Finding Community at SAKALA

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

On Saturday mornings, when I used to stay in SAKALA’s guest room at the community center, I would hear a knock on the steel door outside.

When I would answer it I would see Dany and Fefe, both maybe 15 then.

It was time to make arrangements for an informal breakfast for the kids there.

Unless it was for the frequent special events, SAKALA did not have formal programming on the weekends.

So the kids who were there early on a Saturday morning were most likely living in homes where breakfast was an unaffordable luxury.

Dany and Fefe would tell me the menu for the hot breakfast for the 10 or so younger kids they were helping out and how much it would cost to pull off.

Usually, it was about 200 Haitian gourdes (about US $3 at the time. Now it would be $2 – another sign of the plummeting economy in Haiti).

I was always surprised by how little they asked for to feed so many kids.

If all I had was a 250 gourde bill to give them to go to the street market, unfailingly, about 30 minutes later I would hear another knock on my door with the exact change.

I never reminded them to give me my change, did not particularly care if they kept it, but they always brought it anyway. It was a matter of honor.

This Saturday morning routine always ended with another knock on the door, the one where Fefe and Dany brought me breakfast too -- usually, a bowl of rice with vegetables and protein mix.

The first time they did this I was surprised. I thought I was just buying breakfast for the kids.

But that first Saturday bowl and all the others that came after it came to mean so much more to me than food. It was community.

I have never been a part of a better community than the one at SAKALA in Cité Soleil.

I don’t have a picture of this Saturday morning routine. You don’t take a picture of a routine thing.

What I loved about Dany and Fefe’s routine was that it felt like a family making breakfast together and I was touched they adopted me as a part of the family.

 I also don’t have a picture of another Saturday morning knock at the door in February 2019.

It was, for me, the beginning of the period we now see dominating the news from Haiti.

Every year, on February 7, there have been protests in Haiti. In the better world Haitians deserve, but have not yet gotten, February 7 should be a day of celebration as it marks the anniversary of the end of the brutal Duvalier dictatorship in 1986.

Instead, there are protests because they have so far been denied the better life that day promised.

So, on February 7, 2019, the protests were expected. We expected to stay home and hunker down.

What was also expected was that on Feb. 8 the streets would be relatively calm again. Street merchants could go back to selling and you could go anywhere freely and safely.

But that didn’t happen on February 8, 2019. Instead, the country entered a period of “lockdown” – where groups patrolled and blocked the streets. You could not go anywhere, do anything outside your home or immediate neighborhood. It would last for 12 days.

Such a situation is common now, but not then.

The politics of Haiti are too complicated – and frankly painful – to go into here.

 But what I remember most is that knock on the door that first Saturday of the February 2019 lockdown.

  I went to open the door expecting to see Dany and Fefe.

And it was Dany and Fefe, ready to get breakfast going like usual.

But right behind them, lining the 20 or so concrete steps, were all these other kids looking up at me.

I can’t say for sure, but I think they, like me, felt something was different this time and they had come to SAKALA for comfort, just like I do.

And when they knocked on the door they were not at all sure I would still be there to answer it.

But I am so grateful – for my own sake – that I was. Again, there is not a better community in the world than SAKALA in Cité Soleil.

It has been over a year since I have been able to stay at SAKALA because of insecurity in the country and in Cité Soleil. So, when I go to Haiti, I stay at a place near the airport in case I need to get out quick. Some visits I can get to SAKALA, some I can’t.

It has been almost three months since I have been able to visit Haiti and SAKALA. In fact I had hoped to be there this week. I hoped this newsletter would be written from there.

But at the moment I am more a liability for them if I go. I want to be a part of the community, not a problem for it.

So I stay here in the US in a bit of a limbo, telling myself maybe next week I can go, or the week after.

Because I miss my friends and I will never have a better breakfast than those Saturday mornings at SAKALA.

But until I can go back to SAKALA for real, let me share a few recent photos from the staff there that have warmed my heart.

Despite everything, SAKALA started a new music program in September.

And yoga and meditation continues as part of the after school tutoring program.

Here is one of my favorites just because it is so sweet. It captures what many years ago now, SAKALA leader Daniel Tillias (a 2019 CNN Hero) told me about why he and others who had grown up in Cité Soleil founded SAKALA.

“There will be love in this place, there will be sharing in this place.”

And there is. Every day.