Things I Like About Haitians

“Bonjou!” and “Bonsoir!” I like that Haitians greet one another with a robust “hello” and a hug and kiss on the cheek like they haven’t seen each other in weeks or months—even if they saw each other earlier that day.

Strength. While I don’t like the conditions that keep testing them, I do like and admire the physical, emotional, and spiritual strength of the Haitians. It’s astounding how they endure things that would have made most of us crumble long ago.






















Patience. I like that Haitians don’t fret traffic jams, they patiently tolerate the fumblings of foreigners trying to help, and I watched this Haitian fellow patiently and kindly help Yvonne learn some Creole for quite a long time on the patio.


Sharing. In the van one day, Carla bought us all a bunch of chips in plastic bags. When we stopped to pick up some Haitian friends of hers, she gave each of them a bag to eat too. When one man was dropped off first, he took his unopened bag with him. “See that?” Carla shared, “he’s taking that home to his family to share with them. Haitians always think of others when they receive something.”

Big is Beautiful. Upon arriving at the wharf for our ferry ride to La Gonave our van was swarmed by a dozen men wanting to carry our bags to the boat. Hot and sweaty, in NO WAY looking my best, I climbed out of the van under the stare of 12 sets of eyes. “Big woman!” one of the men said appreciatively while the others nodded. All righty then.

Artists. In Port au Prince-- a city where there isn’t much natural beauty-- public art stands out as a lily among thorns. I admired much of the graffiti, and their public buses are fancied up real purty too!
Local Heroes. All over Haiti there are people like Mona and William who have other passions and responsibilities, yet remain committed to their communities and work hard to raise the quality of life around them. I can only guess at the massive number of local heroes who share their food and water, offer their personal space for a stranger to sleep in, care for orphans who lost family members in the earthquake. Heck, I considered Madame Antoine a local hero for cooking over open fires in this “kitchen” and churning out delicious meals for us guests every day. Average Haitians rise up every day and make good things happen.

A Great Saying. In Creole—as in English—there are a large variety of responses you can give when someone asks “How are you?” My favorite response is “Map bat zel mwen” (I’m still beating my wings!)

Tent Camps

In one month I’m going tent camping with my sister. We’ll pitch my fine REI tent on a carefully tended campsite in a lush forest, toast marshmallows over a fire, sleep on comfortable mattresses, and consider it a fine vacation.

In Haiti there is a completely different situation going on with tents. Driving around the countryside we saw plenty of tents pitched on hillsides or out in fields. Many of them were stenciled with “PR China” and the names of countless other governments and NGO’s providing housing to the Haitian people after the earthquake. In Port au Prince there are tent camps scattered around the city. There’s a big one by the airport, there are tent camps in spaces where there used to be parks or public squares, there are tent camps built on top of the rubble from fallen buildings, and Sean Penn’s famous tent camp in Petionville (a suburb of Port au Prince) is situated on a golf course and houses and cares for 50,000 people. Check out this before and after satellite photo.

We drove by many of them, but it is difficult to take photos while cruising in a van, and I also didn’t want to be a voyeuristic jerk, obnoxiously taking photos of other people’s misfortunes. So I don’t have great photos. I have ones like this:

But I have vivid memories.


One of my host Carla’s good friends is a man named Mona who is a remarkably gifted painter, poet, musician, and song writer. He is a classic Renaissance man. On January 12, 2010 the earth started shaking, walls and ceilings came down all around Mona, and despite being in a basement room on the bottom of a house, he miraculously survived.

Out of necessity, a tent camp sprung up in his neighborhood and 300 families currently live there. When my group visited his camp we walked through muddy, narrow walkways past rows of tents and shacks made out of plywood and scavenged materials. Tent flaps were tied back to reveal 5-10 people sitting in tents about 15 feet wide and long. Older children came out to shake our hands and offer cheerful “bonsoir’s”, while naked toddlers laughed and twirled in the rain.

