Haiti, at last

When I last went to India, in 2007, my father, sister, and I spent a week teaching lessons at a dirt-poor public school in Madras—the kind in which some children don’t even have shoes to wear, where they are sent principally so they will get a square meal at lunch. I was essentially useless, as my Tamil skills extend to the phrase “I understand, but I don’t speak” and the names of certain obscure vegetables (“winter squash,” anyone?) Regardless, the kids and we became instant friends. On the last day of class, after bidding them goodbye, we were about to leave when a little boy walked up to us, shyly, with a pen in hand. “For you,” he said. The rest of the group immediately followed suit, giving us the precious possessions of which they had so little—pictures of deities, candies, even an entire set of markers (the holy grail of school supplies). I was reminded of that scene again and again this week in Haiti; there, nominally at least, to do a weeklong service project, I ended up being its real benefactor.

The first thing I saw at the airport in Port-au-Prince, before getting on the bus to the baggage claim.

It’s beyond evident to call the deadly earthquake of January 12 a devastation, the kind of horrific unthinkable event you read about in the papers, follow for a couple of weeks, donate money to in order to assuage your own liberal guilt, and ultimately forget about. (At least, this was exactly what I had done.) It is entirely different to visit a Haitian school turned church turned post-quake orphanage and see half of a blackboard with the chalk-written words mardi 12 janvier 2010 written at the top, the beginnings of a vocabulary lesson inscribed below—a lesson that would be chillingly, eternally unfinished.

This chalkboard now serves as a partition between the pharmacy and the room used as the doctor's office.

Six months have passed since 12 janvier 2010, and the streets are still covered in debris. Sturdy buildings and undamaged houses stand alongside caved-in churches and schools that have been reduced to piles of rubble. Amidst the ruins of one house, we made out the mangled remains of a blue Toyota, a dining table, chairs: those jarring remnants of normalcy, pictures of what daily life was once like in Haiti before being so cruelly interrupted. When we were driving back from our medical camp, we passed the ruins of the once-majestic Grand Palace, perhaps the symbol of Haiti’s devastation. Opposite to it was one of Haiti’s ubiquitous encampments: neat grids of tents (from all over, UNICEF to USAID to the People’s Republic of China) that now serve as the homes for over one million Haitians. “See that?” one of our translators asked, pointing towards the encampment. “That used to be a place to walk around, read, play. It was beautiful.”

Today, walking into that space, you’d be more likely to see thousands upon thousands of people sharing a single water source, crammed into tents without the smallest semblance of privacy, looking at you, their eyes reflecting pain, weariness, a little curiosity. You’d see damp, sticky litter strewn all over the ground, from empty rum bottles to condom wrappers to torn pieces of playing cards, filth between each row of tents. You’d snap on a pair of surgical gloves—totally inadequate for the job at hand, tearing just as you were picking up a particularly wet, wormy, unidentifiable piece of trash—hold a Glad bag, and get to work cleaning as the merciless Haitian sun beat down on your back. Just as you’d cleaned an entire row, you’d look at the crevasse behind the encampment, only to see it turned into a makeshift dump of sorts, overflowing with about a thousand times the garbage you’d just spent an hour picking up. You leave the rest of your Glad bags and gloves there.

Examples of tents from the encampments; above, from USAID ("From the American People"), below, from the People's Republic of China.

It is easy to focus on the negative in Haiti; the country has been so spectacularly blighted that an old tale about how it made a pact with the devil still has traction today. Once France’s wealthiest colony, the country became the first in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery (see, e.g., Toussaint L’Ouverture, slave rebellion), after a long and tough revolutionary war ended in 1801. Those idealists who would have hoped that this would begin a wave of enlightenment across the hemisphere would be sadly mistaken: not only did slavery go on for nearly seventy more years in the United States, but our always-upstanding government refused to recognize the country for fear of inspiring a similar rebellion stateside. That is, until we occupied it in the twentieth century for three decades and left it in the hands of corrupt dictatorships that lasted well into the nineteen-eighties. Add to these corrupted political institutions deforestation, overpopulation, primary school education onward in a mandated foreign language (French) as opposed to Creole, and of course, a score of natural disasters, and you almost begin to believe those whispers of an ancient devil pact.

The airport is named for Toussaint L'Ouverture, rebel and hero.

When I first arrived in Haiti, all I could think about was the negative. Every pile of rubble, every encampment, every sighting of the ubiquitous UN peacekeeping forces (which just angered me more: where was the food? Where was the medical aid? Why were resources being wasted like this?) As I was riding in the back of the pickup truck we took to the medical camp every day, a small Haitian child jumped up onto the ledge of the truck as it was moving. “Please. I’m so hungry.” We had a cab full of medical supplies and not a bite of food to give him. “I’m sorry, please get down, it’s dangerous,” a volunteer replied. When we got home—dinner ready on the table—I locked myself in the bathroom and cried.

