I recently spent 8 days in Haiti, working a few organizations. I won't bore you with the day by day details other than to say that day by day, I fell in love with Haiti. Here's something I wrote for my creative writing class:“The Road to Jacmel”
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“A Crash Course in Poverty”
We left Port-au-Prince, Haiti around 11 am. The air was already thick and sticky, holding every smell in it, good and bad. Ken helped me hop into the back of the pick up truck and I slathered on the sun block. I found a comfortable spot on top of someone’s back pack and settled in for the four hour drive out of the capital of this little island, to the small beach town of Jacmel.
The clouds had parted ways with the sky and the sun was free to beat down with all it’s fury. My shoulders started to tingle with that familiar feeling of vitamin D entering my skin. We headed out, pass all the gated homes and sad looking “guard dogs” biting away their ticks and looking longingly, hoping for a meal. Sometime you forget about Port-au-Prince from behind those gates. We were reminded immediately. The city’s 4 million inhabitants were running about madly. A busy intersection greeted us with nothing but chaos and poverty. People hopped on “tap taps” (Haiti’s version of a taxi cab), children dangerously meandered around the street, men leaned against things and women got their hair done. Everyone was rushing somewhere. Where, I’m not sure, since no one really has a job in that town. Meat sat in it’s own stink on the side of the road with a haggard looking woman sitting next to it, hoping for customers. American looking apparel hung on the side of buildings, and Digicell billboards littered the skyline while almost every inhabitant of Port-au-Prince rushed along with their cell phone in hand. Apparently the company came in a few years ago and handed out free cell phones to everyone. So, whether or not they work, almost every Haitian in the city has a cell phone. Venders were selling tin art, paintings, plantanes, and water packaged in little bags. I would not recommend drinking from these bags unless you would like to experience “Haitian Happiness.” Trust me, you will not be very happy about it.
Naked, or hardly clothed children ran about and shirtless women stood fragilely. the smell of urine wafted into the air and held there, stubborn in the humidity. Stern looking men with seat bubbling on their necks tried to sell us their wares while we sat in traffic. They walked around with cell phones and pirated dvds, pushing them towards us. We were white, which meant we had money to burn. The hardest thing to explain to a Haitian is the concept of an American not having money to spare.
My pale skin acted like a beacon, screaming “easy target” or “sugar mamma.” Men crawled by on their motorcycles and yelled “blonde blonde!” Junior, our Haitian friend that rode along said there were proposing. On man called out to me and said “darling” and reached out his hand. Their much more polite in their cat calls than Americans. The UN soldiers were the worst, they made kissing faces and lude hand gestures. The exuded entitlement. We asked Junior exactly what it is they do other than drive around with machine guns. He said that was about it. He said “it’s all politics. They make problems so they can fix the problems so they can stay. But they help keep things stable. It’s all politics.”
The truck navigated it’s way through a roundabout and stopped in a traffic jam. Children, babies really, came up tot he back of the truck and stood on the bumper with out stretched hands. Some laughed with us and had a fire in their eyes. They had personality and jokes. They said “give me a dollar give me a dollar!” Junior said back to him, “you give ME a dollar!” They both laughed. Poverty is part of Junior’s everyday life. He can look at this begging child and laugh. Another little boy stood on the bumper with a pink palm upturned. He looked up at me with hopeless eyes, eyes that were hungry. I really had no money so I held his hand in mine and looked into his eyes. He looked at me pleading with my soul, to either take him out of this filth or give him something to survive in it another day. Nothing else in Port-au-Prince captivated or haunted me like this little boy’s face. His dark almond eyes pierced every thing I thought I knew and could compartmentalize about poverty. He was poverty. This beautiful, young, starving ball of potential was the face of poverty and corruption. I gave him and his joking friend all I had, a protein bar. Seven of them shared it.
That’s the hardest thing about Haiti. It’s not the shirtless women or the feces infested water, it’s those dark almond eyes, full of want and me with nothing to give them. There is a hopelessness in Haiti, but an acceptance and resilience, and completely contradictory hopefulness too. We met a boy who said he loves Haiti because it is his country and that he wants to grow up to love his family and change Haiti. These are the thoughts of the youth there. They are not beaten down by their circumstances, they want to change what they were born into.
We began to see the ocean and I began to think more about Haiti. The country is not a sob story. It is beautiful in it’s imperfections, in it’s corruption, greed, and complacency. The people are it’s beauty, their spirit of wanting something more than what they were handed is it’s wonder. As I watch the brown statue like people whirl behind me, left behind the truck in a hazing diesel black smoke, the noise starts to fade the statues become less and less packed. I shifted my weight back against the truck and snapped some pictures of mounds of garbage. The ocean breeze pushed away the smell of filth in the air. All is quiet as we approach the mountain. Jacmel is just on the other side.
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