Our group gathered in a make-shift community center built out of plywood, and listened to Mona and his co-laborer William speak of their experiences helping to run the tent camp. Shortly after the earthquake, a pastor from San Diego had showed up with a wad of cash, asked the tent community what they needed, and peeling off $3,000 had commissioned them to build the community center in one week so that he could take a photo of it before leaving to show his church what they had paid for. Mona and William had hired Haitian workers and moved heaven and earth to complete the room in one week, with a painted sign “Rev. James W. Smith Memorial Community Center” being the finishing touch. They also built a small medical center so tent community members could get medical attention, and they want to stock it with more medicines but they need to save up for a cupboard with a lock so that the medications will stay safe. They’d also like to hire a Haitian nurse to provide care-- especially since there are so many Haitian medical practitioners currently out of work.

Of the 300 families living in the tent camp, there are a handful of men and women who participate in a committee that makes decisions for the community. It is difficult for Mona and William because they are looked at as people who can give other people work if an NGO approaches them with a project. So they hear a lot of desperation and get a lot of requests. Mona and William have a computer with spreadsheets of hundreds of names of people who want work, and there is a lot of pressure to ensure that the distribution of work and resources is fair and just.

Seeing that the tent community had taken initiative to build a community center (as a gathering place for meetings, and for a space for children to play and learn), another NGO gave the tent camp a water tank and built toilets and showers. The NGO pays for two people to clean and maintain the public toilets and showers, but instead the community chose four people to work part-time so that more people can make a little money. With an 80% unemployment rate, cleaning toilets is a prized job.

First World Problems Rap

Great perspective in light of the other things I'm writing about lately.

Healing in Haiti

I’ve traveled to several developing countries and the truth is that with the exception of the Philippines, I haven’t had great experiences. India was the absolute worst. I don’t even talk about what happened there, except to say that after a week I left there with severe post-traumatic stress syndrome that I recovered from by sitting in a guest house garden in Katmandu for a week.

When I’ve traveled to developing countries, I’ve been prepared for the fact that they will be poor, that there will be people asking me for money, and there will be sad things to see and experience. I accept those realities. But what I’ve never been able to accept is the cheating, lying, scamming, stealing, and the constant feeling that everyone sees me only as a walking ATM machine, everyone is trying to get one over on me, or everyone is trying to befriend me just to get something from me. In those countries I feel like I can’t trust anyone.

Haiti wasn’t like that. In my 8 days of traveling Haiti, only about 2 people asked me for money—and they didn’t really even ask—they just pointed to their stomachs and said they were hungry. I never felt pounced upon or unsafe in Haiti (except for maybe seeing all the U.N. soldiers with automatic weapons resting on their knees). And the Beyond Borders staff brokered all the relationships, so I never felt like anyone was trying to shake me down or get something out of me.

So the disturbing things that have happened to me in other developing countries didn’t happen to me in Haiti. But Mother Ayiti took it a step further—she healed me.

On my final day with my rural hosting family on La Gonave, our group had to leave unexpectedly to catch a boat across the water before a bad storm hit. At my hosting family’s house I quickly packed my backpack, said reluctant goodbye’s, and slung my backpack over my shoulder to walk back to the truck. After a minute I heard a child yelling “Mel-a-nie! Mel-a-nie!” One of the children from my house ran down the trail with my shoes in his hand. Someone had put them outside the door of the house, and when I packed I didn’t notice they were gone.

I can’t describe how healing that moment was for me. I was profoundly touched. Any other country I had been in, the person finding my shoes would have probably thought “that damn American has other shoes. I’m keeping these.” But in Haiti- the poorest country in the Western hemisphere-- this beautiful child knocked himself out to return my stupid, old, beat up shoes (that I was planning on leaving in Haiti anyway).

It's easy to ascertain from my vague narrative above that I carry some heavy emotional baggage from past travels. Fully aware of this, in the months leading up to my departure for Haiti I had been filling up a flip chart on my living room wall with prayers for me, my fellow travelers, and for Haiti. Here’s what I had written in one corner:
How’s that for an answer to prayer?

Children in Haiti

One of the best things Mother Ayiti has going for her is her children. Haitian children have something special going on.



Number 1- Haitian children are not lazy. If an adult needs to send a message to another person in the village (or even the household), they flag down a kid and the child runs to deliver it. With no TV's or video games to plop down in front of, Haitian children actually apply the old-fashioned practice of physical movement.

