"Things didn’t turn out the way they were supposed to, but what can you do ? You must take life the way it comes at you and make the best of it." (From Yann Martel’s Life of Pi)
Once upon a time when my daughter was still alive, and she was a student at Stanford where I worked - and where I "wrote" the autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr. among other things... I was a compiler, of sorts, let's be accurate.
So perhaps Brother Martin was an inspiration? Listening to all his speeches, putting them in chronological order, and the Prof. Clay Carson edited by efforts...
Learning from King, the Poor People's Campaig and what was then "the Other America," Black, disenfranchised, under-served...
So...To Haiti!
We went to Haiti because she had a report to write in high school about a Caribbean or Latin American country.
My daughter was disappointed when a classmate got Cuba. I told her "Why don’t you choose Haiti ? You speak French Haiti speaks French…"
Well, Haiti doesn’t speak French at least the masses of people don’t and so….
After meeting up with a Haitian foundation at Stanford’s Haas center, we made some connections and studied Kreyol at Staford and went to the mountains of rural, Haiti and fell in love.
We took teams of Stanford students over the following years to learn from and live with the people -- not to help but to learn from because "Help" is a four letter word, and you don’t do that- not when your mother is an anthropologist.
Right. So, I saw as a mother-daughter anthropologist team, like Margaret Mead and her daughher Mary Catherine Bateson...(Aunt Maggie had been my mentor from a distance, as an undergrad at University of Hawaii).
But, it was not to be.
From Levi-Strauss, my hero so long ago:
“Like a city-dweller transported to the mountains, I became drunk with space, while my dazzled eyes measured the wealth and varieties of the objects surrounding me. An anthropological Paradise.”
Over the years, the past 25 years to be precise, of summers and December vacations, at Project Base, our home in those hills, I have finally gotten used to the constant comings and goings, interruptions, greetings — it is impolite not to shout some reply, acknowledgement, greeting, from the path or the window. From wherever you stand.
In my absence, “Project Base” is lived in, managed by, and its gardens, flowers, hibiscus, planted and maintained by Madam Kawolis. In my absence, she plants black beans which cascade over the patio. Food more than flowers.
In my presence, Madam Kawolis. is happy sleeping in the depot, a small separate kabin for storing tools and, well, the stuff that we lot bo dlo (USA) might hoard and forget about in our 2-car garages or basements—oddments of old furniture which could perhaps be used for firewood, but in any case, not to be tossed (where?). Mme. Kawo keeps mayi, corn, in one or another stage of husking or grinding, and banane on their way to or from the “upstairs” (Fort Kampon) or “downstairs” market, in the almost-coastal town of Dabon.
Madame Kawolis is a peddler, or rather, a porter; the banane, the mayi is carried in huge baskets on her head. The baskets are woven nearby. I treasure them. Into the baskets goes produce. Madame Kawo carries her goods “upstairs” as I call it — or rather, upmountain — to Kampon market.
Down and back to Dabon, “downstairs” as I would say, is 6 hours round trip if you are blan (foreigner, visitor — not a skin shade!) Up and back to Kampon is best before dawn — you actually climb faster before sun up! It’s true. This, I learned. Vivere e imparare.
Baskets. One year, I actually fit one in my largest empty suitcase and flew it across the seas, lot bo dlo. It served back in Palo Alto for laundry for many years…My favorite basket.
Until it, like so much else, had to go.
