Celebrating Work at SAKALA!

News for a Better World from the SAKALA community center in Cité Soleil, Haiti

It is sometimes hard to strike the balance between the (often) terrible news coming out of Haiti now and the joyous pictures the local SAKALA team sends me showing the activities there.

Reading the news – things have been especially dire lately in Cité Soleil, where SAKALA is located – I hesitated to ask the staff if there would be any activities celebrating Labor and Agriculture Day (which in Haiti is celebrated on May 1).

I have fond memories of past celebrations of the holiday, eating the delicious and filling traditional tchaka stew – chock full of corn, beans, spices and a bit of meat for flavor, simmered for hours in a huge pot in the SAKALA kitchen. Tchaka is itself a celebration of agriculture’s (and the cook’s) gifts.

These days, when I ask about activities at SAKALA, I am really checking to see if the folks there are ok, because I know things are hard.

I am especially grateful and relieved when I not only get an answer, but also pictures showing the kids playing and learning, just like normal, even though the situation in Haiti now is decidedly not normal.

When I asked on Sunday about possible activities happening Monday, the first answer I got showed the dichotomy of life at SAKALA.

1.)   Yes, I was told, all the regular holiday activities are planned for the children.

2.)   If there is no gunfire in the area that day, there will be activities in the garden. If there is gunfire, the celebration will be moved to SAKALA’s auditorium.

What struck me was that the contingency plans for gunfire were calmly relayed in the same way as those for rain might be.

This is how SAKALA keeps running with love, day after day. Sometimes that means moving indoors to the auditorium, sometimes that means having to stay home for everyone’s safety.

Often the safest refuge, where the better world we are all hoping for is already here, is SAKALA itself.

Monday evening I was hoping to see the pictures of the Labor Day celebration because that would mean everybody was all right.

But the SAKALA WhatsApp chat was quiet that day. I told myself they were just busy, but I worried that it was something more ominous. Were they locked in by violence? Were they ok?

Then Tuesday evening, this.

And, this.

And, this.

Many more pictures came through showing the Labor and Agriculture Day celebration that clearly went on as scheduled.

You will notice they are outside caring for SAKALA’s community garden. That means no shooting in the area at that time.

SAKALA was founded in 2006 by people who grew up in Cité Soleil, during another period of political violence in Haiti, to give youths growing up peaceful alternatives to joining gangs.

In those early days, on less than a shoestring budget, SAKALA offered peace-through-sports and education programs. They brought together kids from neighborhoods that were warring with each other to play together on the same teams.

Many of SAKALA’s first children are now staff members there, teaching by example the principles of peace.

SAKALA leader and co-founder Daniel Tillias said that back in 2006 there were calls on the radio to just bomb Cité Soleil out of existence to solve the problems there. As if there were no people living there, no children playing and growing.

Instead Daniel (who would be named a CNN Hero in 2019) and his colleagues in Cité Soleil went a different way.

“There will be love in this place,” Daniel said of the SAKALA mission in one of my first interviews with him, around the center’s 10th anniversary in 2016. “There will be sharing in this place.”

From SAKALA’s beginnings, education was seen as the path to a brighter future.

For this Labor Day celebration, let me share pictures of the work of the children, which is to learn.

These are photos of everyday activities in SAKALA’s after school program, all taken in the last month, when some of the worst news has come out of Haiti.

Because of the violence in the country, for the last few years schools in Haiti have often been closed for weeks at a time— but SAKALA’s after school programs keep running whether the schools are able to or not.

While technically Labor and Agriculture Day ended on Monday, let’s celebrate all year the work, bravery, and love of SAKALA’s staff, and the children themselves.

Thanking you as always for your solidarity and support of SAKALA.

Wishing you much peace, happiness, and health.