Tag Archives: Haiti

Creole

funny wisdom on words that begin with a C

Creole: (n) a person born in Louisiana but of usually French ancestry.

Sometimes I feel that my life is a series of leaps into quicksand, with the excitement coming from each escape from foolishness.

Would any of us truly have a reason for being if we weren’t finding creative ways to correct our mistakes?

For a very brief time in my life, I thought that because I possessed faith, it was my responsibility to infuse it into others. This misconception led me to make a brief missionary trip to the country of Haiti. Never has one small nation been so inundated with religious propaganda and promises of eternal life with so little prospect for earthly sustenance. Yet I decided to add my own drivel to the propagated myth. I arrived in Haiti convinced that if I preached the Gospel, I could save souls. It didn’t occur to me that there were actually people linked to those souls.

People who got hungry.

People who needed love.

People who valued romance.

People who just thought, felt and dreamed about “people things.”

I was in the middle of my third little sermon in an adobe building, in front of a packed house—eager faces who had obviously been told by their leadership that the arrival of white people from America always offered the possibility of financial relief.

The language was Creole.

I did not take the time to learn the tongue, but over the several days that I had been there, I picked up a word here and there—maybe even a phrase.

I suddenly noticed that my translator, who had a grin foretelling of sin, was not exactly sharing what I was saying to the congregation.

So after I finished my teaching, I cornered him and asked him what he was doing. Never dropping his smile, he looked me right in the eyes and said, “You come from a country where your biggest concern is getting too fat. You are visiting a country where our biggest concern is staying alive. Sometimes you say dumb things that would be offensive, and I just find happier ways to translate them.”

A chill went down my spine. Even though I believed myself to be a plain-spoken individual who always wanted to hear the truth, I kind of wished he’d lied to me.

But I’m glad he didn’t—because he made it clear that my preaching could not be eaten and my Bible verses didn’t provide warmth; that even though I might have good intentions, my efforts were worthless to the needy.

That day I started trying to learn some of the Creole language.

It was literally the least I could do.

 

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Breadline

j-r-practix-with-border-2

Breadline: (n) a line of people waiting to receive free food.

I’ve actually said it out loud.

“I’m starved.”Dictionary B

Truth of the matter is, I have rarely been hungry enough to justify a complaint. Maybe lunch was a little late and I claimed low blood sugar, which justified eating a Snickers while waiting for my Big Mac. But I’ve never really been malnourished to the point that my innards were trying to take over my brain.

When I see pictures of human folks standing in line to get nourishment, a meal which I would mock for its insufficiency, I am temporarily humbled and shaken.

Much of the world will go to bed tonight without dinner.

You don’t make friends by bringing this up at a party, and you don’t feed ten children by putting them on your prayer list.

What truly astounded me was when I found myself touring through Haiti, I came across a man who had picked up a few pennies on the street to buy two tomatoes. He also had saved some grains of rice from a bag which had a hole in it. I watched him put that in a pot over a little fire and stir it together as he realized he needed a little something else. He walked over to a patch of grass and pulled out a handful of blades and threw it into his concoction with a smile on his face.

At that point I realized that I had no comprehension of hunger.

Would I be willing to stand in a breadline, waiting for a paltry parcel of portion?

Actually … I think my stomach might insist on it.

 

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Bilingual

Bilingual: (adj) fluent in two languages.Dictionary B

Perhaps one of the better definitions of “honorable” is sharing one’s experience while freely admitting it is limited.

I have an exciting life, filled with many journeys, but most of them have occured within the confines of the United States. I have been to Canada several times, and made a ten-day journey to Haiti.

It hardly classifies me as a world traveler.

I share this preface because I want you, as the reader, to understand that it is fine to offer our testimony as long as we’re willing to warn the hearer of the limits of our scope.

So since Canada speaks English (though some of my brethren in the deep South would disagree) my only true experience of bilingual situations lies in my escapade to Haiti.

The thing I immediately sensed upon arriving in this country is that I wanted to be able to communicate with them in their own tongue. My lack of preparation for such a maneuver left me quite aggravated with myself.

