A Show of Hearts

Passion, Practicality, and the Magic of Music with Priya Darshini

Priya Darshini is a Brooklyn based singer, athlete and philanthropist. In this episode of A Show of Hearts, Priya discusses her experience growing up in India, how she and her family began taking care of pediatric cancer patients and how she became the first Indian woman to complete the Himalayan 100 Mile Ultra Marathon. Listen to her and host Rosemary talk about having the courage to follow your heart and pursue your passions without sacrificing practicality and about how they believe music is a form of magic. Though she has musical influences from all over the world and sings in 18 languages, her roots are in Indian Classical music. She describes the inspiration her Indian upbringing provides her to this day, particularly her grandmother, an accomplished singer and dancer whose name was also Priya Darshini. Priya belongs to several bands that mix genres, cultures and languages, including The Epichorus, the Karsh Kale ensemble, and the recently launched Priya Darshini Trio. She co-leads Women’s Raga Massive, with whom she co-produces a festival called Out of the Woods, now in its third year. Priya occasionally sits in with her husband Max’s band, House of Waters, in which every member of the group is from a different country. In February, she teamed up with them at a house concert at Rosemary’s home in Miami, which was an extraordinary, intimate evening. Towards the end of the show, you’ll hear a clip of her from that night, singing a love song in Hindi. As you’ll experience, her otherworldly voice is multifaceted, pure and heartfelt. And, if you’re ever in New York, she regularly leads fascinating music workshops at The Met, explaining what’s going on in various forms of music, so you know what you’re listening to. On top of a thriving music career, she helps run her family’s organization focused on pediatric cancer and education, adopting and operating schools in India. Priya also founded her own social venture called The Wind Chasers, which organizes ultramarathons throughout the Himalayas, and supports the livelihood of many Sherpa people. She explains how her intense experience as an ultramarathon runner has shaped her thinking and her life decisions. Listen and enjoy her singing, her life story and her reflections. Priya Darshini’s website: https://priyadarshini.com/bio [https://priyadarshini.com/bio] Priya’s organization, Jana Rakshita: http://www.janarakshita.org [http://www.janarakshita.org/] The Epichorus: http://theepichorus.com [http://theepichorus.com/] The Wind Chasers: http://www.thewindchasers.com/ [http://www.thewindchasers.com/] Thanks so much for listening! If you like what you heard, please subscribe and rate on iTunes, visit www.ashowofhearts.com [http://www.ashowofhearts.local/] or follow us @ashowofhearts on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter! Take a screenshot of this episode and share it in your Instastory and use the hashtag #ashowofhearts – we’d really appreciate it. TRANSCRIPT Rosemary Pritzker: You’re listening to A Show of Hearts, the podcast about finding the courage to live a deep and magical life. I’m your host, life coach, Rosemary Pritzker. (singing) Priya Darshini is a Brooklyn-based singer, ultra marathon runner, and pediatric cancer philanthropist who was born and raised in Bombay, India. Her roots are in Indian classical music, but she has influences from all over the world. She belongs to several bands that mix genres, cultures, and languages including the Epichorus, the Karsh Kale ensemble, and she recently started the Priya Darshini trio. She co-leads Women’s Raga Masive with whom she co-produces a festival called Out of the Woods now in its third year. Priya also occasionally sits in with her husband Max’s band, House of Waters in which every member of the group is from a different country. In February, she teamed up with them at a house concert at my home in Miami which was an extraordinary intimate evening. Towards the end of this episode, you’ll hear a clip from her that night singing a song in Hindi. As you’ll experience, her other worldly voice is multifaceted, pure, and heartfelt. I hope you enjoy her singing, her life story and her reflections as much as I do. For now we’ll start with Priya with the Epichorus singing a song in Hebrew called Odecha. (singing) When someone talks about following the heart, what does that evoke for you? Priya Darshini: What does that evoke for me? Often times when someone says follow your heart, as I’m getting older, the first thing my brain says is, “Oh, but you also have to be practical.” I didn’t really think like that when I was much younger. When I was younger, I just did anything that I wanted to and I just had this complete confidence. It felt like I had the world ahead of me and the entire world was … It was available for me to explore, and anything was possible. I just did all of that, and so when someone says that to me now, I do have that extra like this thing in my brain that says, “Yes, follow your heart, but also make sure that you’re making practical moves.” I often go back and tell myself that, “Hey, you’re here today because you followed your heart all your life, so don’t forget that and you’re going to be fine.” Rosemary Pritzker: Yeah. It’s both like, yeah, you really do need to follow your heart in order to create a really wonderful life, and you do have to be practical so it’s got to be a balance. Priya Darshini: It has to be a balance, definitely. I also think that when you really, really want something very bad, the universe conspires to make it happen for you, and you make that happen for yourself. If it doesn’t happen, you haven’t wanted it bad enough. I really believe that because when you really want something so bad, all your actions, and your thoughts, all of that just follows what you want and just everything starts to fall in place even if there are hurdles, when you’re in that passionate mode of really wanting something, hurdles seem so small. The biggest challenges seem small, and you really feel positive about it as well. If you don’t want it bad enough then even the smallest of hurdles, smallest of challenges just start to feel much bigger. Rosemary Pritzker: I would love to know about your childhood in India, what that was like. Priya Darshini: Wow. Rosemary Pritzker: For those of us who have never been to India, and don’t know how different it is. Priya Darshini: Oh, India is very, very different from any other part of the world, I would say. It’s hard to describe actually. I still struggle to find a word to describe what India is really like because every part of India is so different, and it’s so diverse. There’s so many languages, so many different types of cuisine. When they say Indian food in America or anywhere else, typically, everyone is talking about … Rosemary Pritzker: Chicken tikka masala. Priya Darshini: Yeah. From one state called Punjab. It’s all from one state. I’m saying every state has its own cuisine, and even within every state, there’s so many different versions of cuisines and you can imagine how diverse it is. I mean, if you try one dish, every day of your life, I feel like you could go on for years and not repeat a single dish. That’s how diverse the cuisine is. Cuisine, language, all of that, the kind of diversity that India offers, it makes us very unique type of person because you’re exposed to so many different things. You’re approach to life and the world just changes. India is also very difficult, it’s very difficult. I thought when I moved from Bombay to New York, everyone told me, “Oh, New York is going to be so rough. It’s like it’s a big hustle.” When I got to New York, I was like, “Oh, I know this. I got this.” It’s actually way more convenient. The train comes on time. I have to walk only two minutes for a subway. Are you kidding me? That’s awesome. The hustle is totally fine. I got it. I grew up in Bombay, and I was born in Chennai, in the south of India, and I was in Pondicherry for about a couple of years, and then moved to Bombay. Bombay, like I said it’s a lot like New York. It’s almost like New York on steroids or something. It’s crazy, but also it has this incredible energy about it. People are so positive about everything which I’m so glad that I had … I mean, I’m so glad I had that influence in my life. I used to go to school by train. I take a bus, and then a train like the local transport. I don’t know if you’ve seen those trains. It’s crazy. People are hanging out of the train. There’s no space to stand. I would take a bus and a train, and then walk to school, and even to college, I took these trains every day. You’ll see on these trains that the women especially because it’s such a patriarchal society still, unfortunately, the women you’d see that these are women who are working, the middle class women are working because they have to … Bombay is also incredibly expensive. If you go out to a restaurant, I almost spend more than I spend in New York for a good meal. Yeah, you wouldn’t believe. Bombay can be very expensive, but you can also get meals very cheap, but it’s a lifestyle thing. Middle class women have to work to support their families but because it’s so patriarchal they also have to do the cooking, and the cleaning and things like that. What I would find so inspiring is none of these women, they’re going to work, they’d come back from work and on the way in the train. On the train, firstly, there’s no space. We’re all crowded and cramped like this, and they’d be chopping vegetables, and singing songs. They would have women’s groups just like singing bhajans and all kinds of kirtans. Just movie songs playing this game called antakshari where you play like a tag thing that people play with songs. If you sing a song, then you immediately sing, the other team sings a song from the last letter or something like that. Anyway, they would just keep that joyous positive energy alive while chopping vegetables. I know for a fact that these women have woken up at 5:00 AM getting their kids ready for school, cooking and getting their breakfast ready, packing lunch for the kids, and their husbands, and then getting themselves ready, going to work, on the way back, chopping all these vegetables, and so that they can get home and make dinner for their family again, and then do that over again, all over again, every day. Just to see that kind of attitude is like that really … That’s why I’m talking about it’s just one example of what Bombay is like, and I’ve never seen anything like that anywhere in the world. Growing up in Bombay, what it taught me was I just don’t complain about anything. I’m like everything seems like a privilege. “Wow. This is a clean bathroom. That’s amazing.” India checks your privilege in a lot of ways. At least for me because I didn’t grow up rich or anything like that. That’s a whole different scenario. If you’re rich, that’s a different experience. Rosemary Pritzker: In India? Priya Darshini: Yeah. You did ask me how my life was growing up at home. That was very different because I’m very, very grateful to have had the most inspiring, giving generous kind parents in the world. We had a tiny … I think a one bedroom, or two bedroom really tiny apartment. We weren’t really that well to do, but my mother would bring in cancer patients that she found on the streets because this was even before we had a nonprofit organization. She just wanted to help in whatever way she could, and because we didn’t have money so she wanted to help … She wanted to serve. That was her way to help service so she would bring home patients who were actually getting treatment and they didn’t have anywhere to live. These were very, very underprivileged people and underserved people. She’d bring them home, and they just live with us. I grew up like that. She’d train me and my sister to care for them and just share whatever we had. I mean, we didn’t have a room or anything, just like, “Okay. Here’s someone now. They’re going to be here for two weeks so you’re sleeping there in the kitchen or somewhere else in the living room like sure, okay.” I didn’t know it was a different kind of life until I started going to school, and I started talking about these things when I was older. I was like, “Oh, you don’t have strangers living in your home?” My dad, he’s really all about education for girls, and also education just for everybody, so even though we didn’t have much, he was funding so many kids, their education for years, and then eventually as I got trained more and more, we were able to offer them a better place not just our apartment. We started a nonprofit, so now we … It’s called Jana Rakshita. Since 2004, we’ve been able to do it in a much more organized proper way. We work in pediatric cancer and now, we’re building schools. Especially focusing on Adivasi indigenous people. We’re building schools for them that focus on girls. Now, we’re focused on pediatric cancer. Earlier it was just adults, adolescent, and pediatric cancer now. We focus on pediatric cancer. Rosemary Pritzker: How did you guys get focused on cancer in the first place? Priya Darshini: Firstly, cancer is such a difficult disease. It’s so difficult, not just for the patient, it’s difficult for the whole family. It is so taxing financially. It’s a long, long oftentimes, not in every case of course, but it’s such a long disease in the sense like it takes years to … For recovery, oftentimes it comes back. How this all started was … There’s a very … There’s a really good hospital called Tata Cancer Hospital in Bombay, and it’s one of its kind in all of Asia. It offers subsidized treatment, and does not subsidize the quality of the treatment which is why there’s patients coming from all over the country, from Bangladesh, from everywhere, all over Asia the people come there. That means that the hospital is overwhelmed with patients and there’s no spaces, no beds … When they’re getting chemotherapy for example, it’s over a period of five, six weeks maybe, two weeks, whatever. A lot of these patients come from really remote parts of the country, and they don’t have the money to travel back and forth while ongoing treatment. They can’t really even travel because it’s so hard on their bodies. They just sleep on the streets, and I’ve watched people like women give birth on the streets while their husband or someone is getting treatment. They’re all living on the streets. That kind of thing is just insane. I’ve never seen anything like that anywhere else. My mother just started bringing them home. I think that’s how it all started. Also, her mother was a social worker. Her brothers are also social workers. The whole family they’re all beautiful people like that and are so giving. One of my skills was to be able to work with these kids in a very personal way. I was able to communicate with them in a way that really was helpful. I was working on the field a lot, and now that I’m so far, I’m in New York, and it’s been five or six years really. I’m not working in the field. I miss that because believe it or not, I got way more than I was able to give. It’s always the case. Life made sense to me like that. It was also the kind of life I knew because I grew up like that, but now living in New York has been so hard. I’m not able to have that personal connection with the kids. I know so many of the kids, and they make that bond with you, and they want to see you, and I miss them. They miss me too. From New York, now I’m able to do a lot