Leaving (to return)

(written 12/18)

Kenscoff has been wet and overcast all week.  Three weeks out of the rainy season, Port au Prince has seen the unusual advent of a week straight of rain, muddying the roads and dampening the sheets hung out to dry.  As the roads run with gray water, the gasoline stations are drying up, and with that in-country travel grinds to a halt.  With the rain, the lack of gas, the cool (comparatively) December air, and the small chains of Christmas lights that surround the few doors of anyone lucky enough to have electricity, the country feels in-between, almost still, waiting for the outbreak of trouble but tempered by a tired holiday spirit.

Monday through Thursday, we worked.  There were early-morning school visits, meetings with partners, student appointments, and last-minute office details to work out.  One student decided that he’d had enough of exams and didn’t want to go, another had run out of food for his entire family, and a third visited in between his school hours and 12 hour work shift to find money for this month at school.  There was plenty to do.

Thursday evening, we celebrated.  My roommate and guide to everything Haitian left late that evening to work for an undetermined amount of time in the countryside, so we had his sisters and cousins and our friends from town over to bid our house farewell for a few weeks.  In between sips of popular Dominican wine (the sips were few; imagine red wine with two collosal scoops of sugar), it was decided that my next language would be French and that I’d visit the country soon.

That evening and the next day were frantic. FRANTIC. By 7:30 am I was walking up the mountain to check for a ride down to Tabarre, 2 hours away, where I would get a lift to the airport from a friend.  By 8, all the cars had gone down.  Throughout the day I talked to the passing cars of partner organizations, just to see if anyone would help me out.  They all came and went, and when it grew dark it looked like I would have to find my own way down the next day.  And just then, when the prospect of staying another night in Kenscoff had just sunk in, an old white SUV rolled past my house.

“Gina’s car! Go, stop!” my friend Frantz urged me, and I jogged over hopefully.

“Hey Gina, I know this is short notice but I’ve been looking for a ride all day and I don’t know when the next car will go down and I can’t really take taptap with my bags and I’m kind of nervous to wait to go down and, uuuuuh, could I have a ride?”

“Of course.”

So I bid adieu to my Haitian home for a few weeks, and we loaded my things into the SUV with the sturdy frame and extra tire on the hood, and down we went, conversing.

“How is work, Chris?”

“You know, good and bad. It’s a struggle but we’re getting somewhere I think.”

“That’s always how it is, you know.  This poor country, just being beaten the way it is right now.  I’m glad to 

know that things are going alright at least. Are you excited to go home?”

“Honestly I can’t wait.  I suppose it will be an adjustment, but I can only think of seeing everyone right now.”

“Yes, it’s the right time to go home for a break, good for you.”

The bumps in the road jostling the car back and forth, throwing us into the air, filled up the silence that neither of us felt we needed to fill.  I was happy for whatever conversation we had, happy to let it be. I was happy to have found a way down, I thought, as the dimly lit evening scenes of Port au Prince floating by from the windows of the tall car.  Past Laboulle, where the UN truck sits outside President Preval’s house, the guards holding their shotguns easily between their legs.  Past the Hotel where I sat wearily when the old lady asked me for money and I didn’t have the words or the energy to explain why no.  Past one of the tent cities in Petion Ville, the barefoot children scampering through the maze of the dirty white rows of tents and tarps in the night.  Past a fried food stand in Reute Frere, the grease gleaming from the old yellow streetlight overhead.  And somewhere along the way, Gina spoke again.

“Do you remember a tall, skinny boy named Eliphete, Chris?  Very deep voice, thin face, in his mid 20s.  You would have met him just as you arrived.”

“Yea, I do know him. He stopped by the office just three or four weeks back to ask about school.”

“He died last night. We’re going down to the wake right now. He had AIDS, you know.  He was very sick, with not a lot of people coming to see him.  At the end I think he lost the will to live.  In a way I’m happy for him.”

Tomorrow I will drink water out of the tap.  I will drive 100 miles in 100 minutes.  I will wake in manufactured heat.  I will have electricity, day and night.  I will know that my neighbors have food for their children.  I will have a family with a bank account and a home.

I will not enter a chapel to find that the dead outnumber the living.  I will not lift their resting bodies onto the truck bound for the morgue.  I will not take caution to survey the political landscape before I go to work.  I will not have to say no to the hope they harbor.  I will not be reminded, at least not so viscerally, from the time I wake until the time I sleep, that the world is not fair.

But today I know that it is not, and I am going back to the cholera hospital. Today, I am in Haiti.

L'eternal