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Tuesday, December 5, 1995
PROFILE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
"Each one has a life story.
Each one has a life story. This is raw Haiti. These are people who had been abandoned by their families and were just living on the street."
Children at Kenscoff orphanage, located outside of Port-au-Prince, peer through a wooden gate. Many Haitian parents abandon their children because they cannot afford to feed them. Unlike St. Joseph's orphanage where Freeman stays, the children at Kenscoff orphanage sleep three to a bed, eat lesser quality food and lack adequate supervision.
Our Man in Haiti
Continued from Page 1A
Freeman stands in the crowded, dusty Cite Soleil street. The curious Haitian men and boys still press in. His hand remains in his right front pocket, guarding his wallet.
Some of the boys are too young to remember much about the 1991 coup when rebel Haitian soldiers terrorized people in this part of town, driving their jeeps though the streets and spraying machine-gun fire at the rusty, corrugated tin shacks.
Freeman gazes out over the harbor, where wry dock workers unload stalks of sugar cane to be sold in the street as cheap snacks for hungry Hells
In a struggle for human rights,you never get to a point when you have done all that you can do."
Gunda Hiebert,
Freeman's former wife
Except for the noise of the traffic and the people milling on the street, the slum is relatively peaceful.
"I would like to get the General down here more," Freeman says. Freeman meets with Klinzer, commander of U.N. troops in Haiti, at U.N. headquarters in Port-au-Prince for about an hour each week to discuss Haitian life and politics. To the General, who gets almost no day-to-day exposure to Haitians, Freeman represents the voice of the people.
Freeman says the United Nations should help Haitians rebuild their country. Kinzer takes a hands-off approach, saying the U.N. efforts should be restricted to peacekeeping.
The two often clash.
"He lives in a mansion with guards, and he has two bodyguards with him at all times," Freeman says. "I've gotten him out a few times, gotten him in jeans and moccasins and a dirty T-shirt. And he and I would just
go around. That's the only Haitian life he has seen."
Freeman wonders whether Kinzer would be an advocate for repairing the country if he spent some more time in Cite Soleil.
Freeman walks onto a dock that juts out over the bay.
Cenatus Gaston, a 24-year-old slum resident, insists Haiti has gold and mineral resources, and he asks Freeman to tell Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the president of Haiti. Freeman does not bother to explain that he has never met Aristide.
The crowd follows him.
The Spanish took all of the gold in the 1500s, Freeman says.
Haiti, he tells the crowd, needs three things: jobs, jobs and jobs.
The crowd titters.
But Freeman is serious. People with jobs can afford adequate medical care. People with jobs can afford to eat. In Haiti, unemployment is 70 percent.
Incredulous, Gaston says in English, "Can you give me a job?"
Then, a hint of desperation in his voice, "If you saw how I live, you would give me something."
Freeman takes him up on his offer, and after a visit to Gaston's house, leaves him with a 100 gourde bill — about $6.60. Gaston's rent is $4.75 a month.
"No country compares with Haiti," says Freeman, who has visited more than 60 countries. "It's weird and different and exotic."
And it's also a world away from pre-civil rights Richmond, where Freeman grew up, the only child in an upper-class home.
In the early 1960s, Freeman became a faculty sponsor for the newly formed Black student union at Virginia. His former wife, Gunda Hebert, who is now remarried and lives in Lawrence, was with him at the time. He and Gunda found themselves under the hateful watch of local white supremacists.
He attended segregated private schools, and the only Blacks he knew were house servants.
"My mother was more liberal than my father, but it wasn't a matter they discussed too much," he says. "I've always sort of been for the underdog."
"For years, I slept with a bat next to the bed," Freeman says.
Freeman did not really understand racism and segregation until after he had earned his Ph.D. in French at Yale and had begun teaching at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
The couple helped stage a stand-in at a local burger joint that steadfastly refused to serve Blacks. Protesters stood in shifts for days, vowing not to engage in violence no matter what happened.
