Home from Haiti: Molly Kinder back from Haiti amid coronavirus fears

After days of confusion and conflicting information about COVID-19 from the Haitian government, Molly Kinder boarded a plane Tuesday in Port-Au-Prince bound for Miami. From there, she flew to Nashville, Tennessee, and drove to her family home in Cape Girardeau, where she is practicing self-quarantine until April 7.

Her departure came after Haitian president Jovenel Moïse announced last week the country had two confirmed cases of the virus.

The 24-year-old Cape Girardeau native has lived in Haiti for the last two years after an internship took her to the commune of Gressier. She has since left the internship and the school she was attending but remained in the community, which she said became home.

“I felt like I developed a family there, not just at school but in the community,” Kinder said. “I joined a Haitian church. Literally every single day, kids came over to play games or to have a snack or whatever after school. ... In Haiti, I felt like a totally different person because of the community. They’re just incredible people.”

Kinder wasn’t forced to evacuate, she said by video-call Wednesday, but she explained non-citizens who tested positive for COVID-19 may have been at risk for acts of violence driven by fear. And with lockdowns possible and advisories to stay home, it didn’t make much sense to stay.

Librarian and outreach coordinator Gregory leads a round of trivia in February at The Neighborhood Library in Gressier, Haiti.Submitted by Molly Kinder

“Everything was going to be closed indefinitely, so we would be stuck in our homes,” she said, noting outsiders “have a history of bringing sickness” to the Haitian people. “And if we got sick, we just didn’t want to put other people at risk, especially in an environment like that.”

With airports closing and little communication among the Haitian government, the American embassy and the airlines, Kinder said: “no one really knew what was going on.” She was nearly stuck with a $1,200 ticket — which normally costs about $150 — on a chartered flight to Miami. Stressful though the situation was, Kinder said more reasonably priced flights were eventually made available.

A ‘massive injustice’

During and before her high school years, Kinder had been on international mission trips through church or service programs and had been exposed to situations of people living in extreme poverty. But it wasn’t until she was spending a gap year with a service program at an orphanage in North Africa, in a wing for children with severe disabilities, that she began to feel a disconnect — like she didn’t have the tools she needed to help.

“I remember feeling, first of all, like I was doing absolutely nothing,” Kinder explained, “because I was 18 and was unskilled and didn’t speak Arabic. I was like, ‘What the heck am I doing here?’”

Two children are seen in February while reading in the main room of The Neighborhood Library in Gressier, Haiti.Submitted by Molly Kinder

Kinder said she felt distressed upon realizing she was part of a “massive injustice.” The internal tension she felt opened her perspective to the fact most people she knew would never have to think about how the children in that orphanage lived.

She said she remembers orphans strapped to beds, restricted from meals and repeatedly devalued or made to feel unworthy for adoption because of their disabilities.

“After that experience, I was determined to go to college, or do something where I could learn skills, and then I could go back to a community that was developing,” she said.

From there, Kinder attended Webster University near St. Louis where she studied special education before moving to Gressier to work with special-education teachers and develop a school resource program.

A garden with papaya, oranges, cherries and hibiscus trees and bushes is seen in August in front of The Neighborhood Library, or "Bibliyotèk Katye A," in Gressier, Haiti.Submitted by Molly Kinder

For the neighborhood

While French and Haitian Creole are the national languages of Haiti, Kinder said most children grow up speaking Creole. But in school, she said, they’re taught to read and write in French. That disparity is difficult for children to reconcile and parents can’t always be of much help, Kinder said, noting the rate of illiteracy among adults in Haiti is much higher than it is among children.

“It really seemed like [there] was this tension that people were coming across, that they wanted to advance, they wanted to know more, they wanted the tools to work in their community better, to understand the world better, but they didn’t have access to [those things] because they were in French,” Kinder, who taught herself Creole, explained.

With that in mind, she helped the community found its own library called The Neighborhood Library, or “Bibliyotèk Katye A,” in Creole. It began as a book club in which residents, often children, would write and illustrate a book Kinder would have printed. The book club soon evolved into an author’s club, and eventually became a library with open hours.

Kinder now acts as library director but noted one of the library’s goals is to help its two Haitian librarians gain the experience needed to become co-directors.

Although she spearheaded the library’s initial fundraising, Kinder adamantly explained it is not her project. Rather, it belongs to the community and is meant to be a community-based center.

“If everything in Haiti is so community-focused — it’s about your neighbors, it’s about the people you live around, it’s about your country — then the library had to reflect that,” Kinder said. “And for me, my role in it, even from the beginning, has really been just like a bridge between resources and the desire. So this has been a project of the community itself.”

Refuge in a crisis

Kinder said it was just before she moved to St. Louis for college that Michael Brown Jr. was fatally shot in Ferguson, Missouri.

“It seemed like Ferguson itself was a war zone,” Kinder said, remembering stories she read detailing rioting and the presence of military personnel. “But the Ferguson Public Library stepped up and they did all of these kids’ programs, they did meals for the community. They really became like this refuge during that crisis.”

As she looked back on her time in St. Louis, Kinder expressed heartache The Neighborhood Library in Haiti must be closed during a crisis.

“I just thought, how incredible that was and how true that should be, like how our library should look like that, too,” Kinder said of the Ferguson library’s response.

The library was forced to close once before, for three months last year when the country was on lockdown and facing violent political unrest — that’s the last time she was evacuated from Haiti. At that time, Kinder said the library was logistically unable to stay open.

Though its doors are once again shuttered, Kinder said The Neighborhood Library has been able to continue offering community support through care packages, which include rice, beans, soap, games and information about the coronavirus.

Whether the Haitian government was offering communes much support, Kinder said she couldn’t be certain. In fact, she said, much of the local relief has come from not-for-profits. A not-for-profit ambulance company had even begun offering hand-washing stations all over the capital city, Port-au-Prince, she said.

“That’s just sort of the story of Haiti,” Kinder said. “ The government ... they don’t have the resources or money to provide people with food, to provide people with much education or provide hospitals with any support. So all of these nonprofits are switching gears to a relief-type outreach.”

Asked whether she planned to remain permanently in Haiti, Kinder said the country, community and library would always be very important to her.

“I anticipate being involved with Haiti forever,” she said. “Living there, I think, is hard.”

Violence is a constant in Haiti, Kinder said, and it has taken a toll on her sense of security.

“I have anxiety now that I didn’t have before about leaving the house or leaving the library,” she said. “That’s not sustainable.”

Prior to its closing, Kinder said the library had just begun offering an adult literacy class and had planned to offer a computer class soon. The latter will likely be pushed back in the program schedule, Kinder said but noted she is accepting donations of retired laptops and tablets that will be used for the library and community.

The Neighborhood Library is a registered 501(c)(3) organization, meaning tax receipts are provided for charitable donations and the library is governed by a board. Fundraising, Kinder said, will probably always be a factor for the library.

For more information about The Neighborhood Library or its upcoming projects or to donate funds, visit www.theneighborhoodlibrary.org, or find Molly Kinder’s contact information at www.theneighborhoodlibrary.org/contact.