The journey from service to solidarity is a rocky road
In my religious education, service began with keeping score. Confirmation was scheduled for Spring of eighth grade, but my classmates and I understood that reception of the sacrament was reserved for those who completed the requisite checklist. The list item that loomed largest was obtaining sign-off on 30 service hours. Eighth graders could be found cleaning classrooms and crawl spaces at the school, fetching coffee at bingo, selling goldfish at the parish festival. It was often humiliating, sometimes enjoyable, occasionally edifying. Yet, because the hours were counted and verified, the service always seemed transactional – the minimum price for becoming a fully initiated Catholic.
Thanks to the gifts of the Holy Spirit I received upon my confirmation (among them, understanding and fortitude), this introduction neither turned me off to Catholicism nor service, and I continued choosing to affiliate with activities, organizations, and even a college dormitory floor which again held requirements for service hours. The type of service, however, branched out from mutely performed labor to activities requiring personal exchange: tutoring elementary school girls in an underinvested neighborhood, facilitating a scouting troop for boys at a group foster home, chopping up heads of cabbage in a soup kitchen. Often these were ongoing commitments, allowing my peers and I to serve the same people week after week. I thought of those I met, especially the children, between times. Relationships formed, lopsided as they were. Either with their words or actions, they told me their dreams. And they ended up in mine. The service hours were still recorded somewhere, but it didn’t matter anymore. I discovered my service would not be complete until all their dreams were realized. Service was no longer an end in itself, only a means toward solidarity.
Until that point, I had understood solidarity in its more epic manifestations. Solidarity meant throngs of people marching for a common cause. It was people standing up and standing out to demand justice. Or, it was people sitting in and sitting down to protest the unjust. I couldn’t perceive that solidarity’s origins were in human and divine kinship and the intimacy that implies. In John’s account of the Last Supper, Jesus prayed that we, his friends, might “become truly one.” In the fulfillment of this prayer, there is no circumstance where some of us make it, and the others do not.
Pope Francis, addressing his former episcopate of Buenos Aires, spoke of creating a culture of encounter with those in need, “Just as Jesus did…he went to meet them.” Our mandate, then, is “to go to the encounter with the neediest.”
Jesus knew that encounter is not always pleasant. He was challenged, rebuked, and accused, as he preached, listened, and healed. Encounter is not all singing songs together by the campfire. I know personally that encounter can mean having my hand pushed away, being informed that my intentions don’t mend the breach of inequity, being told I am not welcome because my own hospitality is conditional. Encounter brings us nose-to-nose with everything that stinks. It holds me accountable for what I have done and what I have failed to do. It tells me that privilege like mine makes poverty possible and perpetual. Encounter invites conversion, a departure from a false belief system that insists that the rich and poor inhabit two separate worlds, instead of the one we were given to share.
One year after the catastrophic 2010 earthquake, I journeyed to Haiti as part of an immersion course in social and economic justice. As students at a school of church ministry, some of us preparing to do missionary work in the Global South, we talked a lot in our trip preparation sessions about solidarity. We learned about walking with those we encounter rather than observing them from a distance, and of establishing relationships of mutuality and trust rather than perpetuating dynamics of helper and helped.
Our trip was made possible by the ongoing relationship between the US-based Just Haiti, and a local Haitian coffee growers’ association. Since its inception in 2007, Just Haiti has worked with six communities to foster development through the export of fair-trade coffee, keeping principles of relationship building and accompaniment central to its mission. As I listened to growers recount their efforts to resurrect a once-abandoned crop, I wondered how organizations like Just Haiti could support these communities in pursuing a higher quality of life given wealthy nations’ history of enslavement, exploitation, and exclusion of Haitian people.
This questioning led to my long-term, ongoing involvement with Just Haiti, as part of its “working board.” That is, volunteer board members and church partners carry out the all US-based operations of Just Haiti so coffee producers can derive the maximum benefit from the sales of their crop. The board strives to promote greater autonomy and independence for our partners in Haiti. For instance, Just Haiti sends all profits from coffee sales proceeds, so the producers can determine their use, rather than directing these funds toward a benefactor-conceived development project. We created a no-interest loan fund for business development needs, rather than award grants, in an attempt to re-write the old narrative of patron and supplicant.
We desired that the coffee producers would ultimately oversee all functions of the business, giving them full control of its destiny, and greater say in their own. This has often been a distant vision to keep in sight, as one crisis after another overwhelms Haiti, and a knee-jerk urge to “save” our partners from extreme poverty and suffering kicks in. With chronic political instability and no viable transportation options, producers have been unable to send us coffee in some time. We anticipate running out of inventory as of the end of April 2026.
What does this mean for our partnership, and more importantly, the livelihood of the families who use the profits we send for school fees, health care, and more? Anticipating the end of our coffee supply, we asked our growers’ associations how we could support them in local entrepreneurship, recognizing that they could best determine how to meet this additional challenge. In response, grower associations have requested our resources in increasing their capacity to prepare coffee for sale on the local market, as well as in establishing Mutuelles de Solidarité, small scale savings and loan and social insurance systems, to enhance capacity for mutual aid.
Just Haiti knows these efforts will not compensate the growers for the loss of coffee income. In the movement toward solidarity, the privileged routinely come up short. Nevertheless, we are discerning how to continue the relationships that have been forged over nearly 20 years. There is a heaviness in our monthly video calls between the routine business items and good-natured teasing of one another. For many years, we began these meetings with spoken prayer. These days we simply hold a collective moment of silence for Haiti. The needs seem too great to voice, at times, even beyond prayer. Be with them, God, I think into the silence, because my accompaniment seems so shallow in this chasm between us. Currently, US commercial flights to Haiti’s capital are banned due to extreme violence. Communications can be limited by spotty internet. We relish the photos and video clips we receive from our friends, but they are no substitute for a greeting kiss exchanged at the end of a sweltering day’s journey to their remote villages. Sometimes I wonder whether I still have a relationship with the farming families I met, or whether it is imaginary — a relationship with ideals – that seems far removed from the encounter Jesus invites.
For now, I still have a precious supply of Haitian coffee that helps to rouse me every morning, something tangible that sustains my connection to the growers’ dreams – for survival, for safety, for a life with dignity. Right now, solidarity looks like me holding those dreams as close as my own and keeping them alive. It means not giving up on Haiti, and dreaming of the day I can walk those sun-beat rocky roads again with our partners, toward the shade of their coffee trees in bloom.
For more by this author and more about solidarity, visit our web site.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Angela Paviglianiti was ruined for life in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps around the turn of the century. She is what happens when you mix women’s studies, social work, and seminary. Angela is indebted to Ignatius of Loyola and Dorothy Day, although she probably wouldn’t have gotten along with either of them. She still believes in fairies, and the Gospel according to you and me and us.
