Interview: Lizandra Vidal, Ayiti Yoga

Lizandra Vidal and I did our yoga teacher training together back in 2011, in Washington, DC. I'm very excited to have reconnected with her and learn what she's up to — teaching yoga in Port Au Prince, Haiti, with the country's first and only yoga studio, Project Zen. She also started her own community based organization, Ayiti Yoga.Lizandra will be back in DC this weekend to join forces with Faith Hunter's Embrace Yoga Studio leading a weekend intensive on Advocacy & Community Organizing -- spots are still available! Click here to register to learn advocacy and leadership skills to leverage the self awareness cultivated through yoga and meditation practice.I interviewed Lizandra to learn about her work in Haiti empowering local youth as "yoga mentors" and doing yoga outreach in the Port Au Prince community, and touched on issues around privilege and economic disparity. While we didn't explicitly touch on Buddhism, her experience and work are reflective of how many of us Buddhists approach "right livelihood" and I wanted to share her story because it exposes a path others may want to follow:How long have you been in Haiti, Lizandra?I came to Haiti in January 2013. I've been here coming on 17 months. My Creole isn't nearly as good as I would like it to be be having been here that long, but I'm thinking of doing a homestay this summer to get my skills up.How did that happen? How did you end up in Haiti teaching yoga?I came to Haiti in 2010 after the earthquake -- I did a week here before our yoga teacher training. Having spent time in Ghana, I really loved the developing country environment. Seeing all the pictures after the earthquake, I felt called to bear witness to what the suffering was -- I knew only one side of it was being represented in the media.At that time, I volunteered with a physical therapy group as a yoga teacher. Then, I came back at end of 2012 and found this yoga studio that needed help. They had had a yoga teacher but lost her. What a great opportunity, right? It was Project Zen -- Haiti’s first and only yoga studio.At first, I thought I could train the Haitian teachers that the studio had, but I couldn’t. I've been here a year and a half and am only just getting a sense of how things work here. It's been a lot of easing in.So I just taught. I taught classes that were quality classes that a lot of ex-pats got excited about. The studio broke even for the first time in February! I'm less involved at the studio now, but am happy to have lended lots of energy last year to help them grow their business.Now, I've started Ayiti Yoga -- Ayiti is how you say Haiti in Creole. It's still taking shape, but we're using it as a vehicle to share yoga more widely in Haiti. We have five to six teachers, and my work is to connect them to the community. We direct people to Project Zen and do a lot of event based yoga.I see part of my role as growing and telling the story of the yoga scene in Haiti. That’s the privileged space — all the people who know yoga and have access to it. So we have an outreach component, too. My dream is for Ayiti Yoga to be a social enterprise so the revenue stream of teaching to ex pats and Haitians with means can cover our outreach.What has the response to yoga been from Haitians?Well, many of our students are members of the Haitian diaspora and so were already familiar with the practice of asana as yoga.People are pretty open, but it hasn’t gotten that much outside Port Au Prince. We do have an outreach programs with an after school girls program, etc. There are 60 adolescents who’ve gone through free yoga at Project Zen. Now a smaller group of 20 youth are in a yoga mentor program on the way to training to be teachers. They start out teaching kids, then will be able to fully teach. In general, anyone who comes to the free classes at Project Zen keep coming back.There is a thing in Haiti here of perceiving yoga as a mystical thing. Some people like it and some keep it at arms length. That’s been a hard dance for me, but physical connection is about expanding breath and connection to the earth, so I try not to say that yoga is or is not mystical.For most people here, voodoo is an underlying and fundamental way of understanding the world, though it's taboo to talk about. Haitians are some of the most psychic people I’ve come across -- they read energy, it’s pulsing all the time whether you’re talking about it or not.How did you get linked up with this Spiritually Fly Changemaker training in DC?To pretty much anyone I meet, I say, “Hi I’m teaching yoga in Haiti, you wanna come?” And Faith said OK!We started planning last year. She had never done a retreat before so she tried leading one here but weren’t able to recruit enough people. We ended up doing a lot of master classes with the youth here and it was great anyway. Her brand is Spiritually Fly, and the idea of SF Changemaker evolved out of her wanting to get more into using yoga to create positive change in communities.My biggest passion is using yoga as a personal transformation tool, to acknowledge the feelings and emotions in your body. That’s really powerful, and the basis of social change. You help people discover who they are and their own strenghts. And they may have a desire to become chagemakers, because once you become aware and empowered you often want to share that with others.So one of the things I wanted to learn about your experience was how you interact with the privilege of being a white American yoga teacher in Haiti.Being in Haiti, the level of white privilege is — I’ve never experienced anything like it. It could have been what made me leave the country. It’s actually light -- not white -- privilege.There is exceptional economic and social disparity here -- we ex-pats drive around in nice cars and live in beautiful houses and there are people living in cement slums on the side of a hill that floods whenever it rains. They don’t have electricity and running water and that's how 90% of the country lives. For me, where I’ve gotten to is that it’s uncomfortable and I just work on accepting that it’s uncomfortable. My thing is to share the practice of yoga outside of that. Focus on what we have in common -- that we all hurt, we all feel joy, lack. We all feel.Privilege in the US is really about a lack of acknowledgement -- it’s invisible. Here it is the opposite of invisible so the challenge is to get past it. The biggest barriers are between the poor and the Haitian bourgeois and it’s a different world, they don’t integrate. The ex-pat community is separate even from that dynamic and treated as such.Do you have a favorite story so far from Ayiti Yoga or your time in Haiti?There is an anecdote from Faith’s visit. 14 youth were there from our Yoga Mentor program -- we're in the process of teaching them to teach. There's this one girl Fahra who’s been coming forever and never volunteered to lead or practice teaching with the group. she's really quiet and I usually let her have that space. But with Faith there, one of the visitors with her gave her a little push to lead a Sun Salutation and she rocked it! I had no idea she had that in her and it was super sweet to see her blossom. She led 20 people through Sun A! [Note: Fahra is pictured above leading her class in Sun A]We worked with a Hatitian based nonprofit that helps supports orphanages called Sow A Seed. They brought 150 kids up to retreat center for a day of mind and body wellness. Our 14 youth from the Yoga Mentor programwent up there with them -- it was their first experience being yoga mentors. This woman Mama-Aye -- she's learned to teach in a dharma yoga tradition but she's still young, 22 -- she held space for 70 orphans to meditate by herself for almost an hour!She was so patient and sweet with them. Five to six others mentors were going around helping kids sit up straight, or if they were fiddling too much or talking too much. That was so exciting, this moment of seeing, "This is going to work!"And Mama-aye is herself an oprhan. She’s had to always rely on herself. Her ability to connect with these other orphans from a heart centered place to discover mindfulness and body centered was amazing.