Haiti through Our Eyes - Girls United

women are able to learn, to grow, and to nd and use
the strengths they possess within.
Community partners also make the lives of
girls in the US purposeful, uniting them in the
challenge of arts advocacy, teaching them to listen
to others’ stories and connecting them with the
needs and strengths of girls around the world.
(See Acknowledgements page for list of partner
organizations and school sites.)
Hope for the Future
e Haitian girls are rapidly transforming their sense
of purpose and potential as they share beautiful gis
with their local and global human family through a
public exhibit and now in this anthology. ey hope
other young people in Haiti and around the world
Photo by FERNANDE JEAN, copyright 2011 J/P HRO
will take inspiration from the anthology. ey invite
the creation of similar projects to promote healing
through the arts in other communities.
We encourage each global sister or brother who
sees Haiti through the eyes of these girls to now share
their own wisdom—at home and beyond their own
borders. Rediscover the arts as a tool for compassion
and for re-envisioning whatever you want to
transform in your own landscape or in yourself.
Young readers and listeners, we challenge you
to apply your creative gis. Find your collective
strengths. Advocate for the needs of others in your
community. Listen, share, and envision the future. You
too can deepen and redene your role as you upli the
condition of the human family.
—FCL/MHF
A Day in the Life
“United means putting our minds together in order to
work together,” said a participant in the Girls United:
Haiti rough Our Eyes project. I had asked these
young women how they would explain what united
meant to them. A youth shyly raised her hand but
then stood up, found greater courage than her small
frame suggested, and spoke those words. e girls, the
interpreters/apprentices, and the facilitators broke into
applause and agreement.
Adding to that, one of our interpreters said, “It is also,
communicating together.” Everyone applauded. We
then joined together the commonalities of those wise
observations: “So being united is putting our minds
together, communicating together, and sharing our
hearts with each other...We join our minds, our voices,
and our hearts.”
During ten days in Haiti, we learned so much about
what it means to be united. We had come to teach
art, photography, writing, and theater as tools for
expression for girls, young women, in Haiti. However,
those youth taught us through their interaction with
us and with each other how listening, how the sharing
of time and not just objects, allows us to see the person
who is inside us and to recognize in that individual the
values and feelings that we hold in common. In this
way, we all realized, we unite to share our lives and
our hope with each other, with other young women in
Haiti, and with youth in countries far away from here
yet within our shared world.
“When I am here I am more comfortable than
when I am at home,” one participant wrote in her
project journal.
at sharing of hearts was what I had seen in the
writing, art, photography and drama we experienced
each day. Young women entered that space as
strangers to us and to our ideas, but still they
opened their lives to us. On one day, aer Holiday
Reinhorn and I gave the writing prompt “What
would you like life to be like one year from now?” a
twelve-year-old sat with her pen, patiently waiting
and saying nothing for a moment. e other girls
were understanding and compassionate when she
soly told us she could not write her response to our
prompt—she had never gone to school and could
neither read nor write.
“at is okay,” we explained. “You can tell us what you
would say, And we will put your words on the page for
you.” Another participant volunteered to gently assist
with that task.
e twelve-year-old spoke her writing aloud: “One
year from now, I want to be in school, and I will be
able to read.” One girl’s words, another girl’s hands…
maybe this too is what it means to be united.
My heart felt both pain for a world where a
child cannot go to school, and admiration for this one
child’s courage and belief in a better future.
e writers of this book—the participants of Girls
United: Haiti rough Our Eyes—do believe in a
better future, and they also demonstrated to us their
awareness that they will be the ones to transform their
lives and their world.
Lynda Delva, a participant from Petionville,
writes of this shared responsibility in her prose poem
included in this anthology:
Haiti can change, but it is we who must
bring about the change.
Let us unite in changing the way we think
and the way we act.
Transformation occurs within us and outside
us each and every day—if we provide space for
that in our hearts and minds. e youth artists and
photographers in this book transformed their worlds
through their vision and their ability to see beauty
8 I GIRLS UNITE D: HAITI THR OUGH OU R EYE S A PRO J E CT O F FULL-C IRCLE LEARNING , THE ME RIDIAN HEALTH FOUNDATIO N AND THE UNITE D N ATIO NS F OUNDATIO N I 9