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| No rain in three months |
Since I had no internet access while in Haiti, these posts are just going to be reflections on themes of my journey, rather than my usual journal-like entries. The road to the tiny town of Petit Trou de Nippes in rural Haiti was long and bumpy, though not as bumpy as it apparently once was. Still, it took several hours over cracked earth and past dried up rivers and streams to reach the church compound where we spend just short of one week. The jeep jostled me in and out of consciousness– I was so crazy tired I just kept falling asleep! So really, the journey felt like it took forever and no time at all. Snippets of green and dugout mountains are all I really remember of the journey out.
The overall purpose of our collaboration with a faith-based, medical mission-focused nonprofit is to help them with their long-term development plan. The trip itself, with its many US attendants, was to celebrate 25 years of partnership between a Colorado-based project and this Episcopal church in rural Haiti. Our purpose was to document the festivities and make some progress toward understanding the role of the nonprofit and the church in the community. Ultimately, we hope to help them develop beyond the wells and school to a sustainable plan that will help the community help themselves. One day, not any time soon, the nonprofit would like to move on to help another community, ideally leaving this one to grow and develop on it’s own. Dependency should never be the goal of a project, and this nonprofit recognizes that. As medical doctors, however, they wanted outside (sociological) eyes to evaluate their operations and help them see what areas must be established or improved before the community itself has the tools it needs to thrive on its own.
Because of the focus on festivities, however, most of our focus this trip was documenting. We did take a walk through the community so my professor and the researcher (one of my favorite traveling companions) who went last year could reconnect with their interviewees. We also managed to slip away from the church compound for a few hours to meet with a women’s group in “town” which was just a few minutes away by car.
Arranged by our translator (French doesn’t translate well to Haitian Kreyol, in case you were wondering), the women’s group met late in the afternoon at the under-construction community center in the town of Petit-Trou. The compound was full of rubble and some people working construction. We really got to take in the sights because the women were all about an hour late. I told the translator that I thought perhaps they’d forgotten about the meeting. “They didn’t forget.” She said, “This is Haitian time.” Ah, yes, like “Africa time.” I get it. You get there when you get there. So, we soaked in the view of the ocean and admired the cemetery just to the left that jutted out into the sea. A little boy behind us was flying a kite he constructed from an old black trash bag, some sticks, string, and construction tape that he’d found lying around. Haiti has a ton of garbage strewn about, even in the rural areas. It’s not quite as bad as Senegal, and nowhere near place in India I’ve seen, but still enough that you could dig up everything you need to build a kite and then some.
Finally the women all arrived and we seated ourselves on plastic patio furniture on the cement veranda of the community center. It was a little awkward because there weren’t enough chairs for everyone. Graciously they offered them up to us, but this (in a sociologists eyes) was awkward as all the “rich” white women sat on chairs while many of the local women sat perched on steps or against walls. We tried to spread the chairs around (I don’t mind sitting on the ground), but hospitality runs deep in Haitian culture, as in many other places in the world, so they wouldn’t hear of it.
We talked until it grew dark outside, about life and the challenges they face as women, and the importance of support networks. I had a mini-awakening–one that maybe seems obvious. It has to do with institutionalized violence and human adaptation. Listening to them talk was like understanding how “gender” happens. At their last meeting, my professor and her research assistant met with these women and lauded their training programs that they’d developed to help themselves and other women in the community reduce the incidence of Gender Based Violence (GBV). This time, we prodded just a little more to understand exactly what that training program included. What kinds of lessons did they teach each other and how did it all work? It’s not what we thought at all, and here’s where ethnocentrism can greatly affect research. We heard “training” and immediately though of Western-centric ideals of “combating” violence against women. It’s turns out that’s not what they were doing at all, which makes more sense as I mull it over now. Here are just some of the odds stacked against these women: The Haitian legal system will gladly take away your abusive husband to prison for beating you, but while there, you are responsible for his everyday care. That means food three times a day (which is well above and beyond the number of times he might normally eat). If you can’t feed him, they will let him go. Huh? Yeah, that’s right. So, for them, it hardly seems worth it. They can’t afford to keep him in prison. When he gets out, your marriage is over anyway. You can’t reconcile from sending your husband to prison (they were shocked to hear that some Western couples stay together after one imprisons the other), so if you love him, you also wouldn’t choose this route. Then, for these particular women, religion is also being used against them. Passages from the Bible that are quoted out of context (according to our mission companions) are used during the marriage vows that inform the woman that she now “belongs” (body and soul) to her man. These women’s local pastor told their husbands that if they don’t submit to them, the wives are not allowed to come to church. Do you see where I’m going with this? It’s about institutionalized violence. State and church, which are all forms of social institutions in these small communities, both influence women’s decisions to endure rather than “combat.” So, what this means is that, when face with the two options of submission or fighting a long uphill battle against “the man,” they choose the easier path (who could blame them?). Ultimately, “training” means encouraging one another to just give the man what he wants and teaching one another how to be a “good girl” and cook dinner, minimize external interests, and be sexually available. I’m still not sure how I feel about all of this. I see where they’re coming from. But, then this trickles down across generations. They told us their sons go out and do whatever they want, while the girls stay home and do chores (a common narrative around the world).
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| Going to the local clinic to talk with doctors |
Socially and culturally institutionalized violence against women. It’s hard to grapple with, from my Western viewpoint, and yet their camaraderie and weekly meeting help them to cope and thrive in this environment. Through the advice (of submitting) that they provide to one another, and the support that the group brings to women in the community, they have actually seen a reduction in violence. It doesn’t break the cycle of violence, and it doesn’t change the status of women. But change is change, and maybe by being together, they can slowly influence the future. Our traveling companion suggested gender mainstreaming where they might bring in some men to the group and start dialog about why this treatment makes them unhappy and work together to find mutually beneficial solutions. I hope the seed has been planted. I hope for change and safety for those women. But, as with all good research trips, I learned a bit about my own expectations and how I can’t let those dictate the way I view other people’s lives. I walked away from our meeting feeling like we all learned from the cultural exchange, and I hope to go back and visit with them in the future.