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Haitian Mother
gmathurin

May 2005__I was abruptly awaken in the wee hours of the morning by my mother’s voice commanding us to wake up, “Leve! Leve! Leve!” Rise! Rise! Rise! I turned over on the bed to find that my older brother, although confused, was already awake, but my younger brothers were still asleep next to me. My mother stood in the middle of the room with a small oil lamp in her outstretched arm, high above her head. The light flickered furiously as she floated across the room. “Leve! Leve!” she screamed again. I finally realized that my mother was waist high in water, around her our funiture, our schoolbooks, our shoes, and the bokit that usually collected raindrops from the leaky ceiling, floated like debris from a shipwreck. Cite Louverture was flooding, and flooding fast.

Cite Louverture was a small neighborhood in Port-au-Prince, off Jean-Jacques Dessalines Boulevard, where my family lived when I was 6 years old. My brothers and I lived with my mother in a small apartment, which was no more than a small room separated by hanging curtains to create a sleeping area and a living area. By today’s standards Cite Louverture may have been a slum, but it was my first home. That evening, I fell asleep to the rhythm of raindrops on the sheet metal roof, and a small bucket was put out to catch the raindrops that would invade our living area through the ceiling.

While I slept that night the rain invaded the whole neighborhood. With floodwaters rising quickly, my mother gathered us, like a chicken collecting her chicks under her wing, and we made our way out of the house. Outside, the combination of dark clouds and heavy raindrops made it difficult to see, but we could hear the panic voices of our neighbors as everyone hurried to higher ground. My mother managed somehow to get all of us on the leaky sheet metal roof, where we all stayed huddled and trembling under a blanket for hours.

We were all lucky that day. Besides bringing garbage and mud into our homes, the flood did little damage to Cite Louverture. It wasn’t until the neighborhood gathered, and neighbors accounted for each other and assessed the damages, that I realized that my mother was hurt. While trying to get us on the roof, she must have gashed her leg on a piece of sheet metal. As she stood there drying us, blood ran down her leg, and at that moment I realized that my mother and God were one of the same.
May 2005