Lately I feel as though I’ve been spending a lot of time in Kosovo. Let me explain: “Kosovo” is a nickname for the area around Pòtay Leyogann, the main bus station for destinations south and southeast of Pòtoprens. It’s called Kosovo because it’s said to be extremely dangerous, a shooting gallery of sorts. Before I go any farther, I should say that I am never there during the dangerous hours of darkness, always during it’s bright and busy-and therefore much safer-days. This is my way of responding to advice that is not really even advice. I have not so much been asked or counseled to stay away from there at night. There have been no “recommendations.” I have been ordered to do so, by Toto and by others as well. I obey.

Erik and I were entering Pòtay Leyogann on a recent Monday morning, sharing the back of Edwa’s motorcycle. I have been going to Okay every Monday for about a month, but this was Erik’s first trip with me. Pòtay Leyogann is an active, active place, home also to strange, strange sights. For example, every once in a while, as I sit in a bus, waiting to leave the station, I see a man walk by. He’s a healthy-looking young man, probably in his twenties or early thirties. He stands tall, and walks deliberately, calmly. As though he knows where he’s going, but is in no rush to arrive. I’ve never seen him stop to talk to anyone, never seen him turn to exchange a quick greeting or even to acknowledge a glance. He just walks, straight and slow and completely naked. Erik says he once saw him wearing a hat. No one seems to take any notice.

As Edwa, Erik, and I drove up, we came upon another startling sight. There was a brass marching band, playing a slow piece, strolling ahead of a bright white hearse. It was a funeral procession – in the States we might say “New Orleans style” – but there seemed little that was funereal about it. The music was slow, but not really sad, and the front of the hearse bore a stunning, many-colored wreath of flowers. Edwa made a quick left, cutting across a layer of rubbish and worse, into the station itself to avoid getting hung up by the procession.

Before going any farther, I should say that there are certain things that any understanding of the station would require. In order to begin to imagine the scene, you have to realize that it is hot, dusty, smoky, noisy, busy, and littered. I suppose that what strikes me the most is all the shouting: merchants shouting their wares and bus loaders shouting to potential passengers.

We drove in on the carpet of trash, and started to look for a bus. Generally, several will be loading up, competitively, at any one time. Teams of loaders shout and tug at you – they might try to grab your baggage, too – hoping to get a bus out a little sooner. They seem well-organized, even if it’s hard to figure out exactly how. I have observed this much: there are individuals, one tall, heavy man in particular, who are shouting loudly, angrily at all of them, all of the time, from the front of the station. The drivers pay the loaders a set fee for their work. There seems to be very little room to argue or negotiate.

The trick for a passenger is to find a bus that has a reasonable chance of leaving fairly soon, but one that also still has not-too-undesirable seats available. One has to make quick decisions about how to compromise between those two ends. The desirability of seats ranges both from bus to bus and within any given bus, too. Things like leg room, proximity to windows, the volume of the music charging out of the inevitable speakers –all these things can vary greatly. The wait can be fifteen minutes or more than an hour.

Erik and I were looking for seats next to the driver, in the front. The busses are local constructions. A bus’s body is built onto the back of what I believe is called a “flatbed” truck. The driver sits, with a small number of passengers, in a separate cab. The two seats right next to him, in contrast to the two behind him, have much more leg room than any others. They cost more, but they’re much more comfortable, too. I tell myself that I need to avoid arriving in Okay too tired. It helps me justify the extravagance. We secured such seats by choosing a bus that wasn’t nearly full yet. They don’t leave before they are. That gave us some time to take in the spectacle: the traffic, the shouting, the busses being washed, the deals being made. At the corner, there’s a tap-tap station. Down the street there are auto repair shops and a car and bus wash, too. Occasionally a police vehicle drifts by.

But there’s something else, too. I’m told that in my life in Waukegan, Illinois, I live near one of the biggest malls in the States, Gurney Mills. I think someone once told me it was roughly three miles long. Everything is there – except exactly what I want – but in order to find anything at all, you have to walk and walk. The stores can’t come to you. More and more folks shop through catalogues or web sites at home, but that involves credit cards, delivery charges, and waiting for the mail. Things at Pòtay Leyogann are much, much easier. The stores all come to you on merchants’ heads. There are hardware stores: baskets filled with flashlights, locks, batteries, screwdrivers, knives, scissors, and other miscellany. There are bookstores: neat, straight piles of Bibles and hymnals. There are opticians, carrying short poles displaying dozens of sunglasses in various styles. There are drugstores: baskets or small tubs of pills, liquids, powders, bandages, soaps, shampoos, toothbrushes and pastes, and other assorted stuff. There are bakeries: men and women selling cookies and cakes and crackers and breads. There are produce stands, selling local fruits and Washington apples. There are candy merchants and drink vendors. You can buy towels and wash clothes. You can buy sewing kits and sandals. You can buy brightly-colored combs for little girls’ hair.

