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Kent Annan from A DROP OF WATER
“I think it’s Pouchon pouring sand into the pile,” I yawned. “Oh,” she said, rolling gently into me for a final cuddle, “and happy birthday!” Seven days ago we had moved into our newly built two-roomed, tin-roofed, no-running-water, scarce-electricity, latrine-is-a-concrete-hole-in-the-ground house here on a mountainside near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Ten days ago the cement floors had been poured. Yesterday, after we mentioned our floor was undryable, a worker said it could take a month or two “pou li pap swe,” to stop sweating. In this humid rainy season, the tin roof is also sweating. Our new home is effectively a miniature tropical rain forest system. Today I turned thirty-one—hovering, it seems, between liquid and solid, between flood and rainbow. We have lived in Haiti for one year and ten days, one-third of our marriage. (Increasingly conscious of time’s collapsing tricks, a few events from days surrounding my birthday may have seeped in here.) What a fool I felt like, lying there with everything in our house soaking wet while having to put on a whimsical, upbeat display for my wife, since in the past year she has often teetered near despair, which on many days in Haiti is not an unreasonable response. For our first seven months, we lived in a small village a few hours away with a peasant farming family, no solitude, intensely confronting racial and economic, cultural and linguistic barriers everyday. Her first time living out of the States. The hardest year of her life, she says unequivocally. Then five months of a house-building project that has brought workers early every morning until late each afternoon, which meant our house was no retreat from work, Creole, noise, interactions, and unrelenting sadness all around. (Of course, there is joy, too. But surrounded by nearly ubiquitous hardship.) Then the year’s sequence of events found a name: only half-joking, she kept exclaiming “Uncanny!” as she read an Atlantic Monthly essay by Mark Bowden that detailed strategies of torture: irregular eating, sleep deprivation, a lack of control over one’s schedule, sudden vacillations between kindness and meanness, temperature extremes, wetness, an unknown future, and so on. The year left us slightly battered. This new house is an attempt to find a sustainable way to keep living here. To keep my wife from giving up and going home. I regret that everything has been so hard for her—and I’m resentful that it has been. My year was difficult but good—and better than the previous few. Undeniably, life here is arduous, and more so for most everyone other than us. Yet two reasons make this more desirable to me than living in the most comfortable suburb in all America. First, I’m doing work that I believe is good and siding with people who need more people on their side. Second, there’s something about the desperation of life here that resonates with how desperate life itself really, actually is. On the surface, an American suburb is a place where life is orderly, manicured, manageable. Here the surface is raw and needy and clawing. There is some comfort in living where the exterior life with all its ragged desperation—and glimpses of beauty and spontaneous dancing—resonates more with the interior experience of being human. Soon a group of men was to arrive outside for a morning meeting scheduled to kick-start the final stage of construction, which is tangled in a thicket of accusations, rumors, and delays that are apparently standard fare. The front and back porches are not yet cemented, so we track dirt and pebbles into our house each time we enter, which turns to mud in our swampy interior. The disagreements between various workers are frustrating, yet in a country with 70% unemployment and 50% malnourishment, the possibility of plunging into hunger from losing a job is a palpable, haunting presence. Even minor business interactions seem charged with the high stakes of survival. When is the next time the mason—whose fiancé is pregnant—will find a job? What if the general contractor’s reputation is tarnished, but he still has to provide for his wife and three children in elementary school? For now, I only know to focus on the immediate goal. Any academic disassociation collapsed two months ago: I’m not seeking anthropological insights into my new culture nor am I fascinated by Haitian approaches to negotiation/money/work/budgets. I just want the house done. On hearing of our decision to build, Haitian colleagues would nod their heads back and forth, smile, and say, “Bon kouraj.” Literal translation: Have courage. Figurative: You’re crazy. I got out of bed, put on flip-flops, and flip-sploshed my way outside to greet Pouchon as he finished another trip and dumped out the bucket he carries on his head: ppppsshshshshshhSHSHSHHSH. He had walked up the narrow path between plantain, avocado, mango, and other trees to our small plot cut into the rock on a steep hillside. He smiled with his uneven overbite jutting out at a forty-five degree angle—his face dusted in a fine layer of sand, as were his disintegrating T-shirt, tattered dress slacks, and cheap plastic flip-flops. “Bonjou, Pouchon. How are you? But it rained last night, isn’t the sand too heavy to carry now. Why not wait till later?” “Oh, bonjou. Good to see you. Pa pi mal. Not too bad. How are you? Yes. Yes, a little heavy. Heavy, but it’s got to be done.” If Jesus correctly predicted the meek will inherit the earth, then expect Pouchon to someday have vast holdings spanning rivers and valleys, mountains and plains. If fortunate, I’ll get to work in his fields. 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