Empty Hand Zen Center

 By Myles Robert and Emily Zocchi

This photograph of Haiti was taken by Zoriah, whose work can be found here.

On Monday, March 29th, Valorie Lordi spoke at our zendo about her recent experiences in Haiti.  Valorie, a registered nurse, Dominican Sister, and known to many as a teacher of native American spirituality and healing, has previously provided medical services in wars and disasters, but when she traveled to earthquake-stricken Haiti in February her own life was shaken to its very core. The devastation of Haiti and the resilience of its people reordered –as Valorie puts it – “the landscape of [her] life.”

She attested that her first impulse upon hearing the news from Haiti was to resist it, to hold it back, but her resistance eventually wore thin and she became filled with an immediate need to engage with the situation head-on. She reached out to an organization called The Ministry of Presence on a Monday, and thirty minutes later was procuring the last seat on a flight departing on Thursday of that same week. She flew to the Dominican Republic and made a mad rush to get to the Haitian border before it closed. The ten minute van ride past the border-guards and into Haiti encapsulated a “time change” of a sort unfamiliar to even the most seasoned world traveler: “in ten minutes all references to my own life fell away.”

The destruction she described and the images she showed us seemed inconceivable –sometimes described as such even by Valorie who had witnessed it all first-hand. Upon approaching an orphanage she was hailed by what remained of a gesture from a girl whose arms had been amputated. The girl asked for help for her mother. Valorie wanted to stop but her hosts said they would never make it inside to the orphanage if they did not move on. Once inside what remained of the orphanage Valorie was met with waves of person after person approaching her and asking for help. She emphasized to us that there was no time for planning how to help; “What you attend to for the hour comes to you.” Over and over again people would approach her with the words nou pa gen meaning we have no . . . : we have no parents, we have no food, we have no water, we have no home."

Photo courtesy of Valorie Lordi

She showed us photos of a hospital and noted how pregnant woman had given birth under the piles of rubble. She explained how mental hospitals had been demolished and told us how those patients who hadn’t died were now walking in the ruin without care and appropriate medication, many suffering delusions. She explained how prisons had broken open due to the quake and how already desperate circumstances were further exasperated by a spike in crime. She explained how the need for medical care outweighed the number of those who could possibly provide it, that amputation was often the only viable method to ensure safety from fatal infections. She showed us a photo of a trickle of water meandering down a wall and explained how water-borne illnesses are already bringing a second wave of deaths. Valorie showed us one photo after another of demolished buildings and injured people. She reminded us that inside every pile of rubble there were piles of bodies. My own body and mind began to slump into passive disbelief longing to separate from the horror, but Valories reminders and guiding words engaged me with what I saw: “Imagine what you would do if your friends or family were under there. Imagine what you would do if you lived there.”

Photo courtesy of Valerie Lordi

 Even before the earthquake Haiti suffered from extreme conditions of impoverishment. It is the poorest country in the western hemisphere despite being only 600 miles away from the wealthiest country, the United States. Haitian ancestors came as slaves torn from their homes in West Africa and forced to work in the sugarcane fields that supplied Europe and North America until the early part of the 19th century. Although the diasporic people of Haiti ultimately won their sovereignty, they have always been plagued by a struggle for basic life needs. Due to limited supplies of food, water and shelter the population of Haiti has been chronically vulnerable to both desperation and criminal greed. As the Ministry of Presence website notes: before the earthquake poverty affected 80 percent of the population; the economical distribution showed one percent of the population holding fifty percent of the wealth. The struggles that preceded the earthquake have now worsened. The particular orphanage that Valorie has been working with quadrupled its residents in facilities which were already at capacity prior to the disaster.

Photo courtesy of Valerie Lordi.  These are women receiving rations, the military had to make the decision that only women could be given food, as they were more likely to feed their families.

As Valorie spoke, her hands guided us with metaphors and with gestures. “Before I went, Haiti was about there,” she said, holding her right arm out straight, palm facing inward. Her hands came closer to her body as she described the urgent need to travel into Haiti, the “energy in her belly.” She described the terrain with her arm, outstretched again, but this time with her palm flat, facing down. She made a smooth slow arc in front of her body as she said, “horizon to horizon there was rubble.” She clapped her hands once and we heard the crack she felt as she crossed the border. Her sharp clap represented the vibration she felt the moment the van entered “the gates of Haiti.” She drew her hands to her head and hair as she remembered the dust that settled down upon her almost ritualistically - “dust of mountains, of land, of buildings and of people.”

At the same time that she crossed borders, her journey also dissolved boundaries inside her. “Nothing was familiar and everything was familiar.” As the journey unraveled her understanding of her place in the world, it wove no new, precise understanding, but rather one abundant with paradoxes and unanswerable questions. She noted that the purity and light amid the destruction were inexplicable. How could there be no hope and so much hope in the same breath? Many of the photos were of smiling children, families waving to the camera. As we looked at the sheer whiteness revealed inside a mountaincracked wide open, Valorie attested that joy and beauty pervade Haiti. The people she encountered were full of “life, passion, fierceness, and intelligence.” Their litany of what they didn‟t have was real and endless, but with persistence they declared men nou gen yon bon (. . . but we have goodness). She described how people touched her face and stroked her hair and asked her to share with them the stories of her life. How could children who had nothing be so eager to learn how she, a stranger, defined her life: did she have a mother? a father? children? where was she from? The orphans asked these questions with limitless curiosity.  When she asked them if they had brothers or sisters, they gestured to everyone around them.

Photo courtesy of Valorie Lordi

On the other end of her journey Valorie could no longer describe her relationship with Haiti in terms of distance as she had done at the beginning of her talk with her outstretched arm: “Before I went, Haiti was there.” The relationship had changed to something immeasurable, something that could not be quantified, and something that was best articulated through gesture rather than words. She showed us the new relationship through her hands – hands that had been telling her story all night, hands that had carried her journey to us, a healer's hands that had checked vital signs, dispensed medicine, and comforted babies. “It was no longer them and me,” she said, one hand away from her body as she said “them,” the other close to her heart to signal “me”. “It’s just like this,” she said as she began to revolve her hands around one another, each one moving around the other in a continuous circle.

Photo of Valorie Lordi by Chuck Peters

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