And it all comes straight to you. If American consumers only knew how easy life could be.

Byton and I were heading down the hill the other morning. When we got to Malik, we saw an unusual sight: There were two street kids in the back of the tap-tap that was waiting to fill up before leaving for Petyonvil. They called to us to hop on, but we said that we’d walk, and off we went. The sight was unusual because they boys don’t usually come up the hill. They pack the tap-taps in Petyonvil for the trip up, but they stay down there.

I told Byton that I enjoy seeing the boys, and I do. He asked why. I explained that I love their manner. There’s a group of five or six of them that work at the station in Petyonvil where tap-taps leave for either Bwa Moket or Malik. They call out each ride’s destination, and get a goud or so from the driver if he’s satisfied with the way they fill his truck or van.

They are genuinely playful. They are playful in the way they shout out destinations: “Malik! Malik! Malik! Ann ale! Ann ale moun mòn nan!” (“Ann ale moun mòn nan” means, roughly, “Let’s go, mountain folk.”) Or: “Dola Malik! Dola Malik! Dola Malik! M prese! M prese!” (Here, “dola” means a Haitian dollar, or five gouds, and “m prese” means, “I’m in a hurry.”) There are plenty of other variations, too. They are playful too in the way they sing, dance, and play-fight with each other as they work. One or another of them might occasionally have a little radio, or even a walkman, and they’ll pass the earphones back and forth. And they are playful in their exchanges with drivers and with passengers as well.

I explained to Byton that I had to like them, because they make me smile. And we talked a little about how we understand their situation. Or how little we understand it. We suppose that they are street boys, homeless. Neither of us had a reasonable guess as to where they sleep or eat. I imagine Byton’s own life as hard-his unpaid apprenticeship demands long hours of heavy work, and when he gets home there’s always more work waiting-but we both tried to reflect sympathetically about the boys’ lives, too. There’s little about it that we’re very clear about. They seem to be organized at least loosely as a union-like body, working the Bwa Moket station, and it’s there they spend their days. It’s always more or less the same boys, enough so that I recognize them and they recognize me-even though I rarely take the ride to Malik. They seem happy.

I had a lot to do on that day, but I spent much of it, on and off, thinking of the boys and about my conversation with Byton about them. I had to go to Bizoton and back that afternoon, a trip which takes me through downtown Pòtoprens. The various rides I take there and back take me around and through several other, bigger tap-tap stations, and so I see many more of the boys. Things are different downtown, though. A fair number of the folks packing the tap-taps are adult men, or much older boys, and no one seems to be having as much fun as the boys at Bwa Moket station do, but those facts didn’t really strike me as I made my way back to our office in Delma. My thoughts were jumping back and forth between the talk with Byton, and the difficult class I had just had.

But as the tightly packed van that I was taking from the Pòtay Leyogann station to the station at Delma 65 turned up Rte de Delmas itself, it ran, predictably, into traffic. Somehow I always end up in the worst possible seat in these vans, right behind the driver, facing the back of the van, with nothing to brace myself on but the hope that I won’t quite end up in the lap of the person whose knees are pressing tightly against the half-seat beneath me. We were in the left lane, with a concrete barrier separating us from oncoming traffic a few feet to our left. Strolling up and down the narrow space between us and the barrier were drink venders, carrying buckets and boxes, and calling out whatever it was-water or various soft drinks-that they had. They spend their days there, selling their wares, and choking on whatever fumes Delma traffic can produce. As I stared out the window that I was clinging to, I started to see another procession walking up and down that little space. They were boys, dressed or half-dressed in filthy rags, many of them barefoot, each carrying a no-less-filthy rag in his hand. They make eye contact with each driver, silently asking for permission to wipe his or her windshield, perhaps the whole car or truck.

None of this really grabbed my attention. It’s surprising how hardened one can become. I was still thinking about my class, and about how uncomfortable I was. Days earlier, I had complained to Erik that I always ended up in the same bad seat on this trip, and I was looking forward to telling him that it happened again.

But then I saw a boy. He was no bigger or smaller than the others. He too had his rag. He too was looking for a windshield he could clean. But he wasn’t looking very hard. He couldn’t, because he was crying. He was walking along, hanging his head, dragging his rag along the street. His torn shirt, whatever its original color, was dark gray-the color of the worst that Delma traffic was coating him with. His reddish brown skin was the same dark gray.

