http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/02/08/100208fa_fact_anderson
This is an article from the February 8th 2010 issue of The New Yorker titled "Neighbors' Keeper". Written and Reported by Jon Lee Anderson.
This is about a woman in Haiti named Nadia who is helping and providing for her neighbors. I am not a religious person by any stretch of anyone's imagination. I am spiritual and have high regard and respect for the various religious and spiritual doctrines which nurture humanity soul with love, courage, peace and humility. This article has nothing to do with religion or spirituality however I take from it a new understanding more so an idea when thinking of religious and spiritual concepts. The idea that I am referring to is Jesus.
After reading this article I thought - a thought which could be coming from my inner child -the keeper of my imagination taking focus and courage- that this woman Nadia a deportee from US and a criminal could be Jesus. Not the Jesus of the bible the man himself but the ideology of Jesus-the Jesus who broke bread and feed thousands; Jesus who tried to bring humanity back into the fold of human existence.
I have always believed that we are all creating our own bibles with parables, psalms and disciples. Our lives are writing old and new testaments. Our bibles are the graffiti tagged all over whenever you read a newspaper article, or listen to that song. Our bibles are not just in the pages journals but in screams, laughter, dance, death, birth and internal conflict, addictions, celebrations, wars, tears, work, career, tears, travel, illness, healing, misunderstanding, meditation or effort to just live.
I share with you this article hoping that it leads you to a new idea on spirituality of self or humankind.
Here are excerpts from the article:
Nadia said she had grown up in Miami with her family. She was thirty-six, "going on thirty-seven," she said, and had been back in Haiti for only the past two years. I asked her why she had returned. She gave a rueful smile and said she had "been bad" and had had "immigration difficulties." In the past week, she had become a principal means of support for her community. Every day, she'd come into the center of town and tried to return with food and other essentials.
Nadia spoke English and Spanish and Creole, but, she told me, she felt more American than Haitian. When I asked her what her favorite television programs were, she laughed and said, "Oh, 'The Dukes of Hazzard' and 'Punky Brewster'!" Her mother took her and her siblings to the U.S. when she was six, on a boat with other Haitian illegal immigrants, going first to Cuba and then to Florida. Her father was in prison in the United States, and joined them when Nadia was fourteen. Soon afterward, she caught him sniffing cocaine in the house, and he had tried to beat her. Her mother threw him out. When she was still in high school, he shot someone and escaped to Port-au-Prince. Not long afterward, she heard, he was shot dead after a drug deal in Delmas 33—about thirty blocks from where she lived now.
As a child in Miami, she had wanted to be a marine or a model. "My mother kept promising to take me to Barbizon, but she lied, she never did." Nadia smiled. Life had been difficult. Her older brother, she explained, had fallen ill after a vodou curse was put on him. Her mother had returned to Port-au-Prince to nurse him, but he had died. Nadia's mother had brought the illness back with her, and died soon afterward. That was in Nadia's senior year of high school. She graduated, but after her mother's death she and her sister had had to move out of their rented house.
For a time, she said, she studied "H.R.S." at Tallahassee Community College. When I asked what that meant, she said, "Human resources services," uncertainly, as if she couldn't quite remember what the initials stood for. She had also studied cosmetology, and got a certificate for call-center work. She had three children, two by one man and one by another.
In 1992, she was arrested and spent five and a half years in prison. The charges were for forging a Treasury check and for armed robbery. She told me at first that she had been arrested in a car that had a gun in it which didn't belong to her. Then she looked at me and said, "I fell in with the wrong people." After prison, she was deported. In 1999, she returned to the U.S., hoping to see her daughter, who she said was being abused in foster care. She was picked up by police for entering the country illegally, and spent seven years and one month in the federal correctional institution at Tallahassee. In June, 2007, together with other detainees, she was sent by special plane back to Port-au-Prince. They were greeted by Haitian policemen, whose faces were hidden by masks, and placed in detention. "I was afraid, because I didn't know what to expect," she said with a shudder. "I don't know why they had to wear masks." After a couple of weeks, a cousin came to fetch her. Not long after, she rented the small house in Fidel and had been there ever since, earning a little income by cutting women's hair.
Nadia hadn't seen any of her children since her last arrest. Her youngest had been a baby when she went to prison. All three had ended up in different foster homes. Nadia's greatest wish was to return to the States with her nephew (the son of the brother who had died in Haiti), to be reunited with her children, and to have a job. "I can work at anything, I don't mind what," she said. "They say that if you pay your dues you're supposed to be given a second chance. Isn't that right?"
Read more:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/02/08/100208fa_fact_anderson?currentPage=5#ixzz0ers74AYm
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