A couple of days into her first Hearts for Haiti mission trip, Lauren Sabo ‘11 was coming back from the village of Calebasse when she saw a swarm of kids in the distance. She and the other members of the group, including doctors and nurses from the Granville area, were returning to work after a lunch made for them by one of the community members–beet salad, fried plantain, and rice and beans with a sardine sauce on top that Sabo enigmatically calls “fascinating.” The village was a mile down the way from the church where they were holding a medical clinic for people who have little access to health care in these remote mountains. As Sabo came over the mountain, she could see that the kids were holding sticks and chanting–and running right toward them.
It was an April day, all blue skies and gorgeous clouds. Sabo, a sociology and anthropology major, was dressed in the kind of clothes that don’t get in the way–khaki work capris with lots of pockets, an old tie-dye camp shirt, and tennis shoes, her blonde hair pulled off her face in a ponytail. The black satchel she usually carried was slung over her shoulder, filled with supplies for the afternoon.
Sabo had come on the trip prepared to do a little teaching, among other kinds of work. In fact, she had started making lesson plans and gathering materials the previous fall. She brushed up on what she remembered from her fourth-grade recorder lessons and procured a donation of forty recorders. She managed to get hundreds of toothbrushes and tubes of toothpaste donated so she could teach a basic lesson on oral hygiene–how to wash your hands before brushing and how to brush your teeth correctly. For a rudimentary lesson on the basics of flight, she had brought little gliders, twirlers that you rub between your hands to launch, and a remote-control airplane. She figured she could get her point across without needing to speak Creole.
What she hadn’t come prepared for–what she couldn’t have come prepared for–was more than a hundred kids showing up the first morning. School, it turned out, wasn’t in session that week. So there were no teachers around. But there were kids everywhere. Sixty squeezed into a room that probably held only 20, younger ones sitting on the laps of older ones, babies to 17-year-olds. Kids sitting, standing, crowding the open doorway, peering in through the window. Out the window went Sabo’s picture of herself presenting a lesson to 20 or 30 kids for an hour or so and then heading over to work at the medical clinic. Instead, she was the main show.
They all want to be there, she thought, so how do I say no? But how do I teach all these kids when there’s such a small classroom and only one of me? She let herself feel daunted for a moment, and then she winged it. The kids wanted to learn some English, so they worked on elementary concepts–numbers, colors, letters. She had them make watercolors and drawings, which she used to decorate the empty walls. They went outside to play Tick, Tock, Boom–the Haitian version of Hot Potato. Then she taught them Duck, Duck, Goose. Later, she tried to teach them about recycling by making pretty beads out of strips of old magazines and newspapers.
It had all seemed to be going well. So why were these kids running at them now?
As her colleagues looked on in shock, the group circled around Sabo, picked her up, and carried her back the last quarter-mile toward the school. Three years and many trips to Calebasse later, it’s the story that Sabo tells most often. For her, it’s the story of why she knew she had to be there and why she keeps coming back. “Just to see those kids,” she says. “It didn’t matter that I didn’t speak their language or that I was from another country. It was the fact that I cared and was willing to give them time.”
Time is something Sabo has mastered. Her days seem to have more hours in them than the standard-issue 24. At Denison, she’s a head resident, captain of the women’s varsity golf team, president of the Campus Environment Team and Recycling Program, and president of Denison’s Habitat for Humanity. She’s helped start a composting program in the dining hall and student apartments, a bike share program set to debut on campus this spring, and a campus community garden. Last fall, with a grant from the Great Lakes Colleges Association, she ran a pilot program she called the Night Light Watchman. The grant allowed her to hire two students who patrolled buildings on the academic quad, going into unoccupied classrooms and offices, turning off the lights, and leaving Night Light grams behind. The goal was to promote awareness of energy consumption, but Sabo calculates that the university saved more than $3,000, with 2,863 lights turned off during the six-week program.
A few short weeks after she graduates this spring, she will head off to Colorado where she will work as a special education teacher for two years under the auspices of Teach for America. She accepted the position on a Friday, after a few weeks of going back and forth between that offer and a stint in Central America with the Peace Corps. By the following Monday, she had already applied for a therapy dog for her classroom and was planning to start a community garden with her class.
Calebasse may take a backseat for a while, but she knows she’ll return. Hearts for Haiti has a $50,000 commitment to build a new school in the village, and Sabo wants to see a clinic established there as well. On her last visit, as part of her senior research paper, she sat down with an engineer to get an idea of what a clinic would cost. She already has a commitment to outfit a clinic from MedWish, which provides donated medical supplies. Still, she’s letting go for awhile. “I’m 22 years old,” she says. “I’ve got my whole life ahead of me. I will do this eventually, but maybe I need to take a step back.” Not too far back, though. “There’s always going to be a place in my heart for Haiti,” she says.