Pinpoints of Light in the Haitian Night

Haiti and the Servant-Leader Response

Who knows how many dead and injured. Families in Haiti, the United States and around the world desperate for information. A crippled airport, a damaged port. Black nights with no electricity.

As we know, a 7.0 level earthquake has devastated Port-au-Prince, the capital of the small island nation of Haiti, the poorest nation in the western hemisphere.

The world is responding - with people, money, ships, helicopters, medical supplies, food and water. Sadness and disbelief hang in the air, and shock. An inability to imagine the horror.

As servant-leaders, what can be our most helpful response? To send cash, surely. If we are in a profession that can help to address the immediate chaos and suffering, to go to Haiti ourselves or help from a distance.

Surely the right-now needs must be met: saving as many lives as possible, burying the dead, tending to the injured, restoring order, providing food, shelter, water, comfort.

But what about healing on a long-range basis? As servant-leaders, we do respond to emergencies as they occur, but our role is also to look to the systemic issues involved in such catastrophes and ask if factors exist that contribute to such disasters occurring and reoccurring in a tragic cycle that does not contribute to the ongoing growth and health of everyone involved.

Time after time, an impoverished country suffers an unimaginable natural disaster, and the wealthier, stronger powers come in to help. We are familiar with the pattern; just as one example out of many, we remember the horrific Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, leaving 150,000 people dead or missing and injuring and displacing countless more.

The world literally responded, helped with the crushing first hours, days, weeks, until some form of stability returned.

Experts describe Haiti as a particularly vulnerable nation because of its chronic poverty, its geographic location subject to earthquakes and hurricanes, a long history of government oppression.

What thoughts can we as servant-leaders offer that would contribute to a basic change in the dismal system that exists now and bring about a transformation that would help to bring Haiti and other countries like it into a new way of living and being? Stronger infrastructures, stricter building codes, yes, but on a deeper level, more national independence growing from a fairer share of the world's wealth, health and strength?

Such issues have begun to be addressed; for example, former president Bill Clinton, as the United Nations special envoy to Haiti, has with others begun to talk about Haiti's future and exploring ways to make that little country stronger.

It remains for us as servant-leaders, however, to ask certain basic questions -- hard, sometimes unwelcome and unpopular questions:

How does a history of governmental oppression contribute to the magnitude of destruction once an event like this occurs?

How do we make decisions not just in Haiti but everywhere in the world about where we live, especially when it comes to places that are particularly subject to hurricanes, floods, earthquakes?

How do we help with the immediate needs without fostering an unhealthy, cruel system that keeps repeating itself again and again?

What, in short, is the servant-leader's best response?

The Gabriel Center welcomes your thoughts and ideas and invites you to share them as part of this conversation.

It may not feel like much of a contribution in alleviating the suffering visited on our southern neighbors.

But, both now and in the long run, your thoughts of love and support, your creative impulse to help build a stronger Haiti as we go forward, do matter, do have energy, strength, power, import.

It means that as we give cash, professional expertise, send thoughts and prayers, taking time to look at this catastrophe from a systemic perspective means that we are giving all that we have to this struggling people.

And it means that a young Haitian boy, a Haitian grandmother, a young Haitian man and woman might be able to look up at that black sky - the blackest of all black nights - and see tiny yellow pinpoints of light piercing the dark.

And it means that they just might know that we are with them. In these days of darkness and in the days to come that will assuredly bring greater light.

Sources:

"Atlanta Journal-Constitution"
News programs: CNN, "PBS NewsHour"
"The Two-Way," National Public Radio's news blog

We invite you to share your thoughts on the following reflection on community: 

The overhead lights dimmed in the newly restored Strand Theater on the square in Marietta, GA. In the comforting darkness, the gilded rococo work on the ends of the aisles shone bright in the light affixed to each row.

Long, tall letters filled the screen, letters forming words: Diana Ross. "The Wiz." Michael Jackson. Richard Pryor. Lena Horne.

Shortly after Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009, big, bold, black letters had filled the Strand marquee announcing that "The Wiz," starring Michael Jackson, would be shown as part of the theater's summer series for children.

The grand old lady on the corner of Lawrence and Cherokee, the art deco theater built in 1935, reopened in the winter of 2008 after being vacant since 2002 and receiving massive renovation, even including the installation of a theater organ.

Above the marquee, the old words etched into the Strand's façade announce: photoplay, etc.
And on the marquee itself, the name bespeaking the new: Michael Jackson.

"The Wiz" and "The Wizard of Oz": Some different, some the same. The golden brick road takes us through Oz to the Emerald City in "The Wiz," just as it does in "The Wizard of Oz." We have Dorothy, Toto, the Scarecrow -- played by Michael Jackson -- the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion. Oz differs in "The Wiz" from "The Wizard of Oz," portrayed as a wondrous urban landscape with subways, taxicabs, escalators, sky rises rather than pastures, meadows and forests.

But on the final trip to the Emerald City, we learn what we learned in Judy Garland's tale: that we already have what we need, who we are, within us. Our hearts, our minds, our courage, our home. It's within us now, will be always and has always been. We walk out of the theater with the same treasured reassurance in our pocket. No matter whether we've just seen "The Wiz" or "The Wizard of Oz."

Michael Jackson's death came just a few days before we learned about another death, this time of a friend in Marietta. Shastin: tall, lanky, blonde, 23 years old. We knew her from her work as a server at Hemingway's, one of our regular stops at lunchtime. Full of spirit, she knew what we usually drank, what we liked and didn't like to eat. She would sail past our table and call out to me, "You don't want the fish today - it's salmon." And the last time I saw her, she took her tall lanky form and folded herself down by my table and said, "I just want you to know that you're one of my favorite lunch people." I tell you that not in a boastful spirit but in a humble one: that Shastin knew what she felt and had the generosity to share it when time was still hers.

In talking with the other servers at Hemingway's about Shastin's tragic death, from a jet ski accident, we experienced consolation, sharing of grief and sadness, memories. We took part in sacred conversations. On the day that two of Shastin's young co-workers and friends told us that she had died, my server did not include the price of my drink on my tab. When I brought it up to her, she responded, "That's alright. We'll do it in remembrance."

And so we learned again what our many trips to the Emerald City have taught us. We relearned that we have in us what we need, our humanity, our connectedness, our community. Shastin's sharing community was not restricted to her funeral in LaGrange, GA. That sharing community spilled out, reaching the tables outside of Hemingway's in Marietta. The umbrella-covered tables strewn up and down the brick path connecting the streets in front of and behind Hemingway's.

Just as the Staples Center in Los Angeles could not hold Michael Jackson's sharing community. Just as it spilled out onto the streets in front of the arena, spilled out to huge screens throughout the world.

Just as the Ed Sullivan theater in New York City can no longer contain Paul McCartney. How David Letterman's crew this summer prepared the marquee hanging over Broadway so that McCartney could perform outside on the marquee itself, instead of on the stage where he, John, George and Ringo sang those historic first notes on this continent.

People jammed Broadway to hear McCartney sing, leaned out of windows. And together, he, Letterman and the stage crew created for us another treasured memory. A collective memory of a time shared and times shared decades ago. Another memory of our connectedness, our humanity, our community that spills out of and beyond our institutions.

We saw once again that our community lives, lives within us and all around us, and that it has been with us all along.

We saw once again that we are...

We are, indeed,

"We are...

the world."

Katherine Elberfeld, September 2009

Where else can we find community outside our established institutions?  What makes a community a community?