A teacher from the past is the future in Haiti

By J. Patrick Coolican

Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2011 | 2:01 a.m.

A recurrent theme of Mr. Moynihan’s freshman English class was destiny and how we discover our place in it. The petulant heroes, Achilles and Hamlet, avoided their fates. Oedipus believed he could overcome his own.

So perhaps it was fitting that Patrick Moynihan took years to discover his own destiny and also appropriate that once he found it, he would become so fully himself.

When he left Xavier High School in Middletown, Conn., in 1990, I was disappointed, even bitterly so. I hoped he would be my teacher at least once more. But — depending on your theology — God or the fates or something buried deep in his own psyche demanded something else of him, and the world is probably better for it.

A year ago today, Haiti suffered a devastating earthquake, killing 200,000 to 250,000 people, while injuring and displacing hundreds of thousands more. The day of the earthquake, Moynihan had just returned to the United States from Haiti, where he runs the Louverture Cleary School, a Catholic boarding school, and its parent organization, the Haitian Project.

He raced back to Haiti. “I left Monday and came back Friday, 100 years later,” he would later say.

The months that followed showed his skills and energy.

He wheedled and cajoled and browbeat. He inspired his staff and students with the words of prophets and poets. He ran around the island in search of supplies and expertise, helping his people but also strangers. He tapped his fundraising network in the states.

His students stood in operating rooms and translated.

Der Spiegel, the German newsweekly, called him the “Moses of Haiti.”

Louverture Cleary reopened the week after Easter.

Many of the girls slept in a converted science lab because of the structural damage to their dorm.

But the learning had to commence. “The preservation of culture is the preservation of humanity,” he told a reporter at the time of the quake, mixing profundity and bombast, just as I fondly remember from his days teaching me literature.

“Make a purpose of your life,” he told us back then, 30 adolescent boys with bad parochial school haircuts. At 14, life was something to be endured and exploited. The most pressing concern was which free agents the Yankees would pick up in the offseason. This notion that life had a purpose? This was a revelation.

Moynihan, 46, came upon his own purpose haltingly and would later credit a God who likes to make crooked lines straight and has a refined sense of irony.

He left my all-male Catholic high school to become a commodities trader, a decision I recall sneering at back then. Not because there’s anything wrong with being a commodities trader but because his decision was baffling in light of all his inspiring talk about heroism, his perfect line readings of the great poets, his provocative political statements.

He wound up fairly wealthy and successful with the firm Louis Dreyfus, living with his wife and children. Then he had a conversion catalyzed by seeing himself as less talented and dedicated than some of his seven siblings who seemed to be doing more important work without similar reward.

“I came to understand that our talents do not belong to us, but to the common good,” he once told Notre Dame Magazine.

He became a Catholic missionary and deacon.

His brother Brian Moynihan, currently CEO of Bank of America, sat on the board of the then-struggling Haitian Project, which was badly in need of a great leader. Brian nudged his brother Patrick into the role in 1996, and Patrick took it up with characteristic gusto.

He and his wife — “The real saint of the household,” he says — and four children used to split their time between Haiti and the states, but since the earthquake, they are permanent residents of Haiti.

The school is again thriving: 350 Haitian children learn Spanish, French, English and Creole, and many graduates are leaders charged with rebuilding the country.

Among graduates, 90 percent are in college or have a steady job; 15 are in medical school and five are doctors. They are housed, fed and taught for $7 per day per child.

Moynihan seems to take the most pride in the sense of social responsibility instilled in the students, which is derived from his own dedication to Catholic social thought. “We teach them that it’s like cracking an egg: It’s so delicate that you have to use both hands, and because you’re using both hands, the yolk will go to someone else.”

Or as Matthew put it: “What you receive as a gift, you must give as a gift.”

The students tutor 200 children and adults in after-school literacy programs, work on damaged houses in the neighborhood, visit a hospital and orphanage, and use their considerable language skills to translate for doctors.

When it comes to the Haiti outside the confines of the school, Moynihan’s mood is pessimistic, although not resigned — he’s filled with intense outrage and wants immediate action.

“It’s a Greek tragedy,” he says, his language often returning to those themes and tropes he helped me understand two decades ago.

Before the earthquake, Haiti was making progress, although the facts of the matter were hard to avoid: By many measures, the world’s poorest economy, riven by shifting autocracies, weak institutions and foreign meddling, not least from the United States.

Since the earthquake, the world and Americans in particular have reacted with significant generosity.

But Moynihan says the international community fell down by not running a credible election last year; the Organization of American States has recommended that so many of the votes for the current governing party’s candidate were fraudulent, that he should be moved into third place and thus thrown out of the runoff. The runoff, meanwhile, has been postponed.

Moynihan reserves special ire for former President Bill Clinton for not making a free and fair election his chief priority. Haiti, Moynihan says, is in dire need of a strong government that can set a plan of action and harness the resources coming into the country.

He believes it’s time to change focus from caring for individuals to nurturing institutions which support individuals and begin rebuilding the country.

“As you learned as a student in my class, without these institutions we suffer from atavism,” he says. (Meaning: A lurching to a violent, uncivilized past, a frequent theme of the Greeks. With the aid of his classics degree and knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin, every day with Mr. Moynihan was an SAT tutorial.)

Although Moynihan is thankful for all the work done by the relief organizations, he believes they are failing to help Haiti and its people become independent. He compares the massive nongovernmental organizations, known as NGOs, to multinational corporations — beasts only concerned with their own self-perpetuation.

“You don’t have to succeed at refugee camps. Failure is expected. And the more failure, the more funding,” he says.

He’s half-kidding, I think, when he says, “What I would do if I were president of Haiti: I’d seize their assets, then I’d find out what they were competent to do and have them do it.”

My own discovery of Mr. Moynihan feels like a story of fate and the gift of wisdom delivered by serendipity, or whatever you want to call it.

When Brian Moynihan was named CEO of Bank of America, I thought for a minute it might be my freshman English teacher. Of course, I never knew Mr. Moynihan’s first name. Where — and when — I was a kid, we would never, ever refer to an adult by anything but his surname, so why would I know his first name?

Last month, the banker was profiled by The New York Times, and the similarities got really eerie. The banker had played rugby at Brown, just like my teacher. He was from a big Irish Catholic family in the Midwest, just like my teacher. I was telling a brother about this, and he pulled our old high school yearbook to get Mr. Moynihan’s name — Patrick Moynihan. Googling “Patrick Moynihan” wouldn’t be much use, we joked, for the famous senator would probably own that search term.

But when we Googled Patrick Moynihan, there he was, president of the Haitian Project.

I found an e-mail address and wrote to him.

His reply began, “It is great to hear from you.”