I don’t know exactly why he was crying. It’s not unusual to see a child cry. Maybe someone hit him or yelled at him. Maybe he lost something important. It’s hard to say. I thought about getting out of the van to try to talk with him, but it was getting late, it would have been hard to catch another ride, I didn’t know how he would react. There are always such reasons. By the time I realized that it was indeed the thing to do, it was
too late. So I’ll never know what he was crying about.

But I can say what I imagined. He seem defeated, disconsolate. He seemed to be crying because of everything all at once.

Since that day, I have seen the boys at the Bwa Moket station several times. They’re just as happy as they’ve always been. As nearly as I can tell. But their happiness seems even stranger and more wonderful to me now.

On the day after our all day hike into the mountains southeast of Pòtoprens, the first sound I heard was the corn mill. I was on my porch, a little tired and a little sore. Juan and Erik were still asleep. I looked over at the mill, and saw Clébert grinding away. He may have been tired too, but that wouldn’t have been to the point. He is married, with four very young children, and the corn he grinds every few days is what his family mainly eats. The work had to be done. After he finished grinding, he went over to Toto’s house where he’s doing some repair work. He’s a stonemason. There he spent the day moving the rocks into position, carrying water and sand, and mixing and applying the cement. Building. If he had any complaints, he kept them to himself.

I often think about work here, about how much work, how much hard work, the people I know here do. Let me mention a few examples.

I’ve written some about my neighbor, Madanm Kastra, but less about her husband, Kastra himself. Bòs Kastra is in his mid-sixties. His five children, ages 19-35, still live in the house he built. Recently, though, he’s started to build a house next to his own for Casnel, his oldest son. He is, like Clébert, a stonemason. He gets some help from his brothers, men not much younger than he is, and from Casnel too. But, on the whole, he’s building it himself. He’s a small thin man, but stands straight as a rod, and he works with the same energy, lifting and moving heavy stones and buckets of cement, that he must have had forty years ago. He’s said to be sick, to need prostate surgery, but the surgery is expensive. He doesn’t have the money, and could hardly afford to take the time away from work that recuperation would require. Even so, to see him from behind is to see a young man. If, once in a while, his knee gives out mid-stride, he gives his leg a shake and keeps walking.

Or take the folks that live in lower Ba Osya. They come, mostly the children, to get their water in Ka Glo. They live about a mile away, but ours is the closest source. It’s an especially hard mile to walk, steep and rocky. A couple of hundred yards of it are through the galèt, the pathless, rock-filled ravine that separates Ba Osya from Ka Glo. They make the trip several times each day, before and after school, with a gallon or two or five or six. I’ve lost my footing on that trail carrying nothing but my lightweight book bag. They carry forty pounds of water on their heads. Even little ones, four or five years old, will carry a gallon. By seven, they carry two, one in each hand. It’s remarkable.

Or Madanm Mèt. She’s up by four every morning, cooking and sweeping. She won’t let her children or her husband or me leave the house without a big meal, and Kasann, for one, leaves by six. She herself won’t leave until the house looks good, and that means carefully sweeping both it and the dirt yard outside. She’s in a hurry, because she too has to get to work. She walks each day to surrounding villages, from ten minutes to two hours away. She meets there with pregnant women and new mothers to talk about prenatal and infant care. And she does child vaccinations. When she gets home, at twelve or one or two, she starts cooking again, in a kitchen that quickly fills with choking, eye-searing smoke. She continues to labor all through the day, whether cleaning the house, preparing more food, or doing her daughters’ hair. She maintains her frenetic pace until eight or nine, then she goes to bed.

One more example: Byton, Bòs and Madanm Kastra’s younger son. He’s twenty-two. When I first came in 1997, he was still in school, a tireless student, up every day at first light, memorizing his daily lesson. When I would light my lamp at night to relax on my front porch, he would rush over and use its feeble light to read. He studied hard, really hard, all his days at school, and though he was the best student in our little neighborhood, he finally failed the national high school examinations. Twice, I think. So he gave up, and left school. It must have been a terrible blow. Now he works in Pòtoprens as a cabinetmaker’s apprentice. He goes down five days-a-week. He gets no days off. If he misses a day, he makes it up on a Sunday. He’s paid nothing, not even the little it would cost to ride a truck down to Petyonvil from Malik in the morning or back up at night. So he walks the hour down from Ka Glo before and after work. He spends his days lugging wood, or acting as his boss’s human vise-grip, or planing hand-cut boards-learning his trade.

It’s easy to romanticize the work that people do here, how much they work and how hard. It’s easy to slip into the habit of admiring special reserves of physical and inner strength they seem to have. It’s easy to think they’re extraordinary in some way. It’s much easier to construct and admire that notion of Haiti’s poor than to face the facts. I recently helped Jean-Reynald and some other young men with a little job they had to do, and was reminded that they are neither especially stronger nor less strong than I am.

