Junior’s face clouds. He nods slowly. Yes, he was. “The land became the sea.” He sways as if reliving the moment. He managed to escape. But it was crazy, crazy: the streets full of frantic people, the dust, the cries. As he talks, the crowd around us grows quiet. Even though Junior is speaking in English, people know that he is talking about goudou goudou, the onomatopoeic name that Haitians have given the earthquake, imitating the sound of the ground shaking, the buildings crumbling.
Junior must assume we’re missionaries or aid workers, because as he is leaving, he thanks us for coming to Haiti.
I feel embarrassed to be getting credit for something we’re not doing. By the same token, it seems coldhearted and not totally accurate to say we didn’t come here to help. “We just came to see,” I explain.
He looks me in the eye, and I’m bracing myself for a moral scolding. But what he says surprises me, “Haiti needs for people to see it.”
“It’s like our 9/11,” Bill remarks as we are finally leaving the pâtisserie, with three sandwiches and a half-eaten baguette (it arrived before the rest of the order). “Everyone wants to tell where they were when it happened.” Haiti’s earthquake, however, was such an overwhelming catastrophe; far more people died than even in the horrific earthquake and tsunami in Japan. But there is no need to compare tragedies; suffering is suffering, not any less intense if it’s experienced by fewer casualties.
Still when the suffering is on such a colossal scale, it feels as if the world is destroyed, not just your corner of it. Did Haiti, not just Haitians, die in the earthquake? It’s a wrenching question, which later I will come upon in Amy Wilentz’s introduction to a new edition of The Rainy Season: “Is Haiti still here? . . . How many people can die in one event without destroying national identity? . . . Is a country a map, as we reflexively believe? What happens, then, when that map is erased?”
God’s pencil has no eraser
We park across the street from the consulate, a two-story building that looks unscathed: no cracks on the walls, no pile of rubble in the yard. A Dominican flag droops on its pole on the roof. No need to keep waving chauvinistically above a destroyed city.
As we are disembarking, a black car pulls up to the entrance, and from its backseat emerges an officious woman in her thirties with a lot of attitude. You can tell—something cross about her expression, something big about her pocketbook, an extra umph in the slamming of the car door. I find myself hoping she does not work in the visa department.
The consulate personnel are busy as we enter. At a long counter, clerks are stamping visas in passports, stacking packets of them at one end. Business has been brisk: a lot of people wanting to go next door and wait out the devastation.
At a desk near the doorway, a young Dominican guy asks if he can help us.
“We’re here to see Ruth Castro,” I tell him. That’s the name Señor Ortiz gave me over the phone. Ruth Castro at the consulate would receive us and help us resolve the problem with Piti’s visa. “She’s expecting us,” I add, hoping to speed things up.
“You mean Ruffy Castor,” the young man corrects me. So much for passing ourselves off as people she knows.
The guy is now looking us over: me, Bill, and Piti. But then, his eyes land on Mikaela, and he is instantly, visibly smitten. Daniel introduces himself and eagerly plies us with questions. What are we doing in Haiti? When will we be returning to the DR? He himself is headed home to Santo Domingo for the weekend, this very afternoon. Any chance we can meet up, anywhere we say? Mikaela glances over at me, and I know we are thinking the same thing: Is this the opportune time to tell Daniel that the day after tomorrow, she will be on an early morning flight home to DC?
Just then, there’s a flurry of activity in the hallway: a woman is approaching, her progress impeded by petitioners needing a signature, an answer to a question, a problem solved. This must be Ruffy Castor, whom Daniel just buzzed. My heart sinks. It’s the very woman I was hoping would not be taking care of us! Even without a big pocketbook and an automobile’s door to bang shut, she still looks cross. Who knows what José Ortiz has told her about us.
“How can I help you?” Ruffy Castor asks, once we’ve introduced ourselves. Does she really not know? I’m wondering if José Ortiz did call her, after all.
