Sermon by Meagan Henry: “If You Came Here to Help Me, You Are Wasting Your Time.”

 

“If you came here to help me, you are wasting your time. If you came here because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

 

This is an aboriginal saying that I first heard six years ago when I was preparing to embark on a volunteer work trip to New Orleans. I will admit, this saying was like a revelation to me.

 

“If you came here to help me, you are wasting your time. If you came here because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

 

As someone who grew up living in poverty in the country, it’s taken a long time for me to understand that I am privileged. Me – the girl whose parents took her to the Salvation Army to pick out new clothes for the school year. I’m the kid whose family didn’t have a TV. In fact, we often did not have running water and there were times we lived without electricity. Much of this was by choice, though, because my parents rejected mainstream society. I was a child of the ’70’s, and although there is no one label that adequately encompasses my parents and their friends, I guess you could say they were hippies.

 

I give you this background to help you understand where I’m coming from when I say that it took me a while to understand that I am privileged. I am privileged because of the color of my skin. I am privileged because I was lucky enough to be born in the United States, to be born into a loving family. When I take into account how much of who I am and where I am is just blind luck and I think, what if I’d been born into poverty somewhere else? It’s humbling, really.

 

It is incredibly hard to face one’s privilege and then figure out how to deal with it. I think a lot of times we tend to see ourselves as not that privileged. We cling to all the things that prove this ‘lack of privilege’because with the realization of one’s privilege often comes feelings of guilt. I think this is one big reason people often avoid admitting to or addressing their privilege. It’s definitely been that way for me. Once I started to see the ways in which I am privileged and just basically how lucky I am, I got really freaked out. I look around and I see the poverty and the violence of our world. It’s everywhere, every day. What can I do about it? I can give money, I can bring canned goods for the food drive, collect winter coats for the homeless. There’s really only so much a person can do. And it feels overwhelming. Oppressive, even. And so we tend to avoid or deny it.

 

So what does all this have to do with my experience in Haiti?

 

I went to Haiti this past February in my capacity as a service-learning program leader with the Unitarian Universalist College of Social Justice. This was my first trip to Haiti.

I was not taken aback by the living conditions of the Haitians living out in the central plateau. They do not have electricity, nor do they have running water. Their homes are small, usually one or two rooms with an outdoor kitchen, and many have dirt floors. These are the surface, obvious things that usually are the most striking to Americans and Europeans who visit Haiti. To me, the living conditions were not that shocking. I feel kind of bad saying that because I know I am supposed to be shocked, and what I really mean is that I’ve seen these living conditions before in other countries. I’ve seen it in India and I’ve seen it in Romania, and I’ve seen it right here at home in the U.S. I certainly don’t mean to down-play a lack of running water or electricity. These are important amenities in life and I believe they are pieces of the larger picture when it comes to health and education and just general ease of living. When you spend large portions of your day carrying water, it drastically reduces your ability to do other things.

 

 

The organization that we UU’s partner with in Haiti through the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee and the College of Social Justice is called MPP which stands for the Papaye Peasant Movement. Chevannes Jean-Baptiste is the founder of MPP. He started the movement in 1971 when he gathered together a group of farmers to talk about what they needed to do for themselves in order to better their situation. MPP has grown into an organization of over 70,000 famers today. MPP offers trainings in horticulture and agriculture. It runs its own low-watt radio station to disseminate news to the central plateau region of Haiti. MPP also has its own health clinic where rural Haitians can get basic healthcare. They run a bank that awards loans to local farmers. They have a wood-working training workshop. They buy peanuts from the local farmers and then turn it into peanut butter they sell at the market. Local bee-keepers sell their honey to MPP who then processes and packages it for sale. They have a solar panel workshop where discarded solar cells from the U.S. are used to make panels that locals can then buy in order to run a light bulb and radio in their homes. And if they don’t have the money to buy the solar panel outright, they can get a loan for it. All this happens right there in the central plateau at the MPP headquarters. It’s an amazing organization that trains and empowers the farmers of Haiti.

 

To me, one of the most profound aspects of our relationship with MPP is that it is a partnership. It’s modeled on a foundation of solidarity rather than charity. It’s not about ‘helping’the farmers of Haiti. It’s really about standing beside them and working together. After the catastrophic earthquake of 2010, thousands of Haitians were displaced. Many of them ended up out on the high central plateau, living outside, sleeping on the ground, scrounging for whatever food and shelter they could find. The grounds of MPP were completely filled with people who had nowhere to go. No homes to return to. The UU Service Committee and MPP had been working together and already had an established relationship so they sat down together and tried to figure out to do. Chevannes and the other MPP organizers and leaders and representatives from UUSC talked with many people and MPP decided they would donate some of their land to house people. The UU Service Committee agreed to partner with them on this project and they began to create the Eco Villages. Each Village houses ten families. Each Village is built from the ground up by the families who will live in it. When I was in Haiti, my group worked on one of the Villages. We moved dirt and rocks from large piles to fill in the foundation of what is to become the central meeting community house of Village five. That was back in February and I’ve been told we are now working on the sixth village. Currently, each Village is dedicated to farming and the focus is on sustainable living. 

