Brush with Haiti (12 page)

Also in that class was Heleine. When she spoke, I noticed an accent.

"Where are you from?" I asked her during the first week of class. Those of us in multicultural studies feel free to ask what others might not dare to or care to. I am fascinated by immigration and how and why people have come to be where they are, and I am especially intrigued by accented blacks in the United States. African Americans comprise the oldest of our immigrant groups next to the English, so their integration - or lack thereof - is part of a long, long, story. However, voluntary migration from Africa is very new, essentially taking place only since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 which removed quotas favoring northern and western Europeans. To have an accent means a physical move, and rather than a distant and detached immigration history, somewhere in each there is an individual and personal migration story.

My curiosity about Heleine's accent and what her story might be was piqued. I wondered what our semester together would hold. Perhaps she was from West Africa and could add priceless insight as we uncovered the story of the Atlantic slave trade. Or it could be East Africa making her therefore detached from this and confronting our assumptions that all blacks in the U.S. hold some connection to the history of New World slavery. Or what if, I imagined, she were from the Caribbean? What an asset her presence would be - a definite opportunity to keep me on my toes.

"Haiti," she replied. That is not what I expected. And I could not have imagined a better gift. Her manner was modest and her voice kind; common, I was coming to know, among Haitians. She seemed honored to be in the class, but I could not have been more honored myself to have her as a student.

Her family came to the United States when she was a teenager, and settled in Florida. It was during the tumultuous 1980s as Baby Doc was being ousted from power. She met her husband in the United States, and they raised three children together. He was white, a lawyer I believe, and his work brought them to Indiana, where they settled. She mentioned he was white before I met him, I suppose thinking I needed to be prepared. It didn't matter, except that it made an otherwise interesting story even more so. Over the years we came to know each other better, and once over lunch we commiserated about raising teenagers in suburban America. But her experiences held an added dimension. She described how frustrating it was to have daughters who took their privileges for granted. She laughed as she explained how her own daily life during childhood had demanded a good deal ofphysical labor - much of it in the form of carrying things - carrying large containers of fresh milk, jugs of water, baskets of laundry, and so on. Her children, born in the United States, were typical but the cultural chasm between them and their mother compared with that between my children and me, was far greater.

Listening to her reminded me of an amazing conversation I once had with an Ethiopian taxi driver in Minneapolis. He lamented the difficulties of getting his teenaged, American-born son to sit down to dinner with the family. After describing the scarcity of sustenance during his upbringing, his confusion over his son's taste for fast food was heart wrenching. He had walked many miles during a famine when he was that age. I was a teenager in 1970s suburban America where physical labor might consist of riding my bicycle to meet friends at the community pool. And we always had enough money for a candy bar or ice cream. As an adult I came to appreciate my own father's Great Depression tales of scavenging for scrap metal in order to make enough money to go to the movies. Still, the challenges of life in other countries were more extreme.

That semester's class performances were markedly better than usual, and I credit the mix of students for that.

"A class is like a herd of cattle," one of my graduate school professors once remarked. I was a bit offended, but more amused, chalking it up to fact that this was a course in The American Frontier, and he was trying to get us to understand herd behavior. Once a professor, it did not take long for me to see what he meant. Students' behaviors -liveliness, enthusiasm, apathy, misery - tend to feed off one another's. In each class, each semester, this new group of people would behave as a group, based on some invisible force, some instinctual and silent communication. This class was among my best, and it had everything to do with the students enrolled. Heleine's presence added an extra dimension, for to be learning alongside someone who had come from Haiti made history more real and tangible.

That was also the time in which I met Renate. Someone from the Heartland Center let me know about her work in Haiti, and that she was back in the Chicago area for a visit. At that point she was working as a co-director of the University of Fondwa. Her story seemed an interesting one and certainly worthy of a presentation to my class. I gave her directions to my room and looked forward to meeting her. The first time I saw her, I felt a sense of warmth and familiarity difficult to describe. She is small and dynamic and I immediately sensed her calm and fearlessness in dealing with whatever it was that life had put before her. I felt immediately at ease. I described my comfort with her as an unarticulated common bond among those who understood social justice and humanitarian work, wherever in the world. That must have sounded so absurd to her, as it was a terribly pretentious way of putting it.

