Searching for my moon
This morning there were children screaming at play outside our house. I stood on the balcony and tried to see them on the street, over the top of the wall and metal gate that enclose our house. But I couldn’t see them so I guessed they were playing with the water that sometimes flows out of the pipe built into the hillside. Children everywhere in the world, it would seem, love to play with water.
But my first thought when I heard the children playing was how precious that water is and I’m glad their little bodies will get rinsed off today. Nearly half of the children of Haiti didn’t have access to clean drinking water even before the earthquake. And that water running out of the pipe definitely isn’t clean. As a Haiti-based American journalist told me, “you’d better keep your mouth closed in the shower.” Even so, at night when I’m covered in sweat and grime and the water flowers out of the showerhead in my bathroom I am so grateful that I literally whisper “thank God,” and I mean it.
I think there is a part of my brain that is developing into the Haiti part. Like when I’m surprised to see myself in a mirror because the way I look has completely disappeared from my thought process (except, of course, the very powerful 27/7 awareness that my skin is pale white). The way that I worship bleach and its germ-killing powers and “refreshing” scent (why do I find that refreshing?!). When I meet a child I look straight to her belly, wondering about malnutrition. At the grocery store I’m surprised to find a product not past it’s sell-by date (most everything in the grocery store is imported from the States). I actively try to eat more salt because I sweat so much (although I don’t really know if eating salt helps!). Hearing rain at night makes me feel guilty because 1.5 million people are living outside under plastic tarps.
I’ve been in Haiti for over three months, which is a very short time to try to understand this country and a very long time compared most of the aid workers here. But, I have learned a few things, and I guess I’ve changed while I’ve been here.
If I don’t work for a three-hour stretch on a Sunday I feel like I haven’t worked in a week. I know that staying calm is one of the greatest achievements and challenges in life. Wise people stay calm! One of my daily challenges is to stop myself from mixing French and English in the same sentence. Scented laundry soap is an amazing thing because it covers up the constant mildew smell. If you lose 10 pounds from a parasite you really can eat a lot of chips and chocolate to gain it back. Squatting to pee into a deep hole is better than squatting to pee directly on the ground (less splashing). You really can’t eat too much yogurt, especially the kind with extra probiotics. It is possible to drink about 10 liters of water in eight hours on a daily basis. Haiti has absolutely beautiful flowers and if I were smarter I’d get into the flower export business.
Sometimes during college I felt like I couldn’t fit more information into my head. It was like there were filing drawers for pieces of information and the drawers were absolutely filled with sheets of paper, and not a single new sheet would fit. Here, I also sometimes feel like I can’t fit more information into my head. But it’s not like a filing drawer. Instead I feel like my brain is filled with squishy balls of thoughts and feelings and analyses on different interdependent topics ranging from the safety of chlorinated water to integration of former sex workers into mainstream businesses to the fact that my favorite colleague at work has a standing house but chooses to sleep in a tent outside. Every day is a behemoth effort to try to make sense out of it all, and at the same time that I’m processing my emotional and intellectual response to everything I’m tasked with communicating to the rest of the world what’s going on in Haiti and what more has to be done, in a clear and honest way.
Very few things, it would seem, have a simple answer, especially in Haiti. Maybe that’s why I like bleach so much. No matter where you are in the world, it has the same smell, and it kills lots of germs, Haitian germs and American germs alike. I think tonight I’m searching for my moon that looks the same from everywhere in the world and doesn’t have particular complexities because I’m seeing it from Haiti.
