[saymaListserv] "You Can't Bury Water": reflections from Kathy Kelly on her way to prison

[Steve Livingston]

Dear Friends,

A number of SAYMA Quakers have been involved in civil 
disobediece actions at the "former" School of the Americas at Fort 
Benning, GA, a facility that was revealed to be a training ground for 
torturers, and subsequently changed its name to obscure its legacy.

Friends joined with other concerned people of conscience to keep 
the School and its awful legacy in the public eye, despite the name 
change, and many continued being arrested there. Among those 
arrested was Kathy Kelly, a co-founder of the Voices in the 
Wilderness organization and for twenty years a Christian 
Peacemaker in Latin America and the Middle East. Kathy describes 
her Moral Values in a way that is instructive to us Friends:

"I feel a deep urge to be silent and listen to the cries of those 
most afflicted. Their cries are often hard to hear, but when we 
hear them, we’re called, all of us, to be like voices in the 
wilderness, raising their laments and finding ourselves 
motivated to build a better world."

At her trial last Winter she was sentenced to four months in the 
Federal Prison at Pekin, IL, for her actions of witness to U.S. 
militarism.  Before she left, she wrote a reflection on the way our 
nation's policies affect those who are "most afflicted". The 
metaphor about "burying water" is a poignant one, as water is 
more precious than gold to the poorest of our planet's people.

Kathy's witness and her unrelenting personal accounts 
demonstrate a calling that transcends slogans, sects, bumper 
stickers, and political campaigns to address a most fundamental 
spiritual concern: what Jesus reportedly called "the least of my 
brethren" (Matt 25:40).

Burying Water
by Kathy Kelly

In the summer of 1994, I was part of a four-person Christian 
Peacemaker Team dedicated to filing reports on human rights 
conditions in Jeremie, located in the southern finger of Haiti. 
When I arrived, I spent one day in Port au Prince, waiting to 
travel by ferry to the tiny coastal town of St. Helene. That day, 
eager to be Helpful Hannah, I joined some young girls to haul 
Hinckley Schmidt size water containers, destined for a 
neighborhood center in Port au Prince’s appalling Cite Soleil, 
across a ravine. My arms were trembling almost immediately. 
When we reached the cement ledge where the plastic water 
containers were lined up for vehicle transport, I dropped mine 
down with an exhausted hurrah and then watched in horror as it 
split. The girls flew into action trying to save some of the 
precious water. “Si ou cache verite, ou enterre dlo” – the Haitian 
proverb says that to hide the truth is like trying to bury water. 
The truth was gushing out. Throughout that summer I watched 
women carry water, on their heads, walking miles uphill. One 
day my friend Madame Ti Pa nearly fainted from the ordeal.

Madame Ti Pa struggled to support three children: Natasha, 8, 
Petiarson, 2, and Patricia, 1. Natasha was an orphan whose 
parents were killed when the overcrowded Neptune ship 
capsized off Haiti’s coastline. Madame Ti Pa found Natasha 
wandering tearfully in the street and took her into her home. 
Natasha was elegible for financial help to attend school, but 
Madame Ti Pa couldn’t afford to buy her a uniform, socks and 
shoes. Nor did she have money to feed the children properly. 
The children appeared malnourished and were often feverish. 
Even so, they sang, laughed and cuddled together, obviously 
responsive to Madame Ti Pa’s animated spontaneity.

St. Helene’s hilly roads were rocky and jagged, rough on wheels, 
shoes and bare feet. Beyond St. Helene, one path led to a 
smooth, paved road with attractive interlocking stones called 
“adoken”. Lined by gorgeous plants, trees and flowers, the road 
passed through the richest section of Jeremie.

Our Christian Peacemaker Team members hurried along this 
route two mornings each week to make radio contact with Port-
au-Prince. The sisters at the House of the Good Shepherd let us 
use their equipment. Afterward, it was always pleasant to chat 
with the kindly sisters and to hear of progress at the cooperative 
farm they sponsored. Sixty-five families were supported by 
women who cultivated crops in fields next to the sisters’ home.

One day, Madame Ti Pa asked me to go with her to talk to the 
sisters about joining the project. A woman in Port-au-Prince had 
written her a letter of recommendation. Madame Ti Pa’s eyes 
shone with hope when she showed me the typed letter. Then, 
she asked for a bar of soap. She hadn’t been able to wash 
clothes for weeks, soap having become a luxury.

Letter in hand, dressed in a clean skirt and top, Madame Ti Pa 
met me to walk up to the Good Shepherd House. When we 
reached the smooth road, Madame Ti Pa told me the story 
behind it. The “adoken” bricks were ordered by President Jean 
Bertrand Aristide to build a road through St. Helen, but the 
shipment was delayed and didn’t arrive until after the coup 
d’etat. The bricks were then confiscated and used instead to 
cover the already paved road through the richest section of 
town. The people of St. Helen felt disappointed and cheated.

