Mixed Feelings

At any given moment, I feel very different about my hope for Haiti. Sometimes I hate this place, and sometimes I feel great optimism for it. I can’t really say I ever truly love it. I’m not good at loving a place where the majority of people live in poverty. I get angry too easily at the wasted potential of this place, its bad governance.

Start of the day: gorgeous blue sky, look out my window and see tropical flowers in the yard. Turn on some Girl From Ipanema and all is good. Turn on the tap and water runs out, and life is even better.

Climb into the Land Rover for the 10-minute drive to the office. Greet our driver and the security guys. Say goodbye to the dog. Radio in our location. Lock the doors. Tumble down the crazy rutted mountain I live on and pass people pouring sweat at 7am from hiking up the mountain with goods for sale on their heads. I feel like a horrible colonialist. I also think back to how awful it feels to physically exert yourself when you’re malnourished. Some of people I know are – the infamous swollen belly and skinny legs. I have been malnourished (and clinically starved!) in my life (oh, the wonders of Celiac Disease). When you walk uphill when malnourished, your heart feels like it’s going to beat out of your chest and there’s a rock in your throat and you have a pounding headache. So in this moment I feel a) ashamed that I’m in a vehicle and others are walking, b) blessed that I recovered from my own illness when I was malnourished and starved, c) angry that people are malnourished and most are living hand-to-mouth, d) excited to go to work where I work for positive change, e) scared to go to work and feel like I might not actually make any difference in this situation at all.

So we bump through the gutted streets, braking for small girls with ribbons and matching pinafores. Haitian children going to school must be one of the cuter sights in the world, I think. We pass the souvenir corners of handmade goods and I wish I could pop out and buy several. During this 10-minute car ride I feel happy that we have a driver who stops for children (many nearly kill the kids) and regretful that I’m not a better haggler when buying souvenirs and fruits and vegetables on the street.

The morning hours in the office are the most enjoyable: zombielike trips to the kitchen for coffee, enthusiastic greeting of dozens of people who you just saw twelve hours ago, restarting the computer many times to ensure best possible performance during the day.

The light from sunrise to about 9am is Haiti at its best: invigorating, fresh, sharp. After about 9 o’clock, the sun breaks loose from its morning softness and comes out burning. Haiti’s poverty is thrown into sharp relief. In wealthy Petionville dirty water runs along the street edges. In teeming Delmas, ragged preadolescent boys weave between cars, escaping fenders by what seems a toe width, trying to entice drivers to pay them for wiping down their vehicles with cloths so dusty you wouldn’t want to breathe too closely to the rag. The worst part is that the boys’ clothes and skin and even their eyes have the same film of dust, so caked on it’s like spackle with too many air pockets.

As the sun turns from lovely and warm to brutal, so do my feelings about Haiti. The day picks up urgency. I just missed a meeting. A reporter in Germany needs a hard-to-find bit of information about water trucking in next hour. Wyclef has declared he’ll challenge the electoral council ruling. I’m maxed out on the amount of coffee my stomach can handle. This is a confusing time of day. Sometimes I feel forward momentum: yes, I’m contributing to a better Haiti. Sometimes I feel like it’s all futile and that I’m a hated foreigner in this country.

By the afternoon, my feelings on Haiti could be anywhere. Today I sat for about 15 minutes in the “security” foyer at the Prime Minister’s office, waiting to the let into the office of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission. I listened to some very lazy Haitian staff complain about white people in Creole, assuming we couldn’t understand. I felt frustrated about the chasm between foreigners and Haitians in quake recovery work. I also felt annoyed that these people work here, in a place with so much power to do something good but they really don’t seem to care at all. But then again, maybe they have reason to be mad about a bunch of white people and they’re more realistic than I am about the actual power of the Prime Minister’s office.

At the end of the day, I chat with the driver on the way home. Some days we talk about his kids and I feel happy that his daughter is recovering from her clavicle injury, which happened during the quake. Some days we talk about how he only eats one meal a day and his family lives in a tent because he’s saving money to finish making the payments on a small plot of land. I ask him if he’s sure he’ll get the title for the land. He says he’s sure, once he’s made all the payments. I get worried because I know Haiti’s land titling system is a mess, sometimes nonexistent, and property owners have little security of ownership. I don’t know if I should tell him about my worry. Maybe he already knows. I tell him if he ever wants a meal don’t hesitate to ask. He says that’s very nice and in life we have to sacrifice to get to the good stuff. I tell him he’s right, he’s a good father, he’s a good driver. I get out of the car and I greet the dog and the security guards and I go inside and gulp loads of cold water. I’ve lost my appetite.

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~ by jule324 on August 25, 2010.