A Moment with Haiti's Valiant Women for International Women's Day

It was a couple of months after the earthquake before I went to see the women. Malya and Eramithe have been friends of mine for many years. We have had highs and lows together, and I have listened to their stories and the stories of the women around them many times. Their organization, KOFAVIV (The Commission of Women Victims for Victims) has a membership of women and girls who are survivors of rape and worse. For this reason seeing the women is never an easy thing, but after the earthquake I had already heard the stories about the attacks in the camps. And I knew that my friends were living in the most dangerous and terrible place I could imagine. It was going to be much more difficult this time.

I rode down to the Champ de Mars in downtown Port-au-Prince on a motorcycle with a friend, having left my son at home with his nanny, and tried to prepare myself for what I was about to experience. I had already been to many tent camps, and had talked with women, men and children about how their lives had been devastated by the earthquake and how, afterwards, they found themselves out in the open in the parks and streets of the city, completely vulnerable and without a safe place to stay.

Some days Port-au-Prince is no big deal, but other days it hits you hard. You look around at the rubble and destruction and you realize that you are living in a cemetery. As I rode down to see the women I felt that deep in my gut. I was tet chaje, completely overwhelmed, but I had waited too long to see them already. All our mutual friends and colleagues had told me how bad the situation was for them, and I knew I had to go. Even if I had nothing to offer, I had to be a witness to their lives and listen to their stories.

I spotted them on the side of the road outside the Place Petion. We kissed and they began to lead me through the muddy paths to their corner of the camp. Eramithe pointed out the tent they had received as a donation where she, Malya, and seventeen other family members were staying off and on. I saw her daughter, a lovely girl whose smile I remembered from all the times we’d met before. She wasn’t smiling anymore, though. They led me to a chair under a tarp where at 8am it was already well over 100 degrees and they began to explain to me what was going on.

As we talked I found myself taking stock of the small details. I was struck by Eramithe’s white sandals, how she managed to be so clean and presentable and how my own shoes were covered with mud from the moto ride down. I watched a woman in a nearby tent try to wash the mud off her feet with a small basin of dirty water, and couldn’t imagine keeping the inside of the tents clean enough to sleep in with your children running around in this mud all day. I watched another woman with a tiny newborn baby, wiping the sweat off her daughter’s face with a washcloth.

The stories Malya and Eramithe told me that day have been seared into my memory. I have a physical reaction when I take myself back to that morning. KOFAVIV does a great deal of peer counseling, where women who have been raped reach out to new rape victims. Since the earthquake, the women of KOFAVIV hadn’t had much time to mourn the loss of members to the dekonb, the rubble all around us, because they were so busy collecting new members. Younger women, orphaned by the quake, even children, were being raped every day in the new tent cities. Most of them were gang raped and many had to be brought to the hospital for emergency medical care. Many of the women were raped in front of their children, or their daughters were raped alongside them.

The women were calm and stoic as they told the stories. The sweat poured off of all of us, and when they stopped talking I looked at my feet and the ground around them. I promised to send aquatabs to treat the dirty water in the camp, I promised to follow up on some funding possibilities, I promised to come back for a meeting the next week. Mostly I just smiled while my heart fell apart inside my body, and held tightly to Eramithe’s fingers before she walked me back out of the maze of tarps and the searing heat into the street of downtown Port-au-Prince.

As I rode away from them I could not stop the tears, the sobs that shook me.  I had cried many times since the earthquake, but not the way I cried that day. As we pulled into the yard at the house, my son ran down to greet me and I turned away, completely falling apart. I folded in on myself, unable to stop crying. I don’t remember how long it took to catch my breath and to find the words to explain to those around me what had happened.

A month later the women held an event for Mother’s Day. Hundreds of women poured out from under tarps and tents to march peacefully, calling on their fellow citizens to protect the children of Haiti. They followed it up with a celebration complete with theater, music, dancing, food, and gifts for the mothers. At the end of the event, after brightening the day for so many other women, my friends returned to their tent at Place Petion.

The women remained in the camp at the Champ de Mars for several months longer, until a grant came through that allowed them to move to a safe house. They had gathered more than a dozen victims around them in their corner of the camp, and had recently been threatened at gunpoint for their work seeking justice for others. Funding allowed KOFAVIV to open a new center for women in Christ Roi, too. I visited their center in September 2010, seven months after the quake, and felt hope again.  Here they are providing peer counseling, using reflection circles to help women heal, and providing emergency medical support to women who have been raped.

After visiting KOFAVIV’s center, an oasis of peace and support for women, I headed back down to that corner of Place Petion in the Champ de Mars where my friends had lived for months. I went with a videographer, working to finish up a short documentary on KOFAVIV. We were there to film one final interview, so I led the way down the twisting path to the tarp and we sat down to begin. There a member of KOFAVIV told us about how she was raped only two days after the earthquake, and how several months later she was attacked in a latrine in the camp, stabbed and raped again. I looked around, seeing the familiar faces of Eramithe and Malya’s former neighbors. I focused my eyes for a moment on the darkness inside the tent where a small baby girl has lived her entire life so far. And then I brought myself back to the woman we were interviewing, willing myself to be completely present for her at that moment.

In the company of these Haitian women I am humbled, and sometimes when I truly reflect on their lives I feel shame as well. Forced to live in the horrific conditions of the camps, bathing out of buckets on sidewalks where anyone can see them, so many intimate activities that belong inside bedrooms now being enacted in the streets. These women survive a suffering I can only comprehend as a witness, a pain I will never know myself. As a friend who also worked with the women once said, “True empathy would probably destroy us.” And yes, even on the periphery the suffering is enough to knock me to my knees, a weeping mess.

I have wanted to share the story of the women and their life on the Champ de Mars for a long time now. Each time I wanted to begin I could not find the words. Today is the 100^th International Women’s Day and as I assembled photographs of the most valiant Haitian women into a slideshow this morning, I saw that corner of the camp in my mind. I was awash again in the anguish I felt as I rode away from them that first day.

Today as the world celebrates International Women’s Day, I spend a quiet moment remembering the strength, the tenacity of these tremendous women. These girls and women who are forced to survive the un-survivable, who do not have the luxury of even a moment of self-pity because they have to get up each day and fight just to keep their children and their own bodies safe.

Please take a moment with these women today. Watch the slideshow here.