During our time in Haiti from 1986 until 2007, my wife and I were blessed to have many opportunities to work along side different groups of people and help Haitian communities with a variety of community projects. On one such occasion I was a member of a small team that put together a tree planting seminar that lasted 12 weeks. We were a mixture of religious non-profit organizations, agricultural cooperatives and civilian conservationists. We came together under the banner of reforestation for a mountain region above the capitol city.
Over the twelve weeks, we were able to train more than 50 community people in composting, contouring and tree nursery production. During this time I was reminded of just how integrated life is in rural Haiti.
From a funding perspective, this was a secular project , but our group from all religions and walks of life insisted on starting every meeting with a prayer and a song or two. Over the twelve weeks, the group also came up with poems and songs to help remember their lessons.
While in Haiti this past summer, my wife and I were hiking to see an area that a friend of ours owns. On the way up the mountain, one of the young Haitian men with us began singing one of the songs from our tree project. My wife and I stopped and said, “you remember that?” “Of course,” he replied with a smile. Later that week we were blessed to visit several homes where some of the trees from that and other projects we conducted had been planted. To see them growing and producing fruit was a huge source of inspiration for us.
One lesson learned for us was to be sure and meet needs seen by the people you are working with and do something that is valued by them. We also learned that we should integrate our spiritual and physical lives. Here in the United States we tend to have our family life, our work life, our church life and so on. In most of the world life is not so compartmentalized. Sometimes, we miss the intimate side of living abroad where people sing songs about their faith while washing clothes at the spring or while working in their gardens. Their reason for singing has no hidden agendas, they were not protesting or trying to get a point across. They were simply expressing life experiences or lifting prayers to the heavens.
Post by Phil Murphy