Saint Joan and the forgotten ones.

Sister Joan came here 60 years ago and built a school for the deaf, disabled and blind street kids of Haiti. She died a few years back during the earthquake her school was destroyed her life work reduced to a pile of rocks and her students left homeless and out of school. This was a special school where written on the wall still stands a passage from the bible it reads in red cursive: “The blind will see, the deaf will hear, the crippled will dance.” She made these miracles happen everyday. By giving the blind Braille she gave them sight, by giving the crippled prosthetics and physical therapy they danced and lastly she created a bell choir for the deaf that was purely based on feeling the vibration of the bell ring. The deaf could now hear.

Father Rick knew Sister Joan well and saw that the school had collapsed; he approached me in the early morning and told me we were building the school again on our front lawn. For everyday this week we have worked tirelessly from sun up to well past sun down moving containers, lugging supplies and rice; organizing, sweating and struggling. The containers need a crane to move them, they are unwieldy and stubborn. The center container wouldn’t budge from its place and was crooked. I asker Father Rick if we should call the crane back to adjust it slightly so that it would be inline with the others. He smiled deliriously and said, “It’s fine Bryn, thank god it’s a school for the blind, they’ll never know, if they were architects we’d be in trouble!” You need to have a sense of humor here or you will be quietly consumed.

“We should have been on Gilligan’s Island” Father Rick tells me as we roll a tire hub full of cement to be placed as the base of a container. I laugh so hard I cry. Sometimes it gets hard to tell the difference between crying and laughing. We sit and drink a beer on the crumbled wall looking at the skeleton of our new school. I ask Father Rick what we will call the school, he looks up at the reddening sky, thinks for a second, smiles and says, “Saint Joan.” Normal canonization rules do not apply here.

It is a disadvantage to be born deaf, blind or crippled in the states but in Haiti these are death sentences, these kids have nowhere to go but when we finish this school, which will cost 20,000 to build and 60,000 a year to run they will have a home once again. That’s a miracle.

Triplets were born three days ago they weigh less than 2 pounds, I spend the days with them, one I was just told is dying going to see her now.

More later – so tired can’t think

Heading to the beach later to drink rum sours with David Belle and sleep deeply.