If the question
regards a kid living in the wealthy suburb where I grew up, the answer is almost always an enthusiastic “Very important!” The developmental benefits of learning
an instrument have been indisputably proven and spill into nearly every other
discipline that a child might want to pursue. Few of us would deny this…with
regard to a kid in a wealthy American suburb.
But for some reason when the question regards a child living in a poor neighborhood in Haiti, and the well-meaning American organizations that intend to serve that child,
the value calculus rarely works out the same. After all, there should be a
certain triage of need, right? Haitian kids are in need of food and shelter,
not saxophones. So most NGOs measure their inputs accordingly.
As reasonable as
that assumption sounds (it’s true, there are kids in Haiti who really are
hungry and homeless) it doesn’t have a strong track record of producing long
term change in the poorest country in the western hemisphere and quite
frequently does more harm than good. There are many reasons why this is. Most
of them can be summarized as follows: providing things is not the same as
investing in human beings.
Only the latter
amounts to any long term results, and I believe, only the latter has any
resonance with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
This lesson was
first taught to me by Elyon. Elyon wasn’t, in aid-speak, an “area of focus.” She
was an 11 year old girl with an unforgettable smile—charmed but quizzical at
the sight of us sunscreen lathering blan (meaning "white people," "foreigners," or "generally awkward people").
And Elyon didn’t know that, as a poor Haitian child, the extent of her
ambitions should be a daily meal and some hand-me-down clothes. Elyon was a
music lover.
So in my first
trip to Haiti, through the Haitian Timoun
Foundation (HTF) in 2007, I was surprised to find that one of our precious few
checked bags was a very clunky, awkward saxophone. I confess that the thought
did cross my mind, “Shouldn’t we be bringing with us more immediate needs?”
I still didn’t
“get it” at that point.
Seven years
after that first trip, Elyon is a young woman. She graduated high school with
straight As. With an unstoppable combination of intelligence and charisma and a
head full of ideas about how to turn the world upside down, she is poised to
join the small handful of students who will ever step foot inside one of the
highly competitive Haitian universities. In her neighborhood back in Jacmel,
they still tell stories about the saxophone girl who would spend hours each day
filling their streets with the type of beauty that can only come from something
as wasteful and extravagant as music.
The Haitian
Timoun Foundation doesn’t look at the kids with whom we partner as so much
intractable need. We look at them as Elyon and Kathleen and Samuel—highly
unique, differently gifted individuals who are ready not to just subsist on a
handful of necessities but to develop themselves as people capable of one day
leading their own country out of a decades old dependency cycle. If the only
news we’re hearing from Haiti is the last staggering statistic on extreme poverty or
the bracing image from the latest disaster, then it’s our own understanding
that’s truly impoverished. Everyone already knows these stories and they’re
good for building the viewership of media conglomerates but not much else.
For the hundreds
of people I’ve seen come back from travel with HTF, the stories they’re more
interested in telling are those of ingenuity, of resourcefulness, of love in
the face of loss, hope in the face of death. They tell stories of the empty
tomb.
How important is
it for a kid to have a saxophone?
As important as
the kingdom of God.
Go to:
to learn more.
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