Scenes from a Broken Country

[bcholmes]

Islanded in a Sea of Tents

There are tents everywhere. There are tent cities everywhere. The whole Champs de Mars is one enormous tent city, with occasional historical statue sticking its head out of the multicoloured peaks and domes. Pétion looks down from his granite perch; stone-faced Bolivar scans the displaced people.

Sometimes tents are erected on the former roofs of now-collapsed buildings. Some sit in the yard beside partially-intact (but still structurally dangerous) cement buildings.

I saw many tents as the shuttle to Leyogàn wound through Pòtoprens toward the highway in the south. Finally, we emerged on the highway -- the part nearest the city has always been especially chaotic, with bad roads, multiple street vendors, and pedestrians who need to cross over from one side of the highway to the other.

And that's when I saw the neat row of tents. Pitched in the narrow island between the two lanes of highway traffic. The space can't be more than five feet wide, and the doors open directly on to the highway itself. I can't help but think of the noise, the horns (which are often used in place of signal lights, here), the cars constantly belching out oily exhaust. I can't imagine dodging highway traffic to get in or out of your home (wake up in the middle of the night, having to go pee? Well, first, dodge a few trucks to get to a safe location.)

Pòtoprens is a city that was intended for about 200,000 people, back in the sixties and seventies. At the time of the earthquake, over three million people lived here, crammed on top of one another. Space was at a premium, then. And now, even more so.

Art is Why I Get Up in the Morning

There's a wall that surrounds a large property just off of Delmas. I've never figured out what the property is used for, but the wall has consistently served as one of the local art shops. Every day, a ti machann hangs hundreds of paintings on the wall, in hopes that someone with money will come along to purchase something. the_siobhan picked up a small painting from this wall a few years ago.

Over the many years that I've been here, I've become pretty familiar with several of the paintings. There's a particular image of Papa Doc that's been there forever. Two years ago, a large number of Obama images were there, but are nowhere to be seen, now. Some images are almost soft-core porn.

Common themes include Toussaint Louverture, the Presidential Palace, and the Neg Mawon.

This year, I don't know why I was surprised to see so many paintings depicting buildings destroyed by the quake. And part of me wonders: is there a demand for paintings of La Tremblè? Are there people who want that on their walls? Or is it just that artists needed to process it, needed to inscribe it in paint?

Does Whatever a Spider Does

I swear, until this trip, I didn't know that Haiti had tarantulas.

The Uses of Tables

Two weeks ago, I had just arrived, and was checking out the various ways that Matthew 25 House had changed. "You got new tablecloths," I said to Sister Mary. There were two long dining tables, and there were new tablecloths -- still in that plastic-y style with the fuzzy underside, but a very different colour.

"Yes," Sister Mary said, and I could see something going on behind her eyes. Finally, she added, "this style is getting hard to find."

What didn't she say? I wondered, but then remembered the stories from Vivian's emails: amputations performed on the dining room tables, without the benefit of anesthetic.

I changed the subject.

Kreyòl pale; kreyòl konpran

My kreyòl continues to improve. I'm able to say most of the things that I want to say. My weakness remains my ability to parse other people's words.

On this trip, I've been in a large number of conversations in which Haitians have been telling me how important it is that I know kreyòl if I'm going to be in this country. And I'm not talking about people whose job it is to counsel me on standards of behaviour. I mean, ti machann will get into a conversation with me as I pass them on the street, and they drill me on how much kreyòl I know, and then lecture me on the importance of using kreyòl. One woman told me, in kreyòl, that she gives better prices to blan who can speak the language.

There are a lot of blan in Leyogàn; I find myself wondering if the high concentration of foreigners since the earthquake has fomented a lot of nationalistic pride. They want visitors to make some efforts to adapt. Make no mistake, I can totally grok that.

On two different occasions, people who've passed us in the road started chanting to us, "Haiti is a beautiful country, beautiful country, beautiful country." And they were right. Haiti is a beautiful country.

Few Or Many Assholes, Depending on Perspective

Jess UK and I were doing breakfast dishes. I'd signed up to do house cleaning -- empty trash and compost, clean the toilets, sweep the floors. It turned out to be a lot of work.

"Is it what you were expecting?" she asked of my experience of arriving at HODR.

"Mostly," I said. I pondered. "I think I'm a little surprised by stuff like people who don't flush their shit." For the last several days, the same meeting note kept coming up again and again: flush your shit; your mom isn't here.

We have real, actual ceramic toilets that empty into a septic tank. But they don't have running water. To flush them, we fill a quarter of a pail of water (or use one of the pails that the sink water runs into) and pour the water into the toilet until it flushes. To conserve water, we don't flush unless we need to. What that translates to is "don't flush if you're only urinating; definitely flush if you take a dump." But, hey, these people are mostly 20-somethings. Taking a few extra moments to deal with shit is icky. Surely someone else will come along and deal with it. Hence the repeated meeting notes.

"Yeah," Jess says with a sigh. "We sometimes say that HODR is living proof that communism doesn't work. We don't think we have very many assholes, here, and yet unless you stand over the meal table every time, people will take more than their allotment of food."

Flatland

Today, I was down in the downtown core. That was hard. You remember that scene in The Two Towers, in which Treebeard comments that some of those trees were friends of his? Yeah.

I've walked those roads dozens of times. And they all look so wrong. The little restaurant, where my most recent delegation group ate a few meals (and were clandestinely photographed by an unknown blan) is closed. No visible damage, but something obviously earthquake-related caused its closure. Some buildings that I've known well are just gone, now.

Some of the collapsed buildings were well-constructed and new; others were shabby and old. The narrative of Haiti's weak building codes just seems so inaccurate. The destruction was just random.

And it occurs to me that the sense of loss I'm feeling is merely loss of the familiar. Compared to the much more real losses of the people here, what I'm feeling is nothing.

But I miss the city that I remember.

Direction

Carson was my shuttle driver back from Leyogàn. I say "shuttle", although what that really means is that he had a car and drove blan back and forth between Pòtoprens and the HODR base.

"Ayewopo?" he asked. Airport?

"Non," I replied. "Delma trant twa." Delmas 33

He checked that I would be able to direct him, and I told him that I could. We chatted a fair bit; me practicing my kreyòl, and him practicing his English.

Finally, we hit Delmas 33, and I started directing him around different corners. As we got closer to Rue A. Martial, and Matthew 25, he said, "I know this area. My family and I used to sleep near here after the earthquake."

"Camp Izmery?" I asked. I recall that Sr. Mary said that there'd been over 2000 in the camp at times.

"Yes, Camp Izmery," he replied. Earlier in the conversation, he'd said that his family was now living in the Dominican Republic. "It's not possible to live in Haiti any more," he'd said at the time.