white girl driving

When I started this page I was seeking a place to share the adventure and revelations I was experiencing every day in Haiti. I have memories of exciting times in Haiti spanning more than ten years now. I wanted to write about what was happening day-to-day as I was living full-time in Haiti, but I also wanted to go back and retell the stories of things I had already lived through, lessons I had already learned. Haiti has so many lessons to teach, and growing up while going back and forth to Haiti has meant learning lessons the hard way much of the time.

Then a month and a year ago I stopped writing on this site. Before I had seen myself as a worthy narrator of life in Haiti, and I thought I was telling stories that incorporated my point of view but not to the point where the personal overwhelmed what was really interesting in the stories. It was my attempt to be a portal, to tell you what I was seeing, experiencing and feeling in way that you might be able to relate to yourself.

When I got pregnant I was sick and too many details of life in Haiti exacerbated my sickness. I couldn’t keep rice down, it was always too hot, I was losing weight when I should have been gaining. Joe and I made the huge decision to move back to the US for the duration of the pregnancy and until the baby was ready to go down to Haiti.

Back in the US! Was the great experiment abandoned? There was a time, a span of months in fact, when I couldn’t fathom going back to Haiti. I didn’t even want to contemplate it; I didn’t want to imagine myself there. Would I ever feel longing for Haiti again? Would these feelings pass when I was no longer sick, no longer sleep-deprived? Or was Haiti lost to me forever?

And a bigger, stranger, more complicated question loomed in my mind. What is the basis of my connection to Haiti? Honestly, I had never been anything less than obsessed with all things Haiti. And now, to be pregnant and bringing a child into the world – suddenly my life had meaning with or without Haiti. It forced me to contemplate just what it was that had drawn me there in the first place, why it had become so defining in my life, and what it all had to say about me.

I am not ready to write that story yet, to get into it with myself enough to get into with you. I don’t know if I ever will. But merely articulating the question was enough to unsettle me, to leave me with nothing to say, and certainly nothing to say on this blog. But here I am, and now I have a son. Another child of Haiti, a golden boy. It took months even after he was born for me to begin to dream of Haiti again, the blue and green sea, the coconut trees, the dramatic and barren mountains. Now that Haiti has returned to my spirit I am feeling stronger and more able to turn over and look upon the new truths this life-changing event has brought out into the open. And as I step back towards the glare of tropical sun I will try to bring some of my thoughts back out onto this page. Don’t be surprised if I wander away from where I started for a while or even forever. It’s not the end of the world, just a bend in the path.

At least that’s what I keep telling myself.

april 2, 2007

It’s interesting the way the mind works. Sometimes in a dream I walk into a house I’ve been in before, or maybe it’s all the houses I’ve ever been in before. I have a familiar feeling, so strong it grips my chest and I feel the tightness spread throughout my body. I wake up with this feeling, with a scent or a taste, with a dry mouth and cold fingers.

Today is eighteen years to the day since my father died. Like all the unforgettable experiences in life, my mind has preserved strange details. Some relevant, some trivial, but all seared into memory. The cat underfoot, the sound of the shower through the bathroom wall, the silence that followed the heart attack.

This morning my son woke me by crying out in his sleep. I pulled myself out of a dream, clinging to the smell of the wood burning stove my father used to have in his basement. Without thinking about the significance of the date I began my Monday morning routines. It was only hours later when I opened my window and felt the warm spring air on my face, the lingering scent of fires burning somewhere in the distance, that I realized that time of year had come again. And I thought how sensible it is to mark time this way: the life cut short, the spring come early.

it is a truly gorgeous day, just three days before elections are supposed to happen. it is sunny, about 85 and the wind is blowing in off the ocean in gusts, making the wind chime sing. ooo, it is just so gorgeous, and so hard to reconcile with all that’s going on in haiti. i suppose i feel this way most of the time, and i am constantly trying to reconcile. i’m not trying to adapt anymore - adaptation becomes second nature in haiti. if you cannot accomplish that you just won’t make it here. the elections have filled the country with tension, unavoidable stress that underlines everything that you do in a normal day. its because the elections mark the demarcation between what we know and what we don’t know - the black hole of our future here is february 7, 2006. it sounds dramatic, but really, i’m not making it more dramatic than it is. it is serious, this not knowing what will come next in your life. a few days ago joe was saying, “this could be the last weekend of carnival” acknowledging that a bad outcome on tuesday could close the country down in a lot of ways. that is, if things go bad they will go terribly bad. now this weekend’s carnival has been cancelled, along with sale of alcohol and school for the next week. american airlines has cancelled flights to and from haiti on monday and tuesday.

