong enough to go yet, but that will happen soon. I pray every day that the Lord will heal my daughter.

But how do you heal something that isn’t an illness? How can you hope to give hope without talking of God, or of mercy? It’s always hot here. And stories get tangled up in one another and everything ends up confused. Even Christopher Columbus, the explorer who found the Island of Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in 1492, would get lost here. One speaks of God and of Voodoo, of sins and of unhappy fates, as if they are all connected to one another – and of course, if we don’t understand things, we start imagining things. It’s cheaper than a visit to a specialist and it makes for lively conversation.

I raised the issue of poverty at the beginning of this blog, but I haven’t told the whole story. Adeline’s family still lives in a traditional house: the thatched roof, stone and rose-coloured cement walls, the scraps of wood and the cracks are a given. Meals are simple affairs – rice, peas, boiled bananas ... when you can find them. Because the lack of money has more of an impact here than it does elsewhere. The children don’t go to school, but this is not unusual. What transforms this life of poverty into a life of misfortune, even tragedy, is this woman, Adeline – this lovely, smiling, hard-working young woman who has become the burden of an family that is now isolated. Whispers echo in the light of an oil lamp, mutterings about what this victim must have done to deserve her fate. Heads turn on the street when this woman and her daughter walk toward the L’Arche workshop. Is she going to infect other people? Will she have another panic attack in the middle of the day? The curious hope she will; the pious fear she will.

There is a “before” and an “after in this story, and the “after” is certainly the hardest to swallow. Before: a lovely, young woman - popular, courted; mother, neighbour, cousin, sister; this Adeline who probably mocked people different from her – handicapped people, ugly people. After: a woman who limps, who can no longer speak normally, who cries for no reason and who howls her agony in the middle of the night. She has become a stranger to her family; her own children don’t recognize her any more. Steven, the eldest, is barely five years old, and he is, in effect, raising himself, often in nudity and in chaos. The youngest, born last January, was lucky enough to have been taken in by one of Adeline’s sisters, the second in the family, a woman who is blind. You see, I didn’t tell you everything before. This family is doubly unlucky: they must care for two people with disabilities. In Haiti, as in all societies facing senseless levels of poverty, children help the family. They are in effect the “investments” of penniless parents. So if you find that half of your “investment” will never be profitable, well, you panic and talk about a ‘crash’ – except that human beings aren’t abstract numbers but beings who must sometimes struggle just to survive.

It’s Sunday morning, 7:15. Yfany and Adeline’s oldest sister are at church. The sun, which minutes before was nothing more than a pink glow in the sky over Chantal, is beginning its dazzling climb amidst the leaves of the banana trees. We can already smell the odour of burning coal. Everyone is a little tired from the night, and yet only Fara, Adeline’s young sister, is still in bed. Flashing a smile, she tells us, eyes half-closed as she faces the endless cycle:

This is what my sister is like: we still have to find something to eat, regardless. Yes, certainly life has become harder over the past few months. It’s not easy to endure people’s stares. I’m often angry at these people, whom we believed were our friends. However, the sun rises and we are alive, so we resign ourselves to the situation, and we get on with it. We accept it, and we go on. We accept it – and we pray.

I’m getting used to this, you know. It is actually rather rewarding, all this driving in the streets of Port-au-Prince. A little shot of adrenaline in the veins – and we’re off! Turn here, avoid a pothole there, slam on the brakes, avoid a pedestrian, start off again, pin ass a motorcycle, slow down ...

The streets are narrow: women drenched in sweat—selling everything and nothing— watch the car pass, breathing in the hot diesel fumes of the Toyotas and Fords, the Land Rovers, and the Mitsu-whatever-they-are-called. Red light: a police officer tells us to go ahead; we start to move and a motorcycle cuts us off on the left – but we’re trying to turn left! So, the tires screech, I honk the horn, and – nothing. No sound from the stupid horn. So we start up again, bypass a pothole, watching out for the displays of grooming and beauty products that sit next to car parts and salvaged oil.

We buy a little packet of water, purified by reverse osmosis, from a vendor who carries his stock on top of his head. Saluting the smiling old man crossing the street, we head off again, then brake quickly to let a bigger vehicle pass – a bus and its 2,000 passengers! Here, the biggest go first - period.

Daily traffic – it’s called “blocus” here – is a furnace of heat and dust. It’s oppressive, exhausting, and draining - in short, the “blocus” is one of Haiti’s most beautiful inventions. This is nothing like rush hour in Montreal! Oh, no! Here, life won’t go away – and you can’t think about anything else but the road ahead: the jolts, the detours, the broken-down vehicles, the street vendors, the clamouring children, handicapped people begging, sugared pistachios, sweetened juices; places that are filthy and others that seem too clean ... the “tap-tap” (small pick-up trucks or minivans that serve as communal taxis), so-called because people tap on the truck when they want to get out, the water trucks and their loudspeakers that spit out the theme from Titanic, the bikes that snake around cars, cars that swerve around bikes, pedestrians who move more slowly than snails in the sun.

