Last Friday I walked out of the airport in Port au Prince to a plethora of sensations. I was running on almost no sleep, practically a zombie stumbling through the airport and just wanting a bed. I was welcomed by a wall of heat and humidity that has few equals in the world. Loud abrasive music was yelling at me from somewhere. A dozen bag handlers were accosting me to hire them and explaining their dire situation and why I should help. I could smell garbage, urine, and I think a burning tire. Honking horns, loud revving engines, shouting in Creole, and scared looking foreigners rounded out the scene for my senses to take in. And I was smiling. I couldn’t stop smiling.
Sitting in the Miami airport last year after leaving Haiti I wrote down my thoughts on leaving Haiti, and I think it’s time to share them:
I think I look like the kid that can’t find their mom at the carnival, but feels like it’s something they did that got them into that situation. Sad, shell-shocked, arms in tight to keep from shivering, and staring deeply at a wooden globe with disproportionate continents and mislabeled cities that I’m slowly rotating back and forth in my hand. This is me walking through the Miami airport. People are passing me as I move at my un-rushed pace while they try to beat customs line ups and impending flight times. I find myself, looking as I described above, questioning the purpose and existence of hallways. Yeah, that’s right, hallways. I fly into a post earthquake city struggling to recover when it wasn’t in a recovered state before the earthquake, where dead bodies are ignored in the streets for hours on end, where trash and rubble line every street, where people haul the frames of wrecked cars on wooden hand carts through traffic and weld things together without goggles on the sides of the streets, where 124 orphans share a single long drop toilet, where electricity is an unreliable and sporadic thing, where tent communities are everywhere you look – all that and I don’t remember ever being shocked in all the months I’ve been in Haiti.
And a hallway in the Miami airport breaks my brain.
I think about how many people could make a home out of this one corridor and be 1000 times safer than in the tents they live in now. It’s currently used to keep people inside while walking over a km between our gate and customs…over a kilometer of moving walkways, concrete, carpet, lights (with electricity running them), glass and steel. And I know there are many more just in this building. All serving…what purpose? How much work and money went into this…hallway? This probably won’t make ANY sense to anyone else reading this, but that’s ok, because that’s how mind numbing it is – I just feel lost. I feel like if I could see someone from the base I’d be ok with feeling this way, maybe even shed a tear, but the idea that I won’t see them pushes me that extra bit into literal shock. Images and moments from my time in Haiti keep coming to mind. I want to turn and run, for the plane to take me back to my home in Fantamara, Port au Prince, in time for community feedback time tonight. My insides shrink with grief at the fact that I keep moving forwards, one foot in front of the other, on to the rest of the airport. I know it will pass, but for now, man do I wish I hadn’t left Haiti.
Those were my thoughts after leaving Haiti last year, unsure if I’d ever return. Coming back, though, has had the opposite effect. There are good friends here, things I’ve missed, things I’d forgotten I loved. I don’t know why there are places in this world that do this to me, where I feel more complete, more at home than when surrounded by what’s most familiar and easy, but I do, and I don’t often get to return to them as new and structureless things always seem to be part of my calling. Despite the hard things going on here, possibly because of those things, I can’t imagine being anywhere else.
