Chickens

I was struggling to explain why living in Port au Prince is such a bizarre and awesome experience to a friend of mine the other day, and here's what I came up with:

So you're in the taptap, which is like a pickup truck or cargo bus designed to cram in as many people as possible, riding along, probably in the middle of a traffic jam, on any given day.  At last, life seems normal enough; the sight of a woman carrying a fifty pound bag on her head or a guy selling pharmaceuticals out of a bucket no longer phases you. You're in the zone.

Then, as the taptap pulls over to the side of the road, the plastic bag next to your feet emits a series of load squaks and you hear the desperate fluttering of wings. The woman next to you pulls out her chicken from under the wooden bench, its head protruding from the plastic bag, with necessary force and a routine manner. She probably bought her live chicken 5 minutes ago, in the middle of the largest city in the Caribbean.

And you are reminded that, yes, this is a normal day in Port au Prince.

Prestige

Need

Think about how many times every week you tell someone what it is that you need.  The words, “Mwen dwe” – I must, and “Mwen bezwen” – I need, were some of the first words I committed to memory after arriving in Haiti (right after “kob” – money).  I find it essential in communication to tell others what I must do; it conveys an immediate sense of obligation and reminds me of the importance of the task at hand.  But most of the time, it’s really a convenient linguistic inaccuracy I employ to stress necessity or urgency.  Most of the time, it’s really just a lie. 

When Haitian people, most people really, describe the more repetitive, mundane events in their everyday lives, they tend to focus on the immediacy of their condition.  One says, “I am hungry,” much more than, “I need to eat.”  One says, “I am sleeping in a tent,” rather than, “I need a house.”  Maybe communication has so developed because the power involved in describing one’s condition elicits some level of empathy in others, who know the impossibility of living without food or rolling around on a cold dirty floor every night.  Maybe it has so developed because of the more regular inability of the speaker to see past condition and identify necessity.  Maybe there’s just no one listening who can provide.  

But maybe, the things so mundane and repetitive, the things that every person really needs on a daily basis, become more like the facts of life in an environment to which one must adjust or face life as a speck in the desperate oblivion of poverty.  Every day, true needs take a back seat in the minds of those who fight to break their cycle of misery.  They convince themselves that their needs can take a backseat while they fight to become more than a casualty to their circumstances.  For the word “need,” when used sparingly, evokes a far greater response both to those who hear it spoken and to those who give themselves permission to speak it. 

I have seen “need” written only one time that I can remember in my month here.  It was on a small white cloth sign, hanging on the fence of a tent camp.  “We need food, water, tents, a doctor,” it read.  I hear the word, in one form or another, on a very regular basis in contexts things you might expect (we need jobs, we need a real government, you need to get on the bus or get out of the damn way, etc.).  But the most consistent usage I’ve heard occurs when young people, most of whom have little means of support and no family, enter my office.  “I need to go to school,” they say.    

The school is all that matters.  Without the school I am nothing.  The cost isn’t even too much, really.  I want to study medicine, I want to own my own store, I want to speak English, I want to go many places, I want to help my country. You have to understand, you have to, you have to.  And in their expressions, always carefully reserved, intentionally collared to shield hope from the much greater possibility of rejection, they scream, “I don’t want to be something.  I see something. I have lived something.  My family has disappeared into the thick, ugly fog of something.  Every day the threat of something lingers just around the corner.  Let me be my own.  Let me be someone.” 

If by some fortune, they are granted the chance to continue their studies, the struggle multiplies.  “Some of your students,” warned a Haitian graduate, “will not make it.  Me, I knew that I needed to go to school, that it was the most important thing.  That meant some days I would not eat; some will not continue to understand that.”  It will not stop there.  They will face these tradeoffs every day.  Use the precious daylight hours to study or to sell sodas for a little income?  Save what little extra money you have for a rainy day or give it to your sickly grandparents?  Shower or wash your clothes?  Cold medicine or condoms?  

Theirs is a struggle against all odds: they fight to untangle themselves from the web of poverty and despair into which they have been born and bred.  Making it requires constant discipline, careful consideration, and precision of movement.  And even for the most Spartan, following that lifestyle is sometimes not enough.  Also required is the ready attention to the unpredictability of the condition itself, for the web continually moves and tightens, squeezing inexorably the parts that one has pointedly ignored for the sake of concentration and ambition.  It is a web, most of all, which tugs at the blurry divisions between the immediacy of superficial want, the power of the deepest desire to overcome, and the inescapable call of true need. 

Because after all, like anything humans have the capacity for, one’s ability for transcendence is limited.  Need gone untended, when it is true and undeniable, will eventually eat away at health, ability and conscience. No one has the ability to concentrate and study without nourishment in mind and body.  

And yet the ones that make it, who stick it out through all circumstances, do indeed teach us something.  Need is not quantifiable or definite.  Nor is it confined to one place or another within one’s self.  It is a balancing act, pliable enough to bend but strong enough to always remain intact.  In practice it may be meted out, manipulated by the definition that one chooses to apply him or herself.  

And it will return unseen to attack them, clawing its way up and biting voraciously with big, horrible teeth that sink in too deep and too painfully with such a strong grip that it will stop them from moving at all. Caught, they will hurt and they will withdraw and they will cry out and they will most certainly sometimes fail utterly.  Then, with a helping hand and with the recollection of the task at hand, they will continue.  For as with one’s language, one can mold the conscience, so that the idea of need becomes a convenient existential tool employed to stress necessity or urgency.  Except, in the realm of our thoughts, maybe it’s less a lie and more a choice.

What is it you really need?  Really. And when you can’t figure it out, what is it that you really want?  It’s likely contingent upon a lot of things.  The first one is you.

No time to waste

Photos!

The link leads to a few pictures of my time here, both personal and a little bit of work.  More will be on the way soon as a part of the same album; hope you enjoy!

http://picasaweb.google.com/copolicr/Haiti?authkey=Gv1sRgCICTx6Wd1u7mHA#