A Wedding in Haiti (27 page)

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 whether 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