A trait that I value in persons who would be leaders of people and even leaders of leaders is “teachability.”
Great leaders are always seeking to learn from others and have coaches and others who can provide valuable feedback. As one wise person once said, “Feedback is the breakfast of champions.”
Great leaders are always evolving and look to reinvent themselves for the changing landscape and parameters of the context within which they lead and the world around them.
As I still try to process the words spoken in January by the leader of the free world that dismissed people of certain countries, I think of my greatest teachers. They have been the courageous, joyful, hopeful, and tenacious people of Haiti, people who have kept on keeping on and moving forward against the longest of odds.
A few weeks after that awful day of January 12, 2010 when the earth shook in Haiti, killing over 350,000 persons, displacing many times more, and creating over a million new orphans, I was privileged to preside at the funeral of two remarkable young people, Marc Erline and Evenson, students in the Haitian Education and Leadership Program (uhelp.net), an awe-inspiring program that has as its most long standing continuous supporting partner the Haitian Timoun Foundation (htflive.org).
This program invites the very brightest young people in Haiti who have no way to fund a college education and provides for such an education including tuition, housing, food, leadership development and much more.
The hundreds of young men and women who have graduated from this program or are in it now truly represent the very best in terms of leadership and leadership potential.
They have overcome incredible hardships and obstacles – no electricity, miles to the nearest school, inadequate nutrition, and generally only a mother or grandmother as a parent – to not only graduate from high school but to also be ranked number one in their class.
In a country where 85% of all people holding a college degree do not live in Haiti, these young people who are integrated into the H.E.L.P program have a deep desire to take their learning and invest themselves in Haiti, making it better and more just.
On this day of the funeral, the grief in the makeshift worship space under a tarp in the mid-day Port-au-Prince sun filled the air with the sounds of mourning and the shock of what had happened.
Haiti is a cruel place where the best dreams can be smacked down.
Marc Erline and Evenson, both killed in the earthquake, were amazing young people who brought joy, light, and excellence to every group they entered.
The reality on this day was not that an earthquake had taken their lives. Poverty had.
It is the kind of poverty where a country mired in it is exploited by exporters of cement who can sell expired cement to them and get away with it. It is a place where inadequate reinforcing steel can be placed in the substandard concrete because those doing it can get away with it.
Haiti’s buildings, built to withstand hurricanes but using substandard cement block, became instant death traps for those caught inside them.
But these Haitian young men and women devoted little energy to wringing their hands and crying out, “Woe is us.” They got to work, entering devastated buildings and using their learned engineering skills to repair them and the faulty electrical wiring in them. Many joined forces with the emergency medical team at a makeshift hospital deployed by HTF to attend to the injured.
Their spirit is not unlike the women in the Central Plateau of Haiti, who are in the Fonkoze-led and HTF-sponsored Chemen Lavi Miyo program. CLM is proving that the most despicable and degrading poverty on the planet can be eradicated.
These women and their children have been told that they are nobodies, even sub-human because of their living conditions; yet, they enter the CLM program and have no quit in them. Over an 18-month period under intentional coaching and with moderate material assistance they raise themselves up to be players in the Haiti economy and society.
I once told a group of 100 women who were graduating from the CLM program (and it graduates 98% of those who enter) that they were the most courageous persons I have ever seen.
So, the question of the day is not so much about the rhetoric of our president stemming from a life born with a silver spoon in his mouth but about teachability.
What can we as Americans learn from the Haitians whom I describe?
What can we learn about a sense of community, tenacity, and a never-give-up-hope spirit? What can we learn about their hospitality, where welcoming the stranger and always making room for one more is part of their way of life?
When invited to a wedding thrown by a wealthy man for his daughter and watching how the guests arrived in their fine clothing and took their seats at the banquet table, Jesus once said,
“When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous” (Luke 14:12-14).
Jesus pointed to something that we who are in solidarity with Haiti know. Our deep relationships and partnership teach us and transform us. The relationships are so powerful that we give thanks. Deep down we know that we need Haiti more than Haiti needs us.
In the abiding hope of the empty tomb,