and it is serious that things could change and our lives could be completely different in a week. we’re hesitating now, the whole country is holding its breath to see what will happen. at the same time everyone is getting up everyday and doing, doing whatever they do to make it. jacmel police announced a respite, that the bands will be allowed to go out tonight, and people will dance in the street, fearless and accustomed to not knowing, the unpredictability. as i said, adaptation is the particular art of the haitian. elections in the US change the lives of americans, too, but you don’t have to run or hide or any of that. you don’t worry about losing everything one moment to the next. haitians know this well. their situation may inspire them to flee, but they have no where to go. life just goes on regardless of how shitty it may get.

and so it is a sinfully gorgeous day - sinful in the sense that you feel guilty for enjoying it so much. we talk in the morning about contingency plans and i spend the day scanning the news for a prediction that sounds believable. it could go either way really. people in our village are being sent into the mountains to vote, and this is typical of most of the country. people are being sent to places that are too far to get to by foot, yet there are no cars allowed on the road on election day, especially public transportation. so preval could win, he could still win and things could stay as they are now. or enough of the population could be discouraged from voting, and the second-up, charlito, could win. in which case the slums of port-au-prince would likely erupt. that is the scenario that american airlines is worried about, isn’t it? the explosion in port-au-prince, the all-out war. what could inspire such violence other than a preval defeat?

it’s a mistake i make all the time, running through the possibilities and trying to see what the powerful are preparing for, what the rich of this country are expecting to happen. what would benefit the private sector most right now? i ask myself the question every morning, for three more mornings until elections. the electoral council has suggested that results of the elections will be available in only three days, which is laughable considering it took weeks in may 2000 and there are at least as many if not more seats being contested on tuesday. will the elections happen, be accepted, and the country just proceed on to carnival? will the city become more violent, more impossible, more insecure? can the private sector afford to not have a carnival this year?

twop kesyon, san repons. too many questions, without answer. it makes more sense to enjoy the weather, to adapt to this aspect of life in haiti, too. we don’t know what will happen so we just do, do whatever it is we do to make it.

(a piece I wrote for the Quixote Center about our trip to Gros Morne last week)

It was seven years ago when I first visited the village of Gros Morne for the Quixote Center. The tree nursery was a recently renovated pig-sty and the gardens were only partially cultivated at the Jean Marie Vincent Training Center, where the rooms were too dusky and damp to accept guests. The center of town was on the verge of washing away due to a cliff created by the steady annual rise and fall of the Mancelle River. The mountaintop fondly known as Tèt Mòn was a rocky, barren hillside where tiny ankle-high tree seedlings were struggling in the hot Caribbean sun.

The village of Gros Morne, like almost every community across Haiti, was confronting environmental problems in 1999 for which no one was prepared. People most affected by the urgent cliff situation and leaders of the community came together to find a solution and soon realized that if they wanted to solve the problem of erosion from one river, they would have to confront a problem plaguing more than just their town. To really change the desperate environmental problems, they were going to have to fight the devastation of the environment in their entire region.

The drive from Haiti’s capital to Gros Morne gives a visitor a good sense of the variety of the country. In the coastal region the villages sprawl out across the dusty, flat lands between ocean and mountain. In the Artibonite Valley the rice fields almost glow with vibrant green. In the aptly named Desolate Savannah the water of the Artibonite dries in the scorching sun and rice paddies are replaced by a dusty desert.

The village of Hatte-Granmont lies on the frontier between the valley and the savannah. On one side of the road you can see rice and irrigation canals stretching towards the distant horizon. On the other side mountains rise, dotted with cacti, barren of trees. There are some trees in the village, here and there along the road beside a house. But these trees only serve to emphasize how few trees there are in Hatte-Granmont. The most dangerous element for the villagers is water, because treeless ravines become rivers and cliffs become waterfalls when it rains.

I visited Gros Morne in January, stopping in Hatte-Granmont on the way to bring a young environmental activist, Samuel Dorvilus, along to visit the projects at the Jean Marie Vincent Training Center. Today Gros Morne is a center of environmental work with several successful projects, and it is a place of hope for communities throughout the region. The Montfortan Fathers and Sister Pat Dillon, a community organizer in Gros Morne, have guided the project as it has experimented and expanded, training people from throughout the area and working to affect the entire watershed area.

We stayed at the Jean Marie Vincent Training Center, where peasants come for training programs on compost, seed selection and preservation, natural insecticides and more. The Center has an enormous garden where various irrigation techniques are being tested, and boasts the largest compost in the community. Seven agronomy technicians are working with the Center to provide training and to maintain the large tree nursery there.

