Externally, rapaciousness was also the rule. Most pernicious were the loans made at such exorbitant terms that the country’s financial hole just kept getting deeper and deeper. Two foreign occupations by our own United States, as well as dictatorships and military coups, often supported by the United States. Our fingerprints are all over the bruised body of Haiti.
Baby Doc was finally sent packing in 1986. From the ranks of the poor emerged a then Catholic priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, preaching the gospel of liberation theology. His wildly popular grassroots movement swept him into power in 1991, and then again in 2004. It seemed that Haiti would at last reconnect with her original revolutionary ideals and nationhood goals. But alas, both times, Aristide was ousted by coups that even by conservative analysis had the tacit approval if not outright help of the United States.
As for Aristide himself, opinions vary confusedly: from Haitians who championed him as “our modern Toussaint L’Ouverture” to Piti’s negative assessment: “He did nothing for us; we only got poorer, and there was more violence because of the arming of the population.” What is clear to supporters and detractors alike is that Aristide was the legitimately elected president of Haiti, and his populist agenda represented a threat to local and international beneficiaries of the old order.
It’s as if Haiti’s historical and political legacy were now operating on automatic, a juggernaut hurtling forward, running over the poor, the deforested countryside, the depleted economy, the disrupted nation. Add to this man-made legacy, the slings and arrows of climate and geography, including hurricanes, floods, and yes, earthquakes—though none so bad as this recent one—the wonder is that the Haitian people have survived with pride and soul intact.
That should give us pause. Notwithstanding a whole pack of wolves on both sides of her door, Haiti keeps bouncing back. After the world ends and the dust settles, heart broken, body bruised and maimed, Haiti stirs. Her spirit rallies, like that woman pulled out of the rubble after I don’t know how many days, weak and lying on a stretcher, white with dust, seemingly a corpse, except that she was singing. She was singing!
It’s as if Haiti has made a pact—with hope.
February 2010, a party and a plan
In early February, three weeks after the earthquake, Bill and I are back in the Dominican Republic. I’ve stayed in regular contact with Piti by phone, and through him have kept abreast of how our Haitian friends are faring. Everyone is still reeling with shock from the disaster. Some have returned to Haiti, hoping that the reconstruction will mean jobs. But so far, no one has had any luck, since, of course, the rebuilding will not be taking place in the countryside but in the capital city, which is already packed with desperate people wanting to work.
In our own Dominican countryside, jobs are scarce. A sparse coffee harvest, a bad economy. Pablo is out of work, so we hire him for odd jobs that Piti could easily do by himself. Leonardo is off to the cane fields near La Romana, where the work is grueling. Six days cutting cane, whose sharp stalks are like knives, so that at the end of the day, his arms are full of the equivalent of little paper cuts. All this under the sweltering lowland sun. It’s hard to imagine the smirking Leonardo, who didn’t want to get his clothes dirty by taking his turn riding in the back of the pickup, taking on this kind of job.
“Things are very difficult,” Piti admits with a sigh. It is now his habitual mode of verbal punctuation instead of the giggles of the past. The boy has become a man, a heavyhearted one.
In an attempt to raise everyone’s spirits, Bill and I decide to throw a party for our Haitian friends. We’ll prepare a meal, featuring a Haitian favorite, goat. Afterward, we’ll have music provided by Piti and friends.
We propose the idea to Piti. What does he think?
He giggles in reply.
And so it is that a month after the earthquake, almost to the day, we are partying in the little house. It’s the first time I’ve seen Eseline smiling since we arrived. She has been sullen, shaking her head whenever I ask what’s wrong, using a few phrases I’ve learned in Kreyòl. But tonight, she is in her element, partying like the girl she still is. All the young Haitian men want to dance with her. I can see what Eli meant. But Piti seems unperturbed as he sings away. Thank goodness he is not a jealous man.