of other stuff, backend stuff, and I keep going back so I can keep helping with newer projects. This time when I was there, I just got back last week. We adopted another school, it’s a government run school in the middle of nowhere in Maharashtra. It has nothing just like this is a really dilapidated building with just two rooms, and there’s like first, second, third in one classroom, and the fourth, and fifth in one classroom. They’re all studying together. They don’t have water. There’s no electricity. The building might fall apart anytime, and yet these kids are so invested in their education. They have such big dreams, and it’s … Rosemary Pritzker: They’re probably more dedicated to their studies than most American kids. Priya Darshini: You know what, yes. Rosemary Pritzker: I’m sorry. American kids just, I feel like, mostly a lot of them take their educations for granted because it’s like this thing that everyone does and most American kids I feel like school is a drag. Priya Darshini: Right. I mean, it is a privilege, education is a privilege. These kids, for them, they’re so hungry, so hungry. I’d bring them books and by the next week, they would read every single book, and they’d be able to answer every single thing. They’re hungry for … They’d be like, “Can you bring me that book? Can you bring me this book?” I’d be like, “Wow. You read all of it?” These kids are quietly like … Sometimes I’d hear nothing, and I’d be like, “Wait. Is the school open? Are there kids inside?” I would walk in, and every child is so quiet, and studying so well disciplined. It makes it so worth it. Rosemary Pritzker: Often students in schools in underdeveloped areas, face challenges that are so basic. It’s something as simple and as complicated as a toilet can make the difference between dropping out and graduating. This is the case in many developing countries throughout the world. Priya Darshini: A lot of the girls would drop out after fifth or sixth grade when they would get there, period because all these kids walk like 8 to 10 kilometers, and this is a jungle like nothing is around. They walk 8 to 10 kilometers. It’s not safe for the girls firstly, and then they’d come to schools and there’s no … This particular school didn’t have toilets, there’s no hygiene facilities, so the girls started dropping out. We just constructed toilets. Something as simple as that, all the girls started coming back to school. What is so interesting and fascinating about this is that the schools that we’re working with, they’re literally about an hour and 15 minutes away from Bombay from the city. You’d go to the city, and like you find some of the wealthiest people in the entire world. The wealthiest people who have everything. The economic disparity is so much, you have everything. Then you get out, by one hour outside and they don’t have electricity. We want to bring in solar energy and solar panels and also trying to see how we can … A lot of the Adivasi children, they’re basically farmers, and now they’re all … The farmers’ suicide rate in India is insane and of course the corporations are coming in. Monsanto has arrived, so the small farmer is out. Rosemary Pritzker: Well, I’ve heard that in India a lot of them why they’re committing suicide is because they’re being forced to use pesticides that they don’t want to use. Priya Darshini: They don’t want to use. Also large scale production. They’re not able to beat that. How can they beat that? They don’t have the wherewithal for any of that. Like I was saying the Adivasis are also farmers, and by law they own the land, they’re indigenous people, but the corporations are finding ways to get around that. What if they die? Suddenly, there’s a highway they built through their village and all their cattle gets run over because there’s like a highway through a village, and the kids are walking across the highway in the middle of the night, and they get killed, and then there’s suddenly a huge industry that’s being built in their backyard, and chemicals are flowing their rivers. Rosemary Pritzker: No wonder they have cancer. Priya Darshini: Yeah. Boom. Not just that, there’s also other prolific ways in which their land is being taken away from them. What we’re also trying to do is we want to make them realize that being farmers, being a farmer is one of the most important things and they need to be proud of it, because I see that a lot of the Adivasi kids like, “What do you want to be?” “Oh, I want to be am engineer. I want to be a doctor,” which is great. I love that they have these big dreams. What do your parents do, the farmers? What do your parents want you to do? What would you actually like to do?” It’s like, “I would love to work on the farm. This is all I know, but it’s not going to bring me money.” So that’s why they want to become engineers often times, or doctors, and I’m like, “Wait, but you can be proud of who you are, and you can continue doing that.” But they don’t want to because they’ve seen what happens. Rosemary Pritzker: Did you have any heroes or mentors besides your parents when you were growing up? Priya Darshini: So many. My grandmother was one of my biggest heroes. I have her name actually. She was an incredible artist. She was a dancer, a Bharatanatyam dancer, and a Carnatic classical vocalist, and received this title called Chandrika Priyadarshini which is what you receive when you’re excelled in the field. She used to perform like two-hour performances on stage from when she was six or seven years old. Bharatanatyam was a very difficult classical form, and she would not only dance but she’d also accompany herself singing while dancing. Rosemary Pritzker: What? Priya Darshini: It’s crazy. Rosemary Pritzker: That’s like some Beyonce stuff. Priya Darshini: That is some Beyonce stuff, but we’re talking Bharatanatyam. We’re talking Carnatic classical which is so intricate. She would do all of that. She is amazing. She’s also an incredible cook. She was also again very generous. She worked at hospitals and dedicated her time helping people. She was one of my biggest inspirations. She is one of my biggest inspirations. Outside of that, I think inspiration from … I think everybody has something to give me, I feel. I meet so many people. The world is full of amazing inspiring people. Rosemary Pritzker: Is that how you got into singing, is your grandmother? Priya Darshini: Actually, I got into singing because as a South Indian, this is a thing we just do. I don’t think we have an option just like now you’re four years old, now you have to start learning how to sing classical music or you learn violin or you sing or you learn Bharatanatyam dance, or boys would learn Mridangam or a percussion instrument. Rosemary Pritzker: Not everybody chooses it as their profession, and dedicates themselves that much. Priya Darshini: Yeah. Rosemary Pritzker: How did that come about? Priya Darshini: I think that came from my grandmother. She quit performing professionally when she was very young. After she had kids and I think right after she got married she quit. There was a lot of reasons and now as I’m getting older, and I’m doing a lot of research about classical music from that time, and the patriarchy, and the Indian classical music world which has been a subject of interest for me in recent times. I’ve been doing research about that, and I found out a lot about the time that she was a professional musician. The society made it very difficult. Women were not looked at with a lot of respect if you were actually a performer, and dancing on stage. Bharatanatyam for example today, it’s one of the most … It’s a classical, pure classical dance form and it’s so respected, and it’s like cultured. That’s today. But when my grandmother was dancing, Bharatanatyam was almost about to die. Around that time, I’m talking about 1930s, only the Devadasis danced and the Devadasis are typically the women like people would see them as sex workers or just people who are women who are lose or who are dedicated themselves to entertaining men. That conservatism came from the British, that came also from the missionaries that were in India around that time. Then the Brahmans also were very conservative so the British, their conservative attitudes and the missionaries, that kind of really worked well with the Brahmans and so they were like, “Okay, cool. We’re going to take this.” The women were not really … They were not allowed to dance. Only in 1929 or 1930s when they started trying to break through that. Rukmini Devi and the Madras Academy, they were some of the foremost people who are trying to break into that whole scene, and saying, “Hey, this is a studding beautiful art form, and it’ll die if we don’t protect and save it. My grandmother was a professional artist in those times. That was a difficult time to navigate. Even though she did perform a lot and she did a lot of Bharatanatyam performances as well, eventually I think she caved in, and gave up because also she was like, “I have kids I’m going to teach now.” I wanted to be a performer for her in a way also. In the beginning, that’s how it all started. It was like, “Oh, paati.” Paati is grandmother in Tamil. It’s like, “Paati, if you can do it, I’m going to do it for you. Don’t worry. I got it. I got your name so I’m going to do it for you.” I keep telling her before she passed. I always dreamt of being a musician, and a performer. I’m more a musician since I was a child. I couldn’t see a life outside of it. Rosemary Pritzker: That’s lucky because a lot of people spend their whole lives searching for what is their thing. In my case, it’s like, “Ooh.” I get so passionate about so many different things and focusing is my issue, so to … Priya Darshini: I have that too. I definitely have that. Especially now is a time when people are now beginning to see why that is a very special thing to have, to be able to do different things. Innovation comes from that it doesn’t come from doing one thing all the time. You have to have the ability to have talent and skills, and cross-disciplines. Rosemary Pritzker: My ex-boyfriend used to say specialization is for insects. Priya Darshini: That’s funny. Are you able to find a common thread between all the things you really like and are passionate about? Rosemary Pritzker: Several. Priya Darshini: That you can put together? Rosemary Pritzker: Yeah. Priya Darshini: The common thread is you, right? Rosemary Pritzker: Totally. Priya Darshini: You are the common thread. Rosemary Pritzker: The common thread is like what I’m passionate about, and taking the different passions and seeing where they overlap. In my case a lot of times, it’s really exploring other cultures, and seeing how I can mix them in a way that’s colorful and alive, and beautiful, and really meaningful. I love doing that through food, through music, through culture in general, and just seeing the lines between cultures melting away. That’s why actually, that’s how I ended up in New York is I actually went to spend a summer in New York in 2004 and dropped out of college to stay because I was like this is the cultural capital of the world. I’ve always wanted to basically travel the world as much as possible and explore as many other cultures as I can, but I was like they’re all here. Priya Darshini: They’re all here. That’s true. Rosemary Pritzker: When you’re in New York, they’re all there. They get mixed … Priya Darshini: There’s every kind of person. Rosemary Pritzker: They get mixed together there in a way there that I haven’t seen to the same extent anywhere else. I mean, it’s why the Epichorus and House of Waters and all these things get to exist is because of a melting pot like New York. Priya Darshini: Right. Even though the boundaries are blurring, it all gets mixed in New York, but I think New York also allows for each of these cultures to maintain its identity, and that’s necessary. That’s also a very beautiful thing. Rosemary Pritzker: That’s one of the coolest things about New York is like … I feel like a big part of why New York is so liberal is because you move there and, you can’t help but have your eyes constantly opened because I live in New York for nine years, and every time I walk outside there, I marvel at how many languages I hear. I hear more other languages than I hear English, every single time. Priya Darshini: Yeah. I mean, which is why New York feels like home to me as well because India has so many languages and just traveling from one state to another would feel like going to a whole different country. Yeah, and I sing with so many different bands. One of the reasons I moved to New York was to, again, learn and study all these different forms in music that exist out there and learn from it, and take inspiration from it, and bring that into what I do. My solo project that I’m working on is going to take a while, gig. I’m hoping for it to be a cross-disciplinary performance piece. You’ll hear all of my influences, everything. Everything that has just made me, me, and it’s just my experiences from traveling and living in different places, and getting to know people from around the world. Again, in New York there’s some of the most brilliant musicians from around the world who live right there, and you can bump into them like a small venue down the street. They’re so open and warm and welcoming, and I sing and collaborate with them, and then I learn from them, and they’re going to give you lessons. It’s very beautiful like that. Sometimes we’ll exchange lessons. I’ll give them a voice lesson, or Indian classical lesson, and they’ll give me another lesson in return. It’s like it’s beautiful. Rosemary Pritzker: I feel a good example of all that is Joe’s Pub. Priya Darshini: Oh, yeah. I love Joe’s Pub. Rosemary Pritzker: I love Joe’s Pub. I mean, that has been one of my favorite venues in New York for a really long time. Priya Darshini: Me too. Rosemary Pritzker: What I love about it is it’s small, and intimate, and the acoustics are great, and everything, but you can see everything from … I saw Sara Bareillis there. To see Sara Bareillis in such a small venue is amazing, but then you’ll hear obscure people that no one has heard of who just happen to be totally amazing. Priya Darshini: The curation is really good. Rosemary Pritzker: We talked about our mutual friend Bill Bragin who used to be the director of Joe’s Pub. He’s also the founder of a well known world music festival in New York called globalFEST which brings together cutting edge bands from all over the world. It’s a blast. I’ve been many times, and Priya has performed there as well. I’ve discovered a lot of my favorite music at globalFEST and it’s also where I got to know the founders of Afropop Sean and Banning who I interviewed for my show last year. Priya and I discussed how incredibly talented Bill Bragin is at curating music. A few years ago, he moved away to become the executive and artistic director of the Art Center at NYU Abu Dhabi. I think Bill Bragin has brought a lot of wonderful stuff to New York. Bill, if you’re listening … I’ll have to send this to him. We love you. Priya Darshini: Yeah, we do. Come back. Rosemary Pritzker: Anyway, so tell me a little bit more about what is the Epichorus, what is Women’s Raga Massive? Priya Darshini: The Epichorus was started by Zach Fredman. A really beautiful composer. He writes beautiful melodies. He’s a very good Oud player. Rosemary Pritzker: Insane Oud player. Priya Darshini: Yeah, and so talented. Just beautiful heart. Rosemary Pritzker: And a really lovely