The highlight of any trip to Gros Morne is a hike into the Tèt Mòn Forest. This time I walked along the eroding national highway to the foot of the mountain, photographing the cliffs and holes. Walking into the forest now feels like you are truly walking into the woods – the trees are tall and there are so many that the quality of the air is actually different. Inside the forest the paths twist through different seasons of seedlings, more fruit trees here, more fir trees there. Control channels cross the path, cutting horizontally through the trees to promote soil conservation.

We visited the Maureeen Nielsen Forest on Tèt Mòn. Two parts of the hillside have been planted in her honor, one through the Quixote Center with funding from her parish community in Rochester, Spiritus Christi, and another with the support of the Haiti Solidarity Network of the Northeast. At the top of the mountain we came across a group of workers breaking new ground to replant some trees that hadn’t made it through the dry season. In the sitting area we saw some visitors to the Forest, enjoying the shade and the breeze as they prayed.

The Forest has become a symbol in a region of deforested mountaintops and villages plagued by flooding and mudslides. Seeing what has been accomplished in so little time is an inspiration – a concrete success in the effort to build a greener Haiti.

In Fon Imbo, just outside the gates to Gros Morne, a second tree nursery is producing mango seedlings for peasants who participate in training programs. Driving from the Center in Grepin to other side of town you can appreciate the unprecedented success of the neighborhood tree-planting project. Along several main streets trees are growing at intervals along the road, protected by small fences to keep out hungry goats.

At the John the 23rd High School two more projects are underway, testing different kinds of living hedges, control channels and irrigation techniques. Different edible trees and plants are used to help conserve soil and improve nutrition, like the tasty chaya, which is prepared like spinach but has more calcium and iron.

Before the afternoon light is gone we visit two more sites. One is the youth group’s property, where work has been done to build dry walls in large ravines and some trees are already being planted. This youth group has persevered even in the face of intimidation, and has rebuilt the pillars and fencing that was destroyed a few years ago. The second and final visit is to an area of the village that is in grave danger during rainy season because of its deep ravines. Gros Morne is not a prosperous town, and the people in this neighborhood are struggling to survive. Children group around us to gawk and giggle as we discuss the imminent danger their environment poses to them.

This visit to Gros Morne felt like a turning point to me. As I said before, the project in Gros Morne may be experiencing unprecedented success, but it is not a unique project. In villages throughout the country groups of affected people and community leaders have created organizations and initiatives to tackle the two intertwined challenges that rule their lives: poverty and the environment. Continuing poverty drives peasants to destroy the environment, just as the erosion of the environment deepens poverty. Gros Morne is a shining example of a project that is taking into account all the sources of the environmental problem. From studying the watershed and working to build greenbelts upstream, to researching what kinds of trees can retain soil and improve nutrition, the Jean Marie Vincent project is working for a holistic solution.

Samuel went back to Hatte-Granmont when I left Gros Morne, but he has already returned for more training. We left with Gros Morne seedlings in our car, mango trees to plant in other parts of the country. The trip was a turning point on a personal level because it was the first time I could take my own mango tree home to plant in my corner of Haiti. On a much larger level, Gros Morne marks the turning point in this work we do for Haiti’s environment. Some say that seven years is the cycle. This year wide-reaching alliances are being built to take control of a crisis that has been escalating for decades. Experts from the Greenbelt Movement will visit Haiti this Spring, and new training materials are being designed for FONKOZE that will be shared throughout the country, and connecting Hatte-Granmont and Gros Morne was a groundbreaking moment in a national networking initiative for the environment.

On Monday there was a strike in Port-au-Prince and Jacmel. In town the protesters chanted:

“Nou pa bezwen MINUSTAH! Nou sivilize!”

We don’t need MINUSTAH (the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti)! We are civilized!

The strike was a classic employers strike. Called by the president of the Haitian Chamber of Commerce, Reginald Boulos, it was seconded by leaders of the Group of 184 (a political party dominated by the private sector) and presidential candidate Charlito Baker. All public transportation was halted in both cities, factories and shops and markets were closed. Although the strike was hardly followed in other parts of Haiti, these two cities were standing still. In Jacmel the expectations were so high for the strike that we were granted electricity for the entire day, an event usually reserved for Sundays and holidays.

Jacmel is a happy town in a prosperous region. That’s why we enjoy such peace and security compared to the capital. There are many elite families with huge homes here, and a lot of businesses in the city itself. Charlito is running second in the polls, not far behind Preval, and at our local imported food market the grocery bags have his smirking face on them. Jacmel is already in the carnival spirit, with walking bands and mardi gras out on the weekends. The presence of the MINUSTAH here is quite different than elsewhere in the country, too. Before troops were cut back from the region, you were most likely to run into soldiers at the beach or the internet cafe. Now you don’t see them much at all.

