Merry Christmas, Bon Makaya!

I was about 7 years old when I saw a child playing with a pig in Orphelin ravine. Since then, I had promised myself to build a house for children, a real one, with walls stronger than speeches, so that they would no longer play with pigs, so that they would play with childhood. But I couldn't. Because here, even promises get kidnapped. Yet the country had everything to stand on its own. For the first time, as the white man wanted, all political factions aligned like a docile choir. A doctor to examine misery without curing it, a lawyer to elegantly plead injustice, a sociologist to name the fall, an engineer to calculate the collapse, an architect to design clean ruins, a businessman to transform disaster into opportunity. And now, as a Christmas gesture, they sign a decree. A neatly folded paper, an institutional gift, a legal ribbon tightened around the people's throat. No bread. No security. No justice. But a decree. Damn the people... not as a vulgar insult, but as an assumed policy. Clean. Signed. Dated. Christmas in Haiti is no longer a celebration, it's an observation: texts are distributed where repaired lives should be distributed. Merry Christmas, Bon Makaya. May anger remain clear-headed. May memory refuse amnesia. And may the child of Orphelin Ravine one day cease to be a metaphor and become a future. Daniel brought me leaves. I complete them with basil found in a nearby botanica. Nathalie put three pinches of earth in it. There are no oranges; I will take burnt lemon. Gade w pétwo way,
mpaka travay way,
m ta fè lòbèy, mpaka fè lòbèy ! Merry Christmas. Bon Makaya
Yves Lafortune, Port St Lucie