Resilience

Resilience

Ti Legliz Village

Kevin spends the rest of his time at Ti Legiz climbing up and down Mount Boueffe and working on other projects as assigned by Solange or Father Jean. He sends reports to Tim and Head Engineer about progress, never mentioning that he’s not camping on the peak. Kevin is writing his report for the week: this many kilos of sand removed from the tank,that many liters of water carried up the mountain and flushed through the tank. The sort of details that show how miserable his life has become. He’s looking for a typewriter and more paper in the Ti Legliz closet-sized office when he sees Father Jean. Kevin hasn’t talked to Henri or Panielle in weeks and asks about them. Fr. Jean smiles and playfully punches Kevin on his shoulder, “Opsec! They have their own mission from God. All is well.”

Since Kevin is contributing to the base community, they’ve made him a member. He passes the exam about how the village protects itself and what it contributes to nearby communities. The community’s center is the village of Ti Legliz and consists of seven ti groupma with 20 – 30 people in each. These little groups are scattered strategically at all the passes and trails that make their way up the mountain to the base community. Young children are trained as runners to pass intelligence and logistics details between the groups. Each ti groupma combines its cash to buy seed and supplies. Then they harvest and bring the crops to the silo at Ti Legliz village. When market prices are favorable, they arrange for a truck to come collect their harvest and take it to the markets in Port or Ceyes. The profits are shared after a 20% allocation to the emergency fund. Ti Legliz has been coordinating with other villages to build a 20 km road, which is used by 40,000 people in six surrounding counties.

What’s left of the Government of Haiti has no interest in leaving the main roads or wandering around in the mountains trying to find agronomists and labor organizers. They pretend they don’t know what’s happening while the base community builds infrastructure around them. But the existing power structure needs the peasants to remain poor and helpless, so old Duvalierists use the old Macoute death squads to terrorize any community that organizes itself economically.

The Ti Legliz community has a policy of full participation in governance. Everyone must come to the weekly group meetings, usually held after Sunday worship services. But even though the community is led by Catholic religious, they welcome anyone into the base community if they agree to the rules of governance. Each ti groupma elects a committee of three for coordination and decision making. If there are discipline problems, the group handles that on their own. Usually, the offending member will lose recreation privileges and will perform an act of service to the community, before regaining full voting status again. No one is expelled but may be encouraged to leave after too many infractions. Beyond that, the priests don’t want to know unless there’s actual bloodshed involved. In addition, each member who is not disabled, widowed, or orphaned, is expected to contribute roughly one US dollar to the co-op each month to cover incidentals and hopefully, an annual celebration on St. John Bosco’s birthday.

Jè stops in every few weeks to bring Kevin supplies and take his progress reports back to the station. Sometimes, Solange asks him to pass packages to Jè, but Kevin never asks for details. Solange runs a small army of kids as informants all over the province. Most information is exchanged orally, but the runners also carrying notes with them. Since colonial times, the spoken language of Haitian Creole has been suppressed and all official documents have been in the French language. The Aristide government is proposing that Haitian Creole be adopted as one of the country’s official languages. But since that allows peasants to do business without a clerk, priest, or pastor to document and tax every transaction, the reaction from Big Business is predictable. Now even Creole Bibles are considered subversive.

Ti Legliz have been using their hand-cranked mimeograph machine to copy and distribute pamphlets in nearby communities. They’ve collected a variety of Creole language guides on how to setup cooperatives, organize a labor union, and the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Jè and Solange approach Kevin with an idea to get the materials mass-produced. The station has a storage closet filled with missionary photocopiers that don’t work anymore. If Jè and Kevin can get one of them working, they can run a printing shop at the station and distribute from their Carrefour house.

Amid all this, there’s also great debate and inevitable shouting about the Constitution that the Ti Legliz community will ratify in June. It’s quite radical and gives equal rights to men and women, regardless of whether they worship Protestant, Catholic, Voodoo, or none of the gods. Kevin never makes any suggestions and doesn’t intend to vote, but asks a lot of questions to make sure he understands all the implications of this egalitarian approach.

The Protestant transmitter is working again and now the station is clamoring for Kevin to return to Carrefour. Head Engineer’s family has already left the country for summer vacation. But until Kevin gets back from the provinces, Head Engineer can’t leave. Tim doesn’t trust the Haitian staff without American supervision. Former Father Jean-Betrand Aristide has been inaugurated and other than breaking up the military and police into two different entities and thanking the women of Haiti for their sacrifice, none of the missionary nightmares have come true.

Despite its rocky start, the Aristide government is getting itself together and the poor people who swept the Lavalas party into power are starting to see how democracy can help them. Nevertheless, Protestant leaders are resisting all the changes including ratification of the Haitian Constitution. Kevin fumes about this when it comes up and wonders why anyone would want to live in a country without a bill of rights. But without fail, a Haitian will eventually remind Kevin that, “The Constitution is paper. The bayonet is steel. Only we and Bon Dieu can save us.”