Facing Knives in the Street: An Object Lesson in Living Fully Awake [Excerpt]
Someone pulled a knife on the dusty streets of Cité Soleil, and Joel N. Clark’s life was never the same… But not for a reason you’d expect. Check out Joel’s story about a “real-life hero” in this excerpt from the book Awake: Discover the Power of YOUR Story (The Book You Can Watch).
I watched as they dragged a screaming woman into the dusty streets of [the Haitian city] Cité Soleil. Stopping directly outside our truck, a group of men threw her to the ground, savagely ripping the shirt from her body. One man jumped in with fists flailing. He was trying to drive away the others, but there were too many… At least ten men were involved in the fighting, but the crowd that had gathered to watch easily numbered more than fifty, and it was growing by the second. My eyes were glued on the woman who was at the center of it all, being pulled back and forth like a rag doll.
Father Rick Frechette — whom I simply call “the priest” — was talking on his cell phone, not yet aware of the brutality happening just outside his eyeshot. Only when a man was shoved against the side of the truck did his attention shift… Unable to make myself move (and unsure what I would do if I could), I sat and watched as the violence began to spread. Some of the spectators — men and women — were beginning to join in the fight.
