It is Sunday morning.
Sun squeezes through delicate spider webs by an old stump.
Water seeps through screw holes in the tin roof of the guest house.
Children sing songs at Ms. Sue’s.
When you have little, you are happy with what little you have.
The kid meter is shaped like a stop signal with green,yellow, and red lights.
When the green light is on there are bursts of positive energy. Kids seek like minded playmates and act out dramas the length of the dining room. They stay out of each others way and, like water, seek paths of least resistance. There are yells of pleasure, shouts, rising and falling voices harmonizing like a well tuned college choir.
With the yellow light there are the beginnings of malfunction. Small groups disintegrate, individuals grab for the same toy, sharing is a foreign concept. Someone is pushed down by someone bigger or someone is reprimanded by staff for doing a behavior out of bounds even by a child care workers loosest standards.
At the red light, there is loud and persistent crying, by one, several, or many.
At this breakfast, there are 42 children and staff being served, getting books ready for school, visiting, doing dishes, wiping down tables, sweeping the floor and finishing chores. It is not a well oiled machine, but there are good things happening that are reinforced each day over time.
This morning the light is solid green.
In the 1950’s, the world was in a Cold War.
Yet, there was hot atomic testing with Pacific atolls being blown into non-existence and school children crawling under their desks at a school bell. Russia and the United States were headbutting and angry rhetoric took the place of missiles. Scientists, and what they were working on, became a preoccupation for the public.
In the 1950’s, there was also a flurry of B movies about giant insects, crabs and birds turned into threats by nuclear radiation and/or chemical injections in secret government research stations, taking revenge on humans that created them, casting fear into hearts at local theaters and spawning fantastic comic books.
One such movie production was a 1955 epic, titled ” Tarantula . ”
The plot stars a giant angry spider escaping from an isolated desert laboratory and threatening the fictional town of Desert Rock, its hard luck population, the U.S., and, by extrapolation, the world.
This real tarantula, outside my guest house in Haiti, is not to be feared.
After discussion with the kids who watch the tarantula with me, he is allowed to live, to move back into the brush. His bite would hurt but his venom wouldn’t be fatal to any watching him this morning while tree trimmers work, stirring up undergrowth.
We have more to fear from the things this big boy eats.
Scarier than tarantula’s is what science is doing, outside our purview, while promising everything is just fine.
Eggs come from a local source and are delivered when ordered.
There are 30 eggs to a flat and ten flats to this stack which makes three hundred eggs. It sounds like a multiplication word problem from one of the kid’s math workbooks stored in a plastic crate on the back porch.
It becomes more than a multiplication problem when the cook cracks a hundred eggs for this mornings breakfast alone.
Now, it becomes a logistics problem.
Multiply your own children times a factor of ten, fifteen, or twenty, and think which direction your household finances are going.
What complicates the story is these kids don’t have parents, have parents who have left them to be raised by strangers, or have been abandoned.
That turns this post quickly into a lesson in multiplication, logistics, and heartache.
The crack in this wall began after a contractor built a security grate of ironwork on top of the storage unit so thieves couldn’t slip in at night and help themselves to someone else’s food. The crack has dangerously expanded and weakened the wall, and, in extension, the entire storage room.
This morning Mich poses next to a Haitian broom that looks like it wouldn’t work but does nicely on concrete, tile, even on stones in the yard. The broom’s fibers are flexible and strong enough to push mango leaves and paper into a pile to be picked up and thrown into an old oil drum to be burned or hauled off later.
The broom’s bristles are held together by rope twisted around them and the long thin wood branch handle. The broom is light to carry and easy to shake out and leans against the wall like a ;professional loafer.
Mich smiles.
He is happy even if this crack looks like a lizard ready to swallow him up and smack its lips after it’s snack.
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