The people of Haiti wear the clothes we cannot sell or give away.
After Goodwill, after the Disabled American Veterans, after Saint
Agatha's rummage sale, there is Haiti.
My daughter Anna, who recently finished her freshman year at
Notre Dame, says Americans are T-shirt literalists. If you see
a guy with "Varsity Swim Team -- Palmer High School" on his shirt,
chances are he's a teenager a few credits shy of graduation with
a decent backstroke. Literalist T-shirts require a context: the
big game against State or the protest against the new Wal-Mart
out on the highway or the annual race for, not a, but "The," cure.
Haiti is -- the whole place -- out of context, at least any context
with which I am familiar.
I saw a man pushing a wooden handcart along the streets of Port-au-Prince.
He was barefoot and traveling the way any of us might have traveled
200 years ago. He was wearing a shirt on which bold black letters
urged one and all to "Shop Online."
Boys hawking peeled stalks of sugar cane in front of the Merci
Jesus Barber Shop wear shirts with the names of colleges they
will never attend, or even visit, colleges they probably couldn't
locate on a map: Colby and Carleton and Texas Tech and the University
of Puget Sound.
Lots of young Haitian men wear shirts with the tough Nike slogan
"Just Do It." As I understand it, "Just do it" involves getting
up off the couch, turning off the television, putting down the
Krispy Kreme, pulling on some sleek (Nike) athletic shorts, tying
on some sleek (Nike) running shoes and moving. Moving not to work
or to the market or to a clinic or to a friend's house, but moving
around a track or through a park. The indoor track at my local
YMCA announces each day whether we will be running clockwise or
counter, and just how many circuits we have to complete in order
to have run a mile. "Just Do It" is the cry for people who can
run a mile and never go anywhere. It is an odd sight on the back
of a man who walks everywhere he must go -- to get water and food,
to receive medical care, to sell wares on the streets of the city.
I saw a man with a shirt advertising the wonders of Aqua Fresh
toothpaste, which offers, the shirt says, "Triple Protection."
Three kinds of protection against oral offenses -- bad breath
and gum disease and tooth decay -- seem somehow less comforting
and important in a country where people die of typhoid from eating
and drinking contaminated food and water and others die from eating
nothing at all.
At the Saint Boniface Clinic in Fond des Blanc, where my daughter
Elisabeth is a nurse, patients routinely walk miles for medical
care. They come, carrying their children in their arms. They come,
running high fevers, cradling broken limbs, vomiting, dangling
gangrenous hands. Children walk the streets of Fond Des Blanc
carrying filled water jugs. Women walk the streets with bundles
balanced on their heads. I saw one woman walking with a 50-gallon
Styrofoam cooler, filled with food to sell, balanced atop her
kerchiefed head. They just do it.
I don't know where the plus-size cast-offs go, the Big and Tall
men's shirts with the ample belly space, the wide-hipped 3X stirrup
pants from the Big and Beautiful Shop. The Haitians I saw are
lean. Many look, in the words of my children, "ripped," as though
they spend hours in the gym. Does the fitness industry know about
hauling water? Would that make a good shirt: "Just Haul It"?
My daughter was visiting the States from Haiti when a relative
saw her and exclaimed, "You're so skinny! How did you do it?"
Elisabeth says she didn't know how to answer. "The Haitian Starvation
Diet"? "The 5 Percent Employment Plan"? "The One-Meal-A-Day-If-You're-Lucky
System"? The folks in marketing would have to come up with a new
name.
Americans wear brand new shirts, often tailored to fit the occasion.
I thought of this while standing, on the Feast of the Epiphany,
in the airport in Port-au-Prince, surrounded by American missionaries.
I carried a watch and a radio for friends of my daughter and her
husband. Others brought their own gifts, and their T-shirts alerted
us as to what they bore. There was the kid wearing the long-winded
logo:
"If you meet me and forget me, you have lost nothing.
If you meet Christ and forget Him, you have lost everything."
He was a Baptist (the shirt told me so), and I stood for a long
time wondering what happened to the grace-filled Baptist proclamation
of the God who knows that we fallen will forget, but who remembers
us, always.
The surgery team whose matching green shirts read "Medical Missions
of Northern Haiti" were just that: tired men and women back from
days of performing eye operations near Cap Hatien. They wiped
their hands repeatedly on antibacterial Handi-Wipes pulled from
zippered fanny packs. They pulled sealed cellophane-wrapped packages
of food from their packs, opened them and ate, wiping their hands
before and after eating.
There were the men from South Carolina: carpenters and drywallers
and bricklayers and electricians and roofers. They wore matching
blue T-shirts that read, simply: "Here I Am . . . Send Me." The
illustration below the words was a line drawing of building tools:
saws and hammers and wrenches and screwdrivers and drills. They
were going home after wiring a rural village for electricity and
hauling in donated generators. Some years they build houses or
clinics. They always come back. I asked one of them why.
He smiled and said, "I don't know. It just gets in your blood,
I guess."
I liked those men. I liked their shirts. Perhaps it has to do
with that most American of values, truth in advertising. Perhaps
it has to do with context. In a land of so many needs, they show
up with exactly who and what they are printed on their chests.
Like Catholics on Ash Wednesday, they wear the brand of their
first and final belonging.
"Here I am . . . Send me," they announce, with pictures -- illustrations
for the nonreaders in their midst! -- of just what it is they
have been sent to do. And then, well, and this is the best part,
they just do it.
* * *
Melissa Musick Nussbaum is the campus minister for the Catholic
Community at Colorado College. She is a writer and speaker and
the author of six books. She and her husband, Martin '74, are
the parents of five children, including Notre Dame graduates Mary
Margaret '02 and Anna '06.
July 2003
