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Combating COVID-19 in rural Haiti

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As COVID-19 quickly spread from Asia to Europe and across the ocean to the United States, worldwide concern over the impact of the global pandemic grew. Concern was greatest for countries like Haiti that have few healthcare facilities, poorly functioning governments and long struggling economies. Paul Farmer, physician and co-founder of the Boston-based healthcare organization Partners in Health, said in a March interview with National Public Radio that Haiti probably had less than 30 ICU beds. Haiti Liberté, the country’s largest weekly newspaper, reported on March 30 that there were an estimated 64 ventilators in the country, with many not working. On March 30, Haitian president Jovenel Moïse announced the closure of the border shared with the Dominican Republic and suspended all commercial flights into the country. To further contain the virus, schools and churches were closed by decree and citizens were asked to stay at home. The Haitian people were left on their own to fight … [Read more...]

Tagged With: COVID19 • global church

One body

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We are one body, so the Bible says. “If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.” COVID-19 has brought with it many painful lessons. COVID-19 has unearthed just-below-the-surface realities that were glaringly evident pre-pandemic to many in our world (food insecurity, inaccessible healthcare, living a paycheck away from financial disaster, no paid sick leave). COVID-19 has relentlessly revealed just how vulnerable we are physically, economically, socially. COVID-19 has also brought home to me the truth of our interconnectedness. As it turns out, we are, in fact, one body — whether we like it or not. When one part of the world gets the coronavirus, the rest of the world, eventually, will be infected too. I confess that in February I felt immune. China, after all, is very far away. Other horrific diseases had come and gone without breaching our borders, surely this one would stay away too. In March I assumed we would spend a few weeks at … [Read more...]

Tagged With: COVID19

Yearning to sing, yearning to breathe

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Selah. This mysterious little word is sprinkled throughout the psalms. My colleagues tell me that its origin and translation are uncertain and cryptic. Likely it is a kind of marker, delineating thought and suggesting performance, like a poetic or musical caesura — a pause, a connective suspension, an in-between place, a breath. One of my favorite six minutes of music is a recording by Duke Ellington called “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue.” It launches out of the gate, hurling spectacular blues choruses with blistering energy. As it travels, it sobers — instruments fall by the wayside, texture and dynamics recede, reaching a nadir: the briefest of piano solos by Ellington himself is suspenseful, eerie, strange. It fades… the moment is held… and then music is back, gathering strength, unbelievably vital, teeming, almost delirious with ideas and voices. But at the center, that mysterious piano solo and pause. Selah. There is a dramatic and painful selah in our worship life … [Read more...]

Tagged With: COVID19 • music

Fifty years for the 19th amendment — 50 years ago

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50 years ago — August 24, 1970 “One hundred years ago women voted for the first time in American elections in Utah and the Territory of Wyoming. The country did not fall apart when the hand that rocked the cradle began to rule. Just fifty years ago Congress submitted the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution to the states for ratification. … On August 26, 1920, twenty-six million women of voting age were enfranchised. They infused fresh energy into American political life at every level.” It was the Women’s Rights Convention held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 that got the ball rolling. The convention drew women and men into the intellectual leadership of the movement for women’s suffrage. “The women’s rights movement was stimulated in the debate over slavery and the rights of blacks when female abolitionists, for example, Sarah and Angelina Grimke, found it next to impossible to participate in debates because they were women. … The women saw their own liberties as bound up … [Read more...]

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