The strike was called to pressure the MINUSTAH to bring some stability and security to the capital. Kidnappings have been as many as twenty a day since the beginning of the new year, and now they have spread to areas of the city that were formerly safer zones. The UN is going to have to increase its no-go zone, which was the area just around Cite Soleil and a few other hot spots, to include the up-scale neighborhoods of Petionville and Pacot, where kidnappings are now daily occurrences.

These kidnappings are not political in nature. They are strictly a for-profit affair. There are a lot of theories and rumors about who is involved. Here is a sampling:
- Members of the former army who had maintained a relationship with the citizens of Petionville (getting paid to “protect” them) are now in charge of a kidnapping ring in that zone.
- There are approximately thirty independent gangs operating out of Cite Soleil now, and they are kidnapping for cash to buy weapons.
- Jordanian peacekeepers with MINUSTAH who have been stationed in Cite Soleil and have presided over its deterioration, are also part of the kidnappings. One victims claims he stumbled out of his captors’ grasp and to a UN checkpoint, but soldier simply returned him to captivity.

A fact, rather than a rumor, is that the MINUSTAH soldiers are shooting a hell of a lot of innocent civilians in Cite Soleil. A three-day period of shoddy peacekeeping has resulted in as many as 24 victims.

Let’s see some numbers:
Victims of kidnapping each day = 20
Victims of MINUSTAH shootings each day = 8

People in Port-au-Prince aren’t doing too well. Every family I know has been directly affected by kidnapping, rape, murder or other random violence. Everyone is depressed, the mood is negative, nothing ever gets better – it only gets worse. The atmosphere is suffocating, tense, frightened, resigned, helpless. The strike was called to pressure the MINUSTAH to do more. In particular, the business community has repeatedly asked the Mission to take care of the Cite Soleil problem.

The roads were clear, free of cars on Monday, a phenomenon we call “lari a blanch”. It’s creepy to see such an overpopulated city look so empty. Empty like the stomachs of most of its residents that night. The employers can call a successful strike because people in the capital are so terrorized right now they wouldn’t dream of violating it. The consequences could easily be death, and one more day without food is nothing new to most of the population. Residents of Jacmel are in a celebratory spirit, and mostly students turned out to protest happily in the streets. “MINUSTAH, take your father, take your mother, take your brother, take your sister! We don’t need you here!”

Perhaps this chant is true, but ironic that it would be used to pressure the MINUSTAH to crack down. All this ongoing misery in Cite Soleil makes me want to ask the MINUSTAH one question:

How big is Cite Soleil anyway?

Last time I checked, it was not that big. And the MINUSTAH have been here a long time, spending their money, driving in their nice shiny cars, eating good food. They have shot so many of the wrong people in Port-au-Prince, it truly boggles the mind that they have not solved the problems in Cite Soleil. Last summer I spoke with residents of Cite Soleil who were asking the UN to come in and take care of the problem in one action instead of these piecemeal operations that never accomplish anything. Instead the no-go zone around the slum has grown, the number of gangs inside the slum has grown, the number of weapons in their hands has grown, the casualties have grown, and the despair has grown. Cite Soleil is not an abstraction to me. The people who live there are not alien and incomprehensible, they are not simply extras in a violent film. I have wandered the paths of Cite Soleil, gathering the children behind me, touching babies and women, feeling dozens of dirty hands in my hair. When I hear or read the latest news of those shot, raped, burned and killed, I can picture their neighborhoods in my head. Truly, I can see little else.

When all is said and done I don’t understand the chant, “We don’t need MINUSTAH! We are civilized!” Is one to believe that the organizers of the strike are more civilized than the MINUSTAH? Looking around Haiti today, recognizing how NOT extraordinary the suffering is in the world at large, I really have to question the idea that any of us are civilized. Are the Haitian elite civilized? Are the gangs of Cite Soleil? The former soldiers and the drug traffickers? How about Haitian politicians, business owners and coup plotters? The MINUSTAH, who have a battalion on each side of a small river and Leogane, but cannot fix a bridge between them, are they civilized?