The route, and what its citizens have made of it, is a work of art composed of impossible labyrinths.

However, despite all the pleasure that it provides to its few drivers in need of adrenaline and new sensations, I would like to see it transformed for all of the people who live here, sitting and baking in the sun, without shade, the whole day long—the same folks who hope to make a few “gourdes” (the basic unit of Haitian currency) selling bananas, figs, and avocadoes; country folk-become-city-dwellers in a city that doesn’t want them, that has had it, where no one seems to be able to be able. (The city of Port-au-Prince was built for and intended to accommodate a population of about 300,000—today, it is home to more than 2.5 million inhabitants. )

But waiting for this change, this “power to be able to” – I start off again, because the light has turned green ...

- Na’p toune a goch
-O.k. I'm turning left
- Non non non! A goch!
- But this is what I'm doing!
- A goch la.
- Ah! To the right.
- Wi, la.
- O.k… but this is your left, not mine…

In L’Arche, we often say that “we are a big family.” This idea may be understood in a number of different ways, but my experience yesterday completely affirmed that the expression is well chosen.

Léonette is house responsible at L’Arche Chantal. A reserved woman, silent, smiling, she does everything with love. To me, and now also to you, she is Léo, our sister. In Creole, she is “sè’m”– my sister.

Jean Chéry has been a carpenter at the Chantal workshop for some time. Self-effacing, gentle, he is a calm and smiling man. To me, and now to you, he is “Boss Jean.”  To be a “boss” means to be a craftsman. His craft, learned on the job as it were, is carpentry. In Creole, he would be “Boss mwen”– my boss.

Yesterday afternoon, in the quiet yard of a house in the middle of nowhere, two families prayed together. The coconut palms and the hens, the hot sun and one white man witnessed the singing voices of the mothers, who made us long to find comfort in the arms of this young woman, to find courage in the arms of this good man.

Léonette is going to be married. So is Jean. They have decided to have a double wedding since it is more practical. No! Kidding aside, the two lovers will join their lives forever this coming December 24th - just before midnight Mass, I was told. As Léo’s brother and Boss Jean’s friend, I was invited to the celebration of their engagement and I had the right to say something there – me, who loves to talk …

In Haitian tradition, the future groom does not attend the engagement event. So we toasted Boss Jean’s health and enjoyed excellent griot, bananas, acras, and carrot salad. As it turned out, it was a good thing Boss Jean wasn’t there– I would have eaten less! Before we ate, each person expressed his or her feelings about the upcoming marriage. Léo’s mother is a true grandmother, someone whose picture you want to take whenever she smiles at you. Her words were ringing expressions of love and pride; she was a happy and fulfilled mother – you could see it in her shining eyes. And Jean’s mother, more serious and reserved, was the person who made us laugh hardest. In Creole, she said: “Si w pa marie’l, w pa bezwen vini la kay mwen enkò!” Seated in the shade of a tin roof, she was overjoyed to participate. And what was it she said to her son? “If you don’t marry her, don’t bother coming home …!”

And, thus, everything was said. These two families have walked alongside one another for generations, and yesterday the ties between them were welded together, in love and respect. The white guest, proud to have participated in such a silently perfect event, left the gathering convinced that, sometimes, we do choose our family …

I love Haiti; it is my second native land, a refuge from North American life and, over the past five years, I have found myself becoming more and more involved with L’Arche here. And if Haiti is myà second homeland, L’Arche is, without the shadow of a doubt, my second family. In L’Arche, I have grown so much, humanly and spiritually, guided by people who live with intellectual disabilities.

What was the project? It was well-defined, and the inspiration behind it renews itself daily. The European Union is supporting L’Arche Haiti in the development of a sheltered workshop in the L’Arche community of Chantal. Chantal, (besides being the name of my cousin), is the name of a village in which the second L’Arche community in Haiti was born more than 25 years ago.

The workshop currently includes two sections: a cabinet-making workshop, to which we are adding professional mechanical tools, and a Manba workshop, where people make peanut butter. A total of sixteen core members work here. The primary goal of the project is to enhance the work done by people affected by intellectual disabilities.

They gave me a title: “Project Leader.” I don’t like it, but it appears to be important for the paperwork. I don’t agree with having that title because, in a project like this one and, especially in an organization like L’Arche, there is no need for a “boss.” There are only people who work together, who collaborate to grow ideas, who transform ideas into concrete activities and action.

So, here I am in this hot country, which I have visited several times, speaking the language (well, getting by would be closer to the truth), and getting used to the food, the heat, and the lack of sleep…. What can I tell you? I just can’t seem to wake up at 4 a.m. the way my farmer neighbours do!

Please don’t hold it against me if I don’t update this blog regularly. It’s probably because the electricity has failed again, or it might be the fault of the Internet not wanting to visit my distant village. Or it may be that I simply don’t have enough time. The heat is forcing me to get a lot of rest in my hammock, neatly situated between two clouds.

On behalf of L’Arche Haiti, of myself, and of all the beautiful core members who accompany me every day, I’ll speak to you very soon!