I recognized my awkwardness in these matters and inability to find the right words during a discussion with a student some years before. We had led efforts to collect donations for victims of Hurricane Mitch in Honduras. When he told me of his remarkable past work in relief efforts, I was very impressed.

"You must feel good about that," I said to him. He looked at me, surprised that I would make such a comment.

"No," he replied. He was a devout Christian who exuded pure humility in every way. "It's just what we do." And then he went on to cite Scripture to illustrate why he said what he said, and what I said sounded all the more wrong. It was as if I had accused him of being arrogant. He seemed almost ashamed that he had told me of his good deeds at all, and in that moment I learned something precious about pride and self-righteousness.

When I struggled to find meaning in my comfort with Renate in our first meeting, perhaps it was in contrast to my discomfort with others who saw me as chasing rainbows and my words just came out poorly. Some might explain the feeling of familiarity I sensed with her as a sign that we had spent a past life together. And perhaps there was a time when I would have explained it in that way, too. But I have come to learn through experience that such first feelings can indicate future work together. At that time I had no plans to work with Renate, or even see her again. But we did become reconnected.

Her presentation to the class about the University of Fondwa did just what I had hoped it would. It helped students connect more closely with Haiti. They were also able to learn something about college life under very different circumstances and were exposed a bit more to the idea that human action can change history. The work being done at the University of Fondwa had a purpose; it was inspired, intentional, and strategic and it responded to dire needs.

Fondwa is situated south of Port-au-Prince, just far enough to be rural. Life there flows with the rhythm of country life and seemed a perfect setting for the development of unique post-secondary programs. Starting with a handful of students, Renate and her co-workers established programs in management and agronomy, designed in ways that would employ graduates meaningfully in their home villages once they were finished with their studies. Productive and sustainable agriculture continued to be of primary importance to Haiti's future and providing the knowledge and skills necessary for long term growth could help students make a difference. The majority of Haiti's post-secondary agronomy programs were still centered in Port-au-Prince, and as many as 80 percent of the country's trained agronomists held office jobs there. The mission of the University of Fondwa was to bring students from rural areas and send them back to apply what they learned where it was most needed. The fact that a small group of people could take it upon themselves to create such a school was awe inspiring.

In addition to the class presentation, I scheduled a campus-wide one that evening, which was open to the community. The turnout was wonderful. Thinking back, perhaps Renate was hoping to inspire some donations and I don't know whether she did. I do know, however, that her message was well-received. Some prominent people were there and the feedback was encouraging. Some of the students in my class appeared to hear her once again. That was good to see. Very importantly, I wanted them to see the strength of human action. Empowering students to take on leadership roles can be challenging.

The study of history can sometimes be seen as abstract and irrelevant. Perhaps that is due to the way in which it is taught or perhaps those to whom it is being taught are not quite prepared to hear the whole story, to receive the message in its entirety. History is the account, or many accounts, of achievement and change. If people of the past had stood still and done nothing, there would be no such thing as history. For better or worse, it is indeed the course of human action. Renate's talk came at the right time in the semester, as students had become well-acquainted with the struggles Haitians had faced and the many attempts to make improvements. The talk also came to the right students. They got it. Each had been active on campus, and would continue to be active in their post-graduation lives. And by active, I mean taking action. Appropriate action to make a positive difference for the future.

The University of Fondwa made a difference in people's lives, and we will never know just how far the ripples begun by this educational endeavor would reach. Perhaps it could have done more. We will not know that, either. The buildings of the campus were destroyed in the earthquake, and they could no longer take any students.

