My world is very small right now. My world is a clinic in a city on an island in the Caribbean sea. Geographically, it's the same little world I lived in a year ago - only back then, it didn't feel like it was the only place in the world that mattered.
Days here have melded into one. I find myself having to remind myself that the larger world is still turning. That babies in NYC and preschoolers in Washington state are still growing up. That friends back in Ithaca are still making progress on Phds. That some of my friends from here in Haiti who I have yet to see but who I know are physically okay are really there in the US with family and friends. The rest of the world isn't pausing just because I feel like my life has paused in this so familiar but not quite right place.
But even here in Haiti you can see that life is moving ahead. Too slowly but surely aid is reaching communities. Some corners of the city feel so normal that you can almost forget about the rubble filling others. Supermarkets that did not fall are full of food and shoppers. Many of the restaurants most popular with expatriots are open for business. Market stands, food stalls, and barber shops have popped up all around the tent cities that fill every public space.
Last night my friend K and I got thai food to go (a pricey but tasty recent addition to the PAP restaurant scene) and passed by the central plaza to grab some beer from a street vendor to go with our dinner. Beyond the tents, the main sign that things weren't quite right was that no one was selling Prestige - Haiti's national beer. We had to settle for Colt 45.
As a foreigner and a physically unscathed survivior I know that my experience of this disaster remains superficial. Even though I was there to feel the earth groan and shake. Even though I walked through the immediate aftermath of downtown Port au Prince. Even though the place where I lived for more than two years is no longer inhabitable. Even though I am here now. I am not the one who lost a child, a brother, or a close friend. I am not sleeping under a bed sheet, a tarp or even a tent. I do not have loved ones who are learning to live without a leg. I do not have to worry about my job security in an even more devastated economy - if anything, my job just got more secure. I just can't find my preferred brand of beer.
I am comfortable being here in Haiti right now. I am tired - but in that good tired way. Tired because you are spending time doing things that just might really matter. I am sure that at some point, sooner than later, I will catch up to ordinary time but for now, I can live in this extraordinary one.
I LOVE this piece posted on Salon.com by a UNC anthropology grad student who was living here at the time of the quake.... she gets it.
Haiti: A survivor's story By Laura Wagner
I was sitting barefoot on my bed, catching up on ethnographic field notes, when the earthquake hit. As a child of the San Francisco area, I was underwhelmed at first. “An earthquake. This is unexpected," I thought. But then the shaking grew stronger. I had never felt such a loss of control, not only of my body but also of my surroundings, as though the world that contained me were being crumpled.
I braced myself in a doorway between the hallway and the kitchen, trying to hold on to the frame, and then a cloud of darkness and cement dust swallowed everything as the house collapsed. I was surprised to die in this way, but not afraid. And then I was surprised not to be dead after all. I was trapped, neither lying down nor sitting, with my left arm crushed between the planks of the shattered doorway and my legs pinned under the collapsed roof. Somewhere, outside, I heard people screaming, praying and singing. It was reassuring. It meant the world hadn’t ended.
I want you to know that, before the earthquake, things in Haiti were normal. Outside Haiti, people only hear the worst -- tales that are cherry-picked, tales that are exaggerated, tales that are lies. I want you to understand that there was poverty and oppression and injustice in Port-au-Prince, but there was also banality. There were teenage girls who sang along hilariously with the love ballads of Marco Antonio Solís, despite not speaking Spanish. There were men who searched in vain for odd jobs by day and told never-ending Bouki and Ti Malis stories and riddles as the sun went down and rain began to fall on the banana leaves. There were young women who painted their toenails rose for church every Sunday, and stern middle-aged women who wouldn’t let me leave the house without admonishing me to iron my skirt and comb my hair. There were young students who washed their uniforms and white socks every evening by hand, rhythmically working the detergent into a noisy foam. There were great water trucks that passed through the streets several times a day, inexplicably playing a squealing, mechanical version of the theme from "Titanic," which we all learned to ignore the same way we tuned out the overzealous and confused roosters that crowed at 3 a.m. There were families who finished each day no further ahead than they had begun it and then, at night, sat on the floor and intently followed the Mexican telenovelas dubbed into French. Their eyes trained on fantastic visions of alternate worlds in which roles become reversed and the righteous are rewarded, dreaming ahead into a future that might, against all odds, hold promise.
I need to tell you these things, not just so that you know, but also so I don’t forget.
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