rabbi. Priya Darshini: Yeah, very. There’s only one of his kind in New York, definitely, in the world. He’s such a beautiful songwriter, and Max actually introduced me to Zach saying, “Hey, you guys should … I don’t know what’s going to happen, but you should do something together. At that point Zach was like, “Wait. I play middle eastern music. I play Oud. You’re using Indian classical music. I don’t know.” The work that he does, a lot of it is in Hebrew. I was like, “Well, I could sing in Hebrew.” He’s like, “Do you speak Hebrew?” I was like, “Nope, but I can learn.” I love learning languages. Rosemary Pritzker: How many languages do you sing in, five? Priya Darshini: I sing in about 18 or something. Rosemary Pritzker: Oh my god. Priya Darshini: I don’t speak all of those. I speak maybe seven or eight of those. Fluently maybe four. Rosemary Pritzker: That’s impressive. Priya Darshini: Conversationally seven or eight and it comes back when I start speaking with someone. A lot of the others I can just … I actually write out so the Hebrew script that I sing with the Epichorus, I write out in the Devanagari script. I’m working on creating own script actually, and I’ve been working on it for a while. I use diuretics, and a combination of the Latin and the Devanagari script to be able to pronounce any language. It’s still in the works but so far all the languages that I’ve been singing on, it’s really been very useful. I’m able to pronounce the words as close to original as possible. How I know this is because when I’m done with the gigs, sometimes I’ll have the audience come up and start speaking in that language very fluently. I’m like I don’t understand a word of what you said. They’re like, “You sounded so authentic. You sounded like you speak it really well,” and I was like, “Nope. I just … ” Then I show them my script, and they’re like, “Wait. What?” Rosemary Pritzker: It’s like you’re on secret language. Well, you were talking about the other night about, that you were talking about the other night of like when it comes to music it doesn’t matter if you understand afterwards. It’s the feeling. It’s the magic that it creates, and how it moves you. Priya Darshini: Definitely. I mean, words are heavy. Words have a lot of meaning, lyrics, poetry, it’s beautiful. I feel like, yes, in a way, if you don’t understand the lyrics it could feel like it’s taking away something from the song, but I … Also a thing that it could add something because then you interpret what you’re listening to in our own way. Also, again, lyrics are so poetic, these words express emotion even just by the sound of it which is why I love language. Every language has … All the words carries so many emotions, and the way they … The melody with how they’re spoken itself tells you something. Certain words can be harsh and certain words can be soft. I think it just conveys the meaning and the emotion even just by the sound of it even if you don’t understand the meaning of the word. Rosemary Pritzker: They’re like tools that you’re utilizing. Priya Darshini: Yeah. For example sometimes in Indian classical music, I’m singing the names of the notes. It’s called Sargam, and it doesn’t need lyrics. Sometimes you’re just singing in Alap which is just like ah’s and oh’s and you don’t really need lyrics either. It depends on how you want to listen to a song I guess. I enjoy listening to music that I don’t understand the language for also. You see language is just a tool for communication. Yes, words are heavy, poetry is beautiful. You can express so much with very little. It’s an art form by itself. Language is an art form. Also, sometimes you can communicate without any words. Rosemary Pritzker: I really feel like music is actually a form of magic. Honestly, I really feel that way. Priya Darshini: Agreed. I would never argue that. Yes. Rosemary Pritzker: I mean, with the magnitude to which it is able to move people. The other night when you were performing here, I felt it so much and then my friend Michelle came up to me afterwards and she was like, “I was moved to tears.” Multiple people said similar things. Priya Darshini: I think intention plays a very big part in music. A lot of my study has been in Indian classical music and that study has taught me about how every single note that comes out of you has to be intentional. It has to have purpose. Even the silence has purpose so that has to be intentional. It shouldn’t just be like vomiting stuff. It has to be very intentional. Any classical music focuses a lot on that stuff because it’s entirely 100% improvised, so you can’t really … You have to be very, very present. You have to be incredibly in the moment and that’s why it’s so introspective like people are listening to it even if you don’t know how Indian classical music works. It’s a very intellectual form of music, but at the same time when you’re listening to it, even if you don’t know that, you feel the spiritual … You get vibe. It’s a very introspective vibe. You want to close your eyes and just be in the moment. That whole music, because of the improvised nature of the music, and it forces you to be in the moment, not just the … The artist has to be in the moment, and that moment will never come back again which is beautiful because you’ll never be able to perform the same thing twice. None of it is memorized, not of it is … There’s no notation for this stuff. Rosemary Pritzker: It sounds like it’s like its own form of spiritual practice. Priya Darshini: It is. It’s definitely my spiritual practice. It’s meditative and it really … A lot of it is about dropping your ego because music is always going to be bigger, and the more that comes in the way, what I’m singing sounds worse like, “Oh, crap. I need to fix that.” A lot of how I’ve approached music comes from whatever I learned in any classical music, and the idea of being very intentional is important. I know several different cultures do that in their styles in music as well but intention really passes on so when I’m singing and there’s an audience that I can connect to and they’re looking at me, and I can … I want them to feel a certain way. I try and have that in my heart when I’m singing every note. Rosemary Pritzker: I’ve noticed how present you are the whole time but also I feel like there are these little moments where you just … There’s this expansiveness where you’re so in it. It’s so hard to explain what I’m seeing in these moments. You know what I’m talking about? Priya Darshini: Yes. I’m lost sometimes. I just lose myself. Rosemary Pritzker: I feel like sometimes it’s the moments where you’re singing really softly. Not always, but that’s where I felt it the most. There’s this tenderness and sweetness but power to it at the same time which is an interesting balance to strike. I was wondering if you could speak to in those moments where you’re really transcending and just letting go and feeling it. What is that like? I know it’s beyond words to try and describe it, but what’s happening for you in those moments? Priya Darshini: Those moments that you’re talking about, I think those are … I know exactly what you’re talking about because I get there at several points in time. I wish I could be there the whole time, and that’s what I’m hoping for. Those moments, I’m just so connected to myself, and I just am … I become a vessel. I’m not even there. It’s not me who’s doing the singing. It’s just happening through me. That’s really an incredible moment for me also. I feel so full and alive, and I also feel so grateful and humbled because it’s not me. Rosemary Pritzker: I’m getting goosebumps just hearing you talk about it because I’ve witnessed you in those moments, and it … What you’re describing really comes through. I feel like those of us who are watching are basically just sitting there in awe of whatever it is that’s coming through. Priya Darshini: I’m grateful. Playing is so beautiful. One of the things that I really enjoyed was not having … I wasn’t wearing my footwear. I was bare feet. That helped me stayed grounded. I also like that. There was no stage. That really takes away that separation from the audience and you, so you’re just one. I could feel what was coming back to me. I’m looking at everyone right in front of me just right there. When you’re doing something and you immediately see how it’s affecting someone, it really inspires you to keep doing that. That was it. That was human connection. Rosemary Pritzker: Yeah. Just human to you. Priya Darshini: How could I have that on Facebook? Rosemary Pritzker: That’s beautiful. Priya Darshini: I cannot have that on Facebook. Rosemary Pritzker: Speaking of human connection, so tell me about Max. How did you guys meet? what’s the story there? Priya Darshini: This is really funny. Max was actually studying in India. This was around 2010 or 2011. He got a grant to study in India with Pandit Shivkumar Sharma so he was there living in Bombay for two years, but when he was living there I was actually living in Nashville Tennessee. I was singing with Future Man Roy Wooten and that whole seen in Nashville. I was there and I was going back and forth. I also had a job in London so I just keep going back and forth. One of the times that I was visiting Bombay, I met Max at this party. This guy who was really interested in dating me, he was like, “Come to this party, come to this party.” I was like, “Okay. Is someone playing … What’s happening there.” I didn’t really want to to go and he was like, “There might be music. There might be a jam session.” I was like, “Whose going to play?” He was like, “I don’t know.” Then he sends me Max’s website or something, and I was like, “Oh, okay. Sounds interesting. I’ll come.” I go there and Max shows up without an instrument and I was like, “Oh, okay. There’s no Jam Session.” We chatted then and then there was this instant connection. It was we talked about music and we had this deep musical connection immediately because we talked about the artist that I really look up to, and I talk about Indian classical music and he’d been studying in classical music. He’s talking about introspection. Our first conversation became so deep, it was all about introspection, and I was like, “Okay, that’s cool.” The week after we connected and we had a jam session, and that was beautiful. To have a musical connection was again just really, really I felt like I knew him even though we hadn’t spend any time together. Then I left. I went back to Nashville. Months later, many months later, in fact a year later, I was coming back to India and actually a couple of months after I came back to India, I didn’t really … I didn’t remember he was still there. I forgotten about that. Then I suddenly remembered, I was like, “Oh, Max was here.” I was trying to get back to all my music connections in Bombay, and I was like, “Oh, I should give him a shout.” When I called Max, he was actually moving back to New York, and we had one week. I was like, “Oh, dammit.” We spent that week together going to concerts, playing more music. We’re like, “Wow. I think there’s something here, but you’re leaving. I don’t know what’s going to happen but this could be anything. This could be a beautiful friendship.” He left, we stayed in touch. We would talk every day on Skype. Again, it was all about very deep introspections of life and just wanting to be a better person, and trying to find the tools to call ourselves out on our bullshit. I feel like that’s the most important thing to recognize our own bullshit. We were on that process, and like that’s how we became best friends. Three or four months after chatting on Skype like that one day he’s like, “He had just left.” He’s like, “Okay. I’m coming to Bombay, to see you.” I was like okay. I was like, “Don’t expect anything.” He’s like, “No, no, no. I’m not expecting anything to come out of this, but I don’t want to regret that I didn’t try. I just want to know what this is. If this turns out to be just the most incredible friendship, I would be so happy with that.” I was like, “Okay. That’s really sweet.” He showed up in Bombay and we spent … Actually, we traveled to a couple of national parks. I love wildlife, and all my holidays are typically national parks or just jungles, wildlife, mountains. I took him into a wildlife sanctuaries and national parks in India. He saw tigers and elephants, and he was like, “Oh my gosh.” We played music in the jungle. It was beautiful. He came back. We had a two-and-a-half year long distance relationship, and then eventually I moved. I was coming out of another long-distance relationship, and I was like, “Okay. I can’t. No more long distance relationship if this has to work. We have to be in the same city.” Also, the fact that he lived in New York made a lot of sense because I’d been wanting to move to New York for music so it just made sense. I was like okay. I moved to New York, and I’ll have you also to be there. He was there, and for the first couple of years, we just tried to figure out what’s going on, how do we work this in the same city. We didn’t want to put any pressure on each other, and I wanted to make sure that I also have my own individual life. I didn’t want to be dependent on anyone. He’s so easy. He’s just the kindest, sweetest person. I mean, that dulcimer, it sounds so sweet. He really is like that. He’s my best friend, he’s my collaborator, he’s my teacher, he’s my student. All of that. It’s just a really beautiful full of relationship. We got married two years ago. Rosemary Pritzker: Where did you do that? Priya Darshini: We got married in Bombay. Rosemary Pritzker: That’s great. I feel like just having witnessed you guys making music together in a couple of different settings with the Epichorus here with House of Waters, it’s like not just a marriage of two people, it’s a marriage of sound that is making more of the magic that I was talking about. There’s something palpable there that’s really special. I mean, first of all, how many people in the US and most parts of the world get to hear traditional Indian singing, much less a hammered dulcimer which is such an obscure instrument, and the two together is like just mesmerizingly beautiful. Priya Darshini: Thank you. Also, he’s traveled so much like it helps because I wouldn’t be able to connect that deeply with someone who hasn’t traveled and has an experience and lived, immersed themselves in different cultures. He has done that. He lived in synagogue for six or seven years. He moved to Bombay to study his music, so he really practices immersion which to me is very important. He’s like a child of the world and I feel that way to. It just made sense. I’m glad you were able to hear that in our music. I love stories, I love knowing … I love history, I love knowing something came to be. You learn so much from just knowing that journey because for example, I’m talking to you, I want to know what made you, you because without that aspect, I can gauge you right now but that wouldn’t be entirely accurate because there’s so many layers of you that I could completely miss and all those subtleties and the things that you don’t talk about, the things that you don’t show on your face, all of those things, I wouldn’t know unless I knew your stories, and I knew your entire life. In that same way, I feel like going back in time, going back years in time, centuries, to our forefathers, our foremothers, it’s so important because what they learned and what they tried to pass on is very important. They did that with good intention. They wanted