No shining examples of civility. Perhaps it is the peasants of this country who are civilized, the men and women who go on day to day, working to exhaustion. And strikes make little difference to them.

nearly a month after we left we are home and driving through kafou. we choose the main road because we have a soft tire. the country is filled with campaign propoganda, evans paul and guy phillipe are smiling at you from every wall and gate. especially charles “charlito” baker, his huge white face and boyish gray hair plastered on the crumbling walls of shantytowns. does he feel like a good person? he couldn’t possibly. not if he’s ever been on this street, seeing it as i do. the things i see in the street make me wonder if i am good people.

the heat is like a comforter, stopping and starting in the traffic. i’m confused. am i home or did i just leave home? suddenly i don’t know how to feel. i take my sunglasses off. i don’t hide. this is routine, habit. i receive what i inspire, just being a white girl in kafou. a guy on the side of street yells, ‘hey, white girl!’ in american accented english. how does he know my name? i don’t look. there are fires everywhere, small piles of trash burning at intervals along the road. there are alleys between the buildings, countless, endless twisting paths. i touch my hair, the side by the window, and it’s grimy - i pull my hand off in disgust. we’ve only been in the car a half an hour.

there are police in the street. they’ve stopped their car in the middle, causing a traffic jam. two stand in the road. one faces us, wearing mirrored sunglasses, an m16 across his chest. READY OR NOT.

then, the pink-tipped deep blue clouds, pink reflections stretching across the bay. the light turns mango and banana trees into silhouettes and the purple and blue mountains swing closer. we’re choking on dust but the dark night is crawling across the moutains on our horizon and our imaginations are filling with the smell and the breeze of the coast to our south.

and then i know this is home: beautiful, scary, and disgustingly grimy.

I’ve been trying to re-envision things lately. After the unusually long hurricane season, Haiti is bearing visible scars. A whole panorama of hillsides has been washed away along the road to Port-au-Prince. Just before the sprawling Kafou neighborhood, a river flooded the road in Mariani, leaving behind mud and rocks. The debris and earth was plowed into banks along the edges of the road, making me think of snow piled up in a parking lot. Deeper in Kafou there were several large wash outs between houses and down alleys. On the right are mountains, on the left the sea. People are stacking rocks into piles for removal and to use in construction, more fertile soil is being carried off for use elsewhere.

I want to envision a different Haiti, a Haiti that doesn’t bring you to tears looking down from the airplane before you even land, with those images of ravaged mountains and top soil in the sea. Haitians who aren’t hungry, cities without slums, plains without famine. I look out the window of the Trooper at the Haiti of today and I think: there is a reason nature is so out of balance here. It reflects the imbalance in the society.

Really, what does a country look like when 2% of the population controls 85% of the resources?

It looks like this. The rich own all the businesses, and they control the banks. They monopolize access to education to keep their numbers small, and they capitalize on repression. The rich also own most of the land, and basically all of the good land in the country. The rich maintain only the bare minimum in infrastructure and use big trucks and sport utility vehicles to make up for the bad roads, gas-powered generators to avoid blackouts, satellite dishes for telephones and internet access, walls and private security detail to make up for the lack of peace and the absence of a police force.

The rich have some industries that require the poor – assembly factories, agricultural plantations. The rich also require the poor to perform services for them, from meal production to cultivating their land piecemeal as sharecroppers. The most profitable industry is the international aid business, which is more lucrative the poorer your country is.

What benefit would the rich get from changing this situation? Why build infrastructure you don’t need?

The MINUSTAH (United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti) is a cash cow for the rich. The foreigners eat at their restaurants, shop at their markets, drink their water, soda and beer, drive cars they imported, rent rooms at their hotels and grant contracts to their companies. They patrol the streets of Port-au-Prince, keeping everything rolling at a slow boil. The boil is good for the aid scene; it keeps the huge MINUSTAH apparatus in the country indefinitely, which simultaneously provides security for the resumption of international assistance.

Elections are a distraction, a pre-occupation of appearances. If your goal is to capitalize, to profit the greatest possible amount, what happens next? MINUSTAH leaving would be very bad. The crush of incoming foreign funds is part of the strange shimmering era we are in. There is more money flowing right now in Port-au-Prince then there has been in YEARS and yet the poverty just grows exponentially. It is clear what is happening, the change between hands. Is there panic? Is it all planned?

What are the rich doing? They do their nefarious things to maintain the boil. They get contracts, play politics, get more funding. They build houses in the Dominican Republic, or lot bo (abroad). They won’t leave until there is nothing left.

If you are born poor in Haiti you have slim chances of surviving infancy and early childhood. You will always be hungry and your growth or ability to learn may be stunted. You will live in the dirt, the mud when it rains. The land you work is not your own, nor will it ever be. There is no school for your children, no doctor. No clean water or electricity. When the darkness comes before 7pm you will see the sky full of stars, and your stomach will be empty. There be few roads to take you to the places you need to go, and fewer will be the places where you are welcome. You can stay and search for wood to make charcoal to try to keep your malnourished children alive. You can make a bigger mistake and move to Port-au-Prince. Potoprens se dlo nan je, vant mare. (Port-au-Prince is tears, knotted stomach, KOFAVIV poet.)

