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history and the “I”

Haiti in Rimini
“Why Me?”
Three friends from Port-au-Prince chopped meat and vegetables for a whole week at the Meeting. They came to Rimini to answer a question, and to see what it was that “changed their soul.”

by Alessandra Stoppa

It’s a strange certainty that leads you to leave your island, for the first time in your life, to go to a foreign land, for a week, working free of charge in a kitchen. It is a magnificent certainty for which you go somewhere, not because you are sure of what is awaiting you, but so as to discover why you are there. Wesley is at the Meeting in order to answer his father’s question on the evening when he told him about his upcoming journey from Haiti to Rimini: “Why you?”
They thought the invitation was linked to an AVSI project, since Wesley works for AVSI. But there are 300 people working for AVSI in Haiti, and there are only three of them in Rimini. “Maybe there is a list,” his father suggested. “If there is a list, then I am at the bottom,” Wesley replied. In fact, there was no list, and Wesley couldn’t answer that question. He brought the question here. He looks around and fixes his eyes on the people crowding the restaurant zone. “I would like to ask one of them.” He looks at me and asks, “Why me?”
It will soon be time for his shift in the kitchen, and he will exchange his Inter-Milan tee shirt for the yellow one of the volunteers. There are thick, short scars on his face and neck, like those that say, “Life in Cité Soleil [a district of Port-au-Prince] is not easy.” He grew up in the city’s biggest slum, in the most degraded area of the capital, destroyed by the earthquake two years ago. Then, with two friends who are here with him, Delva and Sherline, he started working for AVSI, he met the Movement, and watched his life change. “We have a new soul.”
It was an Italian colleague who told them all about the Meeting. “When Gloria told us about it,” says Sherline, “I never imagined what I am now seeing.” She never imagined feeling herself such a friend of people she had never met, including Maxime, a Canadian girl who translated everything for her throughout the week, and others who took up a collection for them to come. “We thought we were there on the island on our own; instead, we are part of something so great,” says Delva, “I feel I am loved.” In the evening, when she goes back to the hotel, she sits on the bed and writes. “I write everything. I don’t want to forget even a second of what is happening.” Not even the 25 glasses she broke in the kitchen. “I felt I was a disaster; I was so sorry. But everyone clapped. I thought then that our limitations are positive. We are empty because we need God.” It was the same when the earthquake happened. “That day, I thought the world was at an end,” says Sherline. “Then I stopped and thought, ‘I’m still here!’ And so? It was with my friends of the School of Community that I understood that life is given to us to be lived.”
The capital of Haiti is divided in two by an imaginary line. Those who live to the West are considered “excrement.” Wesley comes from there; never in his life could he have imagined he would confront a lawyer, someone from the East. “After my encounter with the Movement, this happened, too, because now I know the meaning of the words I use.” It was an argument that came about by chance, over what reason is. The lawyer was lost for words: “He told me, ‘So, there are humans in the West, too. Go ahead like that.’ I who am nothing faced up to a lawyer: human dignity comes from Christianity.” This is also seen in the friendship between him and Delva. “It’s not possible for us to be friends.” He is a Methodist and she is a Catholic and yet people were asking them if they were brother and sister. “This unity is from God.” It’s the same for the other friendships born here. “I have come to know true freedom,” Sherline says, “and I take home strong bonds, that is, Jesus.”
It’s the last day of the Meeting. Wesley thinks of all the faces, the discussions, the people who passed through the restaurant, the songs, the exhibitions. “What is going on?” he asks Delva as they begin their last shift. “You know what, Wesley? We have to walk. It doesn’t depend on us. The point is to walk, because the path has been marked out by an Other. We have done nothing; all this has come to meet us.”