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Haiti 2011: June Fourth

I was in Jacmel, Haiti, this past week with a team of eleven people. To say the least, it was memorable. I documented some of the highlights of the trip, from my perspective. Unfortunately, two days into the trip, I lost my notebook, which means I lost my entries for the first few days. From my memory, here were the highlights of those days. Over the next days, I also plan to post interviews with my fellow team members, who were without exception happy to let me share their experiences.

I'll start at the Port-au-Prince airport. We were told to guard our luggage upon entry, and now I know why. Waiting for us as we approached our luggage were several men in blue shirts, counting and organizing our checked baggage. These were airport employees. With our minds on simply gathering our bags and getting out of the airport, this took us as somewhat of a surprise. Although they were employees, it is customary (as it is here) for a traveler to tip in cases like these. They'd already done the work, so we felt obligated to do that, to our own chagrin.

This wasn't the end, however. After we were checked by customs, we met our liaison, Andrew, who helped lead us to the van. We left the building to find still more Haitian aids. These were also uniformed, this time in plaid, though it took us (or at least, me) a moment to understand that these men were not employed by the airport, but simply waiting to earn an income. To say that they insisted to help carry them to our vehicle could be an understatement. At first, we simply told them no, but as they continued to place their hands on the luggage and offer help, we became equally insistent that they do not, at one point stopping to turn and launch a mild bickering session. We told the lead man no several times, but still they pushed. When we reached the van, we managed to get the luggage in quickly, all while stanching the lead aid's help. When this man followed us to our bus, he asked for his expected tip, and seemed genuinely hurt (not angry) when he was denied.

The trip through Port-au-Prince was sobering. We were tired, having taken a red-eye and getting-- at best-- intermittent sleep. What we saw, though, would have left us silent anyway. Tent colonies to the sides, dilapidated buildings, traffic-ridden streets with countless people walking all directions, across and to the side of those streets. The whole city looked so improvised and haphazard. Streets wound in unpredicted directions. Hilly and pothole-ridden, they were lined with buildings that seemed to be constructed on a first-come, first-serve basis. In other words, they didn't appear zoned in any way, so that they seemed to be unplanned. The poverty was overshadowed only by the ubiquitous exhaust smell, poured forth by trucks and cars and tap-taps throughout these busy lanes.

Driving was also very different here. Street width required skilled maneuvering on the part of our driver. If you hesitated to pull around a vehicle-- or a person walking-- you risked halting traffic behind you. The people here expect you to take advantage of opportunities to push forward. At the same time-- one of our group members made this observation later in the trip-- there is a strange cooperation between those in cars and trucks and motorcycles on the one hand, and pedestrians on the other. The need to share the road with one another is given, and pedestrians and motorcycles will-- almost without thought-- allow the larger vehicles to pass, to keep traffic flowing. This tendency also lacks the anger we in the U.S. would meet with in these conditions. While traffic issues cause people to scream at each other, there was absolutely no anger involved, despite the stress involved in it. The whole process seemed almost organic.

What was most visible to me, though, beyond the poverty and grime and traffic was the population itself. In short, the people were almost completely made up of children and young adults. The middle-aged and elderly were almost non-existent. This was bad news. It meant that people die young here. We did see more older people later in Jacmel, but even here, the older population was a very distinct minority. It was a sad indication of the life expectancy here.

The sheer number of people also reminded me of a concept I had learned in a geography class, called the "demographic transition model." In short, the model shows that countries transition through four stages of development. In the first stage, a country will experience both high birth and death rates, population being checked by disease and famine. Whatever population growth occurs, then, is canceled out by its losses. Countries in this stage are preindustrial. Haiti seems to be in the second stage, a stage marked by declining mortality rates, but coupled with the high birth rates of the first stage. The result is a "population explosion."* I should note that my perception of this in Haiti was influenced by the density of the population in Port-au-Prince, how closely packed everyone seemed to be. The smaller towns we observed as we climbed the mountain to reach Jacmel seemed to be highly populated as well, but there was also a vast and lush countryside dotted with huts and only lightly populated. It was, as the leader of Audio Adrenaline (one of the founders of the organization we worked with through the week) said, a "land of contrasts."

*de Blij, Harm and Peter O. Muller. Geography: Realms, Regions, and Concepts. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2002.
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