Sheepishly, I explain that we need a visa for Piti. His old one, well, it expired a while ago. Again, I’m expecting a scolding, but Ruffy gets right to the point. “Let me see your passport,” she asks Piti. Quickly, she reviews it; asks if we want a new visa for three months or for a year; collects the two-hundred-dollar fee for the year visa; tucks it inside the passport; then hands the packet over to one of the clerks to take care of. “It will be a few minutes,” she explains. Meanwhile, she invites us to wait inside her office.
That’s all there is to it? We’re impressed. Give this woman a job running Marie Beliard!
We follow Ruffy down the hall and crowd into a minuscule office (so maybe she’s not as important as I thought) with two chairs crammed on the other side of her large and cluttered desk. Bill and I sit, while Piti and Mikaela stand behind us. Once we’re all packed in, Ruffy closes the door and turns on a rattling air conditioner—a little luxury, along with the chairs, she can offer us.
When we ask how long she has been in Haiti, Ruffy launches into her story about the earthquake. She was right here in her office; it was a little before five in the afternoon. She was already thinking of going home to her husband and her little six-month-old baby when the quake struck. She ran out on the street to find the world destroyed. All she could think of was her husband and child. Were they alive? Injured? She tried using her cell phone, but, of course, there was no reception. The anguish, the anguish she felt as she made her way home! It took her two hours on foot to reach her apartment, all the while passing scenes that kept stoking her terror. Thankfully, her husband and child were safe, her building still standing amid the surrounding rubble.
There is a knock on Ruffy’s door: Piti’s visa is ready. Bill asks Ruffy if there is anyone at the consulate we can hire to give us a tour of the city. It turns out there is a Haitian policeman assigned to the consulate, Leonard, whom she’d be happy to loan us. In parting, we exchange hugs. I recall my initial impression of Ruffy and wonder if I misjudged her, or if by listening to her story we gained access to a warmer, more caring person.
Before we proceed with Leonard to view the city, we stop at the Dominican embassy just a few blocks away. Ambassador Silié is currently at a conference in the Dominican Republic, but José Ortiz comes out of his office to greet us. A short, slender man with dark, expressive eyes, he is as gracious as Ruffy, though understandably a little wary at first. Every time we’ve been in touch in the past, it’s with problemas.
But this time, we come with good news: Piti’s visa issue has been resolved. And yes, we will be at the southern border crossing before five this afternoon.
I ask after his health. He looks to be in excellent shape, but since the earthquake, he has been very anxious, he explains. As he starts telling the story of that afternoon last January, his face tenses up. He was still at work when the earthquake struck, and although the embassy itself did not collapse, the next-door children’s hospital fell on the portion of the building in which his office was located. He was trapped inside, unharmed but not knowing if any minute, in an aftershock, the roof would cave in and crush him. It was like being buried alive, he explains. The worst part was hearing the children screaming for help, and not being able to do anything for them. He was finally rescued, but the experience keeps playing over and over in his head.
As we leave the embassy, we are quiet, sobered by José’s account. Months later, still preoccupied with the story he told us, I will e-mail him, asking if he knows what became of the children. Unfortunately, José does not. Instead, he paints another haunting scene: panicked parents racing to the hospital to dig out their children. A few were carried away on stretchers to the makeshift clinics springing up around the city. But wheth
er those made it, José cannot tell.
Inside the pickup, Leonard, our guide, begins recounting his own story. That January afternoon, he was standing at the gas station where he usually picks up his bus to go home at the end of the day. The first thing he heard was an eerie honking sound like an electric wire short-circuiting. Then he felt it: the earth undulating under his feet. He had to work hard to keep his balance. Leonard makes the honking sound over and over, so that finally I understand why people have named the earthquake goudou goudou.
“What would you like to see?” Leonard asks, after he finishes his story. We are on Pan American Avenue headed into downtown Port-au-Prince.
I have no idea what to ask for. In fact, I feel ashamed even making a selection. Let’s see. Which scene of destruction and suffering will it be? As if we were ordering lunch from a menu at the Oloffson.
Bill wants to see the presidential palace—the enormous white confection that collapsed, its three domes deflated. I’ve seen it over and over in news footage. Hard to feel unalloyed sadness about the destruction of a structure that has housed so many scoundrels and self-serving public officials. But it is also a poor nation’s proud monument. Tread softly, and throw away the big sticks.
