The thousand words a picture is worth

I bought a painting today. On the way home from clinic we drove through the downtown, just past the destroyed Palace (Haitian White House) and sprawling tent city in front of it, is a small market place with a dozen vendors.  It is surely a fraction of the tourist trade that used to line the capitol city streets. These few vendors vied for the attention of American doctors. My attention was drawn to a stylistic and nearly monochromatic painting of Haitian women dressed in white, gathering bags of  rice into baskets headed for the marketplace.

Many of our patients arrive to clinic in clean white clothes. All arrive well-dressed, the men in pants and button-down shirts, the women in dresses, skirts. The children, too, are dressed well. This despite the fact that they are living in the street. Just outside the clinic a shoe shine has set up 'shop' along the dusty streets that are lined with fallen debris. Men are lined up throughout the day having shoes, even tennis shoes, cleaned and shined. The people here have a quiet, reserved dignity that is at once startling and humbling.

There are signs throughout the city that say: "Revive, live life. Haiti has not perished". There are t-shirts with this same message seen on the backs of paraders walking through the streets, with music and singing. The music is starting to come back in parades, in church, in the streets. The streets were eerily silent of music for weeks after the earthquake. Partly from lack of electricity and music makers, and I imagine, from overwhelming sorrow.

Sunday morning we attended service at the church that is home to our clinic on it's top floor. This was the second Sunday service held after the earthquake. People were too afraid to enter buildings before that. This Sunday, however, several hundred people filled the pews. Again, all impeccably dressed, even though they have been living on the streets for 5 weeks.  Men and boys in ties, and suit pants, women and girls in beautiful dresses, with hats and bows in their hair. I sat next to a woman dressed in a white linen dress and held her six-month old baby for part of the service, so she could fully participate without being distracted by a squirmy, cute-as-a button, big-eyed, baby boy. (Yes, of course, there was also my selfish motivation of receiving rejuvenation from this little spirit).

The service was over two hours long and filled with praise, singing, dancing. It was powerful and humbling (I am continually humbled by the Haitians) to see these people who have lost so much,  able to offer such joyful praise. This culture knows what it is to live in gratitude...and dignity. I witnessed this at the church service, and every day I work at the clinic. 

And so now I have this painting of women in white to remind me...of the Haitian people, of my experiences here, of the calling we all have to live in gratitude and dignity.

~Maryclaire