the further generations to learn from it, and it’s stupid to make the same mistakes again, and again. There’s a lot of learning there, but also just that connection with humans from a different time that makes you feel like, “Wow. We’re actually the same. There’s something beautiful about knowing that we’ve been here for thousands of years and we’re going to be here for a long time,” and that knowledge, it helps me understand. Sometimes the futility of things that I worry about, it helps me keep things real in a lot of ways like it’s just fine. My parents did this, my grandparents did this, their parents did this. We all have different set of challenges of course. We have completely different lives, completely different journeys. Again, there’s something to be said about how in that journey, there’s such a similar struggle for peace, or a quest for peace or a quest for just human connection. There’s this quest for community, there’s this quest for finding purpose, and meaning in life. Rosemary Pritzker: I want to give the listeners a taste of a couple of the sings that you sing the other night, but I love if you could explain a little bit about them starting particularly with … There is a love song that you sang towards the end that is just so sweet. Priya Darshini: That’s actually a composition that was written around 150 years ago, really old composition and it’s based on Rakul Kamaj. It’s a beautiful, again, poetry doesn’t translate very well from different language. I’ll do my best in trying to translate just a few lines of it. There’s one part that goes [Hindi 00:54:31]. It’s talking about lovers and one of the lovers is upset with the other. They talk about missing and longing for the other lover and saying, “Hey, you’re not talking to me. When you’re not talking to me, my playground is barren. My feelings feel empty.” It’s talking about how much they long for them to come back. I could translate line by line, but you know. Rosemary Pritzker: What language is it? Priya Darshini: It’s in Hindi, but it’s older version of Hindi, more poetic. Urdu, influenced Hindi. [Hindi 00:55:21]. It’s like the monsoon is now back to leave. It’s coming, it’s going. I got to sing this to remember the lines. (singing) [Hindi 00:55:31] is you left home for foreign lands (singing) [Hindi 00:56:05] is like I don’t find peace anymore. (singing) My lover doesn’t talk to me. (singing) As much as I try and long for you and pray for you, I’m constantly just hoping, hoping against hope that you will come back, but you don’t even talk to me. (singing) I love that song. Again, talking about language. A lot of people came up to me and told me about that. I did tell them it was a love song. I think even if I didn’t tell them it was a love song, I think they would have still felt the same emotions. They came up to me and said that, that really moved them, and even though they didn’t know what the hell I was talking about, it really moved them. Rosemary Pritzker: What’s your favorite song that you do with the Epichorus or a favorite? Priya Darshini: I love Azlat that I did the other night. That was actually written by Zach Fredman. Oh my god, what a beautiful composition. It just takes me back. It’s in Aramaic, and it feels like it’s a story from thousands of years ago. There’s something so profound about the lyrics written by Israel Najara. I would translate it for you, but I would be better if Zach does that. In short it’s a hypothetical situation where Moses has died and Moses’ mother, Jochebed is looking for Moses. In a way, it’s also about a mother losing a child, and so it’s a very powerful, very powerful moving piece. Just the composition itself just takes you back in time when I’m singing it, and I feel like I have just transported to several thousand years ago. (singing) Rosemary Pritzker: One thing that we haven’t talked about much yet is your racing, and your life as an athlete. Do you want to just tell us just a little bit about how you got into that? Priya Darshini: Sure. I was always into sports since I was a kid. Thank god because it saved me so many ways. It became my go-to for everything whenever I was angry, sad, happy, upset, everything. Also, the work that we do, I hadn’t realize that it is traumatic so having children that you love, die in your arms is not an easy thing, and I’m so glad that I have music, and I have sports to just some form of … Rosemary Pritzker: Expression? Priya Darshini: … expression, yeah. As a kid, I was a competitive swimmer. In fact as a child outside of being a singer, I wanted to be an Olympic athlete. That was my dream. Every day I had to be involved in some form of some sport or the other. I played cricket, I played badminton, I played squash which is racquetball here, and every type of sport. If I may say so myself is pretty good at it. In 2007, I think it was a really difficult year for me. I was going through a lot and not just that but I was in some form of rut. I needed more, I needed something bigger in my life. For some reason, everything felt like it was … I needed more challenges. I needed to challenge my brain, my mind. I needed to figure out what the corners of my mind were and what is this? Who am I? Pretty much that was it. Around that time, I met this person called Ram who had just run 160 miles in the Gobi Desert. It was self-supported race. He called me, and I was like, “What? 160, what?” That’s 250 kilometers. It was like “Holy crap. That’s a lot.” I was like, “Wait. Ram, how are you alive? What are you doing? You just run this two days ago?” He sounded so joyful about that. He’s very good at it. He’s one of those guys. If he talks to you, he’ll get you to run in a week. We started talking about that, and just suddenly I was like, “Wow, I think that’s exactly what I need to do. I need to challenge myself. I need to push all of my boundaries. I need to figure out what this means for me, just who am I? What’s happening in my brain? What am I capable of? Within that 10-minute conversation, I signed up for my first ultra marathon. It was my first race ever. I do not advice anyone to do that, but my first race was 100 mile race in the Himalayas. It is considered to be one of the most difficult challenging endurance races in the world. People have almost died trying this race. I almost died running it, first time. I had four-and-a-half months to train for it. I’ve always wanted to go to the Himalayas. I feel like I belong there so I was like that’s it, that’s where I’m going. My dream was to climb Everest. It’s not a dream anymore, but it used to be, so I thought this would be a great way to just go to the Himalayas and be like just be there, and find my home there. I trained for it, and ran that and it changed my whole life. I finished the race which is amazing. I became the first Indian woman, the youngest woman, the youngest person to run the race, and all of that. I found it very strange because I was like that makes no sense. I’m not that good of an athlete because there’s way better athletes in India. I was like, “How could I be the first person to do this?” It makes no sense. Also, just that experience of discovering myself, doing that, this race, it starts at 6,000 feet, goes up to 12,000 feet and back, and you’re running through the most remote location. Basically it’s exactly on the border of India and Nepal. It’s extreme. This was in November. I was running in negative 18, negative 20 degree temperatures with unobstructed winds from Everest, Lhotse, Makalu, Kanchenjunga, four other world’s tallest peaks. You can’t carry too much gear either so I’m not wearing much. It’s like really fighting a lot of things. The distance becomes a very small challenge. All the other things are the big challenges. What it taught me, actually is also very cool. I took a little recorder with me. I’m so glad I did that because I wanted to make notes of my thought process, while I was doing that. I wanted to see how many times I want to give up or if I do give up or what my process was, I wanted to just learn myself. It was very interesting because after the first three kilometers I’m crying because I had already … it’s high altitude. I didn’t know how … I was training for it, but I didn’t realize it would hit me so bad, it was like on the side. A lot of us were on the side of the road throwing up within the first kilometer or two. At the end of three kilometers, I was like, “What have I gotten myself into?” I have another 157 kilometers to go and I have to go up to 12,000 feet. Holy crap. From then on, just that experience taught me, I wasn’t even teaching myself. It was just that process, forced me to stop thinking off the finish line because at the beginning, it was all about finish line, finish line. How do I get there? It’s important to be goal-oriented yes but that was in the training. That was the goal-oriented part, but when I was at the race, if I approached it like that, I would not get there. Then I slowly started thinking about, how do I get to that day’s finish line. Then it became about, “Okay. Forget that. If I think that far, I’m going to get overwhelmed and I’m not going to make it.” Then I start thinking about, okay, how do I just get to the next aid station? Eventually, it came down to how do I just put one foot in front of the other? And that was it. Rosemary Pritzker: I feel like that everything you just said is a really good metaphor for life. Priya Darshini: It was. That’s exactly what happened. I think I lived an entire lifetime because I went through every type of emotion, and I pushed my body beyond. Even if you were incredibly well trained, you can’t train really for altitude, you just don’t know how it’s going to affect you or that terrain. Himalayan terrain is like nothing else I’ve ever experience before. You have 70 degree inclines and it’s crazy. There’s cobblestones everywhere. The weather is ruthless. I had hypothermia, but if I look up, I would just see the most beautiful, beautiful divine, just the most stunning mountains, and it would just keep reminding me of why I was there. Then another thing that I really liked was a part of the race would run through a Himalayan national park, and out here these birds every now and then sing like … There’s one bird that had this specific … I want to try doing that. It would do that. I just keep looking out for that bird. I said I’m making friends with little things that just kept me going, and then there’d be a little cloud just hanging. I wanted to run through that cloud. That experience made me realize the finish line is not an important thing at all. It’s just right now, what I do right now is all that matters. I’ve always been very interested in the life of Sherpas because the Himalayas always felt like home to me, and during that race, I saw how they were being exploited. This is common knowledge that Sherpas are exploited by … Rosemary Pritzker: And misunderstood. Most people hear the word Sherpa and they think it’s a profession. Most people on earth don’t know that’s an ethnic group. Priya Darshini: It’s just people. Rosemary Pritzker: Basically on the border of Nepal and Tibet, right? Priya Darshini: Yeah. India and Nepal just basically the people who live in the Himalayas. They’re some of the most beautiful human beings I’ve ever come across, and super human, super human. Genetically, their lungs are bigger. They’re the most hardworking people I’ve ever come across and they just … They’re so humble about it. It’s amazing. They just amazed me. I wanted to do something for them because we need them to take care of the mountains. The Himalayas are being thrashed which is why I earlier said I wanted to climb Everest. Now, I don’t want to do it anymore. If I do, I want to go, just to clean the mountain because it is thrashed, not only with dead bodies but it’s also thrashed with shit and crap that people have left behind because everyone is trying to go to the top, and it’s this crazy ego thing. It’s entirely an ego thing now. There are just companies that will take you like, “Oh, you got $50,000? I’ll take you to the top, to the summit of Everest.” You don’t have to even have climbing experience sometimes. It’s this thing everyone wants to put on their checklist like I climb Everest. The actual work that’s being done is by the Sherpas, and they get paid little to nothing for putting their entire lives and danger for running this whole thing. All of these big companies, adventure companies, and climbing companies that organize these expeditions, they are the ones who take all the money, and they thrash the place, and there’s no respect for the mountains. Bring back all your crap, don’t leave it on the mountain. That’s one of another reason also the communities that were the tiny little three, four house villages that my race would run through. I wanted to bring some money to them also. I wanted basically to inspire more women to do this. In 2007, when I started running ultra marathons in India, I knew two other people who knew what ultra marathons were. Everybody else was making fun of me, they would lay bets on how I would not finish and things like that. Running on the streets was not safe for me, and it was really against all odds for me to just train for this whole thing, and I wanted to change that, and I wanted to have other people have this experience because once you have those experience, nothing feels impossible anymore. It just feels like you redefine everything for yourself which is why I started this company called The WindChasers. It’s a social enterprise. Because of WindChasers, we’ve been able to support so many Sherpa families and pay them way more than any of these other expeditions would so they don’t have to do life threatening work. They can start with their families, and we’re trying to bring education to the kids who live in that area, and solar panels, that kind of stuff, but also at the same time have runners experience this incredible thing, and clean up the mountain, raise awareness, environmental awareness, all of that. That’s how WindChasers was started. Also, a selfish reason because I just want to be in the Himalayas. I just want to be there. Any excuse. Rosemary Pritzker: There’s a lot of intense scary stuff going on in the world right now, and I’m sure you probably have those moments like I do, like we all do of like, “Oh my god. This is like … How are we going to turn this around? There’s so many bad stuff going on. In those moments, what gives you solace or hope? What do you turn to for that? Priya Darshini: I believe humans are intrinsically good, and I believe that we are all trying … Naturally we want to think positive. No one wants to think the worst for yourself, for the world even though we do think we feel like it’s going there. We always wake up wanting for this to be a good day for ourselves. I do believe that humans want to think positively and want a more positive experience in life. It’s the only thing that gives me some form of peace knowing that maybe it’s just a rough time at some point when this passes. It’s the ebb and flow. There’s also this whole concept. It could be Kalyug, but whatever it is, it’s the acceptance of what it is, and I definitely believe that there’s more good people in the world. There’s so many good people in the world. The good people are going to make this world a better place. Rosemary Pritzker: Especially if we have magical music to fuel the resistance of the patriarchy. Priya Darshini: Oh my god, yes. Also, women are finely coming out of the woods, and hopefully we’ll bring this energy that is needed is so necessary. I didn’t know there was a term for this, ecofeminist, but I really believe that there’s something to be said about the violence towards the planet and towards women, towards the feminine. In general the masculine energy tends to naturally go towards … You go to war, it’s the men who go to war. It’s aggressive. Every person has both. We all have both energies. It’s important to accept that and allow for them both to coexist so that we can have this balance. Females, they nurture so we have the nurturing ability, and that’s what women do. Rosemary Pritzker: It’s so important. Priya Darshini: It’s so important. Right now the planet needs that. We need nurture. We need that energy because it’s been the other way for so long. This is not to say we don’t need the men at all, we need each other. We need all kinds of people. We need queer, we need no genders, we need genders. We need all of this, all of us to just be whoever we want to be and coexist and find that balance, but whatever it is, we just need something that is more nurturing. Rosemary Pritzker: What gifts has music brought to your life? Priya Darshini: Wow. I mean, that’s my spiritual practice. I feel like that’s my, for lack of a better word, religion. It’s what teaches me about how to see the world, about how to be a better human being, but how to work through my egos, and all of that stuff. Healing, it’s my home. It’s the

