Saturday morning, I had finished my run and was still aglow from the delight of a cold shower as I got ready for the day. I started thinking through what I would wear for children’s ministry that morning, knowing I’d have kids jumping on me and wanting to dance, and that my go-to skirt was nearly too dirty to wear for a third day.
All of a sudden, shouting started pouring over the gates of our compound. My teammates trickled into the house one by one, saying something about tear gas.
We didn’t come to Haiti month 1, like we were supposed to. The political unrest was just too great and our leadership wasn’t about to send us to a country where the State Department determined that our safety was in question.
I remember being a freshman volunteering at the university TV station. I stood peering over the shoulder of an older journalism student as she edited footage from the day. It was a storm and the weather advisory instructed everyone to seek shelter inside. But she ran toward the storm. Her colleague set up her shot, and she stood, nearly getting knocked over by the wind, and recorded her stand-up as an apocalyptic sky brewed behind her.
“It’s funny,” she told me. “Whenever there’s danger or some disastrous event, everyone runs away. But you’ll always see two types of people running towards it—first responders and journalists.”
I always expected to find myself in the thick of something like that. I’ve run toward protests and crime scenes, pulled with a logic-defying magnetism to security threats, and it’s not because I was suicidal. It’s not because I wanted to get hurt. It’s because it was my duty to get the story, and the story was worth it.
When I read Laura Kasinof’s Don’t be Afraid of the Bullets, I wasn’t scared, I was inspired. And her words stuck with me…
“I had already started building the wall that prevented me from being debilitating my traumatized by all this. It was the wall that allowed me to report, to suspend a part of my humanity, the part that feels. The wall came so naturally, I didn’t even know I was building it at the time. I suppose it’s an intuitive defense mechanism. My brain knew that my body would not flee, that it must stay and be witness to tragedy…I knew I wouldn’t run because that’s not who I believed myself to be—a person who flees.”
So what happened in Haiti? Our host handed everyone toothpaste to put under their eyes and nose, to assuage the burning, and told us we were going to the long-term missionaries’ house, where we would be safer.
A switch went off in my head, and I was in perfectly practical problem solving mode. I attribute my speedy packing skills to my journalism training. I am #merrillmade, after all, and you won’t catch me without a go-bag or unprepared to chase that story across town. I put my laptop, phone, and chargers in my backpack, checked that I had water and my pen and paper, grabbed the team money, and a headband to hold over my mouth and nose.
We walked in a pack over to the other house, less than a half mile away. There, we settled in, notified our leadership, and waited, knowing nothing else about the situation.
It turns out that the political tension was trickling out of the capital and into our little town of Monwi. Dissidents reacted angrily to a statement by the president and began rioting and setting up roadblocks in an effort to be heard by the nation’s higher-ups. Police had set off tear gas on the main road to disperse the crowds, and we caught a whiff of it in the latter hours of the riots.
We were fine. No one on our teams was in danger. I was calm. Our hosts relayed to us information about what had happened based on alerts and advisories. So what was the problem? I wasn’t nervous or scared. I was acutely aware and alert, of course, but at no time felt unsafe. But I had (reasonably) run away from trouble, and I traced the source of that itching burning sensation not to the tear gas but to the fact that I was sitting there, sipping coffee and eating avocado toast, not reporting on a story.
At one point, a squadmate asked if this would be in the news. I thought, “not because of me, that’s for sure.”
I’m so grateful for our hosts and our staff, who work hard to keep us safe. I’m grateful we weren’t in danger. I’m grateful for our team leaders, who filled out an incident report, and the women who brought our breakfast over to the long term missionaries’ house for us to eat. But ingrained so deeply within me will always be that instinct—that pull—to run toward the danger and not away. And I’ll just have to figure out what it feels like to resist that. So far, it kinda burns.