The party turns out to be just what everyone needs. I recall a friend guiltily confessing how after her mother’s funeral, while a reception was going on downstairs, she and her boyfriend went upstairs and made love. She felt awful about it, but also strangely comforted. Death would not have the final word.
In the days after the party, Piti talks a little more about his own situation. Eseline has not been doing well. Mal estar, a generalized bad feeling. They did follow my advice and go to the clinic and ask for help with family planning. “So, maybe it’s the birth control pills,” I wager. Piti thought so, too, and he spoke to la doctora, who has prescribed another pill.
Over the next few months, we keep in touch with Piti by phone from Vermont. Eseline isn’t getting any better. Some days she just stays in bed. But the doctors keep sending her home with a clean bill of health and another bottle of expensive vitamins. Piti doesn’t know what to do except take Eseline back to Haiti. Her family has some old country cures that might work on her mal estar.
When I get off the phone, Bill gives me his diagnosis. Eseline is homesick. “It’s been a tough few months. Lots of new things to get used to. And now the earthquake.”
And so we decide to take Piti and Eseline and Ludy back to Moustique, spend a few days there, then return with Piti while Eseline stays on with the baby, recuperating.
Okay, I admit it. In this vaudeville act of who did what when and how did we get into this fix, I am the one who comes up with the idea. After last summer’s arduous trip, we had both said that we were getting too old for that kind of travel adventure anymore. But these are special circumstances. Piti and Eseline are going through hard times. We are godparents of their marriage. We promised to help them out when they hit rough spots as a couple.
“You’re kidding, right?” Bill exaggerates his shock. I don’t know if he is more astonished by the idea of a return trip to Haiti or by his cautious wife suggesting it.
“I’m not kidding. I’m going, and you can come if you want.” Fat chance I’ll drive a big four-wheel-drive pickup twelve hours into the interior of Haiti on bad roads. And I suspect that some of those cliff-hanging paths are now impassable, piled high with boulders, if not completely destroyed by the earthquake, crumbling off the mountainside and tumbling into the ravines below. Or waiting until I drive by in our pickup to do so.
“You’re not going to Haiti without me!” Bill declares, just the lines I would have written for him if this were a vaudeville act.
But the trip will have to wait until we return in the summer, which is actually a good thing, as it’ll give us the chance to plan. We want to do everything aboveboard this time, with all the right papers and supplies we need. No more trafficking with undocumented human beings and their babies. We’ll stock up with supplies and also bring along gifts of food and clothes for both families.
Bill adds a side trip to our plan. If we are going to go to the trouble of driving all the way to Moustique again, then we should definitely come back via Port-au-Prince. “We should see it. Piti should see it.” I should have known. Anything I come up with, Bill takes it and runs with it. It’s how my writing an article about small, endangered coffee farms morphed into our owning one.
Complications
I guess it would be asking too much to have a plan go off without complication. In our intensely social, intricately interconnected, so-called Third World countries, the best-laid plans will most certainly be subject to revision, mostly the revision of addition. That is, if you plan a trip for just four of you (Bill, Piti, Eseline, me) and a baby, before you know it, there will be seven of you and a baby, and at one point during the trip, there will be eight of you, a baby, and an iron double-bed frame, which a
young Haitian man had been carrying home to his new bride five kilometers away in the rain. If you have a heart and live in Haiti, or in the Dominican Republic, for that matter, your life is going to be complicated.
Actually, even if you don’t have a heart, and live safely and separately and sumptuously, your life will get complicated in another direction. For example, the next time there’s a revolution, your big mansion, your late-model Mercedes, and your kids with expensive First World educations will be targeted. As our yoga teacher often reminds us, when we’re straining to hold our downward-dog pose, “There are two kinds of pain. The pain of doing yoga. And the pain of not doing yoga.” Life is going to be complicated no matter what, so you might as well open the door and invite it into your house, or your pickup, as the case may be. Besides, someday, when you have to carry your double bed on your back, someone you once helped might give you a lift. It’s the basic investment plan of the poor: save what you have by sharing it.