2 Apr 2019 - 1 h 20 min

Strength, Dignity, and Resilience in Haiti with Jeff Feldman

In this episode of A Show of Hearts, Jeff Feldman shares his experience working in Haiti for over a year and a half in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake in 2010. We talk about what it was like to be on the ground at the time, the many misconceptions about Haiti and acts of strength he witnessed in the wake of unimaginable hardship. We discuss the darkness but also the light – the magic of Haiti, the resiliency and pride of its people and a culture steeped in mysticism and creativity. Inspired by this creativity, Feldman produced a show of Haitian art called the Haiti Art Expo that drew attention to art from the area and raised funds for relief. Also hear a hilarious, eye opening story at the end about what we see on the news that may or may not be true. Feldman is a dear friend and, in addition to continuing to advocate for Haiti, is the Senior Vice President of Uribe Construction, which designs and builds commercial and residential real estate in Miami. Resources mentioned in the episode: JP/HRO [https://www.jphro.org/] Ayiti Community Trust [https://www.ayiticommunitytrust.org/] Hand in Hand for Haiti [https://hihh.org/] How to Fix the Broken Humanitarian System: A Q&A with Paul Spiegel [https://www.globalhealthnow.org/2017-06/how-fix-broken-humanitarian-system-qa-paul-spiegel] “Why Haiti Needs New Narratives [https://www.amazon.com/Why-Haiti-Needs-New-Narratives/dp/0819575453/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=Haiti+Needs+New+Narratives+by+Gina+Athena+Ulysse&qid=1551452046&s=gateway&sr=8-2-spell]: A Post Quake Chronicle” by Gina Athena Ulysse Thanks so much for listening! If you like what you heard, please subscribe and rate on iTunes, visit www.ashowofhearts.com [http://www.ashowofhearts.local/] or follow us @ashowofhearts on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook! Take a screenshot of this episode and share it in your Instastory and use the hashtag #ashowofhearts – we’d really appreciate it. Feel free to email us at info@ashowofhearts with any questions or comments! TRANSCRIPT RP: You’re listening to A Show of Hearts, the podcast about finding the courage to live a deep and magical life. I’m your host, life coach, Rosemary Pritzker. Speaker 2: (singing) RP: My dear friend, Jeff Feldman, and I met at a sustainable business conference in Tucson almost 13 years ago. He’s the Senior Vice President of Uribe Construction, which designs and builds both commercial and residential luxury real estate in Miami, but what Jeff and I are focused on in this episode is his passion for Haiti and particularly his experience working there for a year and a half after the massive earthquake that happened nine years ago on January 12th, 2010. RP: When we sat down to talk last year, Pres. Trump had just called Haiti a shithole country, and Anderson Cooper had a strong emotional response on CNN. We picked up the conversation there. I’m just wondering what your response was to that video of Anderson Cooper, how it felt to watch it. JF: There’s too much emotion wrapped up. I was watching him go through this, and I was like, “You Know What?” I turned the TV off. I just turned the TV off, because I knew where he was going. I knew where he was coming from, and I didn’t really want to be there in the moment, and because my anger, I was so furious, and to see the leader of the United States make such a terrible and awful and completely false type statement like that was infuriating. I just had to turn it off. JF: He’s not the only person. A lot of people have the completely wrong picture of what Haiti actually really is. I mean, most people don’t really understand it. The visuals that we see on television here for the last 30 years have been of struggle and strife and despair, and there’s just so much more to it than that. It’s such a special place. It’s so different from anything that you’ve ever experienced. I mean, it’s one of the happiest and most beautiful and fruitful places as much, as they send the message that it’s not. RP: Jeff spoke of the dignity and resilience of the Haitian people despite all the negative narratives about Haiti in the international press. JF: I mean, these people are … Many of them go to sleep every night with less than a dollar to their name, millions of people, and particularly those in the capital in Port-au-Prince, but you can take everything away from them, their homes. You could take away jobs, food. You could take everything away from them, but you cannot take away their dignity. They’re the most dignified people. They’re the strongest willed people. They’re the most resilient people I believe anywhere in the planet. JF: If you were to look in any of the shanties or any of the homes or anything in Haiti throughout, you’ll see that they’re completely organized. They’re clean, top to bottom. The shoes are by the front door. The spices are on a rack. I mean, the places, they are just … Their fingernails are always clean. Their teeth are always clean. Their hair is always brushed, and that’s something that just runs through the entire population of that country. There’s just pride in yourself and dignity, and you can’t take that from them. RP: What was your relationship to Haiti like before the earthquake? JF: Well, it goes back to about when I was 12 years old, which is now 30 years. I was always, as a kid, working. I was a busboy in South Florida. I worked for a friend’s father’s diner as a 12-year-old, and all the dishwashers were Haitian, and I was a busboy, so my job was to bring the dishes back to the dishwashers. They were these unbelievably unique and different people. I also grew up in white suburbia, so they were the first black people that I really knew in mass. JF: I mean, there was definitely a few black kids throughout my schooling and all this other stuff, but this was an entire group of people, and they were from some island offshore. Being the way that I am, of course, I wanted to be their friends and learn their language and ask them how to say certain things, and they were the sweetest and the nicest and the kindest people. Even the ones that didn’t speak English, we had this unspoken, just affection for each other. It was part of the reason why I studied French in school growing up. JF: From being a busboy and then just throughout the course of my life, I’ve always been drawn to them, to Haitians. Then, in 2006, I actually went the first time to go surf, one of my buddies I went to high school with, a couple of Haitians that grew up here in Miami. They lived back in Port-au-Prince. Their family business is in Port-au-Prince, and so we all went down to surf. I went 2006 for New Year’s. 2007, we went back. I toured all over the countryside, off-road, surf, Safari, crazy, driving down goat paths, the whole thing. It was wild, wild. JF: In 2008, there were four hurricanes that had, in sequence, one after the other, passed right over Haiti and just absolutely annihilated Haiti, killing thousands. I should say thousands of people, but lots of people, stranding thousands of people, killing livestock, destroying crops. I mean, it just really was devastating, and I started a local supplies relief campaign, and then this thing happened a couple of years later, and I was a go-to guy after my experience there. RP: When the earthquake happened, what motivated you to go? JF: When we started our supply chain rally here in Miami Beach, there came a point in time where we had personally delivered so much stuff, pharmaceuticals, clothing, feminine hygiene products, medical products, just, I mean, so much stuff. We had transported dozens and dozens and dozens of aircrafts over the course of the first five days after the earthquake, that I said to the people with whom we were coordinating this at UM, University of Miami, “Whose, what’s happening with this stuff when it hits the ground? Where is it? How is it getting dealt with?” JF: The answer was, “We don’t really know.” It’s a disaster, and it was. I said, “Well, what if I can rally a group of eight of us to go down and sort it out, figure it out?” The answer was, “When can you go?” and so we went the next day. RP: What happened when you got there? JF: Well, we were on the first commercial airliner that was able to land at the airport. It was the first five days. The airport was destroyed. The actual physical building, the airport was destroyed and closed. The runway was unknown whether or not it was working or not working, but planes started landing there, and the US military got there very quickly. We were on the first commercial airliner that was chartered to get as many supplies, but also critical people down there to administer, I mean, from aid to prayer to security. I mean, you name it. JF: I was on an airplane, that you couldn’t make it up if you tried. There were priests, nurses, doctors, mercenaries with weapons, animals. I mean, you name it. It was crazy. The eight of us, our group from Miami Beach, we went down there, and as we were landing, before we touched down, I circled the group up and said, “Listen. When we land, when this plane touches the ground, there’s not going to be somebody here landing this plane and telling you, okay, welcome to Haiti, and unloading our bags and unloading the belly of the aircraft that was loaded to the gills with supplies.” JF: I said, “It’s going to be us. When we get off the plane, we’re going to be first off the plane, and we’re going to control the area around this aircraft,” which is exactly what we did. We unloaded the plane. We told all the people to stand over here and don’t move. Then, we started to daisy-chain all of the materials off the aircraft. As we saw people’s names on it or organizations’ names or whatever it was, people claimed it, and they took their stuff, and then they moved along. RP: What did it feel like to instantly have that responsibility on your shoulders? JF: It’s just the way I’m programmed. When there’s a situation, I’m the guy that jumps into the burning car in the accident. I’m the guy that takes control of a situation. RP: Why is that? JF: It’s just the way I’m programmed. I don’t really know any other way. It’s just how I am. One thing I’ve always known is, if you look the part and you act the part and you think you’re the part, then people will give you the part, and so I just looked the part and took control. There came a point in time, a very, very quick point in time after touching down there, that I personally was one of the main people at the airport, where all of the aid and recovery and rescue missions were originating from within the capital. JF: The airport grounds were, was ground zero for that. It was closed, and it was protected by the US Air Force, and there were groups, search and rescue, aid groups, and I don’t really mean NGO’s like the Clean Water people or the Save the Children people or school … I’m talking rescue teams that go into, from South Africa, from Qatar, from Australia, from all over the world. The airport had a capacity of, I think it has a maximum capacity of 160 aircrafts landing and leaving per day. JF: It was maxed out for weeks, aircrafts from all over the world, from small private jets to Russian Antonov’s and US military C-17’s and C5’s and the biggest aircrafts you can imagine filled, filled with supplies and nobody there really to claim it, which is where we started to fill in the blanks. We just started claiming things off of the plane. If there wasn’t somebody standing at the base of the plane, which there almost never was, the Air Force was tasked with taking the materials off the plane and putting it in the middle of the infield, so we just started taking stuff. RP: What was that experience like, witnessing the whole world coming in to help? JF: It was unbelievable. I remember seeing the Red Crescent from Turkey, the aircraft from Brazil, from Qatar, from South Africa, from all over the world. It was incredible, I mean, absolutely incredible. Actually, the first aircraft I remember landing in Haiti after the earthquake from another country besides the United States was China. China and Haiti do not have diplomatic relations, because Haiti has relations with Taiwan, and Taiwan will … China will not accept a country that has relations with Taiwan. JF: The first country to land a plane was China. They literally dropped several humongous crates of whatever the heck was in it, and they were just sitting there for days and days and days. Finally, we said, “You know what? No one’s coming to get this stuff.” It was actually the Chinese materials that made us realize, no one’s picking anything up. If it’s not picked up, it’s just being taken to the middle of the infield. JF: No, it was just otherworldly. It was surreal. I was so hopped up. I worked, I literally worked 20 hours a day. I would probably sleep four or five hours in a cot. RP: Jeff had a connection to someone who managed private jets, so he could get people, supplies and himself in and out of Haiti. After you got there, how long did it take before you got a really clear picture of the magnitude of what was going on, and was there a moment where it hit you? JF: I mean, it was instant. When we landed on the runway and as we were flying in, you can see Port-au-Prince from the airplane. I mean, I actually saw the national palace collapsed from the airplane. When we touched down, and you can see the total mayhem happening inside the airport, and then an airport that I had been to collapsed, but it was when I got on the truck that drove us back to the hospital site, and I could see the infield was starting to fill up with stuff, and all the camps, people were burning fires. JF: I mean, it was like this crazy, Mad Max, Burning Man disaster, insanity that I just couldn’t comprehend. Well, the national hospital was 60% to 70% destroyed. They closed the gates, because they didn’t have a way to handle the number of people who needed to come in. There were bodies piled up out in front of the gates of the national hospital. I stumbled into the triage