Oblije. That is the mantra of our era in Haiti. We are obligated, we must, we have to. How do you survive? Oblije. How can you keep trying? Oblije. It should be the mantra of our era for the WORLD. Why? Oblije. Port-au-Prince is not the only city dying of poverty with that shimmering at the same time. The blue helmets are a sign of prosperity for some, misery for everyone else.

What is the best way to carry out a coup, to hijack an entire population’s dream of dignity as opposed to misery? My friend used to say: The coup is happening right now, all the time. I finally see it myself – the shimmering decline. It is happening right now, all the time. It was so diffuse that deposing a president was only a part of it – spectacular yet denied at the same time.

The real coup is in the slow boil and all that it makes possible.

Haiti is in the midst of full campaign season for elections that will fill every seat in the government. To commemorate the government’s decision to schedule the elections for December 27, the Tuesday after Christmas, with full knowledge that most Haitians will be nowhere near their polling site because they’ll be visiting family, I offer this timeless poem from Haitian poet Felix Morriseau-Leroy. The English translation is below the original Creole.

ABA TOUT KANDIDA

M’di aba tout kandida
Aba tout kandida alaprezidans
M’rele aba aba eleksyon
Ekri sou tout mi lavil la
Aba eleksyon fout
Ekri ak lakre sou tout mi gri
Ekri ak chabon sou tout mi blanch
Aba tout kandida
Aba tout eleksyon
Pou nonmen depite
Ekri sou lanme-a ekri sou mon lan
Aba tout kandida alaprezidans
Yo tout vle vann peyi-a
Ak meriken pou plen poch yo.

DOWN WITH ALL CANDIDATES

I say Down with all cnadidates
With all the candidates for president
I shout Down with Down with elections
Write all over my town
Down with the god-damned elections
Write with chalk all over the grey walls
And with charcoal all over the white walls
Down with all candidates
Down with all elections
To name congressmen
Write on the sea write on the mountainsides
Down with all candidates for president
They want to sell out Haiti
To the Americans to plump up their pockets

[If you’ve been to Haiti you probably get a vivid mental image when he talks about “elections/Write all over my town”. If you haven’t been here, there is an enormous amount of political graffiti here. “Vote For” graffiti is very popular right now, with some candidates even distributing a stencil to their vandalizing teams.]

Our trip to Port-au-Prince in mid-June was an act of ignoring proximity. People often ask what Port-au-Prince is like, or I will tell someone I’m headed there for a couple of days and they say they can’t even imagine. In mid-June Port-au-Prince was terrifying. Press reports noted a dozen kidnappings in the city each day, and shooting could be heard almost around the clock.

The doctor from FOSREF, a clinic on the ground floor of the office where we usually spend most of our time in PAP, was kidnapped the day before we were in town, as he pulled out of the gates from the parking lot. While we were in town on Friday, June 17, six people were kidnapped. We left home fairly early, about 7:15am. It was cold and foggy at the highest point of the mountains, but you could look down and see the sun crossing the valleys below. When we got deep enough into Kafou, the sprawling suburb appropriately named “crossroads” that you must travel through to reach the capital, we turned on the radio to see what, if anything, was happening in the jungle.

We turned to Radio Tropic, and as usual, they had a reporter in the middle of it. He was reporting from Bel Air, where he said everyone was lying flat on their stomach on the floors inside their houses, praying to stay alive.

Thursday had been a dangerous and violent day. Operations in Cite Soleil had resulted in two MINUSTAH or Haitian National Police wounded or dead. The details of who dies each day are something I can’t really hold onto at times. Let me be the first to tell you: you don’t want to get too deep into reality around here sometimes. Like in June. It’s masochistic, really. There is a popular Haitian music video with scenes from the jungle - heavily armed riot police, burning tires, bleeding bodies, UN tanks. Is this a world you want to live in?

We all live in this world.

Operations in Bel Air on Friday. We drove past the Champ Mars, the public park by the National Palace and the anti-gang prison, to the former Holiday Inn to visit the bank inside. Too late for breakfast, we decided to drive up the hill and over to Epi D’Or, a bakery and fast food restaurant, on Delmas. As we crossed over on Delmas 60, we passed a small, energetic and decidedly happy looking group of young people protesting in front of the prime minister’s residence. This was the Group of 184-aligned student group, demonstrating as the business sector grows tired of the US-appointed technocrats. A few minutes later the radio reported on the new military commander for the UN peacekeeping mission. We bought fruit cake and pate (a pastry filled with meat or fish) for breakfast. I threw away most of my chocolate donut.

