I read this article in the French daily La Croix a few days ago and found it very much worth translating.
A few decades ago, Brother Francklin Armand
decided to meet a formidable challenge: to pierce the land of Haiti, a dry soil
eaten away by erosion, with artificial lakes in order to allow farmers to
irrigate their land. And who knows? maybe to fish . . . A simple idea, but in
no way self-evident in a country used to seeing water pour down in buckets
during murderous cyclones and sow desolation in its wake.
But
water is life, too. And the project has grown, to the point where the
Government has, in recent years, asked Brother Armand to widen his outlook, and
has financed the creation of lakes on a national scale. Money is scarce and
never on time, but the work gets done: the cheerful monk and his teams have so
far created nearly 200 lakes in the entire country . . Acres and acres of water, gallons and gallons
of life.
“It’s
particularly important for the peasants in those parts of Haiti where it rains
massively for six months, but then there is nothing for the rest of the year,”
Brother Armand explains, during a stay in Paris this autumn. In the Central
Highlands, for example, an area bordering the Dominican Republic, where in 1976
he founded the Little Brothers of the Incarnation, and then, a few years later,
the Little Sisters of the Incarnation. Religious communities inspired by the
spirituality of Fr Charles de Foucauld, combining prayer and action, “peasants
among the peasants.”
In
Pandiassou, where the two congregations are installed, this man is always on
the move. People to see, things to do . . . When the news gets around of his
return from Port-au-Prince, where the Little Brothers also run a school, people
crowd around. And it’s while walking along the country roads and side-trails
that he listens to some and advises others. On matters as diverse as family
worries, land quarrels or agricultural problems.
In
Haiti, erosion is an essential topic. Radical deforestation has made the
country vulnerable to wind, rain and drought. But, speaking symbolically, Br.
Francklin Armand points to four other forms of aggression that undermine the
country: economic erosion – which ruins the countryside and feeds the anarchic
growth of slums, even more so since the 2010 earthquake --, social erosion, due
to an absent Government, intellectual erosion, a consequence of the flight
overseas of the élite, and finally spiritual erosion, linked notably to voodoo.
Hence
the monk’s frustration when he observes the political class, for all its huge
challenges, spending more time on its own problems than on those of the country.
In a nation used to tearing itself apart in quarrels and disputes, he works, he
walks, he advances. He is known to be closer to the Lavalas [political] school
of thought of former presidents Jean-Bertrand Aristide and René Préval, beaten
in the 2011 election, than to that of Michel Martelly, the current Chief of
State, who does not deny his friendship with the family and friends of former
dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, in power from 1957 to 1971.
But
Br Francklin Armand remains discreet. “We have worked with all the presidents,
whoever they were,” he reminds us. “Haiti’s problem is this division, the fact
that people have other things on their minds . . .” Hence it is not rare to
hear some people suggesting that it might be good for the country if he gave a
new dimension to his uniting energy – that of power and politics. Wasn’t he
declared, in 2008 at the age of 61, a National Treasure? Br Francklin Armand
smilingly rejects the idea. He prefers to continue on the road where he feels
most useful. Digging . . .
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