By: Hari Millan

Email: millanhl@drexel.edu

Ahaji, Nirva and I arrived in Haiti on December 10^th, 2014 with the following language skills between us: Nirva who is Haitian-American, speaks Creole and French, Haiti’s two official languages; Ahaji, the study-abroad director at the University where I teach, speaks French; and despite my particular dream of one day achieving bi-lingualism, I just speak English. Within three minutes, I realized that I could not speak even the simplest words with any one of the children living at Love Orphanage

My previous trips to Haiti, Love Orphanage’s founder, Gabrielle Fedelus, had stood at my side. We’d brought ten students on creative writing study trips and hired Gabrielle as our translator. But this trip wasn’t school related and my non-existent language skills left me unable to communicate.

The trouble was I wanted to get to know the children. This whole trip—five days of volunteering at the Orphanage in Croix-Des-Bouquets–was planned around getting to know them. If I couldn’t talk with them, I’d have to figure out some other way. Granted, back in Philadelphia, I knew I wanted to hold a yoga class at Love Orphanage. Yoga had transformed my body and mind and I wanted to give the children a chance to experience it.

On a previous trip to Haiti, I had visited an AMERT school—now destroyed by bulldozers—where yoga lessons were part of the daily curriculum. AMERT was set on transforming education in Haiti, which meant giving children access to creativity and retraining teachers. High on that list was prohibiting corporal punishment. I knew that the changes would be subtle, but yoga is a practice that yields results. Now it was evident, yoga would get me across the language barrier.

The trouble was I hadn’t considered bringing mats. I’d read on various yoga sites that to get children focused, mats were necessary, but I wasn’t sure the children would take to the practice. The most fun yoga poses are done on the ground. Yet, the yard surrounding the orphanage was speckled black with goat dung and possibly with parasites endemic to soil such as Lassa Fever and Leptospirosis. It was bad enough that the children ran barefoot. I didn’t want them to lie down in it. Hand-washing isn’t the most common behavior among children anywhere. I knew I would have to limit our practice to standing postures.

And then, Esther, the slight eleven-year old girl with the longest set of lashes on her big brown eyes, who had been the first to wrap her arms around me and press her head against my chest when I stepped out of the car, and who hadn’t left my side since the moment I arrived, was the first to imitate me. She held her arms up over her head as close to her ears as possible.

“Stretch,” I said in English with Nirva translating into Creole. I touched the back of Esther’s small hands, turning them sideways. We were communicating. Esther relished the body contact. We both did. The eighteen other children living at Love Orphanage wanted it too. They lifted their bone-thin arms above their heads as I wiped a tear from my eye and began our session with a series of sun salutations. “Bonjour Soleil, Bonjour Soleil,” we shouted, speaking the same language, defeating the boredom the midday heat imposed.

“Hold out your arms and legs in the shape of a star,” I shouted. “What is the word for star?” I asked, Nirva. “Etoile,” she said.

It wasn’t enough to stand like a star, I wanted the children to shine. They would turn into twinkling stars. “Etoile illuminée. Etoile illuminée.” Nirva called out and we all shouted it together.

I decided to cut the yoga lesson short to entice the children to look forward to it the next day, but they didn’t want to stop. They hovered close in their star positions burning with light. The first session ran nearly an hour, more time doing yoga than people I know back home are capable of.

Tree, Elephant, Eagle, Dancers and the Warrior stance series were all poses that the children enjoyed. They asked for another session the next day and the next. Probably the most stunning yoga class I’ve ever participated in, even counting the one atop Aspen Mountain on my birthday, was on an empty patch of ground in the okra fields surrounding the Orphanage. Yellow flowers blossomed on the plants. As we called out the postures, goats brayed and birds squawked.

I left the Xerox of children practicing yoga poses that I had printed off the internet, knowing that the children would continue on their own. The day I left I saw them attempting Archer’s Pose, which I hadn’t shown them because we didn’t know the word for Archer in Creole and “hunter” sounded too violent a substitute.

All in all, I’m looking forward to my return and to this time bringing mats for each of the children in hopes of teaching them more poses and advancing their brave beauty.