Letting Go

Not to be too arrogant, but I am also writing this song on behalf of Christopher Columbus. Haiti is not a place you just visit, as Columbus would surely have told you (he shipwrecked there in 1492). It's not a stream into which you just dip a toe. Here, you dive in headlong. It drives you crazy—with love, with anxiety, with desire. You fall into its arms as if it's been waiting forever to receive you. It hasn't. And as with any great unrequited love, Haiti's indifference only makes you crazier for the place. - Amy Wilentz, from her “Love Song for Haiti”

One of my great fears about finishing my formal education is that my mind will become static from not being exposed to new ideas. Grad school has certainly not helped this fear as there is constant exposure to the world’s great thinkers—and beyond that exposure, Professors encourage harsh criticism of those thinkers. For my own purposes, developing a critical eye involved rethinking the positive view of the organizations that I’d come to know as the world’s development players. While this was difficult in the classroom, I quickly found there is no problem developing a dissenting opinion when looking into the eyes those affected by the policies of those development players. Though I’d been to Haiti on two occasions prior to this past January, I had never truly engaged in on-the-ground, critical thought about the policies that shaped the grinding existence before my eyes. Perhaps I thought I understood it before? Maybe now after a semester of lessons in Kreyol I felt more connected? Whatever the reason, I felt myself learning, understanding and criticizing at a higher rate than I’d ever experienced before. Though I dove into Haiti before this trip, it was as if the water didn’t feel cold anymore, like I was no longer afraid to see what was in the deepest part of the lake. This new level of comfort and understanding only allowed for greater focus.

That focus allowed all neurons to fire. I asked a million questions both of myself and every person I met. I pushed any Kreyol skills I had to the limit and tried so hard to understand the cultural dynamic—as well as my very minor role in it. This focus also allowed for understanding SOILs work and just how important it is in breaking Haiti’s cycle of poverty. To close this post, below is one of the few things I wrote while in Cap-Haitien.

A simple observation is that because of the location of this organization in an apartment above the street in Okap, there is little separation between the very important work of helping the poor and the SOIL Staff’s own time to recuperate from the exhaustion of Haiti. Certainly this attributes to specifically Sasha’s stress, though I think in her heart she wouldn’t have it any other way. For those studying development in the U.S. it is a common observation that out of sight is out of mind. That simply cannot exist here. Though Haiti is always hot, when it rains and floods, the street children have no place to sleep or dry off and still have nothing to eat. At any given time of day there can be three or four children standing below the SOIL apartment bellowing their lungs out with nonsense, yelling “sha-sha” or in the case of one little boy who is deaf, simply squeaking out whatever sound he can muster in an attempt to get the attention of someone who will come down and give him some scraps of food. The boys who scream nonsense are typically high from huffing paint thinner, of which they usually reek. The constant rate of emotional bombardment is astounding, though I think it comes mostly from a knowledge of life on the other side of the water—where “prestige falls from the sky and the rivers flow with coca-cola” as one of my travel companions of years past observed. It is astounding to me that the SOIL team has not become emotional hardened—calloused to a sharpened point.