Solidarity - The Catalyst for Community 1-13-10

Our World

I see that horrific image of the crushed Presidential Palace and wonder how that dear little country can handle any more. That Palace was one of the few really decent looking buildings in the poorest nation in the western Hemisphere, perhaps the world. My theology does not know how to handle the idea of a nation exhausted by the relentless pounding of hurricanes, poverty, corruption, and spiritual darkness now being literally shaken to its foundations.

Perhaps one of the most beautiful places on earth is to be found there in that ravaged little mountainous country, a place where a man’s dream blossomed into community and safety for thousands. I think of the little squatter settlement of 800 refugees back in the 1970s fleeing to the mountains to avoid flooding of their valley by a US Army Corp dam project. With nothing but the mud under their feet, these people were given spiritual hope and a vision that life could be better. It became so in a place called Cange. That squatter settlement became a town of 8,000 with a newly emerging middle class, the finest hospital in the country, magnificent schools available to all, good jobs, clean water; because an old Episcopal priest dared to get outside of himself and create community from his dreams.

I have had the fortune of travelling in fifty nations and perhaps none capture my imagination like this one, a place where the most verdant roses of hope have grown up from the abject ashes of poverty, oppression, and corruption. There are few places on earth where cooperation has been so clearly shown as the higher way to better living for everyone. With a spirit of cooperation and community the gates of Cange were open to all, to receive education, healing, employment, fair traded goods, nutritious food. In our more pervasive systems of competition and hording, those gates would never have been opened.

I wandered around in the miracle that is Cange for eight days, entranced that this botanical paradise with its magnificent buildings for schools and hospitals and housing was once nothing but an absolutely barren wasteland of mud that eventually gave way to dust clouds during the dry season. I wonder if in the space of twenty five seconds the work and dreams of thirty years have been lost. Has Cange survived? Is that beautiful oasis of hope still there? Do the people still have water? Did the new dam built on the backs of hard manual labor survive? Do we have to rebuild everything? Yet, again? I can’t but wonder how it is that people pick up the pieces and make another go at building a better world when the foundations are so shaky.

Perhaps from this cloud of dust we can again see that co-operation and solidarity yields life abundant, for Haitians and for the rest of us.