Keeping Heart in a Haitian School
Every so often while on assignment, I capture a bit of video — a scene or quote or personality that’s telling or extremely moving — but because of length or pacing, I can’t fit it into the larger story. It ends up on the cutting-room floor and, unfortunately, never gets seen.
One such moment presented itself recently, while I was reporting on the start of the new school year in Haiti with my colleague Deborah Sontag. I was interviewing Chantal Kenol, the principal of College Classique Feminin. The school is one of the best in Port-au-Prince and one of thousands damaged or destroyed during the January earthquake (you can hear reconstruction noise in the background of the interview).
Ms. Kenol told me about the challenges she had faced in trying to reopen the school and about the relationships strained by people’s growing desperation: parents who could no longer afford to pay tuition, teachers who wanted more pay. And in the middle of the interview, she recited a beautiful parable about coping with adversity — one she applied to life after the quake.
This is an outtake of the feature video, one I’m glad to be able to share here on Lens. And this is her story:
Even though things are difficult and people have hardened a lot, and the relationships between people have changed, it’s important not to sway from what you are and what you’ve been forever. I tell my students this parable about the carrot, the egg and the coffee bean. It’s about challenges and hardship. The carrot is hard, but when put to the test of boiling it becomes soft and mushy. The egg is soft, and when you boil it, the heart of it becomes hardened. But the coffee bean, it changes the water. It is sharing the nature of its being with the thing that touches it. I want to continue being coffee. But it’s difficult. Given some of the things that have happened, you feel like maybe you should be a bit of an egg now. But if you lose your heart, what is left? I’ve shared my heart with my students, my teachers, my work. So, if I lose my heart, I don’t need to be here anymore. Keeping the heart and still not losing the head, that is the big challenge for me this year.