When I visit another country, it is the terrain of the heart I most long to explore. What do people value, fear, hope? It is the majesty of the human soul in its myriad global expressions that captivates me. The first time I visited a culture far from home, I felt like I was watching shadows…Read more Still Thinking about Haiti
Haiti
A Journey Through the Dust of Haiti
Remembering a Conversation in Haiti Amber-diffused light ignites the dusty air with tender touch of setting sun. Beads of sweat and sighs of labor sift back to earth as day seeps away. Meandering people speak in a lilting language I do not know, mingled with children’s playful giggles. Suddenly, conversation shifts, from easy walking-camaraderie to…Read more A Journey Through the Dust of Haiti
Canopy of Hope
Day by day Haiti seeps into the sea. Deprived of any other reliable energy source, her citizens harvest what they can find. Food today or soil tomorrow? When a belly roils with hunger pangs, the tree is felled. Peasants charcoal the wood in shallow covered pits, then bag and sell it. Experts say Haiti is…Read more Canopy of Hope
A Prayer for Haiti 2
Haiti snuck in as a most unexpected visitor. My heart cracked to make space for it. Vulnerable and achingly beautiful, its vivid colors play in my mind, dancing in the brilliant sun on naked hills. Before and after I visited early this year, I read everything I could to try to understand how such crushing…Read more A Prayer for Haiti 2
Freedom Sunday
During a raid two months ago in India, rescuers invaded a room crowded with 36 women enslaved in the sex industry. Within moments of entering, they heard strange noises just on the other side of a wall. They searched for an opening, but there were no windows or doors. Finally they tore down a section…Read more Freedom Sunday
A Tameable Beast in Haiti
I am the two-faced lover of the developing world, the smiling maiden offering a delicacy secretly laced with poison. With one breath, I nurture and I kill. I demand whole-hearted devotion. They come to me in droves as I freely flow, offering daily obeisance in the washing of clothes and communal bathing. From first waking…Read more A Tameable Beast in Haiti
The Woman at the Well in Haiti
I fall in step behind an old woman who pads along the rocky path in bare feet, carrying empty plastic jugs. We trek single-file along a ridge, with ochre corn fields sprawling beneath layers of purple hills and mountains, crowned by cerulean sky. To our left, various structures perch along the ridge - roughly hewn, boarded boxes…Read more The Woman at the Well in Haiti
Painting A Prayer for Haiti (& a poem)
How my heart cringes on this mountain carcass – mounded bones stripped bare. Flayed flanks decay into ceaseless city striving. Betrayed and battered, you sprawl exposed, miserable, dull with hunger. But I sense something here, yearning at the fringes. Something broods at the frayed edges of this wasteland. Something determined, stubborn, more powerful and pervasive…Read more Painting A Prayer for Haiti (& a poem)
Why I Paint
I could feel the withering of a parched spirit. Aching to reach into the abstract, into the transcendent. To stretch with all my might and drink of the invisible. As of Sunday afternoon, it was my longest break from painting in more than a year. During the previous few weeks, the tactile world around me…Read more Why I Paint
Scars That Tell of the Good Life
With the kind of radiance that hints at secret knowledge of something very deep and very good, Noyo eagerly describes the privilege he feels in serving his native country, Haiti, as a Young Life staff-worker. “Just because something is easy,” he explains, “doesn’t mean it is the best. If you do something easy, it doesn’t…Read more Scars That Tell of the Good Life
Colleen Briggs Art & Writing 