After breakfast we grocery shopped at the biggest and brightest of the supermarkets catering to the rich and imported, Caribbean Market on Delmas 95. Later, a friend informed me that Caribbean is a new kidnapping hot spot. Had I known before, I think we would have stock piled the things you can only buy there, like soy milk and tofu. As it is, we spent plenty of money, saw plenty of UN and moved on to a traffic jam going up the hill. From there you are stopped with panoramic views of the devastating cliff-side shantytowns above the rich, crowded suburb of Petionville.

Port-au-Prince always makes you feel bad, and I see that it should. It is a place that should not exist, a place filled with horrible things. This time it had just rained and Kafou was awash in sewer water, mud, garbage. Everyone is in the mud, and the women are selling their produce in the mud, next to the garbage piles. When you get close enough to the city, after the interminable trip through Kafou, you arrive at a place where Martissant is on your right, and Village de Dieu is on your left. Here the poverty is naked and it is everywhere. In Kafou the remnants of the neighborhoods that once were remain. A beautiful stone street here and there, the shade of trees growing behind a wall, a house with beautiful iron work balconies.

But when you arrive on the frontiers of Haiti’s most stark poverty, there is no alternative version to look at and remember. There is no reminder of before. It seems to grow each time I see it: the misery and just plain wrong-ness of this place. The intersection offers you a turn off to the left into Village de Dieu, Village of God, a slum on the sea, cut into pieces by huge sewer canals which end at the water. Or you can go straight into La Saline, a slum and market opposite the pier, the last stop before the demonized Cite Soleil. Or you can turn right to pass through Portail Leogane and over to Lalue, like we always do. Here behind a wall next to Port-au-Prince’s most memorable sewer canal (also the site of MINUSTAH’s daily tank watch of the gates into Village de Dieu), here in the midst of terrific ugliness and the worst imaginable smells, here sits the National Theater. A truly unfortunate location for a beautiful ampitheater.

And you should feel bad. Either you feel bad just being clean, driving in your car with a full stomach or on the way to one, drinking bottled water and wearing earrings. You feel bad that grandmothers sell mangoes in the rancid mud. You feel bad that pretty teenage girls are being raped here, and that children are dying of diarrhea. You feel bad because you do not want to get out of your car and walk in the mud with these people. Or you distance youself from these things in the environment and you focus on the world that exists inside the car, the bubble you can take with you.

I can never maintain this ignoring for more than a minute before my internal dialogue kicks up again, bringing me back to the inevitable conclusion that I am no more deserving of my life than the people in Kafou are deserving of theirs. Anyone in their right mind would feel bad in Port-au-Prince. I think, I don’t know how people are living there - but I do. They are living there the same way I am living here, and you are living there. We put distance between ourselves and the poor around us for sanity. As my friend says, “To be truly empathetic would likely destroy us.”

And so I ask:

Is empathy valuable? How valuable?

We were at the office for a couple of hours, having lunch and meeting with a group of women victims. We heard gun shots every so often throughout the time we were there. Before we left we all went down to the parking lot to finish talking and wait for one more friend, coming with a car to pick up some of the women. We started hearing machine guns in addition to the other shooting. Here is an act of ignoring proximity: we all continued on with our conversations without moving. Some of the ladies rolled their eyes. After our friend arrived, we continued chatting, they continued shooting, until finally someone turned to someone else and said, “We should all get out of here.” We pulled out the driveway one after another and pulled away as fast as we could. Ten minutes later we were at the intersection and the most memorable sewer canal in Port-au-Prince, turning left and back to the South.

I always leave Port-au-Prince a little shell-shocked and dying to get home, to be home where our relative distance is enough to provide relief, to temporarily take away the vision of so many people suffering so much.

Two weeks ago everything in Haiti was soccer. It was the end of the season, tournaments and championships everywhere. We decided to go to the soccer championship in Meyer, a village not far from ours. When we arrived at the game we were late and the entire village was already there. The field is surrounded by a woven palm enclosure, and the ten feet between this enclosure and the line of the field was crammed with people practically standing on top of each other. We didn’t even try to go inside. The field is on the main road along Haiti’s southeast coast, at a bend where there is a very popular public water pump. There is a field between the soccer field and the road, which was lined with cars and tap-taps. We parked at the far end of the line and walked on the concrete edge of an irrigation canal about halfway across the field where we could at least listen to the game. Guypson climbed into a tree for a better view.

