Sometimes it can be difficult to find hope. The price of rice has skyrocketed recently, not to mention the cost of milk and all types of meat. The political mess always hovers in the background. Friends and neighbors resign themselves to long periods of suffering with fibroid tumors, hernias, and other illnesses, because they don’t have the money for the operation or treatment and because it doesn’t seem so immediately life-threatening.

Guerda Lexima Constant (left) and Coleen Hedglin co-lead a training workshop in July for 160 Haitian teachers as part of the Campaign to End Child Servitude.

This morning my neighbor was sent home from school because one of her teachers was shot and killed last night while getting into a taxi after teaching a night class. There was so much crying that the principal just decided to send everyone back home for the day. Occasionally, I feel like going home for the day, too.

Recently, I was having one of those days (one of those weeks, in fact), when I really felt like going home—to twenty-four-hour electricity; to hot water coming out of the tap; to a place where you know that if you call the police, they’ll actually show up; to hospitals that function in every town; to a life of sufficient distraction that I could just forget for a while about the suffering of others. Then I was invited to a meeting in which representatives from several organizations were gathering to talk about the lives of restavèks— that is, children living in domestic servitude—and about what their groups could do together to work toward eliminating this practice. I’ve been to dozens of these meetings. We always talk with great passion, but not always with hope that things will change. But this meeting was different. This time I was able to see and feel and live hope, in part because Nadège was there.

Nadege Simon speaking to a group of Haitian servant children.

Nadège Simon is a young woman whom I’d met six months earlier at a community center dedicated to serving restavèk children. This center that Beyond Borders has helped support provides social services for the local community as well as a shelter for sixty-three girls who have escaped servitude.

Nadège plays many roles at the center, one of which is serving as surrogate mother to these sixty-three girls. At the time Nadège and I first met, the teachers at this center in Site de Dye (City of God), a very poor section of Port-au-Prince, were nearing the end of a six-month-long training we provided in Reflection Circles and Open Space. These two methods for encouraging critical thought, listening, and respectful exchange were sure to be useful both for teachers and for hundreds of children in the community.

When I saw Nadège at the restavèk meeting months later, I was surprised—but not because she was present at a meeting to discuss the lives of servant children. I know she is deeply concerned about the struggles they face. I was surprised that she was able to find the time. Besides working at the center, she’s also a teacher.

Nadège lit up, as did I, when our eyes met. Soon we were able to talk, and she reminded me of one of the last Reflection Circle meetings I had witnessed at the center. The group had been worried about what would happen when the training ended. I remember listening in as people discussed how they would use what they had learned in their lives and in the classroom. Many participants had already started small Reflection Circles in their neighborhoods, churches, and classrooms.

That day at the restavèk meeting, Nadège went on to tell me about how she had been using these methods in her own work at the center. Here we were, five months after the close of the training, and she was as excited about Reflection Circles and Open Space as she had been during the training, if not more so. She proudly told me, “We continue to meet as a group every Saturday!”

Nadège also talked about the change she’d seen in the children at the center in recent months. Many of them were quite “closed up” when they came to the center because of previous mistreatment and their other negative experiences. “When I started holding Reflection Circles with the children, they were very afraid to speak,” she said. “But after a few meetings, they started to open up and express themselves, like flowers blooming!”

As I sat at the restavèk meeting, wondering where to find hope for these children, wondering where to find hope, period, I was thankful for two of our initiatives that will enable more trainings like this, trainings that will bring life and hope to these children.*

Heguel Mesidor, a friend, university student, and longtime participant in Reflection Circles, dropped by to talk with me a few days after the restavèk meeting. I was profoundly encouraged when he told me, “To find solutions to Haiti’s problems, even if they’re not definitive, people need to be connected to one another. People need to understand that for all to be well in the world, we need to use cooperation, not force. Reflection Circles help us learn to be connected, to share ideas and collaborate, so that we can arrive where we want to go.”

In the midst of overwhelming problems and against long odds, it’s a privilege to hear about the seeds of our work blooming in the precious lives of those sixty-three girls at the community center. In this, I find hope.