Number 2- Haitian children are hard working. At Carla’s guest house, all of the children- whether they were 4 years old or 14 years old—carried adult-sized loads of enormous bags and supplies from the van to the kitchen. Without complaint. They grow them strong in Haiti.

Number 3- Haitian children take school very seriously. In a country where there is no free public education, families who make very little money struggle to scrape together at least $150 a year to send each child to school. So the children study hard to honor their parent’s sacrifice. Late on Friday nights at our guest house, older children could be found fretting over mathematical equations scribbled on a chalkboard.

Number 4- Haitian children are uncomplaining. While staying with my rural hosting family, the family was standing up looking at the postcards of San Francisco and photos of my family that I had brought to show them. The youngest son- a little guy no more than 4 years old— well, here is a photo of him….

…the youngest son stood underneath everyone and clearly wanted to see the photos but they completely ignored him. He jumped up and down a couple of times to try to get a peek, but came up a good 2 feet short of being able to view anything. Eventually I saw that he was being left out, so I lifted him up to see. But the whole time he never said a word- he never cried or whined or complained. Now show me an American kid who acts like that.

Creatures in Haiti

Most of the non-humans occupying Haiti are of the domesticated kind. Haiti is only a small island, so there aren’t any deer or bears wandering around. The animal I saw the most of was goats. Goats are everywhere- sometimes roaming freely and oftentimes tied up.
The rural family that I lived raised these lovely pigs.
And on the more appealing side, I saw a few baby animals like this adorable horse.
It being a Caribbean island, there were a lot of lizards scurrying around the guest house.
But the animal that reigns at the complete bottom of the totem pole is dogs. In Port au Prince dogs could most often be seen pawing at trash piles, searching for something to eat. My rural family had a little puppy whose mother had died weeks before. This scrawny puppy lived a miserable existence fending for itself and trying vainly not to get stepped on. We visitors petted him, but you could tell that it wasn’t used to anyone paying attention to him. The rainy season had just begun, and while I didn’t think it was cold, everyone else- including the puppy—thought it was freezing. The puppy was often found huddled up shivering, and once I woke up in the morning and found the puppy sleeping curled up on top of some coals from a fire that had burned out the night before.
Did it break my heart? Of course! But the sad reality is that in a country where people are struggling to survive and they barely have enough to eat, feeding and loving dogs is not a top priority.

Haitian Market

The streets of Port au Prince are crowded with street vendors selling what they can. Imagine every square foot of the your city’s sidewalks filled with people squatting beside blankets on which they have neatly arranged items to sell- shoes, clothing, food, cooking utensils, mattresses- I literally saw kitchen sinks for sale on a sidewalk. Lucky vendors who stake out prime sidewalk space get to hang their items on a fence or the wall of a building. Of course there are no official standards, no permits, but there probably are mutually understood rules. I have no idea how anyone carves out a living selling the exact same mangoes and bananas that the person right next to them is selling, but somehow it works.

One day our whole group drove Madam Antoine, our amazing cook, to the market in her old neighborhood so she could pick up a few days of food to prepare for us. Madam Antoine brought along 3 children to help her at the market, since she essentially bought the equivalent of a big Costco run and needed help lugging her purchases from place to place.

This is what the market looked like:
There were pyramids of papayas, mangoes, oranges, coconuts, pineapples, melons.
Tables were heavy with piles of pigs feet and chicken feet.
There were wheelbarrows of charcoal for making fires, and other wheelbarrows of 3-4 foot rods of sugar cane (Haiti used to be the sugar cane capital of the world).
Most interesting to me was that men and women stuffed scrawny live chickens head first into black plastic bags, and walked around with them tucked under their arms.
Platters of smoked herring glistened in the heat and Madam Antoine picked up the biggest sweet potato I had ever seen: (this isn't Haitian Madam Anoine, by the way. This is Anne, of Virginia. But that is the sweet potato)

Later on in the day when we returned for Madam Antoine and the children, we had 15 people, all the market purchases, and two propane tanks crammed into a van with a passenger capacity of 12. We were so packed that the sliding door of the van threatened to come off. At one point in the van I yelled “Stop! The window just fell out!” and we drove slowly along in traffic as a random guy on the street trotted alongside us and gave us back our window.