The Mysterious Piano Door/When Haiti Became Real

My friend Scott The Playwright says there is a moment in every play when it must become real, or the entire message is lost.  I used to help with fund-raising for his theater company, Oracle Productions, and Scott was adamant we needed the extra money to get real metal swords.  He would say that when the hero and the villain fight, if the swords were to make some plastic "whack" sound, the play would continue to be fake to the audience and it would never have the impact intended.  But when those swords hit with an iron clash, something inside the audience says, "Those are real swords! Someone really could get hurt!"  They become drawn in, they buy in, they believe, and
the experience becomes real to them.

Today is the two year anniversary of the earthquake that shook Haiti and killed 300,000 people almost instantly.  In July, 2010 I arrived with a team to help rebuild a widow's house.  When I arrived, my first impression was more of an entertaining experience- the ruins, the masses of people, the bright sun and the smell of unregulated car exhaust.  We arrived at the guest house, met with the folks in charge, and then went to the building site.  The houses, if you can call them that, are like a maze of unique buildings, with winding passageways, unseen doors, mismatched steps, all on a steep slope. Somehow it felt like it was something I was observing, like some movie, rather than an actual place.

It wasn't until I came upon the blue door that my experience changed.

Unlike the doors in movies that change you, I never went through this one.  I passed that door probably 50-100 times a day that week, going up and down the 72 haphazard steps from the street level above down to the widows house below, carrying concrete block after concrete block, cement bag after cement bag.  I never saw anyone go in, or out. But it was what first made Haiti 'real' to me.



As I walked by the door, I'd hear anything from the plunkings of a beginner on the white keys, to scales for a warm-up, to Chopin and Bach, and then back again.  The sounds reminded me of my sister practicing all the time as I grew up, or music lessons I heard at school, to my own single lesson in my half-hearted attempt to learn to play as a child.  Amid the rumble and the heartache and the poverty, people were learning to play piano.  Parents were helping their kids learn a love and skill with music, just like many parents here in the US.  That's when my trip stopped being an immersive movie and started being 'real'.

I am glad I stopped to listen a few times.  As you can see from the video below (about the 48 second mark), that was just a couple seconds in a long, exhausting journey, up and down a ravine, building a home by hand.  But stopping allowed me to start to know that this was real.




Has there ever been a time in your life when the needs of those around you became real?  That you realized that they're parents and people just like you, hoping to make a better life for their families?

Do you want to visit Haiti, sponsor a child, or pray for someone specifically?  Here are four great organizations, big and small-, all with people I know personally, who are dedicated to helping those in Haiti:

MyLifeSpeaks (serving orphans in Haiti)
VisitingOrphans (not surprisingly, they help you visit orphans in Haiti)
WorldVision (you can sponsor a child in need)
Conduit (serving children and families in Haiti)