The palace is a good choice. Leonard nods. Across from it there is a big tent city. As he directs us down to the city center, his cell phone rings. He is busy now, he tells the caller. But he can meet this person later. A journalist, he explains, once he gets off. Every time they come, they call him up. Back in January and February, there were many such calls, then they trickled off. But now again, with the six-month anniversary, the journalists are back. “I know what to show them,” Leonard says. “And I offer protection.” I’m reminded he is a policeman; his revolver sticks out at one hip from its holster. An armed Virgil in the ruined city.
We ride into the downtown area, full of ambivalence. To watch or not to watch. What is the respectful way to move through these scenes of devastation? We came to see, and according to Junior, Haiti needs to be seen. But something feels unsavory about visiting sites where people have suffered and are still suffering. You tell yourself you are here in solidarity. But at the end of the day, you add it up, and you still feel ashamed—at least I do. You haven’t improved a damn thing. Natural disaster tourism—that’s what it feels like.
But if that’s all it is, the media has already brought us here and back without ever having to leave our homes. Everything we see gives us a sense of déjà vu: the palace crumpled as if a giant sat down on its roof; the tent cities where people are packed together in squalor with no place left to go; the children staring out listlessly from under tarps; women bathing themselves in the open, bathing their children, washing clothes, cooking on the sidewalk, stirring a row of steaming pots, smoke rising.
So what is it that the eye is seeking and the heart is aching for?
A flicker of wings, a thing that whispers hope. From a sidewalk wall hangs a red evening gown for sale. Incredible to think: there will be partying again! A boy in his school uniform walks by, holding the straps of his backpack. The very ordinariness of the moment seems a blessing.
On another sidewalk, an impromptu bookstore is spread out on top of a pile of rubble. The pickings are slim: Bantu Philosophy, a biography of Walt Disney, 150 Popular College Majors. This, too, seems incredible: there will be reading again! College students will again be studying popular subjects, with a rare one reading up on Disney or the Bantus.
In front of a padlocked storefront, two young women are selling bouquets of plastic roses, blue and white, red and orange, wrapped in plastic. Somebody will buy them for a sweetheart’s birthday, for a godchild’s baptism, for a church altar. There will be occasions requiring floral punctuation again.
It’s almost noon: a girls’ school is letting out. The future women of Haiti pour out onto the streets, dressed in skirts of that beautiful sky-blue color and yellow blouses, with yellow bows in their hair. Mothers are again tying ribbons in their daughters’ hair.
Meanwhile the tap-taps go by, urging us to love God, to love each other, to be thankful, to thank our mothers, to remember that all is possible. It seems a small miracle that we can still say these things to each other here.
There is a Kreyòl saying: God’s pencil has no eraser. I’ve always understood the saying to mean that God doesn’t need to erase. He makes no mistakes; his creation is perfect. But I now understand that saying in a more fatalistic way. There is no erasing or escaping the relentless march of events. And when that march tramples your loved ones or plays havoc in your part of the world (whether Haiti, Chile, New Zealand, Japan, or our own USA), you do what you have to do: you mourn, you bury your dead, you get up the next day and cook for the ones who are left, braid hair, sing songs, tell stories. Somehow you get through. As for the rest of us, we look; we listen; we try to help—even when it seems there is nothing we can do.
The one thing we cannot do is turn away. For our humanity also does not have the eraser option. When we have seen a thing, we have an obligation. To see and to allow ourselves to be transformed by what we have seen.
Later, I will ask Bill why he wanted to see Port-au-Prince. Didn’t he feel a little like a motorist who stops to gawk at an accident? “I would have if I was just going there for myself. But now we have Piti. It was important for him to see it and for us to be with him when he did.” (Yes, reader, this is the same guy who had to sleep at the Oloffson. I sometimes seem to forget: you get all the parts when you love a whole person.)
Periodically, as we drive around, I turn to check on Piti and Mikaela. Both are big-eyed, subdued by the magnitude of the devastation. Piti’s face is that of the grave old man who seems to be showing up more often lately. But every once in a while, when I point out the red evening gown, when I tease that one day one of those young schoolgirls in uniform with yellow ribbons will be Ludy, his face lights up, the face of that grinning boy of long ago with a homemade kite he was getting ready to fly.
