A Ring of Remembrance

About 10 miles from the epicenter of Haiti's recent earthquake there once stood a house with a large yard surrounded by a concrete wall. I don't know if it is still there, and I never understood why the people who lived there occupied such a comparatively large and well-protected property. They were not rich by any means--even by Haitian standards. And the group that inhabited the home and yard was a big, loosely connected assemblage of people: several women of varying ages, a couple of men, a bunch of young children, a grandmother or two. Some were, I think, cousins or aunts or uncles to each other. But some were just friends or cousins of friends or nieces of godmothers of friends. As thing go in Haiti, it's hard sometimes to understand how these living arrangements come to be and how traditional family units have disintegrated.

But however they came to be, these people were my friends. And one evening 20 years ago I came to say goodbye. It was January 1990, and after serving in Carrefour for six months, I was being moved to Petionville. I would miss these people, especially the children.



At this home in Carrefour were several small children--all girls--between the ages about 3 and maybe 6 or 7. I used to tease and joke around with these girls when we would visit. We would "fe grimas"--make faces--at each other and laugh (see above). I would scare them and they would squeal with delight.

So on this evening before I left, as the sky was moving through deeper shades of orange and red, I sat outside the wall with these girls and we made faces and laughed together one last time. One of them, a 3-year-old with the nickname of Bébé, picked up from the ground a small ring made of some sort of silver-colored metal. It looked as if it had been a link in a chain or a part to something mechanical. She gave it to me and I discovered it was the right size and shape for my smallest finger. I put it on and said, "Mesi pou la bag"--thank you for the ring.

She laughed and said it wasn't a ring. I insisted it was, and I teased her that she was my girlfriend and this ring would help me remember her. She giggled, others laughed, and we all joked together there in the twilight.

I kept the ring on my finger as I left that night, and I kept wearing it--because I told Bébé I would. As I wore it through the rest of my mission, it occasionally came up in conversation. I would tell Haitians that it was a gift from my girlfriend. When pressed--and Haitians always pressed--I would reveal that my girlfriend was a 3-year-old Haitian named Bébé. Again, the joke would generate good laughs. But I didn't wear it for laughs. I wore it more and more over time as a souvenir of Haiti and its people.

Soon after I returned home from my mission, I found a new girlfriend. Then another a couple of years later, and then another. Finally I found a girlfriend who became a fiancée who became a wife. And now I have young daughters of my own--sweet and beautiful and pure, like Bébé and her friends. But I still wear Bébé's ring

In recent years, the ring has taken on new and deeper meaning for me--meaning which I imagine was always there but which didn't take real shape until I articulated it to a class of university students two years ago.

I put on this ring initially because I joked with a small girl that I would use it to remember her by. I kept wearing it, I think, because I didn't want to forget her or the many other people I came to love in Haiti. But the ring reminds me now of more than just fond feelings for old friends.

Haiti has often been a sad place for me. The situation was never good there, and the often-depressing conditions juxtaposed against the purity and innocence and joy of childhood were troubling to me. I loved the children I met in Haiti, and I would laugh with them and tease them and play games with them, but the laughter, for me, was often tainted with a sense of tragedy as I thought of their difficult future.



I've often wondered--even before the earthquake--what came of the sweet, lovable children of 20 years ago. What happened to Bébé and her friends with whom we laughed on that warm January evening? Are they now mothers themselves? Have they, like so many Haitian women, become mothers without husbands, eking out a difficult living for their children in a troubled place? Are they some of the women I see on the news now, holding injured children or weeping for lost ones? Or have some of them escaped Haiti--perhaps on a less-than-seaworthy boat, across miles of threatening waves, sneaking into Florida in hopes of a better life? Are they even alive?

I don't know.

And I may never know. But I continue to wear this ring to remember the children I cannot forget. But more than to remember, I wear it to keep them in remembrance. The ring is, in a sense, a form of a prayer: I remember them, but not to myself; I remember them to God.