Two Old Men Bring New Life to a Community
During just 17 days in September of 1963 Hurricane Flora swept through the Caribbean killing some 8,000 people. The University of Rhode Island’s hurricane website estimates Flora to have caused 3.77 billion dollars in damage (in 2009 dollars). Flora ravaged French Guyana, Tobago, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Haiti, and caused massive wind and rain storms along the US East Coast as far north as Maine by the time it spent the last of its anger in Newfoundland, Canada.
One of the most devasted communities Flora left in her wake was Petit Trou de Nippes, a sleepy, forgotten little coastal fishing village in Haiti where, almost twenty years after Flora’s passing I was visiting Odi Long, at the time the world’s oldest Peace Corps volunteer at age 81.
Odi was from northern Maine and had made his career as a lumberjack working for the Bell telephone company, felling trees to make telephone poles. The day he retired he joined Peace Corps and worked in construction projects in Upper Volta, Togo, and Sierra Leone. Now he was one of the first volunteers to be assigned to Haiti, at the time the first “new country addition” in fourteen years to the Peace Corps world.
Odi spoke a sort of northern Maine French that his perfectionist language teacher felt was too far from Haitian Creole for him to be understood locally. Shortly after my arrival in-country when I met him at the Peace Corps training site a few weeks into his cross-cultural training, I learned he had been told he might not pass language training and might have to relocate to another country. I was new to my assignment as Haiti’s first Peace Corps Director. Here I was, at the time the youngest Peace Corps Director in the world, meeting the oldest Peace Corps volunteer in the world! When I was introduced to Odi he was regaling the gardeners at the training site with his high energy humorous story-telling about his fifteen children and half a dozen great grandchildren, and he had them all in stitches. He turned to me and to this day I remember the admiration I felt for this short wiry old guy with an easy smile. “So! Monsieur le Directeur!” he practically sang, shaking his head from side to side with provocative drama. “Are you going to fire me?!” The idea of was so preposterous that I began to laugh, and so did his coterie of listeners. It became a running joke between us whenever he would need more lumber or tools for the buildings he was to repair in Petit Trou, the village where he was going to be assigned to train apprentice carpenters. The village had been devastated by Hurricane Flora and had not recovered in almost twenty years.
A couple of weeks after Odi moved to his village I made my first visit, bringing him a few tools and the lumber he had requested to get started on some scaffolding work. I had been curious to know how Odi would settle in to his village. Would he really have language problems? Would he adjust to the food, handle life in a small tropical fishing village?
On this first visit I found Odi on his porch with a group of youths, all too young to have experienced Hurricane Flora, having a rest from taking measurements for the roofs they were to rebuild. They were having lunch and laughing about some story about Odi’s grandkids. Most of the youths were students, part of Odi’s volunteer crew, who were apprenticed to the construction project. They all called him Pèpè, a Creole term of endearment for Grandpère, Grandfather. He spoke to everyone in his Northern Maine French and they responded in Haitian Créole, and there was never the slightest language gap. It struck me they even had the same quiet belly-laugh.
After lunch Odi took me on a walking tour of the village, and I stumbled a few times on smooth pieces of metal in the street. Odi explained to me that they were the protruding parts of historic old cannons that had ringed the old fishing harbor. The hurricane had picked them up from the harbor wall, blew them around the village’s dirt roads like matchsticks, dropped them, and covered them with mud and sand.
There’s an interesting background to the cannons in Haiti. As it turns out, in Europe most cannons were melted down and rebuilt in a quest to improve their firepower for each successive war. But the cannons in the Caribbean were not part of the European war theatre and were therefore not melted down and modernized. That’s why today the oldest European cannons are found in the Caribbean. And due to the Haitian Revolution’s massive fight against France and Spain and its all-consuming defensive posture for generations after independence, Haiti was the most heavily fortified piece of real estate in the Caribbean. Haiti is therefore is a repository for the oldest pristine French cannons that you can’t find anywhere in France. Few people realize this, and in Petit Trou de Nippes most of those precious old cannons were protruding from the streets. The hurricane had smacked the village with a vengeance and drowned the animals it couldn’t kill. Eighty percent of the population had been either killed by Flora or gave up heir livelihoods and left. And the last thing on the minds of the depressed few who left was the historical preservation of a two-hundred year-old legacy of wars.
In a quiet, sad moment on one of the streets leading to the little harbor where a few fishing boats would still come in, Odi introduced me to Manus, who had lost his wife to Hurricane Flora. He and Odi were the two oldest people in the village. Odi went to visit Manus every day, sometimes bringing members of his crew to hear Manus’ stories about how things used to be. It turned out that one of the cannons had crashed into Maryse, Manus’ wife, as she was running into the house to escape the storm and it had killed her. The cannon was still in his front yard, half buried in the dirt. Twenty years later Manus’ tears still flowed for his Maryse, and it was Odi, a lumberjack from faraway Northern Maine, who had personally felt that same storm twenty years ago, who could fully understand how its angry winds could be so painful.
We spent some time together and then it was time for me to leave. I unloaded the supplies I had brought for Odi and his crew and promised to return in a few months for another visit.
I didn’t realize the visit would mark the twentieth anniversary, to the day, that Flora had passed through and wrecked the town, killed Maryse, took Manus’ dreams, expelled the people, hidden the canons, killed the livestock, and destroyed the harbor and most of the buildings. But the scaffolding for the roof of the old school house on the town square was done. It gleamed humbly in the sun. You have to have seen how gaunt and forlorn that building had been, to appreciate how lively the scaffolding now made it. It was just a scaffolding, but it portrayed a kind of gaiety and sense of resolve that made passersby stand a bit straighter and walk a bit more determinedly, as if they wanted to be there. A local store had given away five gallons of paint per customer and for the first time in twenty years people had painted the walls of their little houses that faced the street. Something was in the air. Something was happening to Petit Trou. Clearly, the fact that repairs had begun created a new attitude in the village. What I’m trying to describe is that reconstruction is about much more than building. It’s obviously about pride and taking back hope. This is probably something carpenters and construction workers know well.
Continuing our walk, Odi brought me to say hello to Manus, and that’s when I saw the most important effect of what had begun in the village. Manus had put together his own crew of youths and had chosen that particular day to start work. And what was his project? They were digging up the old cannons and were going to place them back on the harbor wall, starting with the one in his front yard that had killed his Maryse. Today Manus didn’t have a tear in his eye as he handed out shovels.
Petit Trou is still a sleepy little fishing village, and Odi and Manus are long gone. But in their last years they found a way to bond with each other and help the villagers recover from despair.