In addition to Bill and me, Piti, Eseline, and the baby, three more passengers join us at the last minute. The first of these is Charlie, in whose house we stayed last year in Moustique—so how can we refuse him? Charlie has been working in the Dominican Republic since last fall, but he needs to go home to attend to some business. At first he won’t say what that business is, but it’s a long car trip, twelve hours to his house, time to talk, and Charlie does speak a little English. We find out that he is in love. What’s more, he’s in love with Rozla, Eseline’s sister, the very one who broke down weeping on the roadside last year when we whisked her older sister away to la République. With Piti’s help, Charlie is going to make a formal declaration to her parents. This is wonderful news. Imagine! If Charlie marries Rozla and brings her to the DR, the two sisters can live close to each other. I see another wedding trip to Haiti looming in the crystal ball of the future.
Our second additional passenger is Piti’s half brother, a quiet, mournful-eyed young man named Wilson (not to be confused with Willy, Piti’s full brother). Wilson brings along a small bag, several sacks of staples, and a large bottle of Clorox for his mother. I’m with Leonardo on this one. A box of spaghetti makes a lot more sense.
The third last-minute passenger joins us on my invitation. Our summer volunteer, Mikaela, has just completed a month-long stay on the farm and is headed home to DC. During our farewell dinner in Santiago at my parents’ house, Mikaela listens eagerly to our preparations for Haiti. I ask if she’s ever been.
“It’s the one thing I wish I’d gotten to do while I was here,” she answers wistfully.
“So, why don’t you come along?” I offer, the kind of tossed-off remark you never think someone will take you up on. Mikaela has already told us that her close-knit Italian-Irish family has missed her terribly; her two younger sisters have been counting the days until she returns; they’re probably already camping out at Dulles Airport.
“Really? Can I go?” Mikaela’s face is ablaze with excitement.
My heart sinks. How on earth are we going to fit all seven of us and all our stuff in the pickup? Last year we carried five passengers, six when Pablo joined us later in the trip, and the back was not piled with as many gifts and supplies. But there’s no way I am going to lock the door on this lovely complication. (Sometimes it takes me a little longer to sign up for the saving-by-sharing investment plan.)
And this will turn out to be one of the best investments I could have made. Mikaela will prove to be a calm presence as problems begin to arise on this trip. (Later, we will tease Homero and Eli that they got off easy: our first trip was a piece of cake by comparison.) What’s more, for five glorious days in Haiti, no one feels sorry for me and expresses their condolences that I don’t have my own children. (I consider myself lucky to have two tall, blonde, beautiful stepdaughters, but I’ve never been able to pass them off as my own.) Everyone instantly assumes Mikaela is our daughter: Bill’s blue eyes, my small size and curly hair. It’s as if finally, at sixty, I’ve become a card-carrying member of the human-bearing race. I get totally hooked on having a daughter. Had I known it was this easy, I would have had a dozen of them.
As for our four former passengers, veterans of last year’s trip: Leonardo is off working in the cane fields. Pablo is flat broke and really needing to get serious about finding work. Meanwhile, Eli is back in the States, getting ready to attend NYU law school in the fall.
Finally, there’s Homero, who’s still undecided whether to come along. (Where, oh where, will we put him if he says yes now?) It turns out Homero’s life has gotten, well, complicated. In a word, Homero and his wife are divorcing. The wanderlusty bon vivant has won out over the family man. I worry that our trip last summer might have tipped the balance, but Homero assures me that the marriage was already in trouble.
Homero is tempted to take off for a week to return to Haiti with us. As much as I’d love to have him along—because who will get us out of any tight spots, which I imagine will be even tighter now in post-earthquake Haiti—still, I am relieved when good sense prevails, and Homero decides to stay home. He needs to spend time with his three young sons, whose fairy-tale world has come crashing down.