 

While I was there, I witnessed MPP in action. I saw the amazing, empowering justice work they continue to do day in and day out, regardless of who’s in power in their government and regardless of whether or not we Americans are there, bringing our energy and resources.

 

I also witnessed something equally as powerful, and that is the power of making connections, of building beloved community. Each evening, our group gathered together on the front porch of the volunteer quarters where we were staying and we engaged in spiritual reflections to process our day. On the first evening, we learned a song, and this song became something of an anthem for our group. We sang it each evening and we sang it in the large old beautiful church we visited in the town of Hinche. I asked the choir to sing this song today so you, too, can share in this experience. The words are printed in your order of service and I invite you to join in.

 

Congregation sings ~ SANCTUARY ~

 

I’ll be a living sanctuary for you. It’s a powerful, emotional, and really meaningful song and we sang it together often. We started singing other songs together, too. On the work site we sang all kinds of songs. Let me just tell you right now, I am not a singer. I mean, I like to sing. I love it! I just only do it in public when other people, who are good singers and who can carry a tune are singing. But it didn’t matter that I am not a good singer. It was a bonding ritual for our group and it served to create this lovely different vibe and kind of community than it would have been had we not sung together.

 

So when we were winding down from our first work day late in the morning, we were singing and having a good time and our MPP partners – who don’t speak English, mind you – were working beside us and a few of them were kind of smiling and laughing a little and we could tell they thought we were pretty funny with our singing. But there was one woman who sat just a little apart from the rest of us. She was taking these long, dried, hard seed pods and smashing them open with a rock, removing the large, dried seeds and putting them in a bowl. We invited her to come sit near us and she shook her head and said something in Haitian. Everyone got quiet and our partners looked a little sad and nodded their heads and we Americans asked our interpreter what was happening and she told us that this woman was sad because just the day before she had attended the funeral of her friend’s husband. He died because of a motorcycle accident. The couple was very active with MPP. The wife is one of the MPP radio operators and a very dear friend of hers and she was just feeling very sad. We expressed our concern and condolences and we let her be. Eventually we all started back to talking, singing, working.

 

Someone in our group asked our Haitian partners gathered around, “Do have any song you want to sing for us? Maybe you can teach us. We’d really like to learn one of your songs.”Most were too shy, but one man did teach us a song. It turns out it is an MPP organizing song called Tet Ansamm. The translation of the song is this: Heads Together, Heads Together, It is God we must call on. We must not stay arms crossed and say how good God is. Truly, God is good. But we are the ones who must work to make his goodness appear on the face of the earth. For me, hearing this song and what the words meant in English was especially meaningful because it immediately resonated with the Unitarian Universalist in me. It is our acts here, now, on this earth that can make a difference and just standing around with our arms crossed and hoping someone else, God or whomever, will change the world is not going to cut it. We must do good to be good. We must change the world, bit by bit. This is our calling.

 

We all tried to learn the song in Haitian and we must’ve sounded very funny because everyone was laughing a lot. And then I notice that the woman shelling the seed pods had moved from the step of the building over to the platform of the shelter where we were all singing. And she was smiling and one of our group picked up a pod and cracked it open and dumped the beans into the bowl and then several of us sort of joined in while others were cutting rebar and we kept singing and talking to one another, through our interpreters. It was a beautiful, human moment in time. People from different countries, speaking different languages, all working together, sharing in the sadness of a loss of a loved one, singing together. We made a choice not to allow the walls separation to divide us. The walls of the language barrier, of cultural difference, of the labels of the oppressed and the privileged. Instead, we made a choice to build community.

 

“If you came here to help me, you are wasting your time. If you came here because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

 

I’ve been involved in service-learning for a few years now, and it’s not like I’ve had a revelation all at once, but slowly, I’ve come to know, to really understand what it means to have one’s liberation bound up with another’s. Well, I’m coming close anyway. In reality, I think this is a life-long journey. 

 

And so I leave you with this thought: Is your liberation bound up with another’s? If so, how? You don’t have to go to Haiti to see poverty and oppression. It’s right here. It’s in our county, it’s in our city. It’s often right around the corner.

 

I’m not sure anyone says it better than Adrienne Rich. “My heart is moved by all I cannot save: So much has been destroyed. I have to cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.”Amen and Blessed Be.