We spent two of our days in Haiti in a mountain village called Dofine. When I say "mountain", I don't mean a highway to a higher altitude. I mean a difficult trip for our extraordinarily skilled drivers in Land Cruisers up and down and up and down and up and down and up steep, rocky trails. It took us a while to get there, but the visit was well worth it. We were welcomed with joy and love and lots of good food.
For lunch on Tuesday, I made an effort to sit with a table full of Haitians along with one of our translators, but as people got up to get different foods and drinks, they all left. A few youth and young adults took their places though. None of them spoke much English, and I had only learned how to greet people in Kreyol by that point, so we just kind of smiled awkwardly at each other and exchanged bon swa's, good afternoon's. They would say something short in Kreyol, and I would smile and shake my head, I didn't understand. I'd say something short in English, and get the same response.
Keheline, who I believe is 17, kept flashing me her beautiful smile. And I'd smile back. And after a while, we were just smiling back and forth and laughing with each other between bites of beans and rice and sips of lemonade. I finally got our driver/translator to come back over and ask her why she kept smiling, because I kind of thought the kids were making fun of me in Kreyol or something. Her response: every time she sees me smile, she smiles. Through the translator, she asked me the same question, and my answer was the same: I was smiling because she was smiling. We were literally just sitting there smiling at each other.
And that was our entire lunch conversation.
It makes me very happy to think about a world where that's the discussion we all have with people we don't understand, literally and figuratively. Thanks for the great conversation, Keheline. I'll do my best to keep it going everywhere I go.
:)
ReplyDelete