_______

Something happened a couple of days in. Yoga instructors talk a lot about “gaining strength from your neighbors” when you’re having difficulty, channeling their energy and making it yours, whatever: something that has always seemed a little hokey and New Age to me. But the Haitians, easily the warmest, most resilient people I have encountered, really did give me theirs. Literally every single one of them has been touched by the earthquake of January 12; they survived by sheer luck, chance decisions not to go to work or school that day, fate. Or they were trapped under rubble, sure goners, but somehow made it. There was the story of the Haitian student, who described walking to his university building, watching it crumble suddenly with eight hundred students inside: among them his friends, his teachers. There was the story of the sweet woman employed as a cook in the house we were staying in Delmas (the house having been graciously opened to us by a local Haitian man, who reminded me of an especially benevolent, Creole-speaking Dumbledore.) This woman had been visiting her niece at the hospital, when the walls suddenly collapsed all around her and the ceiling above her; she emerged, having pushed herself through a narrow tunnel, twelve hours later, a living being among the bodies strewn about the building.

And yet, as much as the emotional and physical stresses of having survived such an event linger—our clinic doctors diagnosed more post-traumatic stress disorder and high blood pressure than anything else, prescribing bright pink anti-allergy tablets for the scores and scores of patients who couldn’t sleep at night—the people are still passionate about and proud of their country, eager to help rebuild it, to do their part; from them, I learned to try to do the same. Every weekday, I worked at one of two churches: “Big Church,” as we called it, where one hundred patients sat in pews, our pharmacy a small storage closet, our doctor’s office a table to the left of the pulpit; “small church” was the church-turned-school-turned orphanage, where the patients sat upstairs, and the orphaned children singing songs downstairs would simultaneously break and mend my heart.

These three little guys from the orphanage loved the camera.

After the evening’s harrowing ride from the clinic to the house in the back of the pickup truck (you’ve got to cultivate your “truck legs” much like you would your sea legs), we’d begin work with an incredible local youth group from the neighborhood. The group formed in 2009 to combat the social problems that plagued the country even before the earthquake. (They call themselves “FAST Plan”: the “FAST” stands for Framework for Attaining a Social Transformation; how cool is that?) Since January 12, they’ve focused more on clean-up projects (they set up the encampment clean-up at which I volunteered), water distribution projects, even a project aimed at constructing a primary school for one hundred children from the Delmas neighborhood. (They do this in addition to regular work at school or university.) And they’re between eighteen and twenty-four years old.

This sign, which I snapped in the car on my way from the airport, speaks to one of Haiti's bigger socioeconomic problems: the often-higher cost of local goods.

While the youth group isn’t religious, it is definitely spiritual: meetings always began with a pretty French prayer. God definitely pervades Haiti, if not in spirit, then certainly in letter: in prayer, in song, in conversation, even painted in bright blue letters (“Dieu bénévole”) on the fronts of the colorful tap-taps, the tiny covered trucks that serve as Haiti’s public transportation. Medical clinic always started with a chant; partings ended with the words “May God bless you.” Any recounting of an earthquake survival story always included mentions of God’s grace, God’s benevolence, God’s protection. Although I think the term “reverent agnostic” (heavy on the ‘reverent’, as I was raised in a religious household) fits my belief system better than anything else, I found myself chafing at the idea of God’s supposed omnipresence in a country that looked to me like God (provided s/he even existed) had completely jumped ship, fallen asleep, feigned ignorance while nature cruelly shook the country with all its might. “Are you a believer?” a translator asked me (that’s how they always ask in French: not if you’re religious, but if you’re a croyant/e.) “I’m not sure,” I responded honestly. “That’s not good!” he chided me. “It’s good to believe. I pray every day.”

In the evenings, our Haitian host would often teach us songs, one of which had a lovely, haunting melody and went, I think, along the lines of, Prions pour la paix d’Haïti (Pray for the peace of Haiti). He sang it, like he sang everything, beautifully, a little sadly, movingly, the way only someone who really believed the words could. And all of a sudden I had a feeling that my anemic, intellectual quasi-agnosticism—being as it is, the lack of a belief—wasn’t strong enough to weather Haiti. The Haitian faith in God is so ubiquitous because it inspires, unites, moves, solaces. It isn’t really about the object of the faith at all, but the faith itself; whether or not God exists, whether or not he or she or it has continually left Haiti in the lurch, faith in God and good is, paradoxically, the groundswell for the Haitians’ indomitable strength.

That song played over and over again in my head on my flight back from Port-au-Prince, a surreal undercurrent as I arrived back in Dallas, almost as though it was reminding me to remember the country I had feared and then fallen in love with, the people who’d helped me more than I could ever help them.

Prions pour la paix d’Haïti.

Love at first sight. This was after they'd sung a "Welcome" song in Creole-glish I wish I could post here!