yes please(62)

I met girls with names like Jenica and Suzenie. When I said their names out loud it felt like I had jewels in my mouth. One girl told me her nickname was Sexy. She couldn’t have been twelve, and I worried about who had given her that name. A weird sandstorm kicked up and the dust swirled like a magic trick. We all paused together to watch, and I took a mental picture and time-traveled to the future. I thought about my boys being teenagers and playing soccer and dancing and sharing.

In Kenscoff we ate dinner and heard stories from WWO supervisors. Melissa was a soft-spoken blonde who knew perfect Creole and worked in West Africa with the Peace Corps. Her funny partner, Wendy, came from Michigan by way of Uganda and Kenya. Wendy spoke with what I would call a “world accent,” and she and Melissa told the story of meeting during the Haitian earthquake. Falling in love among the aftershocks . . . it sounded so romantic, and I wondered if Anderson Cooper had ever fallen in love during an earthquake. Then, for the hundredth time that week, I wished I were a lesbian. Melissa and Wendy told us a story about a woman in Haiti who used to dress up like a nun and collect donations for her “orphanage.” She was not a sister of God, and the place she ran sounded like a jail. Melissa cozied up to her until she was finally allowed access inside. The children there were malnourished and dying. Some had rat bites. Girls were being sold into prostitution. WWO brought in toys and youth volunteers. They surreptitiously counted the children as they sang songs with them. They estimated there were at least sixty-five kids in danger in that horrible place. Melissa and Wendy spoke to anyone who listened about the terrible conditions, until the police and UNICEF intervened. The woman threatened them with voodoo, which is no joke in Haiti. Wendy and Melissa scrambled to find placement for all the kids, and on the day they were taken out of that nightmare there were WWO workers waiting in a line so each child had a lap to sit on. That evil woman went to jail. In just one month after he was rescued from her care, one little guy named Shashu went from being a nonverbal boy with a distended belly to being a butterball who loved to sing.

People are very bad and very good.

A little love goes a long way.

The hardest day in Haiti for me was when we visited a few orphanages. Some of these places were doing the best they could. Others had a long way to go. Jane’s colleague Noah and I saw babies living in cribs that looked like cages. A little boy named Woosley jumped into Noah’s arms and wouldn’t let go. He was desperate for attachment, and men were especially scarce. Woosley held on to Noah like a bramble. We were filled with anxiety because we knew we would have to say good-bye. Noah had to drop him back off at his crowded room, and Woosley hung on and started to get upset. He finally got down and faced a corner as he cried. It was the loneliest thing I have ever seen. A teacher went to him, but it barely comforted him.



Those kids needed so much holding. Kisses and hugs and clothes and parents. They needed everything. The enormity of what they needed was so intense. We ended up talking in the street with Jane, and crying. Jane was agitated and passionate. She talked about all the work left to do and all the small changes that can improve children’s lives. I was once again moved by her ability to steer into the curve. Jane was a big-wave rider. She didn’t make the mistake that most of us make, which is to close our eyes and hope the waves will go away or miss us or hit someone else. She dove in, headfirst. That night, I read the deeply calm and at times sneakily funny Pema Ch?dr?n, one my favorite writers: “There are no promises. Look deeply at joy and sorrow, at laughing and crying, at hoping and fearing, at all that lives and dies. What truly heals is gratitude and tenderness.” Pema reminded me to practice tonglen, which is this meditation breathing exercise where you breathe in all the pain and breathe out nothing but love. It felt like the opposite of what I had been doing for a year. I felt one tiny molecule in the bottom of my heart feel better. I heard dogs f*cking outside my window and wondered if I should try to find my Haitian driver. I e-mailed Tina about her Mandy Patinkin bit.

On our last night we went to the Hotel Montana, which had started rebuilding after the earthquake. One of the owners, Gerthe, spoke of how she had survived and her sister Nadine had been pulled out of the rubble. I later read in the Washington Post that her sister was trapped for days and found by a beagle that caught her scent. The rescuers brought over her son, who called to her and said, “I think that is my mother down there.” She was pulled out days later. In the same article, Gerthe says that Nadine had been kidnapped in Haiti a few years ago and held for fifteen days. “You have no idea what it takes to survive here,” Gerthe said. I knew she had a very good idea.

Gerthe also talked about travel. She talked about living in Jamaica. She joked about her husband and her haircut, because she is more than the earthquake. A person’s tragedy does not make up their entire life. A story carves deep grooves into our brains each time we tell it. But we aren’t one story. We can change our stories. We can write our own. Melissa and Wendy and Jane and I joked about the Golden Globes and gave each other fake awards. I gave Melissa “Best Person in Charge.” She gave me “Most Famous and Most Normal.” This meant and means a great deal.

Later that night we talked about animals. Wendy shared a story about how her daughter was caught in a stampede of elephants and lived to tell about it because she ran left instead of right. And because she knew one simple fact: elephants leave the way they come in. This reminded me of something I read, that your divorce will be like your marriage. We all agreed that elephants win for coolest animal, and I showed off by reciting my elephant facts. Elephants have long pregnancies and purr like cats to communicate. They cry, pray, and laugh. They grieve. They have greeting ceremonies when one of them has been away for a long time.