Carefully assigning travel literature
and commentaries from decades gone by can improve students' chances of understanding Haiti's difficult history and contemporaries' interpretations of it. John Dryden Kuser's
Haiti: Its Dawn of Progress after Years in a Night of Revolution
is one possibility. It tells the story of "salvation" by American troops who occupied the country during the early part of the 20th century. In 1921 he wrote: "Haitian agitators, supported by ill-advised Americans, have spread propaganda favoring the withdrawal of the United States from Haiti. Included in the propaganda have been the absurd accusations against the marines of cruelty toward the natives." He went on to say, "The question of any cruelty or unnecessary killings has been conclusively disproven by the findings of a Court of Inquiry sent to Haiti, and which has recently published its findings. As to the withdrawal of the United States from Haiti - such a course would be a menace to the world and a sad neglect of duty by the United States."

It is not easy for some students to grasp the depth of these statements when they have not yet been properly introduced to the history of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America and elsewhere. The attacks on and occupation of countries in Central America and the Caribbean have been frequent. During the early decades of the 20th century alone, the United States military occupied not only Haiti, but also Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, a portion of Mexico's Gulf region, and Cuba from time to time. When the U.S. threatened its attack on Iraq in 2003, an organization called Historians against the War was given birth. It was no coincidence that a notable percentage of its members taught Latin American history. Latin Americanists are very familiar with past episodes there, which often parallel U.S. actions in other parts of the world. As was the case with Kuser's work, atrocities abroad went largely ignored or were rationalized in the name of doing good for those who needed our help.

There is no doubt that studying U.S. intervention in Haiti shaped my perspectives on the U.S. war in Iraq. At the same time, the war in Iraq influenced ways in which I taught history. Again, presentism was at play. Once the unrestrained patriotism of the very early 2000s subsided and the purpose and execution of the war were being challenged, students had grown ready for a bigger dose of U.S. foreign policy history so they could better contextualize events unfolding in their own lives. I envied the courage of other faculty in Historians against the War who were far more activist in their teaching. There were times in my own past when I had been more bold, but at the onset of the war I had hungry mouths to feed and did not yet have tenure. As the attack neared, a few students became increasingly agitated and wanted to talk about the situation in class. Following their lead, I devoted an entire world history class period in early March of 2003 to letting them vent and debate. As a result, I was reprimanded by the department chair, as such a discussion apparently had no place in world history.

Teaching Caribbean History during the fall 2008 semester I was feeling a bit more daring. With tenure under my belt and years of developing the course, it was time to change up my reading assignments significantly. One of the books I decided to use was Mary A. Renda's
Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 19151940.
It was a well-respected work illustrating paternalism and the ways in which it influenced U.S. behavior in Haiti before and throughout occupation. U.S. policy makers and those who executed strategies often viewed the objects of their help as childlike and incapable of taking care of themselves. In the early decades of the 20th century this was grounded in race theory, which classified people of the world in ways that justified U.S. and European presence in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

The notion of U.S. paternalism is grasped more easily by some college students. The ones more apt to acknowledge it have paid closer attention to alternative news sources addressing current events or are actively uncovering truths about the American past that they had not been taught in high school. For students whose own cultural past has been underrepresented in history books, shedding new light on issues of race, ethnicity and gender give them a sense that their story is finally being told. This is certainly true of students on my campus, which is among the most diverse of the Baccalaureate/Master's institutions in Indiana. Indiana may not seem diverse, but in our corner of the state, multiple backgrounds abound. Ours is Lake County, bordering Chicago and Lake Michigan and reaching south into vast cornfields. It is snubbed by both Illinoisans and the remainder of Hoosiers, lying in some netherworld. Students reared in white suburban sprawl, Latinos from an all but post-industrial East Chicago, and blacks from a struggling Gary often occupy one room for the first time in their lives when they come to us. Often they are the first in their families to seek a university degree. They generally come expecting to hear the history they have been taught before and are surprised to learn about revolutionary women, Chicano politics, island slavery, and labor leaders - at least from a few of us. Sometimes they squirm, and sometimes they come alive.