Leaving Bayonnais

Last Saturday, I woke up for my last full day in Bayonnais to the sound of rain. Tropical storm Fay was passing through and there was pretty heavy wind and rain for most of the morning. So, my last full day was spent holed in OFCB, with the rest of Bayonnais holed in their own homes. Everything was pretty quiet. And on Sunday morning, I got up, ate my last plate ever of Madame Sabine’s delicious scrambled eggs, and headed over the church for my preaching appointment. I sat behind the pulpit next to Actionnel for well over an hour, through all the pre-sermon proceedings, slightly nervous at the prospect of having to stand up in front of around 250 people. But my main reason for being nervous was fear that everyone would find my sermon really boring. The services are close to three hours long, in a hot, sweaty church, so if a sermon isn’t captivating, people rest their heads on the back of the bench in front of them and take a nap. I hadn’t been able to understand a sermon since I’d been in Bayonnais due to the language barrier, but I’d sort of been able to judge how interesting a sermon was by how many people were napping.

But the time finally came for me to stand up and do my thing, and I immediately realized how lucky I was to have Actionnel translating for me. Actionnel is a very captivating speaker, and everything I said in English came out sounding much nicer in English. And a few times Actionnel added something of his own to something I said, which was perfectly fine with me. The sermon didn’t really have a single theme. It was more just me talking about what Bayonnais has meant to me spiritually, taking a lot of ideas from the book The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning, a book I read this summer which gave me a lot to think about. And I tried to focus everything on the biblical passages Luke 7:36-50 and Matthew 9:9-12.

“As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him. While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many collectors and ‘sinners’ came and ate with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, ‘Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and ‘sinners’? On hearing this, Jesus said, ‘It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call for the righteous, but sinners.’”
Matthew 9:9-12

I talked about what it means to be ‘spiritually broken’, something Brennan Manning talks about a lot. Overall, I think it went fairly well. I got a fairly decent number of “Amen”s and “Mmmhmmm”s, which I figure is a good sign. And later, Amilor told me “I really understood what you were trying to say,” which was more than I could have hoped for.

And then I ate lunch, and said my goodbyes, and got in the truck (which was kind of weird as I hadn’t ridden in car since May, or even seen a paved road) and rode the four hour drive to Port-au-Prince. The drive was beautiful, and a little saddening because it reminded me how little I had travelled while I had been in Haiti (not a single beach….). I didn’t even get to see that much of Port-au-Prince, but I felt that I had seen enough to get a good impression of the city. If I could describe Port in one word it would be “unstable”. And poverty was just as present in Port as it was in Bayonnais, but it was a different kind of poverty. It was urban poverty, but not like anything I’d ever seen in Central America. I think if I had spent more time this summer in urban areas, I would have seen a completely different side of Haiti. As we approached the city, we began to see UN tanks with uniformed peace-keeping forces sitting on top holding automatic weapons. But they didn’t really stand out as shocking or obtrusive. They blended in with the environment of Port-au-Prince, and seemed to reflect the essence of the city, in a strange and sad way.

I stayed at a “guest house” in the city that lots of Americans stay at while passing through Port. There were three American couples there with 6 small, Haitian children. They were in the middle of an adoption process and this was their second visit to Haiti to visit their future kids. This time, they were moving the kids from an orphanage in Port to an orphanage in Cayes, in Southern Haiti, where they believed they would be safer. It was weird seeing the interaction between these Americans who didn’t speak any Creole and these kids who didn’t speak any English. These American couples were talking and interacting with these kids just as they would with American children, and there was an air of great cultural awkwardness, at least from my point of view. But I could tell these kids were happy, and these couples loved them even though they barely knew them, which I thought was pretty remarkable.

At the Port-au-Prince airport, I had a long conversation with a Haitian-American woman from New York and she asked me a lot about what I had done this summer. And this was the first instance of many this week that I have found it very hard to give an accurate description of Bayonnais to people that haven’t been there. And I’ve realized that I can’t, and I wouldn’t be able to fully understand something similar if someone tried to explain it to me. This woman, who has visited Haiti many times in her life, found many of the things I told her hard to believe. It has been a little frustrating knowing that I can’t really, fully describe what I experienced this summer to other Americans. It was like being asked by students at OFCB if it is true that many families in the States have more cars than family members. They couldn’t really understand it because it seemed too surreal. But that’s what Bayonnais is. It’s a completely different universe, and being back in the States makes me realize it more than ever. When I arrived in Charlotte, the first thing my brother asked me was “Do you want to go to the movies?” So, after spending 12 weeks in Haiti, I came back to the States and what was the first thing I did? I sat in a movie theater and watched the trailer for the movie Beverly Hills Chihuahua. And I realized someone in Bayonnais would not be able to fathom what I was experiencing, sitting in an air-conditioned movie theater with a giant Coke and popcorn watching a singing chihuahua on a giant screen. It wouldn’t make sense, probably because it doesn’t.

Today, I was forced by my mom and aunt to go see the movie Mamma Mia with them. Seeing Meryl Streep sing and dance to the sounds of Abba should have been reverse culture shock at the max, but I’ve experienced enough culture shock in my life for this not to shock or bother me. Being back in a place where very, very few people know what it means to experience hunger, and education and health care are the right instead of the privilege, is not shocking any more. I’m not bitter any more. But it’s not that Bayonnais has made me jaded to what I see around me. If anything it’s the opposite.

This summer has been the hardest period of my life. I’ve had to ask myself questions that I never dreamed I would have to ask myself. And if I ever go back to Bayonnais, I’d be afraid to stay as long because this summer was just too hard. And if I ever went back, I wouldn’t go alone because it was too lonely. But I don’t regret that I went. Tomorrow morning, I’ll be back at Davidson, and when I see friends that I haven’t seen in over three months, I know I will feel much happier than I would have felt if I hadn’t spent this summer in Bayonnais. Bayonnais has made me more appreciative of what I have and the people around me, more conscious of how I live and how I interact with others. And it’s all because Bayonnais is the hardest place I’ve ever lived. And it’s all because Bayonnais is the most beautiful place I’ve ever lived.