A Lesson Learned in Haiti: "We" Instead of "Us versus Them"

Shelley Butler, Beloved Community Communications Team

Pictured on this page: Kids at Ecole Notre Dame de l'Annonciation in Leogane, Haiti. 

Haiti will break your heart. I’m not the first person to say so, but I’m reminded of what Rev. Janne Eller-Isaacs used to say, that when a heart breaks open, it makes more room for love. 

Flying over the Caribbean Sea is a magnificent experience. From a distance islands like Hispaniola appear as small rocks that rise out of the vast water that surround them. It’s only when you get closer that you see the dividing line down the mountain — the Dominican Republic on the lush green side and Haiti on the denuded bare side. It’s an obvious first sign that something is not right in Haiti. As the plane comes down over Port au Prince, the vast neighborhood of makeshift homes that make up Cite Soleil (City of the Sun) appears; infamously known as the largest (and to me scariest) slum in the Western Hemisphere. 

I worked with a small nonprofit that partners with a community of nuns in Haiti for several years and have been there half a dozen times, for grant writing; to tour the education, farming, and elder care projects we support; and to lead immersion trips. When I’m asked what it is like there, I think of the deep pink-magenta bougainvillea blossoms in full bloom that won’t be denied as they wind around nasty looking razor wire atop most middle-class homes. Or the view from Kenscoff, where there is farming and trees in the mountains above Port au Prince, that belies the reality down there, where gullies throughout the city are filled with trash being picked through by a pig or goat or maybe even a child. Children who may live in a shack with no water or electricity come to school pressed, clean, and as happy and goofy as grade school kids anywhere. It’s a land of contrasts.

Haiti is a place where examining my own privilege and white superiority was inescapable; it smacks you in the face. Nothing in the United States or anywhere I’ve traveled in Europe compared to the sights, sounds, smells, and jarring car rides in Haiti. After a few trips, the stench outside the airport became familiar, but God help me if I ever get used to sights like a mother washing her baby in a puddle of water on the side of the road, an orange-haired child with the extended belly of starvation, or a toddler in an orphanage crib so devoid of hope he doesn’t cry for attention anymore. 

Though Haiti was born from revolutionary struggle against colonial oppression, the legacy of racial hierarchies endures in the form of colorism, with wealth and status disproportionately held by those with lighter complexions. Such classism remains deeply entrenched, exemplified by the system of restaveks which still exists. Yet beyond these inherited structures lies another form of racism that is largely of foreign import, brought in by the thousands of organizations and church mission programs full of white people with the best of intentions to help the poor. Many, if not most, find it nearly impossible not to compare “us” to “them,” especially when the differences can be so stark and devastating. The common reaction is, “What can we do to save them?” 
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As you’d expect, antiracism doesn’t exist in Haiti as we largely know it here. There are no workshops on intersectionality and microaggressions. The “us” versus “them” savior complex may be the most obvious racist attitude, of which I was (and often still am) guilty. When I felt my heart breaking, I looked to our Haitians partners to direct me, to tell me what was needed, and let more love into my heart to walk beside the remarkable Haitian nuns who had let me in, despite belonging to Unitarian Universalism, a religious oddity in a country where Vodou is practiced alongside Christianity.