Thursday, December 15, 2011

ARTICLE - SONIA PIERRE - D.R. ACTIVISIT

SONIA PIERRE: A COLOSSUS OF A HEART DEMANDING JUSTICE
(Reuters) - By Jasmine Huggins, Church World Service and Christian Aid Senior Advocacy Officer for Haiti

Sonia Pierre was a feminist, activist, leader, mother, grandmother, counselor, speaker, defender of human rights, development practitioner and humanitarian. She died Sunday afternoon, December 4, much too young at age 48, having lived almost three times that many lifetimes, worn out from having fought since the age of 13 for the defense of rights of her community, Dominicans of Haitian descent who live mostly on the margins of Dominican society.

As a young Program Officer recently appointed by Christian Aid to manage their Dominican Republic program, I first met Sonia back in the early 90s. We met in their then office in Santo Domingo, in a space which she said had been offered by a well meaning Dominican who was supportive of their cause.

Her organization Movimiento de Mujeres Dominico-Haitianas or MUDHA has been a Christian Aid partner ever since. As early as then, she'd pointed out to me their need, as the Movement of Dominico-Haitian women, for continued solidarity from the Dominican community, which was often manifestly hostile and often abusive.

It was a concern and a refrain I was to hear throughout the years of my involvement with MUDHA and Sonia, right up to late October this year, when I last saw her, at an international conference in Washington, D.C., on Statelessness and the Right to Nationality to which we'd invited her.

Ours was not a tension free relationship. There were times we disagreed -- on strategy, on interpretation, on approach. Should Dominicans of Haitian descent assimilate completely, or should they maintain this slightly separate identity? How can MUDHA work better to maintain the network? What can MUDHA do to negotiate a common position in the midst of so many conflicting points of view?

Once, many years ago, she disparagingly called me a white Caribbean woman who would never understand. Actually, I did. Racism, gender discrimination, social hierarchy based on race, skin color and class are ubiquitous throughout the Caribbean where I grew up. My identity and sense of self was as seared by the continuing legacies of a common colonial history as hers was, just differently.

The political economy and racial politics of sugar production in the Dominican Republic were not so completely different from those elsewhere in the Caribbean, with the exception though, that in the Dominican Republic, the problem was contemporary and the agent of oppression, local, rather than foreign.

Over the years, Sonia grew to trust and later confide in me. I realized the extent of her personal sacrifices, the risks that she'd taken over the years for the work that she did and the overall cost to her health.

Sonia did not want charity. She demanded justice. She always reminded me that her work was political, that it was about the need for structural change.

She was as angered by discrimination against women as she was about racism. She raged against the injustices of these twin problems and was proud of her reputation as a “trouble maker.” “Of course, I've been a trouble maker. If I had not been, we would have never reached here,” she told me defiantly one day.

She reminded me always that the MUDHA staff were born in bateyes, and the majority still live there. They were steeped in the problems that they born into and from which they were trying to help their community emerge.

For them, as for her, there was no work-life separation. The struggle for empowerment and equity was what they lived and all they ever knew.

A visit to bateyes with Sonia revealed the extent of her intelligence, charisma and leadership. Crowds of people would come to her, asking for advice, revealing their problems, needing help. Sonia took it all in and always had space for more.

Her vision for a better life for children led to the creation of beautiful little schools for children, happily painted in bright colors, decorated with flowers, stuffed with toys, veritable oases in barren, struggling communities, usually with no running water, sanitation or electricity, fetid drainage, no social services and nightly violence, in the middle of isolated sugar cane plantations.

Recently in Leogane, in a community devastated by the Haitian earthquake, Sonia's holistic vision had started the same kind of project again: a center for women who'd been raped, income generating projects so they could earn money, a school for the orphans, a partnership with the Haitian police so that they could better understand their role. All happily painted in bright, beautiful colors, to make up somehow for the desolation of the grinding poverty that the community faced.

Sonia Pierre, in her long, yet too short life, helped hundreds -- no thousands -- of women, men and children in both Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Dominican and Dominico-Haitian alike, to step beyond the confines of their circumstances, claim their birthright, and dare to believe that they deserved better.

When I last translated for her, back in March, speaking in Spanish, she introduced herself a “citizen of the island,” pointedly reminding us all of the common roots of both countries, political and geographic, social and cultural. It was this belief in the common roots of Haiti and the Dominican Republic that made her the bane of nationalist Dominicans and a target for death threats and abuses.

It was no surprise that her heart gave way in the end. It was a colossus. The bravest, most defiant female heart I have ever met. But it could not withstand the enormity of pressure that her compassion, her concern and her dedication placed it under.

Sonia had space for everybody. She wanted to save everybody. She worried incessantly about her family, the orphans of Haiti, children in schools being abused, women lacking support, men who needed training, government that needed support, psycho-social care that was needed, projects that needed funding, schools and health centers needing to be built, and her own children in danger because of her work, which her dedication did not allow her to cease.

The urgency she felt about everything and the risks she took never allowed her to rest. She's resting now.

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