We were in a good mood. After a long morning of hot and sometimes frustrating strategic planning with some of our favorite people, we had gone to Raymond Les Bains for swimming and lunch. Raymond is always a party on the weekend - the brown sand beach is filled with colorful bathing suits, and boys swimming in their underwear. Under the trees, ti machann (vendors) and boys with wheelbarrows filled with coconuts compete for your attention. There are tables which correspond to specific machann, and we sat in one of our friend’s areas so we could get fried plantains, fish and lambi (conch). I don’t eat sea food, so I was content to scarf down some yogurt on the way to the beach, and buy a bottle of dous pike when we got there.

Dous pike is one of the multitude of varieties of Haitian cane liquor. You start with kleren, a nearly toxic clear alcohol made from sugar cane. The machann at Raymond Les Bains always have a wide spectrum of kleren for you to choose from. Dous pike is especially popular during soccer season. It’s made from kleren, sugar, spices and fruit.

So here we are in the middle of the field next to the soccer field, standing on the irrigation canal at the championship for Meyer, getting silly passing back and forth my bottle of dous pike. We danced when the DJ played good songs, and moved aside as the crowd grew and people passed us on the canal to get a closer look. Here in the Jacmel area we don’t worry about insecurity or violence because it is such a generally peaceful place. Socccer games see a spat or two, kids getting in a fight or players not agreeing with a call. But soccer games I have been to are always community events filled with good feelings and small children eating lollipops, grown ups drinking dous pike and dancing.

I wasn’t expecting the first rush. In Creole we have a word that means to run, kouri. In general usage, however, a kouri is when a crowd begins to run. When there is a kouri in this country there are no questions or hesitations; when people begin to run it is best to join them. The first kouri caught me by surprise. We knew something was happening because the fans were running out across the soccer field. When rocks started to fly, the kids at the other end of the field began to run, taking the woven palm enclosure down with them. Some of the crowd came running in our direction, forcing us to join the kouri, too. As I was slowly and awkwardly fleeing up the irrigation canal, I was cursing my cute strappy sandals and wondering if I could run faster if I jumped off the canal altogether.

As we stood on the road seconds later we scanned the crowd for Guypson, before realizing he was still up in the tree. From there he was watching it all unfold. The referee had called a flagrant foul, and the player in question had attacked him. That was what started the commotion. He was still watching from the tree when the police entered the field, the first shot was fired, and the second kouri began. Everyone was running, calling out to each other that there were gunshots, run! I tried to duck behind the closest car on the far side of the street, but that hiding place was already taken, a few women were crouched low to the ground, holding their heads down out of range of stray bullets.

A stready stream of people were running by. “Kouri!” someone yelled in my face. I started running again, too.

Thankfully, Guypson had the sense to get out of the tree once the shooting started. We argued later that if you are still in the tree when the shooting starts it is already too late - you should have gotten down already! As we drove away from the scene, people still pouring out of the field into the street, I laughed even though I wanted to cry. I am forced to remember sometimes that I don’t live in what people would necessarily consider a nice place. I mean, it’s the nicest place I know, but at the same time, it’s the most horrific.

Before the players and the fans attacked the referee in Meyer, before the crowd began to throw rocks, before the running and the shooting, before all of this there was a dark, deep tension and anxiety inside of me. Here we were, without any kind of cover in the middle of a field, watching a soccer game only two weeks after the championship game of the tournament of peace in Grand Ravine, part of Martissant. My friend’s son was at that game, and a teacher I know from the school in Martissant. In fact, there were more than 2,000 people there, and if I know soccer in Haiti, most of them were children with lollipops, hanging out with their parents or older siblings, who were likely sipping dous pike.

When the police entered the soccer field in Grand Ravine that day, the crowd applauded, thinking they had arrived to give them security. Those thousands of people - drawn out of a desperate life in a desperate place to enjoy a game sponsored by USAID - those thousands of poor people thought the police were there to help them. Then the police asked the DJ to tell everyone to lie on the ground. After that, a team of civilians armed with machetes entered the field and began to hack at the people on the ground with their machetes.

The police shot people trying to flee, anyone who joined the kouri was fair game. They finished off some of the people on the ground with bullets, too. I am hard pressed to imagine a more horrific scene.

Before the massacre in Grand Ravine, only a few weeks ago now, I went to soccer games and felt elated. The entire village would be there, the feeling of community was so strong as we cried “GOAL!” for our team, and took turns watching each other’s children. Soccer was about lollipops, and the hot, dizzy buzz you get from drinking dous pike as the sun goes down. Soccer was about dancing with friends when the DJ played a good song.

But like so many things, Haiti has changed the way I feel about soccer, forever.