"They looked like extras in a movie," Freeman savs.
When another professor in the protest went to a nearby telephone booth to call the police, the supremacists followed and beat him until the police came. They arrested the professor for inciting violence.
But the Nazi party of Virginia sent men in military brown shirts and swastika arm bands.
"That was when Virginia lost me," Freeman says.
"I thought, 'What in the hell am I doing in this state?' You can't help where you were born, but you don't
have to stay there."
Eventually, the protests and the fights became too emotionally exhausting. The couple decided to pull out of the movement.
"We didn't feel comfortable or good about backing out," Hiebert says. "In a struggle for human rights, you never get to a point when you have done all that you can do."
Freeman moved to Lawrence in 1971 to chair the French Department at the University.
Freeman has published numerous books and articles on Haitian language and culture. A Creole-to-English dictionary has been an on-going project for him since 1982. He also has been a consultant for the Peace Corps, for U.S. Ambassadors to Haiti, and for Pax Christi, a Catholic human rights organization. In 1994, when the United States led the U.N. invasion of Haiti, Freeman was interviewed by as many as nine news organizations a day, including Cable News Network and USA Today.
If KU students had not asked Freeman for Creole classes, Haiti probably would have remained nothing more than an interest for him. Freeman first visited Haiti in 1958, but it wasn't until he found a demand for Creole classes at the University that he began to travel to Haiti two and three times a year. He started teaching Creole classes in 1978.
Now, at age 64, he has no plans for retirement.
"Who knows?" he says, "Maybe next year I will feel differently."
But his wife Stephanie Freeman says she couldn't imagine Bryant Freeman retiring.
"He seems more charged up than ever sometimes," Stephanie Freeman says. "He has more drive as the years go by."
Haiti, Bryant Freeman says, is habit forming. It grabs you by the throat.
Friends, family and colleagues say his love for Haiti is sincere.
"Besides thinking of it as his work, he sees it as his contribution," Stephanie Freeman says. "That's how he is going to make his difference."
The couple met while Stephanie Freeman was a student at the University earning a master's degree in painting. Although he was 29 years her senior, she says she was attracted to his quick wit and enormous amount of energy.
Two days after their wedding, he left for Haiti. Stephanie Freeman says his leaving foreshadowed the years to come.
She has visited Haiti three times during her eight-year marriage to Bryant Freeman and works as a research and editorial assistant with him. Now, the
Freeman sits down to breakfast at a long wooden table on the first floor of the boys' orphanage where he lives when he is in Port-au-Prince. He has the usual: fresh-squeezed orange juice, a croissant fetched by one of the boys from a bakery every morning and corn flakes with evaporated milk. He pays $15 a day for room and board.
two are apart for months at a stretch while he is in Haiti.
For years when he went to Haiti, Freeman would stay in fine hotels. In 1983, he lived in a posh suite at the El Rancho Hotel, complete with pink marble bathroom and bidet, courtesy of the United Nations.
But during the past couple of visits he has chosen more rustic accommodations at St. Joseph's orphanage, which he discovered through a chance meeting with a man who was working there.
He jokes that it is a fitting place for an orphan like himself to live.
Michael Geilenfeld, an Iowa native who runs the orphanage, says Freeman's original intention was to stay for two days.
"He said he could handle anything for two days," Geilenfeld says. "And he stayed on and stayed on and stayed on. He fits in so well. He has become more than a guest. We look at him more as part of the family."
They bring their country habits with them, Freeman says pointing to a man urinating by the side of a busy street.
The professor, who claims not to care
much for children, except his 24-year-old son, Tin, has a soft spot in his heart for the 19 boys of St. Joseph's. They call him Ton Ton, Creel&or "uncle."
"Each one has a life story," Freeman says. "This is raw Haiti. These are people who had been abandoned by their families and were just living on the street."
At St. Joseph's, Freeman has learned to do without running water and air conditioning. The four-story building has plumbing and solar panels, which
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