“The Light Clashes with the Darkness…”

Reality, when we emerge from the comfortable insulation of our “privileged” lives, slaps us in the face like a gauntlet. The Light clashes with the Darkness; there can be no truce between them. Christianity clashes with Voodoo, gratitude with jealousy, compassion with indifference, forgiveness with revenge.

Haiti is a land where such contradictions glare in your eyes like the sun off the brilliant, undulating surface of the Caribbean – staggering, blinding if you dare to look it in the face. I arrived in Haiti a month and a half ago, and I will risk your speculation to relate just a few stories of my experience in that time. Hopefully through them, you will be able to catch a glimpse of God reaching down through hands and feet into the lives and hearts of men – not only of the people of Haiti, but also our own.

Bill starting work the morning after the “stoning”

If I were to take the average activities over the course of a month and sum them up in a typical day with Just Mercy, we find Bill sitting on the deck with a cup of coffee, slapping off the mosquitoes as the sun comes peaking over the hill in the east. He is reading, or writing, or talking, and at the same time processing a hundred needs and responsibilities before him. He teases the ladies who are cooking in the kitchen and makes them laugh and feel appreciated.

After breakfast he gets the woodworkers started at the sawmill, or on the porch “woodshop”, or whatever project the day holds, and they know they are earning their families’ rice and bread.

Bill visiting someone in their hut

He packs a box of basic food and takes it out to a house in Kaykok or O Do Kachiman, or Raquette, and steps into a shack where he knows the aged are lying or sitting, and they weep with gratitude for something to eat. Back at the base he finds a child waiting with a fever, or a woman with a septic fungus on her hands, or a man with a gash in his leg, and while he washes or dresses or administers medication, he sends someone to check lobster nests, or buy a bucket of conch, because we at the base need to eat as well, and protein needs to come from somewhere.

As he finishes his peanut butter sandwich a neighbor arrives asking for money – her child was sent home from school because she couldn’t pay – and he has to wrestle with whether or not to give it to her; he can’t afford to send them all. One of the workmen comes to report there is a problem with the power tool they are using, and off he goes to sort it out. On the way back he stops in to check on a girl he sent to the hospital two weeks ago with Pulmonary TB – she is doing okay but he makes a mental note that he needs to bring her family a food packet, as she is not the only one malnourished in a household of six.

He sits down with a glass of water and a paper and takes up where he left off yesterday calculating the cost of the next project, but he is interrupted by a phone call from home. He takes a quick swim to cool off mid afternoon and spends the last of the daylight talking through problems, closing things down, and wrapping up loose ends. Suppertime finds everyone worn out and a friend stops by to visit. He sits at the table and talks to whoever is still there after dark – the ladies who cook, someone from the woodshop, one of the fishermen, a friend or two. He climbs into bed and does a bit of correspondence home before he falls asleep only to be woken at eleven by a late-night motorcycle passing by the front gate, 1:00 am by the stray dogs barking and fighting, 3:00 am by a rain squall passing over, and 4:00 am by the neighbors slaughtering their pig for market. Then he starts it all over again.

Then there are the stories and there is not time to tell them all.

The island of Peletin where 200 people live

There is the story of gratitude, when days after delivering some food boxes to Paletin, we went back there to buy some conch and see how they were doing. One man, thinner by far than his frame was made for, approached me with a big, beautiful seashell in pristine condition and offered it to me as a token of his gratitude for the food we had brought them.

Then there is the story of the shame of the man we know who passes by the gate carrying water every day, but he never waves, never greets us, never looks up anymore. He was among those throwing rocks at us when we were bringing in food for the hungry. What darkness or jealousy drives the heart of a man to cast the stones and then celebrate and cheer?

There is the story of the Kingdom of Light moving in our Christian Haitian friend, Christoph, who told us that every Haitian’s problem is they have jealousy in their hearts. He came to our house for church one Sunday morning – he was the only one. I played the song “Here I am to Worship” for him as I had found it on Youtube in Creole. He was moved to tears, and found himself compelled to leave our company for a time. He returned with his eyes shining. I pray over God’s work in his heart.

Then there are stories of the bolder, more frontal assaults of the Prince of Darkness; a friend called us out on a coast guard rescue mission. A group of four had climbed out on some rocks at the base of a cliff on the other side of the island. They told us they had happened upon a voodoo doll lying up there, and then the sea swells had come rolling in high and hard. They found themselves trapped on the rocks with the sea rushing up onto them, unable to climb higher and unable to climb back down. By the time we found them from around the end of the island in the dinghy, two Haitian men had managed to reach them through the slowly abating swells and helped them back to safety.

When we first caught sight of our friend he was clinging to the cliff face with the swell surging against his back up to his elbows. A minute later he scrambled through the moment of receding surf and up onto dry land. Some were convinced that the sea had come up so suddenly because of the voodoo doll and we found ourselves asking, does Satan have that kind of power? We know the minions of Darkness can possess animals and even people if they let them, but can the Kingdom of Darkness have been the force behind such an anomaly? Voodoo laces its way through the course of these people’s lives like a cancer and it’s presence invaded our lives in the form of a dead cat which washed up on the shore directly in front of our gate, bloated to twice it’s size and with all the skin stripped off it’s head – the sickening victim of some voodoo ritual. But was it chance that brought it to our very doorstep, or is it the clash of the Darkness with the Light? We know surely that the Darkness is present, but we are unafraid of that Darkness, for we are children of the Light.

And the Light is shining gently into people’s hearts. We called together the many Haitians who work with us for a meeting of reconciliation as there had been some division between them. One man who has worked with us for the past four years said that working with us was no good because we have to talk about everything. (In the Haitian culture, you don’t confront people and you don’t stick your nose into their business.) Another man, who also has worked the past four years with us, disagreed. He said that he has worked with many different organizations over the course of his life, but never have any of them bothered to try to sit down and talk through anything with them. And he, for one, truly appreciated it.

A gift of clams in appreciation for a service done for him by JUST MERCY

A man brought us a basket of clams in a tattered basket, indebted to us for some service we did not even remember, and another man kidnapped our dog with intent to kill in a spirit of revenge.

There is no truce. There is only the assault of the Darkness, and the shining of the Light. We bow our knee to the Lord of Heaven’s Armies, and we stand against our enemy, the Prowling Lion seeking to devour us all.  And so we reach out in compassion, in service, in love, as we press forward to drive out the Darkness by the shining of the Light.