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" Published in the December 2012 issue Everywhere you go, there are the boys. After earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, in the middle of the worst famine, there are always these little pricks calling you names and throwing rocks, taunting you, wanting to live, wanting your stuff. Because you, who have come ostensibly to help them, have lots of stuff, and they have nothing. They are wearing rags and washing themselves in a ditch. If ever you needed proof of how we humans are resilient little bugs, look no further than these boys. And so, somehow, this courtship of rock throwing, name-calling, and pilfering gives way to true friendship. And everywhere you go \u2014 after every earthquake, flood, tsunami, and famine \u2014 there are the Americans. Lately, when you imagine Americans projected around the world, you think most often of camouflage. This story, though, isn&amp;#039;t about soldiers, not at all. But then who are these people? And what, with the one match they&amp;#039;ve got to burn, are they doing wasting their flame in misbegotten Haiti? The answer to that question can be understood only if you set aside contemporary notions of career-minded ambition and consider a degree of selflessness and rootlessness that has you living itinerantly from disaster to disaster, not getting rich and not getting ahead in any conventional sense. Oh, and it can only really be understood if you know something about boys and baseball. They have names that sound like they started out as American names but got mashed up a bit, turning them into world names. Bryn Mooser and David Darg met in Haiti during the weeks after the earthquake of January 2010. Mooser was there to build a high school for a Hollywood outfit called Artists for Peace and Justice, a group started by the director Paul Haggis, and disaster-veteran Darg was there for Operation Blessing, to build water and sanitation systems. They had seen each other around for a few days in the big collapsed neighborhood of Cit\u00E9 Soleil, the most dangerous slum in the Western Hemisphere, when one day Mooser approached Darg to ask him if he could build a water system for a nearby primary school. Darg said yes. &amp;quot;When?&amp;quot; Mooser asked. Typically the answer to such a question in the world of NGOs and disaster relief goes something like, &amp;quot;Well, I&amp;#039;ve got to take it to my board, which next meets in September. How about March?&amp;quot; But Darg said, &amp;quot;How about first thing in the morning?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I think I love you!&amp;quot; Mooser said. Cit\u00E9 Soleil is on the ocean, and its water, regularly contaminated by salt water and sewage, makes you sick. The system Darg and Mooser built that morning makes ten thousand gallons of clean water a day, the only reliable source of water for the more than a thousand kids who attend the primary school. From that day on, they were inseparable, and came to combine their efforts in Haiti. They&amp;#039;re both thirty-three, like the same music and movies, and with day after day of misery and death, it was nice to have somebody to talk to toward evening. And they came to realize that they had met before, at a Peace Corps party in Dakar in 2004. They hadn&amp;#039;t liked each other at all. &amp;quot;Dave and I were going for the same girls,&amp;quot; says Mooser, &amp;quot;but I was always living in some tent somewhere, and Dave, being from a better-funded nonprofit, always had air-conditioning and a hot shower. Like most of us, these Peace Corps girls had been without such things for months. So all Dave had to say to a girl was &amp;#039;I have an apartment with air-conditioning and a hot shower,&amp;#039; and it would be game over. I was always scrambling for his leavings.&amp;quot; For ambassadors without portfolio, America simply could not do better than Mooser and Darg. Mooser looks like a rock star, with rock-star hair and light eyes, and smells vaguely of patchouli. He&amp;#039;s an easy friend, the kind of guy who calls you brother the first time you meet. He&amp;#039;s limping on a cane just now, having stepped off a moving medical-supply truck wrong and busted his Achilles. He ignored the injury until he couldn&amp;#039;t walk anymore. As American kids go, Mooser is a vagabond, from Venice Beach, California, but raised in Harlem, with high school in Maine before leaving with his mom when he was sixteen for Zimbabwe, where he fell in love with an African girl and with Africa, too. He joined the Peace Corps after college to get back to his girl in Zimbabwe \u2014 his plan was to drop out after the training period and move to the rural area with her and start up a goat farm \u2014 but just before he shipped out, a volunteer in the country was killed, so he was redirected to Gambia, where he was to teach agriculture, about which he knew nothing. This failure would become the most valuable lesson of Mooser&amp;#039;s life: Know what you&amp;#039;re good at, because no matter how good your intentions, you can really fuck things up if you don&amp;#039;t. He went to Haiti planning to stay for three months, and almost three years later is still there. Darg was born in Norfolk, Virginia, the son of a journalist who moved the family to the Middle East when Darg was four, finally settling in London when he was ten. He looks a little like Ryan Gosling, if Gosling were a rugby player. As a kid, he learned the rudiments of filmmaking from his father, and after studying philosophy fell into documenting operations for several nonprofits. But he wanted to be involved with the actual operations, so in 2005, when the faith-based charity Operation Blessing advertised for a director of relief operations during the famine in Niger, Darg leaped at it, and has been running operations all over the world ever since. It was after the Pisco earthquake in Peru in 2007 that Darg met his wife, Naomi, a nineteen-year-old Australian who took a year off from college to help in the effort. They have worked four quakes since then, in addition to the Japanese tsunami. But it is Haiti that has become as much home as the couple has known together. And it is in Haiti where they met the boys.  