He, too, is being transformed by what he is seeing. In the months following this trip to Port-au-Prince, Piti will reactivate a support group Eli helped found for Haitians working at Alta Gracia and on surrounding farms. Piti will name it CJM, Cooperative des Jeunes de Moustique, Young People of Moustique Cooperative, and redefine its mission from one of just helping each other, to one of working toward the future of Haiti. The cooperative will elect Piti president. From laborer to capataz to president of CJM. God’s blessings are raining down on him, as Piti tells me, for a reason. What that is, he hopes to find out.
But one thing he does know: Haiti is not erased. It is alive in his imagination and in ours. Haiti is what cannot be erased in a human being, not with slavery, not with centuries of exploitation and bad management, invasions, earthquakes, hurricanes, cholera. It embodies those undervalued but increasingly valuable skills we will need to survive on this slowly depleting planet: endurance, how to live with less, how to save by sharing, how to make a pact with hope when you find yourself in hell. The poet Philip Booth once wrote, “How you get there is where you’ll arrive.” How we respond to Haiti is perhaps more critical than we imagine: a preview of where we are likely to end up as a human family.
One last critical survival skill
After two hours of driving around, Leonard directs us to the road that will lead us out of the city to the border. He himself will get out here and take a motorcycle taxi to his meeting with the journalist.
How can he bear to do this again? Leonard shrugs. Actually, he is grateful to God for the extra income he is earning. He has been able to help his extended family and friends rebuild their lives. There is money to be made in the ruined city—not just in high-end hotels and restaurants. And not all of this money ends up lining a full pocket. Some of it helps fill an empty stomach.
As we drive away from the city center, I remind Bill about lunch. “You know, at the Oloffson?” I say it matter-of-factly. All grievance has washed out of me. What is left is a great, familiar
tiredness at the ways we keep failing each other.
“I’m not hungry,” Bill murmurs. He, too, feels chastened, I can tell.
The road to the border is a breeze. It’s the main artery between the two countries; the one politicos use when they are deposed and the Toussaint L’Ouverture Airport is closed; the road that big transport trucks travel, bringing in supplies from the Dominican Republic and taking back undocumented Haitian workers; the road that four weary, heavyhearted travelers are now on, headed home, all of us too overcome to have much to talk about.
As we are leaving Haiti, I look out my window, and there, beside an excavated mountainside, two stone slabs rise out of a pile of rubble like hands steepled together in prayer. Haiti is still speaking to me. I had forgotten our conversation.
By the time we cross the border, evening is coming on. It’s a long drive north to Santiago from this southern entry point, so we decide to spend the night at a small seaside hotel. At supper, Bill asks Piti if he’ll play some songs for us and the other patrons at the restaurant. We’re all feeling raw after the day in Port-au-Prince, hoping for a repeat of the magical night in Moustique.
But it doesn’t happen, which surprises me. You’d think Piti’s gospel songs would appeal to the group of eighteen missionaries sitting at a long table in the middle of the restaurant. They’ve just arrived from a small town in Georgia to repair a church on the border they built six years ago. Not one turns his chair around. Not one sings along. Not one gets up to dance.
If not here, I find myself hoping, let it be happening back in Haiti. Let there be another free concert going on outside one of the tent cities. Let someone wear that red dress and dance to the sounds of a famous band, maybe RAM. Let there be singing and dancing again, even if it keeps someone awake all night or causes a fight.
Back in our room, Bill and I get ready for bed. Through the open window, we can hear the waves crashing on the cliffs, a sound that always makes me think of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” a poem I so loved in college I learned it by heart and can still recite it. In the poem, a man is listening to the ocean at night, and a wave of despair washes over him. All he can hear in its grating roar is “the ebb and flow of human misery.” The world seems a darkling plain without joy or certitude or help of pain. In the final lines, overcome by an apocalyptic vision, which has to be one of the bleakest in English poetry, he calls his beloved to the window. “Ah love, let us be true to one another,” he begs her. That much they can posit together.