I sat in the bus seat staring as the landscape passed quickly before me. My initial reaction was silence. Somber eyes and a grim frown. I was passing Tent City where row upon row upon row of tents swept past in a blur of dirty white, gray, and blue with ’Samaritan’s Purse’ stamped across the side.
The streets were crowded. The capitol of the DR, Santo Domingo, was crowded, but Port au Prince, the capitol of Haiti was chaos. There were no defined lanes as every imaginable vehicle drove madly past each other in both the same direction and opposite directions. Tap taps, buses, cars, trucks, motos, semis, U.N. vehicles, National Police, city police….the list can go on. I would guess that there were at least 7 lanes of traffic at all times on a road made for four.
In both Haiti and the DR, the normal thing to do when driving up on a smaller vehicle is to blast your horn repeatedly and for long periods of time to signal that a larger vehicle is going to pass you. On a 7-lane road jammed packed with multiple-sized vehicles, the larger vehicles had the insatiable desire to force the smaller aside.
I have never seen so many people in one place at one time. It seemed that Port Au Prince was nothing but one big market operating 24/7. Thousands swarmed the streets to hunt for the cheapest food; the freshest vegetables; the best clothing. Others sat around in groups mingling. And others did nothing but stare at the passing vehicles. At the busload of Americans staring wide-eyed out the windows.
We’d been told that what we carried on our backs; what we’d dressed in; what we walked in, might be worth more than these people would make in a year; in two years; in five years. Our big hiking backpacks; our Northface backpacks; our bright clothing. My second reaction was to make sure I had my back to a wall at all times with eyes constantly roving for any suspicious characters.
This was all the first day. It seems that the normal thing that will happen when I arrive in each country is to stay silent for two or three days and simply take it all in. Allow my mind to accept what I’m seeing instead of rushing in and trying to save the country. It’s almost defeating when I look at the big picture and remember the masses I saw in Port Au Prince. It’s almost defeating when replay in my mind the bus ride and staring out at the thousands of tents. And then I think about how its defeating to think of defeat so quickly instead of taking one step at a time. Smaller steps are required to be able to make bigger steps to be able to make leaps and bounds. It may seem that at times progress is at a standstill, but as long as I remember that every day I work here in Haiti means the train is still moving. It doesn’t matter what type of work I do. It doesn’t matter where I work or how long I work, because I know that the work I’m doing will give way to the big picture. One day, Haiti will be able to stand on it’s own feet again and that’s all that matters and as long as I'm working toward that, I know progress is being made.