“He whose uncle is the mayor”
Since we’re trying to do everything legally this time around, we soon encounter the maddening complications of bureaucracy. What exactly do we need to legally cross the border in our own vehicle with Haitian passengers?
I spend a day searching the Web for information, with no luck. Finally, I turn to our problem-solver, Homero, who contacts a reliable source who maps out a process so convoluted, we would have to spend the week of our trip just getting the stamps and seals we need to take our pickup into Haiti.
Besides the bribery route, which we’ve vetoed taking again, and the bureaucratic route, which would gobble up all our time, there is actually a third way to get things done in our little countries: appealing to a well-placed someone you know. So common is the practice that there is a popular Dominican saying, “He whose uncle is the mayor never has to go to jail.”
Bill contacts a friend in the capital who has been in the diplomatic corps. As luck would have it, this friend is good friends with the current Dominican ambassador in Haiti. Our friend cc’s us on an e-mail to the ambassador asking if he’ll help us out. Embajador Rubén Silié answers unbelievably promptly for a Dominican bureaucrat having to deal with communications problems in post-earthquake Port-au-Prince. He addresses me as “Esteemed Julia Alvarez,” and turns me over to his assistant, the ministro consejero, Señor José Ortiz, who will handle everything at their end. I scan the documents Señor Ortiz requests and send them on: Bill’s passport, mine, and the registration of the pickup. I wait till the fourth or fifth e-mail to ask Señor Ortiz about our Haitian friends. Can they come along? A month goes by, and it’s soon mid-May, and I haven’t heard back from Señor Ortiz.
I send several increasingly nudging e-mails. The subject lines speak for themselves. In late May: Taking our pickup & friends to Haiti; in early June: Please let us know; in mid June: We’d appreciate hearing from you; in late June: Traveling soon—please inform us; in early July: Nothing from your end—do we just appear at the border? It won’t be until we are already in Santiago, the Saturday before our scheduled departure to Haiti early Monday morning, when we’ve already resigned ourselves to taking the under-the-table route, that I get a call from the beleaguered Señor Ortiz.
He has gotten my many e-mails, but he has been in the Dominican Republic seeing his doctors regarding high blood pressure resulting from the earthquake.
“I’m so sorry, Señor Ortiz.” And I am: pestering a man who has survived the end of the world. “It’s just we didn’t know what to do.”
“I said I would handle everything,” Señor Ortiz reminds me. And he has. The consuls from both countries at the border have been notified of my coming. He will e-mail me their names. I am to ask for these dignitaries when I arrive.
“So we’re all set with the pickup?”
>
Señor Ortiz sighs. “Our consuls at the border will take care of any paperwork.”
I hesitate, wondering if I should bring up our Haitian friends again. But I can tell Señor Ortiz has had enough of me. Besides, Eseline, Charlie, and Wilson will all be staying on after we depart. Only Piti will be returning with us, and he does have his passport, though his visa has expired. But since it sounds as if I’ll be traveling semiofficially, maybe my retinue will be exonerated from the usual restrictions. Here’s hoping.
There is one more thing. The consuls have advised Señor Ortiz that we not travel on Monday, or for that matter on Friday. Both are market days at the border, and the crowds make the roads impassable.
No way I’m going to tell Señor Ortiz that we know all about market days, how handy they are for transporting undocumented Haitians across the border. “We don’t mind at all, Señor Ortiz. It’ll give us the opportunity to experience a Haitian-Dominican market day.” The minute I’ve said it, I feel chagrined at my bold-faced lie. At our monthly sangha gatherings, my yoga teacher has us read the five mindfulness trainings, and the one that always trips me up is the one that goes, “I am determined to engage in right speech, to speak truthfully . . . and not to spread news that I do not know to be certain.” Recently, every time I find myself inside a fib of my own making, a little spiritual red light comes on in my mind. I suppose I’ve made progress, as I used to lie outright and not think a thing about it.