When your day job has you immersed in extreme poverty and death, you need relief, no matter how strong you are. In addition to building the schools and the water systems, both Mooser and Darg also helped an American priest, Father Rick Frechette, run the crematorium on the day of the week devoted to unclaimed bodies. But as meaningful as they found the work, unrelieved bleakness makes the soul sick. So when the hectoring boys set upon them, they decided to engage them, because is anything more full of life than a ten-year-old boy? They wanted to do something for these boys in the evenings, something organized, to best channel their energies. &amp;quot;They said they wanted to play soccer, so we got them a ball and tried to organize a game, but they were all so malnourished that after five minutes they were listless, just sitting on the field, having lost interest completely,&amp;quot; Darg says. &amp;quot;This was going to be a bigger challenge than we thought. We wondered: What game do boys love that doesn&amp;#039;t require as much energy as soccer? Baseball.&amp;quot; Having grown up mostly abroad, neither Mooser nor Darg knew much about baseball other than the basics, but that was enough. A couple of random balls and bats had arrived in a container, and they managed to scrounge up some gloves from somewhere. They began meeting evenings with the neighborhood strays, all of whom had lost their homes, all of whom had lost some if not all of their families. And almost instantaneously, the boys of the Tabarre neighborhood of Port-au-Prince fell madly in love with America&amp;#039;s pastime. And just as instantaneously, baseball practice became Mooser and Darg&amp;#039;s favorite time of day, a bright beam of life at the edge of all the death. In no time, the lethargy from the soccer pitch was gone. Practices happened most weekdays, and with every practice came a meal that Mooser and Darg paid for out-of-pocket. They&amp;#039;d had no intention of starting an actual team, much less a Little League, but before long the Tabarre Tigers were born, followed by two other teams. Leading the Tigers was a rambunctious assortment of characters, including one kid in a wheelchair who somehow managed to swing a bat anyway. It is a bizarre fact of life that across the island, the Dominican Republic produces 10 percent of the players in the major leagues, while it wasn&amp;#039;t long ago that most baseballs were manufactured in Haiti, where the sport is unknown. &amp;quot;We had this crazy idea,&amp;quot; says Darg, &amp;quot;that we&amp;#039;d get these boys playing really well, then we&amp;#039;d go find a team in the D.R. and kick its ass.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;If success were measured in desire alone,&amp;quot; Mooser adds, &amp;quot;these boys would beat anybody in the world.&amp;quot; Last year, responding to a Haitian friend&amp;#039;s observation that there were no movie theaters in Port-au-Prince, as they&amp;#039;d all been destroyed, and therefore nothing for people to do in the evenings, Mooser and Darg built a simple structure on the edge of the massive Cit\u00E9 Soleil tent city, put up a marquee that read SUN CITY PICTURE HOUSE, downloaded films from the Internet, and voil\u00E0, Port-au-Prince had a movie theater. They&amp;#039;d recorded the experience in a short documentary, and with the Tabarre Tigers in full swing, they decided to pull out the video camera and make a little film about baseball and the boys. That&amp;#039;s when the cholera hit. &amp;quot;And just like that,&amp;quot; Mooser says, &amp;quot;it was as if the earthquake had happened all over again.&amp;quot;  A serious game face. It was October of 2010, nine months after the earthquake and long after the attentions of the world had moved elsewhere, when Haitians by the hundreds began to die from a strain of cholera so vicious that often people would be dead within hours of the first symptoms. Darg&amp;#039;s wife, Naomi, had by this time taught several women in the tent camp how to fashion jewelry from beads made of lacquered pieces of cereal boxes, and by selling the necklaces and earrings online was supporting about a dozen families in Port-au-Prince. One of these women, Marie Claude Alvyns, had a son named Joseph, who is captain of the Tabarre Tigers, and perhaps the most enthusiastic baseball player in all of Haiti. Marie Claude&amp;#039;s husband sold phone cards on the street, a fairly cutthroat business in Port-au-Prince. But before Marie Claude began making jewelry, it was the only money supporting the twelve people living in the family&amp;#039;s makeshift house. Naomi and Marie Claude worked together day after day building the jewelry business, and would come to think of each other as something like family. It is biblical, cholera is, unknown in the twenty-first century in places that take clean tap water for granted. And in a horrible twist, the outbreak would eventually be traced to UN peacekeepers from Nepal who had been dumping their waste in a river where thousands of people washed. A half million (and counting) would eventually get sick, and more than seventy-five hundred would die. And, with disaster heaped upon disaster, the little film Mooser and Darg were making about the Tabarre Tigers would turn into something very different. Baseball in the Time of Cholera it would be called, made in part to shame the UN into taking responsibility for the first cholera to hit Haiti in a century. But even though they&amp;#039;d been ravaged all over again, the boys of the very first Haitian Little League were still playing baseball. Even when Marie Claude got the cholera last fall and died, the boys played on. Even when the UN refused to reallocate even a fraction of its $800 million annual Haiti peacekeeping budget to help its victims, the boys played on. Even when the catcher, a boy named Richlet, drowned this past summer in the washing ditch after Hurricane Isaac turned it into the Mississippi, they played on. And with Mooser and Darg getting to as many practices and games as possible, they play on still. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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