So I set about to rectify the situation by learning as many phrases as possible. Since I was actually doing some public speaking, I was issued a translator. He was a delightful young fellow with a desire to please.

As I gradually assimilated a few words here and there, I realized that this fine youthful translator was editing many of the things I was saying.

So after one of my little talks, I confronted him. A bit red-faced, he candidly replied, “Well, I tried to make sure that everything you said would meet the approval of the audience so they wouldn’t be upset with you.”

I laughed, but instructed him to be more faithful with my content.

We are so afraid of words that even as they are translated into other cultures, there is a gnawing fear that we might say something unacceptable.

The chances of that happening are highly likely.

So that is the reason–whether we’re speaking our native tongue or a tongue that is native to our audience–we always need to remember that humility should precede our words, gentleness should accompany them and a willing spirit should follow.

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Bazaar

Bazaar: (n) a market in a Middle Eastern country.Dictionary B

I often comfort myself with the knowledge that if I didn’t do dumb things, I wouldn’t have great stories to tell.

So a certain amount of imperfection, idiocy and clumsiness is necessary to fall under the classification of “a good writer.” (At least, that’s my take and I’m stickin’ with it.)

Many years ago, I traveled to Haiti, and being a novice at such a journey, I didn’t take enough money. After I paid all the taxes, tariffs and incidentals, I ended up with 72 cents in loose change to last me for two weeks.

My lodging was covered and so were my meals, but I didn’t have any personal money.

One of my guides on suggested that we go to the local street market, or bazaar, to see what the Haitians had put together through their creativity.

I don’t know why, but it didn’t even occur to me that these artisans might just want to sell their wares to hapless Americans. I wasn’t in the bazaar for more than thirty seconds before I was completely surrounded by determined individuals trying to sell me what they had built, cooked or grown.

The stuff was beautiful.

They were great salespeople.

But you see–I only had 72 cents.

To the average Haitian, any white man from America is independently wealthy and probably arrived on their shores in a yacht.

So using a word of Creole here and there, I tried to explain that I had no money. This only encouraged them to sell harder, assuming that they were just one catch-phrase away from garnering my business.

They also kept dropping their prices.

Finally, after about five or six arduous minutes of grueling exchange, I pulled out fifty cents and bought a lovely, carved statue. The person who did the work probably took at least four hours to make it, and I felt like a real jerk.

But they were delighted to get the fifty cents, and I intelligently escaped quickly out the back exit from my experience … at the bizarre bazaar,

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Aeschylus

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

Aeschylus: (c. 390 – 314 BC) Greek dramatist, best known for his tragedies Agamemnon, Choephoroe and Eumenides. Considered to be the father of the Greek tragedy.

Not only the father of the Greek tragedy, but also seemingly the parent of prime-time television and the movie industry of our present day.

After all, if we don’t insert some tragedy into the stories we tell, we risk some critic dubbing our tale “saccharine, cloying,” or worse yet–“family fare.”

There is a common aversion in today’s social strata against sharing a story with ups, downs, ins and outs, which ends up with a realistic conclusion instead of a Hollywood ending. Matter of fact, I think it would be impossible for the 24-hour news cycle to report anything that isn’t either sensational or able to be sensationalized.

And let me offer a tidbit of opinion which will probably grind the teeth of some of my readers: when there is a shooting at a school or a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, and we begin to hear the phrase, “death toll” introduced into the storyline, even though our better selves hope that people will not be killed, we sometimes might be a little disappointed when this running death toll does NOT rise.

We have geared the American public to be thirsty for blood–as long as it’s not their own. If their little angel sons and daughters have a small prick on the finger, they ready to rush them to the emergency room. But we will watch with a mixture of horror and intrigue as the offspring in Haiti wallow in mud, disease and death.

We are a tragic clump of clods, who honor Aeschylus by perusing the Internet for even MORE of the bizarre.

And if anyone such as myself would dare to object to the onslaught of the macabre, we have prepared speeches decrying these idealistic fools as “sappy”–or worse yet, “religious.”

To reach a point where we can stand tall and pursue our dreams, we will need to reject the fallacy of failure as being inevitable in the human experience. Not everything has to come up roses.

But why in the hell would we plant just thorns?