More disappointment was in store for Madame Ti Pa when we 
arrived at the Good Shepherd house. Sr. Angeline firmly told her 
that it was impossible for them to accept any more women into 
the project. Madame Ti Pa was one of many who had begged to 
join.

Walking back along the “adoken” road, Madame Ti Pa trembled 
with weakness. She hadn’t eaten since the previous morning. I 
thought again of the attitude I’d heard macoutes express: “The 
poor are too lazy and stupid to run the country. They just want to 
cheat and steal.” On that road, even the very stones would cry 
out. (Habakkuk 2: 9-11)

What could we say to people who had driven Haitians to raw 
despair? Days later I met a man reputed to have committed the 
worst crimes. He was accused of theft, torture and murder, yet 
because he had a gun, he had power. He used this power 
against simple people who had nothing and craved little more 
than basic rights. Yet, I had to ask, did I come from a country 
that had more in common with him or with the people he 
persecuted?

A cold shiver ran through me when I recalled similar awareness 
of the power of water, the power of guns and the grinding power 
of poverty encountered in Basra, Iraq during the summer of 
2000. Our small peace team, again four in number, wanted to 
settle into the poorest area of Iraq’s southern port city to study 
Arabic and better understand conditions in a neighborhood 
blighted by the effects of economic sanctions and a 
dictatorship’s abusive rule. Three of the first words I wanted to 
learn, in Arabic, were, “Don’t do that!” I wanted to shout the 
phrase at playful boys who, in the blasting heat, would cup their 
hands, dip into the sewage ditch running alongside the road, and 
pour water over their heads to cool off. By the end of the 
summer, my companions and I would sometimes clap our hands 
over our eyes and shout “OK, my turn,” then pucker our lips as 
the boys poured water over our heads. The alternative was to 
pass out under the harsh sun as the temperature rose to 140 
degrees.

Each morning, in the household where I stayed, Nadra, whose 
name means “exceptional,” would rise at 4:00 a.m. to begin 
scrubbing every surface in the sparsely furnished home. Her 
next task would involve removing a stone, lowering an electric 
pump into the well below, and siphoning off some of the 
available tap water supply. Nadra was one of a very few people 
who could afford such a pump. Our team members didn’t drink 
the pumped water, for fear of becoming deathly ill. We drank 
bottled water and spent more money on two days of bottled 
water for ourselves than Nadra’s household spent for an entire 
month. So you can see the pecking order: Americans get 
purified bottled water, an Iraqi family in the good graces of the 
regime could at least manage to pump somewhat sanitized 
water, and the poor would be the most vulnerable to water-borne 
diseases.

Again, memory takes me to a scene of painful conflict over 
water. I’m remembering a time when our friend Caoihme 
Butterly walked into the wretched remains of the Jenin Camp on 
the West Bank, in April of 2002, carrying two heavy six packs of 
bottled water. Immediately, small boys ran up to her, eager to 
greet her. “Caoihme, Caoihme!” they shouted. Caoihme is a tall 
woman. She towered over them, holding the valuable water. I 
watched her eyes fill with tears when the boys, in frustration, 
began to fight with each other as they reached up to grab her 
cargo, eager to bring a bottle home to their family.

I wonder how Natasha, the eight year old orphan whom I met in 
St. Helene, has fared. Is she an eighteen year old woman with 
luminous eyes and a gorgeous smile? Would she remember 
waiting outside her home, each morning, to run and greet me 
when I stepped out of mine? I hope she doesn’t remember a 
morning when she was crouched on the ground and looked away 
when I called her name. I walked toward her, wondering if I had 
done something to hurt the child’s feelings the previous day. 
Drawing closer, I could see tiny pebbles glistening on Natasha’s 
lip. Natasha hadn’t run to see me because Natasha was eating 
dirt.

“You can’t bury water,” said our Haitian friends. “And you can’t 
bury truth.” The British medical journal, the Lancet, estimates 
that upwards of 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of 
the war. Child malnutrition is escalating and chronic outbreaks of 
such diseases as hepatitis and cholera occur regularly.

After 18 months of US war and occupation, contaminated wells 
cause water borne diseases; rivers are so polluted that not even 
animals can safely drink from the rivers; the lack of electricity 
means food and medicine can’t be preserved and water and 
sewage can’t be treated. Because of chaos and corruption in the 
US occupation, Iraqis remain in desperate need of jobs, services 
and security.

A decade has passed since I first met children in Haiti. Next 
month, Voices in the Wilderness will mark a decade since we 
first declared our intent to become “criminals” by traveling to 
Iraq. Several of our members are returning from recent trips to 
Haiti with stories worse than mine. I hope the children we’ve met 
and all those who hunger and thirst for justice will teach us to tell 
the truth, nonviolently, and to never be so foolish as to think you 
can get anywhere by burying water. Many of the people in Haiti 
and Iraq have the truth but don’t have the water. We have the 
water, but we don’t have the truth.

http://vitw.org/archives/718#more-718

Steve
-- 
Steve Livingston
nc_stereoman at charter.net
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