area / recovery area for people who had been brought into the airport, and it was the United Nations airbase, and it was inside of a hangar. JF: I went there to find baggage from our plane that didn’t make it off, and I stepped into this room full of people. People were crying. People were wailing. People had bandages on their heads. People had arms missing. It was nighttime. It was hot. It was crazy, crazy, and I remember seeing a little girl, was probably 12 or 13 who had part of her head smashed, and that was when I finally first realized, “Holy moly, this is real. These are the people. These are the actual humans who live here who were impacted by this.” JF: It was about two or three days later that the hospital that we were putting together at this campsite, for lack of a better term, on the airport grounds were all 200 people who had been, medical conditions of whatever. I mean, there were people having their arms amputated, their legs or whatever. We had to have this hospital up and running, built, air-conditioned, wood floors, the whole thing by a Thursday or whatever the day of the week was. We had 200 people transported from the UN airbase to this tent, and we literally were carrying bodies on people, patients on stretchers into this makeshift hospital. JF: I was like, “My God, this person is so messed up. This person’s arm is off.” Then, these were just days after the earthquake, and people were still being found. In fact, I saw the very last survivor that they found. I believe it was 16 days after the earthquake, and I saw them, I saw them bringing her into our hospital. RP: Did she make it? JF: Yeah, she did. I think she was inside of the famous Caribbean market. The entire market completely collapsed, killing basically almost everybody inside, and she was trapped in a pocket, and she was surrounded by food, so she was just eating and drinking. Eventually, two weeks later, they got to removing the rubble from around her. She wasn’t well. I mean, she was severely hurt and dehydrated and, but she lived. RP: You’ve given a picture of what it looked like for the injured people, the people trying to help, et cetera, down there, but what happened to you down there? JF: That’s a really big question. It was life-changing. I mean, that’s the shortest, quickest answer. It was life-changing. We throw around the terms, “Gosh, it was a disaster. How was the party at your house last night? It was a disaster. I mean, my plate, my house is a disaster.” You don’t know what a disaster is until you’re in one, and this thing, it was a catastrophe of epic proportions. JF: There were 250,000 people who got killed and another 250,000 people who were severely wounded. There were so many dead bodies, that the Haitian government, rightfully so, made the decision to literally scoop them up with machines and dump them into dump trucks and bury them outside, way outside this, about eight to 10 miles outside of the city limits. It sounds inhumane. It sounds terrible, but it had to be done, and they, if I’m not mistaken, I believe they burned them. JF: It was the right thing to do. As terrible as it sounds, it had to be done. There were too many dead bodies. You can’t let them just sit in the city and decompose, and there was nowhere to put them. RP: An estimated 300,000 people died as a result of the earthquake that struck Haiti. Not everyone agrees that burying the dead in mass graves was a humane response. Many people still don’t know where or how their family members died or where their remains are. Shortly after the earthquake, Haitian anthropologist and artist Gina Athena Ulysse wrote, “The Haitian government treats the dead the way they treat the living,” and describes these mass graves as a human rights abuse. RP: On the flipside, having all these dead bodies lying around was unsanitary. They needed to be removed for the health and safety of the living. One could argue that there just were not the resources to dispose of these bodies in a more humane way. There were just too many, and all efforts needed to go towards helping the living since the dire need was so great. Either way, it was a tough call. JF: People say, “Why didn’t they do this?” or, “Why didn’t …” There is, and I always said the following, “There was no they.” When this thing went down, there was no they. There was no, “Why don’t they help us? Why don’t they open this? Why don’t they do …” There was no they. They were half dead. JF: It didn’t discriminate between rich and poor and neighborhoods or areas. Everything everywhere was destroyed, and wherever you were, if the building collapsed, you were dead. A lot of the politicians and a lot of the leaders of Haiti fled. They literally got on airplanes and flew to the Dominican or helicopters flew to the Dominican. They just got the hell out of there. It was total mayhem. RP: What did it feel like to have everything be so out of control, so out of your control? JF: Well, I mean, that’s why I took control. I took control of an area that I could control, and that I was given that control, because everybody was so busy doing what they do. If you were a surgeon, you were operating. If you were a truck driver, that’s what you were doing. You’re using your truck. Everybody was in on helping however they could. JF: Of course, there were always, there’s always forces of evil, and there’s always people trying to look for ways to profit. I didn’t fault any of the Haitians who were looking to steal food or any of that stuff. They were just looking to feed their families or their children or whatever the case may be. There were lots of instances where trucks would be taken or stolen or containers would be taken or stolen and then sold to the Dominican. All kinds of stuff like that was happening too, but I couldn’t concern myself with that. JF: I was concerned with the area that I had an immediate impact on. We had … We were saving lives. I mean, that was the thing, is get the hospital up and running. At one point, very, very quickly after arriving there, I had 77 Haitian volunteers who were desperate to volunteer, because it means, it meant that they got fed twice. They were also safe inside the airport grounds, and it was crazy. It was crazy. RP: I remember you telling me, that after you got there with your group of eight, what was it? Five days later, the rest of them all left? What gave you the guts or the courage or the bravery or whatever you want to call it to stay there despite how enormous it was and how intense it was? JF: I just think I’m just built for that stuff. I’m just, I’m tough like that, and I also knew that, and I felt that if I didn’t continue to do what it was that I was doing every single day, that it may not, and I’m not saying that it wouldn’t, probably wouldn’t, but it may not get done. I knew that the role that I had was so critical, that I had to keep doing it to make sure that, that little space that I controlled was taken care of. Even since I was a kid, I was volunteering. JF: When hurricane Andrew struck in the early 90’s, I drove around my neighborhood and did my own little canned food drive. Then, I went with the food supplies down to Florida City, which was another … By the way, the first disaster zone I ever saw was Florida City, a stop on the way from South Florida to the Keys that I’d make every year at least once or twice to go fishing and hang out during the summer. Florida City was completely flattened, completely and utterly flattened. The only standing building was the Burger King. JF: I saw that at, I don’t know, 13 or 14, and that was the beginning of my service and feeling like I have to help people. That, not only do I feel like I have to help people, I actually enjoy it. It feels good. RP: Do you feel like you need to do that? JF: Yeah. I wouldn’t know. I wouldn’t … I’m not one to stand around and watch. I made a lot of sacrifices to be there. It took a toll on me physically. It took a toll on me emotionally. RP: Financially? JF: Yeah, definitely, but I did it, because I knew it was the right thing to do. People needed it, and I hadn’t really see an option. I just did … There was no option. There was no, “What the hell was I going to do?” Just … I remember one of the first few times I came back home for a few nights. I’d come home for two nights, three nights, a week, once in a while. A friend of mine was in town for Massachusetts, and he said, “Hey, let’s go to dinner. Where do you want to go?” JF: I said, “I really don’t care. You pick it.” He said, “Let’s go to Joe’s Stone Crab,” which was one of the nicest restaurants anywhere in Miami. It’s very expensive. It’s delicious. It’s fantastic. They’re famous for stone crabs. I said, “Okay. That’s fine. Sure.” I remember just being bummed I was there. I felt terrible about the amount of money we were spending. I remember looking out the window and just fantasizing, daydreaming a little bit of, “Here we are, 750 miles away from utter catastrophe, from complete devastation, suffering.” JF: People were living on sides of hills, because there was just, there was a place. There was space. People were living under tarps and tents. People were living in squalor, in mud and rain. I knew a guy who lost two of three of his children. I mean, the list goes on and on and on and on, and here I am having a $60 dish of stone crabs and an $18 cocktail, and I’m just like, “Man, it’s just, this doesn’t feel right.” It took a while for me to come back from that. RP: Is there one experience that sticks out in your mind that was the hardest thing that happened to you down there or the hardest thing you witnessed? JF: There’s so many. It’s hard to really know, but I actually watch a 10-year-old girl die literally right at my feet. I walked up on it, and I always say, in Haiti, when this was all happening, “Wherever you were, there you were, and if something was happening, when you were there, you were on it.” It was you. That was your thing, and I just walked into the doorway of the hospital. All of a sudden, this girl went down on the floor. JF: I remember, there was a couple of local US doctors and then two Israeli doctors, and everybody circled this little girl. It was like, “She needs blood. She needs blood.” I said to the Israeli doctor, “Take mine.” He said, “We don’t know what her blood type is.” I said, “I don’t care. Just try it. She had lost so much blood.” I said, “Just try it. Take mine. Just do it.” JF: I’m not a doctor, so I don’t know if that’s even possible, but they said, “No, we can’t. We just, we can’t.” She literally, her eyes rolled back in her head and closed, and she expired on the floor at the feet of five men. That was definitely not easy to watch, but I remember, at that moment, I was like, “Okay. Well, she’s dead, and I’m busy,” so I ran off to the next thing that I was in the middle of doing to begin with, and I didn’t really think twice about the fact that I just saw a 10-year-old girl die. RP: Did it hit you at some point later? JF: There was a lot of stuff that happened just like that, that there was no time to think about, there was no time to process. I remember having a Blackberry at the time, and my dad would text me saying, “Make sure you take time to process. Make sure you take time to think about all this stuff and let it out.” I was like, “I’m too busy, dad. I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” or whatever, texting about it. RP: I think I was texting you the same thing. JF: I was just like, “God, people, don’t text me. I’m not taking pictures. I’m not sending pictures. I’m busy.” Yeah. There was a time where it was about 8:00 or 9:00 at night, and I was standing in a moment of just calm, and there was control and quiet among the camp, this hospital camp, and I was standing outside, and I heard the sound of people singing, coming from inside the hospital. It was like, it was a beautiful gospel-type Haitian gospel. JF: They sing about God a lot. That’s why, naturally, I walked in just to see what was going on, coming from this hospital, where during the daytime, you hear people’s arms getting sawed off. I walked in, and there’s 200 beds and people. See, Haitian people don’t necessarily have nurses at their bedside. They have their family at their bedside. Their family is their nurse when they’re in a hospital. You have 200 patients, and you have at least 200 other people sitting next to them. JF: There’s 400, 500 people inside of this tent, which was packed. By the time I walked in, the entire place was singing this song, which I would give anything to know what song it was, and it was so beautiful. I had heard it twice, and it was so unbelievable and so beautiful, that at that moment, that was the first time I, it all hit me. “What the hell happened here? How am I standing in the middle of this? This can’t be real,” and I just completely lost it. JF: I mean, I just cried like I probably had never cried before, and just, I mean, it was like I wept. The guy who was my right-hand man, who walked next to me everywhere I went to help me translate and to help me get this and do that, put his arm around me, and I just, I cried even more. He was crying, and I was crying, and everybody was crying, and people were singing. It was just, it was out of body. It was unimaginable. RP: Yeah. I remember you telling me that there were two times that you broke down like that. What was the other time? JF: The other time was, every morning, the airport was locked off, closed off, and every morning, there were, I’d say thousands, but certainly hundreds of people, if not thousands of people, at the gate, the main entry, trying to get into a driveway gate to get into the hospital, because they knew that there was medical care. There was food. There was water. There was life. There was safety, security, so part of what I had created on my own was a volunteer task force of Haitians, that I had a list of their names, and I had them on two shifts. JF: I had a morning, a 12-hour morning shift and then a 12-hour afternoon overnight shift. One morning, I went over to, early on, early on, I went over to the gate. The Air Force opens the gate. There’s thousands of people very orderly standing. They’re not running in. The gates opened. They’re all standing there and everybody yelling my name, “Mr. Jeff, Mr. Jeff, I speak English,” flashing resumes, “Please, I work, I work, Mr. Jeff.” Then, once my name was known, they all knew it, so everybody, “Mr. Jeff, Mr. Jeff,” but I knew I was looking for my list. JF: The Air Force guys would give me a bullhorn, and I would start calling out my names, and I would see their arm reaching through this wall of people, and I would literally grab their arm and pull them through the people. I would tell them, “Stand right here and don’t move.” Then, I, so I’d get the first batch of 35, 36 people out of this crowd at about 7:00 in the morning, and I would literally march them single file from the gate to the back of the hospital. Somehow, I known. I don’t know how they ever did it. They were very crafty. JF: I would count when we got to the camp, before we walked in, and there’d be an extra one. I don’t know where they came from, how they got in and how they got in the line without me seeing it, but there’d always be an extra guy. One morning, there were two extra guys in the line. Somehow, they got in, and I was like, “You guys know. You can’t stay here. You have to leave,” and they were … “Don’t make me call the guards on you.” They both said, “No, please. We’ll work. I speak English. We’ll work. I’ll do whatever you need.” JF: I’m like, “No, no, no. We got plenty of people. We got too many people. You got to leave. Don’t make me, don’t get me upset.” They were like, “Please, we have children. We need milk. I need to work. I need to be able to feed them. Don’t make us go back out there,” and I was like, “Don’t make me cry. You’re going to make me … You have to …” They were like, “Please don’t make us leave,” and I was like, “Please leave.” JF: They were like, “We can’t leave.” I was like, “You have to leave.” Then, I just started to well up, and one guy put his arm on me, and then I just, that was it. I sat down on this wall, and I put my hands in my face, my face in my hands I should say, and I just cried uncontrollably. These are humans. These people eat, breathe, drink like we do and love their family and their kids like we do, and they’re desperate. They’re desperate, and I can’t make them leave. JF: I just all came up and out, and I just, it was the second time that this happened to me when I was there. From that point on, I was just like, “All right, man. You just got to be made of steel.” RP: Why? JF: Because there was too much sadness. There was too much to spare. There was too much desperation. There was too much pain, and you just can’t feel it. You have to just not feel it. You’ll feel it eventually. You don’t need to feel it now. Right now, it’s about the business. RP: Did you find space to feel it later? JF: I think so. I mean, what I found is, that it became the topic of conversation for everybody that I knew for so long, that it was like all they ended up talking about, but I was never really able to tell the stories of what I experienced, because there was too much story to tell. There was too many things that happened. I have potentially, I don’t know, forgotten about more than I could ever remember because it was 24 hours a day for almost a year and a half of stories. JF: Good, bad, fun, funny, scary, threatening, all kinds of stuff that have just became part of, I guess, my life, and so I don’t know. I think so. RP: Was there an element too of when you were talking about the guys that you couldn’t turn away. One of them putting their arm around you, et cetera. It reminds me of soldiers in the trench together in war where they’ve got this shared experience, camaraderie, shared purpose, a sense of belonging and seeing each other that you couldn’t possibly have shared with the people here sitting like wanting you to share your story. RP: Like I imagine telling the story to people who had never been there, who couldn’t begin to comprehend it? I don’t know. You tell me. What did that feel like? JF: I’m not a soldier. I’ve never been a soldier. I’ve obviously never been to battle but I can tell you that in my mind, this is the closest thing to it that you could ever imagine. There absolutely was this feeling of we’re all in this thing together camaraderie, this brotherhood, sisterhood, of course. It also led to some confrontations as well because I felt, if you weren’t onboard with the way we’re moving this thing forward, you need to get the hell out of the way. JF: There were a few instances where people would come in because it became regular where there were flights to bring people in who wanted to help and volunteer. Doctors, nurses, medical support type people but then also just regular people who wanted just to volunteer. What ended up happening was once it stabilized, people started to come in because they wanted to see it. JF: That hurt. That really pissed me off. It upset me. I didn’t want them around. I didn’t want to see them. People came with cameras. They’re taking pictures. They were becoming disaster tourists. I can tell you that back in those days, I had problems with people who were trying to create a fame for themselves using the situation. I definitely was angry at people who were using our success. JF: I say success based on lives saved, help given, aid rendered, and people were using at us, hey, look at this group I’m a part of. Look at me, look at me, look at me. I’m going, “Man, look at you on my effing back. Look at you on the tears and the blood of all these thousands and thousands and thousands of people who are literally dying over here and you’re patting yourself on the back because of it?” JF: I’m going, “No, that’s not.” That upset me. To this day, it makes me mad that people did that. They don’t do it now because it’s not fashionable but when it was fashionable, people used it to propel themselves to … They were clogging up the operation because they were eating our food, drinking our water, sleeping on our beds. JF: Then the media hype coming through and celebrities passing through and I’ll never forget John Edwards who, at the time, was going through his marital, whatever the heck he had done. He came through and I remember telling him to get the hell out of here. Geraldo Rivera came through and was doing some sensational piece. JF: I remember telling him to get the hell out of here. Then I saw Sean Penn walk through. He walked through with a very determined look on his face. His hat pulled down low, a group of people walking alongside of him and then they came in. They came out. He wanted to see what was happening. A couple days later, I’d heard that Sean Penn had started a camp up in the hills of Port-au-Prince in a neighborhood called Pétionville. JF: Actually, at the Pétionville Country Club and so that was where the 182nd Airborne Division was bunking down to. Penn had linked up with the commander of that group, 182nd Airborne and basically said, “I’m not here for TV ratings. I’m not here … I’m here to work. I’m here to work. I’m here to help.” That they said, “If you mean what you say, you can stay with us and make this your camp.” He did. JF: He made good on what he said he was going to do and they created a camp and what ended up happening was there were 60,000 people who amassed on the hillside of this golf course. J/P HRO was founded by Sean Penn and became a very central location for aid. This was in a time when there was no communication throughout the country. RP: Jeff began working closely with Sean Penn and moved his own base of operations to Sean’s Pétionville camp. JF: There came a point in time where I said, “Hey, this is where I need to stand. I’m doing all this stuff in Haiti. I need a place to centralize and I’m going to work here. I’m going to help.” We trusted each other. He trusted me. I was staying in his camp. We got a lot of stuff done together. I knew him to be a tremendous individual, a truly a beautiful human being. JF: People will say what they will about Sean Penn and I can tell you from personal experience. He is a fantastic human being and he doesn’t do it because he needs to. He doesn’t do it because he gets money from it or because … He does because he can. He has that same internal I have to do this that I have. RP: If you like what you’re hearing in this episode, please subscribe, rate and review A Show of Hearts on iTunes. Reviews and ratings do a lot for our visibility, so thanks so much for helping spread our message of courage and living from the heart. You really want to show your support? Share a screenshot of this episode in your Stories on Instagram @ashowofhearts. RP: There’s no doubt that Jeff worked hard and selflessly in Haiti and he took on a great deal of responsibility. He also got extra credits simply because he is a white American man. Jeff also had the privilege to come and go. To leave Haiti whenever he wanted. A privilege, many of the people he worked with in Haiti, did not have. JF: There were times where I would literally fly home at midnight. Be home by 2:00 in the morning. I would shower. I would shave. I would eat. I would sleep and then I’d be on the next aircraft out at seven am. I’m back and nobody even knew I was gone. Meanwhile, I flew out in a Learjet and flew home in a Boeing Business Jet. It was unbelievable. It was truly incredible. RP: I’m sure this is something that you probably pondered a lot. You show up there as a white American man or those are three separate sources of privilege and that opens all kinds of doors for you and gives you automatic credit, et cetera and yet, at the same time, it’s one thing to like choose to show up somewhere where there are a lot of people who are there not by choice. RP: Like stay a couple days and like I can’t take this and leave. It’s another thing to like show up and stay and like be in the trenches with people but I just wanted to like bring up that whole subject of like the whole white savior thing, et cetera. Just anything that’s gone through your mind of the years about the- JF: Yeah, I’ve experienced the whole spectrum of that from people shouting at me, not knowing who I was or what I was there doing. For example, you can walk into the airport. Anybody, anybody that’s there, any Haitian that’s there could see you coming off of a plane from Miami and think that you are just yet another missionary, or yet another charity worker or somebody that’s going to come in, love the country or you’re somebody who’s coming to pillage which happens a lot there too. JF: You’re coming in and you’re going to disappear like the rest of them. That’s a very common feeling from Haitians. Like I said, it depends on where you are. I find myself on the coast like … When I was there two months ago, I went down to [inaudible 00:44:00] with some friends. We went and served and ate grilled conk by the beach, and drank beers all day, and hung out, and laughed and played. JF: We were hanging with the kids and the locals and they look at you differently than people at the airport look at you. They look at you like, “Wow, we’re amazed that you’re here.” It depends on where you are and when you’re there. When people see you working and really giving yourself to them and to their cause, whatever you may be doing, they love it. JF: They love it and they appreciate it and they feel you. They feel you. Those people are so … On one hand, they’re stone cold emotionless about certain things but on the other hand, they’re also deeply emotional and connected to if they feel you, and so like I said, I’ve experienced all of it. I’ve had my life threatened. I’ve had people welcome me into their homes. I’ve had people make me food in a tent. All of it. RP: Yeah. It’s such a complicated subject of like here we are, a couple of white people talking about this, pretty much entirely black country and I don’t know what we can really say about that because we are who we are and really, what it’s about is like you can speak to what you can speak to through your own experience. You’ve had the experience that you had. JF: When I talk about Haiti, the Haitian people, they always at first say, “Are you a missionary or what do you go down there for? How do you know about Haiti?” I tell them, I’ve been there 38 times. Wow, or you say a couple phrases in Creole, or you know about a city that they’ve never even been to or the list goes on. JF: You know obscure foods that they like to eat or the name of a certain soda that they drink and they really then, they just, their eyes connect- RP: Because you’ve taken the time to- JF: You know my Haiti. You really know my Haiti. That’s when people say, that’s when you see their smiles and their eyes, really bright. They love to know that I know Haiti. They want people to know it because if they’re here on the states, they miss it. It’s their home. They live here but that’s their home. That’s their mother nation. JF: They don’t really look at me personally like just another white person going down and doing their thing, and then never going back. They look at me as somebody who loves it like they do. RP: Jeff then shared the story of the day he decided to leave Haiti. JF: I woke up one morning and said to myself, “I’m leaving Haiti today. I don’t care what it takes. I’m leaving today.” Before I left, I decided to not tell anybody until 15 minutes before the plane took off. I’ve gone down to the plane by myself and I told the pilot, “I’m on this plane. You do not leave without me on it. I’ll be back in an hour or in 30 minutes when we take off.” JF: I went back to the camp. I told a couple of the people, “Go inside. Go find everybody. Tell everybody I’m leaving.” People came running out. They all said, “No, no. You can’t leave. No, don’t leave.” I said, “I’m leaving. I’ll be back. Don’t worry. I’ll be back.” They picked me up and they carried me out of the camp and were shouting and cheering and it’s crazy. JF: Laughing and smiling and I was like, “No. Geez. Don’t do it. Don’t pick me up. No.” They did and then they put me down and I got into this little van and headed down and- RP: Ultimately, Jeff’s experience in Haiti continued to impact his life and he found different ways of remaining engaged with the republic. JF: One of the things that I took from Haiti was and it was an effort to raise awareness and to raise funds was the art. Haiti is a country that is steeped in and based on creativity and art and music. It’s the one thing you can’t take away from them. Their dignity and their creativity are the two things that they have endless amounts of. JF: I created with other folks a few different art shows. We had a very big art show in 2010 called the Haiti Art Expo where we created so much hype. It was fresh. It was during [Art Basel 00:48:42], the biggest contemporary art fair in the United States. We created the Haiti Art Expo and I believe we raised about $250,000 in art sales. We had celebrities there and we had tons of hype and we had a big Haitian Rara band. JF: We had four nights of programing and we did the Haiti Art Expo in December of 2010. Again, in 2011, I did an art show up in New York. I sold art to private collectors. It’s fantastic so that’s something that’s always with me. I have it in my home. A photography in my home and every time I see … I live in Miami so every time … I’m with Haitians all the time. Yeah, so it’s always with me. It’s always a big part of my existence. RP: What’s it’s like for you to go back to Haiti now? JF: It took me a while to go back. I basically, from 2000 … No, it’s 12. I don’t think I went back until 2017. It was exhausting to even think about stepping foot there. The traffic, the heat, the exhaust, there was dust and it’s just so high maintenance to be there in Port-au-Prince. Of course, the memories, I was just like, I needed to not go. JF: Going back in March of 2017 with eight of my friends, with one of my very best friends, bachelor party was just the best. I took people all the time. You could go to Haiti today as a tourist and you’ll have the most amazing time and you’re not going to regret it. You’re not going to get kidnapped. You’re not going to get killed. JF: You’re going to have the best time of your life because it’s such a beautiful place. The people are so friendly, so welcoming. There’s not really much of a need to spend much time inside of the capital. It’s about the provinces. That’s where all the magic is and Haiti is magic. It’s magic. It’s different. RP: Yeah. Why? Why is it magic? JF: There’s something there that is very mystical and magical. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know if anybody knows what it is, including the Haitians. They’re steeped in magic and steeped in mysticism and in stories. RP: When you were there during the earthquake, did you feel any of that mysticism or anything unexplainable happening while you’re there? JF: At that point, not really, but the night where I heard the people singing, that was … There was something there in the room that was like I never felt anything like it before. RP: What did it feel like? JF: It felt like touching God and I’m not a religious person. It wasn’t a religious experience. It was like touching humanity. It’s feeling humans on a larger scale like the global sea of consciousness. That moment was like coursing through my veins. RP: Yeah. JF: Where you just know we’re all one. We’re all people. We’re all the same creature and that was that moment. RP: What does Haiti need now? What’s it like there now? JF: The rubbles have been cleared. The problems still persist. The way the government functions, the corruption. That stuff’s baked into their … I think baked into their society and I don’t necessarily know that I have the answers of how that’s ever going to get unwinded. I can tell you that much of what we hear and see and much of what we know to be the case is really based in Port-au-Prince. JF: A city that was built for 300,000 that has three million. The city’s physically broken. It’s broken. There’s 10 times too many people. Part of the reason is because the people that are living out in the provinces have to cut trees for heating, to eat. They don’t have electricity in a lot of these areas so they have to create heat through flame. By doing that, they cut down immature trees based on need. RP: If you look down at Haiti, in the Dominican Republic from the air, you’ll see a lush green country on one side of the island and pretty much the opposite on the other. There’s a long history of deforestation in Haiti that dates back to the Haitian Revolution in 1804 when it became the first black republic in the world. The US and Europe refused to trade with them and France imposed attacks that Haiti paid for 80 years. RP: The new Haitian government, composed of elites, tried to impose a plantation economy on the population that did not serve the majority. As a result, the people, particularly outside the capital, have been left to fend for themselves ever since. There is no standard electricity grid or gas pipeline so people used firewood for cooking. JF: They have completely deforested much of the provinces of the entire country which then denudes the soil which then, when it rains, runs into the ocean which affects the sea and marine life. RP: That’s one of the pieces of why the two countries on the same island, the other one being the Dominican Republic when one of these national disasters happened where there’s an earthquake, hurricane, whatever. The effects on the two countries is completely different and from what I’ve read, that’s one of the reasons why. JF: Absolutely, and one of the things that I would love to see the Haitian government do. I wish they would do this. It would be to subsidize propane. Subsidizing propane, just giving people propane even if it’s for the smallest coin they make. I don’t care what it is. Make people earn it. Give it to them. If they stop cutting down the trees within some number of generations, they would be able to have … I would hope that we would be able to have, restore some of the damage that’s been done. JF: That damage is the root of so many of the problems of that country. The environmental destruction has led to hunger and poverty and like I’m talking about abject poverty and illness and so many other things. If that was solved. By the way, the Dominican did that and it changed the country. Now, their government still has issues but they don’t have that as an issue. RP: I asked Jeff, “Who’s making a significant effort to reforest Haiti?” He said that one of J/P HRO’s main projects is exactly that. Their focus is not only on reforestation but to create jobs to replace those of people who cut down trees as their income. J/P HRO is working with the Haitian government on these efforts. Their goal is to eventually make it a national movement. To learn more, visit the link in the shown ups. JF: Something that really struck a cord with me was one day, I was in the airport in Port-au-Prince and I watched one of these missionary groups come in and their t-shits said something about saving Haiti on their shirts. Everybody wears their color coded t-shirts so that they see each other. They don’t get lost. Haitians are so used to seeing groups come in that fall in love with Haiti, that never go back. JF: They never live up to their promise to this child. I’ll be back. They never come back, so they’re so used to this. All of a sudden, this group of white people come in off of an airplane that says, “Save Haiti.” I saw a Haitian man say, “What do you mean, save Haiti? You’re not going to save Haiti. Get out of here. I don’t want you. You’re not saving Haiti. We don’t need to be saved.” JF: I was like, “You know what? He’s right.” They’re fine. Are there problems? Yes. Could it be better? A million percent. They don’t need to be saved by you or by me. They need to be visited. They need to be respected. They need to be paid well for the things that they provide. Buy their art. Listen to their music. Eat their food. Visit Haiti. That’s the best thing we could do. JF: There’s plenty of tourism infrastructure there and you don’t have to be Indiana Jones to go visit. It’s a great place. It’s a beautiful place with so much history. I tell people to go. Go visit. Go visit. There’s plenty of information on the internet about visiting, tourism. They have an unbelievable Ministry of Tourism. They’ve done a great job of branding it as a beautiful, fun, safe place. The food is fantastic. The people are sweet. The beer is delicious. RP: Is there anything else you would want to say like to address Haitians directly who are listening? JF: The Haitian diaspora is very large and very powerful and I would encourage any one of them to continue to promote their country and their homeland regardless of … It’s easy for me to say, but regardless of their feelings towards whomever is in power or whatever those political issues are, encourage people to visit. RP: I recently followed up with Jeff about the latest situation in Haiti. We talked at length about current events and sustainable development. I’ve been hearing in the news about like violent protests, people asking the president to step down. Can you just give us a little bit of a picture of what’s going on right now? JF: Yeah. I don’t really know all the details. It’s hard to know the truth of what’s really happening there right now. It depends on who you ask, who you talk to. Everybody has a different perspective. Some people love the president. Some people think he’s terrible. I can only tell you that about two weeks ago, nobody worked for about a week and they were demanding that the president steps down. JF: There’s frustrations that even if he does, they’re going to be forced into having to deal with a new transitional government which is what they already have right now. RP: I know you went to Haiti recently, a couple of months ago. What does Haiti look and feel like right now? JF: It’s generally unchanged from all the other times I’ve been there. I will tell you that I was pleasantly surprised by … I did a lot of driving through Port-au-Prince. Actually, I was there for a wedding so I spent a few days down at the beach and then when we came up to the capital for the wedding, we were driving through the city a lot and I saw a lot of really well-paved streets and sidewalks. JF: That’s a huge thing. That helps immensely. It gives people hope in some ways so I noticed a lot of it. More than I had seen before. RP: It sounds like there’s some … Real progress has been made in some ways? JF: Yeah. In some ways, after the earthquake and all the funds that came in and with President Martelly and he set out to do well. They did do a lot of positive things. One of the most and the easiest thing to do is just paving some of the streets in the capital. The capital hasn’t been improved since the ’70s. That was one of the very first things that they could do. JF: Oftentimes, when they do that, they do a cheap version and it washes away in the rain but this time, they really did it. It appears to be that they did it well in certain places. RP: We discussed how in the beginning of a massive catastrophe like the earthquake, you just have to do whatever you can to help in the moment. More long term, just getting humanitarian aid creates dependence and leaves people disempowered. There needs to be more focus on sustainable solutions by merging humanitarian efforts and development. RP: I told Jeff about Dr. Paul Spiegel of the Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health who says that “Giving refugees and displaced people jobs, bank accounts, insurance, et cetera, helps not only with their dignity but also with improving local economies. My friend, John Kluge, Founder and Managing Director of the Refugee Investment Network created a matchmaking service between impact investors and impact actors, focused on the 70 million refugees and internally displaced people in the world.” RP: He said, “We need someone to help connect refugee entrepreneurs to investors, mentors and technical assistance.” What does sustainable development look like in Haiti? What’s the ideal scenario and who’s doing the best work? JF: After the earthquake, everybody and their brother came down hoping to change the world and open up their NGO or their non-profit or their charity or whatever in Haiti and the overwhelming majority of them didn’t make it for the long term. There are a few that were there from the beginning and have absolutely survived and have become the forefront of what’s possible down there. JF: Sean Penn went down there as we discussed and he started the J/P HRO which is still down there doing incredible work. They basically have … The overwhelming majority of the people that work there are actually Haitians. They’ve taught them and trained them and empowered them to be able to operate on their own. There’s a school that was started by some folks from LVMH, Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy. JF: Enormous global brand. They basically started a school. They just basically plot down. The government of one of the areas gave them land and they said, “We’re building a school.” They have built the Lycee Jean-Baptiste Pointe du Sable which is an unbelievable school that is funded through Hand in Hand for Haiti which is an amazing 501(c)(3) organization. JF: They basically give the kids free school, healthcare, two square meals a day. They pick them up. They have a soccer field. It is as legit as any organization anywhere in the world in Saint-Marc, Haiti. It’s just absolutely incredible. They have really knocked the ball out of the park. They’re teaching kids English. They’re teaching kids French. JF: The Ayiti Community Trust is another phenomenal organization and they’re focused on their three main pillars which are the environment, entrepreneurship and civic engagement so they’re really providing, giving local people the tools to be able to fend for themselves. They’re teaching. They’re learning. They’re empowering. They’re supporting so that someday, they don’t have to exist anymore. JF: One of the biggest problems in Haiti is that a lot of the organizations that are down there are down there for the sake of being down there, simply to exist. Their endgame should be to, at some point, not exist, to- RP: To be obsolete. JF: Yeah, to have achieved their goals of creating a self-sustaining future for Haiti and her people. RP: We were going to end it there, but then Jeff told an amazing story that sums up so many aspects of Haiti’s relationship to the US, Haitian ingenuity and resilience in the face of negative narratives and specifically, his friend [Juber 01:04:30] who knows how to get what he wants. JF: Haiti has always been on the pirate route and a stop for pirates. There’s pirate ships and treasure and all kinds of ships from centuries ago that are sunken off the coast. It’s a very dangerous and rugged coast and so a friend of mine, Juber, he actually … He’s a commercial diver in Haiti by profession. He gets a phone call one day. JF: The phone rings and he picks up the phone and it’s a guy called Peter Arnett who was the senior foreign correspondent for CNN back in the ’90s and early 2000s and Juber says, “How can I help you?” Peter Arnett says, “I understand that you are Haiti’s leading boat captain,” and Juber says, not being a boat captain at all, says, “That’s right. I am. What can I do for you?” JF: Peter Arnett says, “There’s violence in the streets and there’s fighting and gun battles and we want to come down and get a story. We want to see this. We want to get a story.” Juber says, “Okay. That’s going to cost you $50,000.” Peter Arnett says, “Why? We can’t do $50,000. It’s too much. We can give you 30.” He says, “It’s $50,000. It’s how much it’s going to cost for me to do this for you.” JF: He says, “We can get you $40,000.” Juber says, of course, knowing that $40,000 is way too much money to be paid for this, he says, “Okay, that’s fine.” Peter Arnett flies down to Haiti and Juber picks him up and takes him, him and his cameraman to this boat. RP: That he scrounged up out of- JF: He scrounged it up. I’m sure he borrowed it from a friend and takes Peter Arnett and the cameraman to this remote piece of the coast off of the capital where he stages a gun battle and fully fakes out the news crew and they’re recording this thing and all of a sudden, the guys firing these guns are heading towards Peter Arnett and the cameraman, and Peter Arnett’s running, “We got to get to the boat. We got to get the hell out of here. We got to go, go, go.” JF: Juber says to him, “$50,000?” Peter Arnett says, “$50,000. Let’s go. Let’s go.” He raised them back to the boat and got paid $50,000 so- RP: Didn’t they air it on CNN? JF: It was aired that night. RP: Then the whole world thinks there’s this thing- JF: It was aired that night. RP: Didn’t you also say that like the only conflict was actually in Port-au-Prince? JF: Yeah. That was totally made up, completely fabricated and aired on CNN that night as some gun battle, raging violence in Haiti which is totally untrue. RP: Yeah, so then we watch or hear the news or read about it, whatever. Like of all these things going on all over the world, who’s to say if any of it is what it looks like. JF: Most of the time, it probably isn’t, but you always got to question the reality. Yeah, Haiti’s got a lot of those stories and it’s really an unbelievable place. It’s really an incredible place. RP: To learn more about the various efforts in Haiti that we mentioned in this show and how you can help, there’s a list of links in the shown ups. For more detail on grassroots Haitian responses to the hurricane recovery and Haitian perspectives on this period, we recommend the book, Haiti Needs New Narratives by Gina Athena Ulysse. RP: Thank you for listening to A Show of Hearts. If you enjoyed what you heard, please subscribe in iTunes and share it with your favorite people. Visit our website, ashowofhearts.com where you can sign up for emails and explore all our episodes in-depth. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter @ashowofhearts. RP: Remember to choose courage even when it’s scary, and join me in igniting the world with our hearts. Speaker 2: (singing) The post Strength, Dignity, and Resilience in Haiti with Jeff Feldman [https://ashowofhearts.com/jeff-feldman/] appeared first on A Show of Hearts [https://ashowofhearts.com].

1 Mar 2019 - 1 h 0 min

A Show of Hearts

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