"People Never Really Die" - View from Haiti

A highly recommended short piece in the latest New Yorker by the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat.

If you've looked at the news recently, you probably seen an update about Haiti, a year after the earthquake, and more recently with a cholera epidemic, on top of every other daily struggle for existence there. Danticat grew up there and has family there, and is able to convey some of the spiritual meaning for them, including voudou and spirits and going "anba dlo—under the water."

Here's an excerpt:
“In Haiti, people never really die,” my grandmothers said when I was a child, which seemed strange, because in Haiti people were always dying. They died in disasters both natural and man-made. They died from political violence. They died of infections that would have been easily treated elsewhere. They even died of chagrin, of broken hearts. But what I didn’t fully understand was that in Haiti people’s spirits never really die. This has been proved true in the stories we have seen and read during the past year, of boundless suffering endured with grace and dignity: mothers have spent nights standing knee-deep in mud, cradling their babies in their arms, while rain pounded the tarpaulin above their heads; amputees have learned to walk, and even dance, on their new prostheses within hours of getting them; rape victims have created organizations to protect other rape victims; people have tried, in any way they could, to reclaim a shadow of their past lives.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2011/01/17/110117taco_talk_danticat