Sending SAKALA Smiles

News for a Better World from SAKALA in Cité Soleil

In the last newsletter on July 5, I wrote about that fortuitous day last summer when Joanna Lumley and a few of her new friends from Port-au-Prince visited SAKALA for the first time.

When the Hidden Caribbean: Havana to Haiti program that showed that visit aired on March 17, hundreds of people from the UK sent donations and good wishes to SAKALA. They were followed by hundreds more from around the world wherever and whenever the show has aired since.

As if on cue, on July 7, Australia entered the SAKALA world. I had that wonderful deja vu all over again on that first day as a few hundred donations and good wishes poured in from Australia.

So, welcome, Australia! :)

I mentioned Joanna Lumley’s new friends from Port-au-Prince — those were the four boys living in the streets that she brought to SAKALA for the first time. That group of four is now more than a dozen who have been coming to SAKALA regularly and are now our good friends too.

As luck would have it, a few days ago the leaders at SAKALA sent me several photos of the boys’ with their art work from SAKALA’s FatraKa (Trash Can in Haitian Creole) environmental art program. In the program, SAKALA’s young artists take recycled pallet wood and items from the street dumps in the area to make very cool and beautiful art. (Read more about FatraKa here.)

So, I’m sending you the pictures, so you can see the smiles and the pride. In a couple of pictures, the smiles are behind masks, a sign of the Covid-19 times, but this has taught me to see the smiles in people’s eyes.

Here, a group of some of the boys “make a picture” of themselves in a big frame they made.

I think I spy bottle caps, on the wooden mask above and the frames below, among the recycled decorations on the artists’ work. You may be able to guess some of the other highlights.

Speaking of sending smiles, look below at what I picked up at the post office over the weekend.

These are 11 frames SAKALA sent to me — against a backdrop of some container gardening experiments for SAKALA’s urban garden that I am trying before my next trip back.

About a month ago, when Haiti was still closed to international travel because of the pandemic, we decided to try an experiment and see if the folks at SAKALA could mail me some frames here. Our normal way of getting their artwork to the US has been in my suitcases — which as you can imagine is super fun for my back. :)

But, with the airport closed, even that limited way was shut down. So they decided to send the frames using the Haitian postal service (the well-known international package delivery services were prohibitively expensive).

I had zero experience with the Haitian postal service and as one week became two became three I started to think maybe the frames would not make it.

Then when she was delivering my other mail, the postal worker told me that there was a box that had arrived and was waiting for me at the Binghamton, NY post office. She couldn’t deliver it because the box was so badly damaged that she couldn’t lift it without it falling apart and she was worried that whatever was inside might be lost.

When I went to the post office to pick it up, this is what I found. Two of the corners were torn down almost to the bottom. The top had busted open. I think the postal worker who went to the back to find it was scratching his head as to how to give it to me and settled on loaning me one of their big carts.

If the box had shown up in pristine condition, I probably would not have thought much of it. In fact, I probably would have torn into to get at the much beloved frames.

But that this beaten up box made it here, despite an obviously rough journey — and that it held together the frames and protected them so that they arrived in pristine condition even if the box itself did not — well, it kind of seems like magic to me.

SAKALA magic.

It’s everywhere. Grateful it made it to me once again.

Wishing you much peace, happiness, and health.

You can reach me (with magic or otherwise) at nancy.young@sakalainternational.org