My husband and I decided to see a late afternoon matinee in Massachusetts on Tuesday, January 12. As we left the theater, I turned on my cell phone to find 6 new messages from family and friends: “Are you okay?” “Are you in Haiti?” “Where are you?”
We should have been in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, but this year we had planned our vacation for January, not December. My husband and I have lived and worked in Haiti since 2007: me with Save the Children and then the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and my husband with the US State Department. I can’t write about the devastation that has forced us from our home, redrawn the city, killed over 200,000 Haitians and displaced even more, but I can write about the Port-au-Prince that has slowly mesmerized us over the past 2 ½ years.
To live in Haiti is to have an affair with the quixotic, dazzling, and befuddling. Haitians often say there are two Haitis: Port-au-Prince and everywhere else. Home to a quarter of the nation’s population, Port-au-Prince looms large on the psyche of the country. On Grand Rue, you can – could – still see the outlines of Haiti’s elegant past; from our balcony we could see the Palais Nationale, which was modeled on the White House, and Notre Dame Cathedral, which was built at the turn of the last century. The city is nestled in deep in the Gulf of Gonave; the month of September is always filled with spectacular thunderstorms that streak across the city, bay and mountainsides.
The city, unable to keep up with the constant influx of people from the countryside looking for better opportunities, is in a constant state of mad disrepair: irregular electricity, sporadic access to city water (we had our own cistern and generator), clogged and congested garbage-filled streets, humanity everywhere. Yet even in the most hopeless slum, there is something to be hopeful about: children’s laughter, the bright painting on a taptap (local transportation) that proclaims “God is good”, or the simple act of neighborliness when strangers help a market woman lift her basket to her head. A friend of mine helped me put the city into perspective by stating that Port-au-Prince was just like being in the countryside, but more crowded. She’s right.
Before returning to Haiti in late February, I had a series of post-apocalyptic dreams: the streets of Port-au-Prince were tunneled to create a series of trash-filled canals (not far from the truth) that were suddenly set on fire – violent infernos streaking across the city. The night before returning I dreamt I was in Middle America, looking at yellow skies filled with tornadoes, at least 7 at one point. I took refuge in a yellow bathtub for the first tornado and then a high school chorus room (oddly filled with members from the cast of “Glee”) during the second storm. Somehow I was preparing myself for the return to Port-au-Prince, where I thought the nightmares would be real.
As I write this, it’s over three and a half months since the earthquake. The nightmare is real for thousands of families, unaccompanied children, and adults living in squalor in camps – planned and unplanned – across the city. My colleagues and friends who have lost loved ones, their homes, their sense of being, tell me that they might be smiling, but there isn’t any smile in their heart. They might say they’re fine, but they’re not, and won’t be for a long time.
Yet there is still reason to hope. Every survey that’s been done in this assessment-riddled environment demonstrates again and again that parents want their children in school. Children want to be in school and learning. With this desire comes change; with this change comes a better future for Haiti.