The very hard work that the people I know do wears them out. Just as it would anyone else. Madanm Mèt has an ulcer. Byton, young as he is, is already developing a bad back. Of course, if you ask him how he is, he always says “tre byen,” very well. That’s just his way.

People work hard here just to survive. It’s not because they like the challenge, or because they’re “workaholics,” or to stay slim, or to get strong. It’s not to make a pile of dough. They have to.

I had a great idea. Not brilliant, but pretty good. The swiftly rising value of the dollar would surely drive the price of gaz blan, or kerosene, up soon. Other prices were and would be rising. Serious inflation is a real danger. I myself, however, was focused on kerosene. The absence of electric lighting where I live makes us depend on it.

This was my idea: I would buy three full gallons today-normally we buy only one, because a little goes a long way. I’d get it all at today’s price. Mèt and Madanm Anténor both liked the idea. We share our kerosene, so we’d all save. Only later did I think about how little we’d actually save: probably less than a buck. Only later did I wonder when I’d begun thinking like some Coeur d’Alene survivalist: squirreling away my stash of essentials to hedge against what might come. These were my thoughts in retrospect. At the time, the idea seemed really good.

So I collected three empty gallon jugs, and took them down the mountain with me. We don’t generally buy kerosene up on the hill, especially larger quantities. I go down to Petyonvil or Delma, and lug it back up. I stopped by the Texaco at Delma 83 on the way down to the office. I figured I’d leave the kerosene at the office for the day while I went off to do some work. I could pick it up on the way home.

But it wasn’t that simple. When I got to the Texaco, they were out. They had had a delivery that morning, but I was unusually late getting down the mountain, and by the time I arrived at around 10:00, they had sold it all. But that wasn’t so serious. The guys at the station said more was on the way. If I came by later, I’d be fine.

So I spent the rest of the morning working in the office, then went another mile or so down Delma to meet with a group of community organizers for the afternoon. Erik and I left that meeting just after 4:00, and headed up the hill. I went by our office to pick up the empty gallons, and walked the five minutes to the Texaco.

The kerosene hadn’t arrived. It would be there, I was told, by 6:00. I should come back. I thought for a minute. If I waited until 6:00, and could fill the jugs then, I could probably get home around 7:30. I hadn’t ever arrived quite that late, and I didn’t relish the thought. It would be dark, and I would be lugging what would be for me a lot of weight, so my footing on the path would be that much harder. I’ve fallen a couple of times recently, and though I haven’t been hurt, little scrapes get infected easily here, and that’s more of a nuisance than I need. On top of that, Madanm Anténor would surely worry, because she was expecting me to arrive by 6:00. So I caught a ride up to Petyonvil. I thought I’d try to buy the kerosene at the Texaco there instead.

They too were out. They said they thought that Delma 83 was the only place to find it. I doubted that was true, but I certainly knew no better. So after a brief little sulk, I headed back down hill. I got to Delma 83 at about 5:30. After reminding me that he had said the kerosene would arrive at 6:00-the way he put it made me feel as though I was being scolded for coming too soon-the guy working there pointed to the full-size eighteen-wheel tanker truck struggling to get into the lot. There it was. I should wait.

At 6:00, the driver was still trying to get the truck into the lot. Mostly by yelling at the station attendants. Since his last trip to the station, a Coca-Cola® truck had left a large locked metal box, filled with cases of Coke®. The box turned what was a tight squeeze into the station for a truck as big as the gas truck into an impossible one. After several efforts to move the full box, by manpower and by four-by-four, the attendants busted open its locks with a hammer, and emptied it out case-by-case. Then they moved the empty box.

By now, it was 6:15. The gas truck started to pull in as soon as its driver was done yelling at the attendants. That took a couple more minutes, but soon he was in. It took a few more minutes for him to yell at the attendants enough that he was able to start filling the station’s underground tanks, but really not too long. He started with the diesel tank.

Now it was almost 6:30, there were more than twenty of us waiting for kerosene, and no indication that he would start on the kerosene tank anytime soon. I started to calculate travel time, and I would hardly be able to make it up the hill much before 8:00 even if I got my kerosene immediately. Not very likely.

So I gave up. I took my jugs back down to the office, and headed back up the hill empty-handed. I would, as it turned out, be able to fill them late the next morning. When I got to Ka Glo, the folks were a little surprised at my late arrival. They enjoyed the story I had to tell.

I spent a lot of the three hours between 5:00 and 8:00 thinking about how I was being inconvenienced. I must admit I was feeling pretty annoyed. But I left the station at 6:30 because I figured I could go a night without reading. Others there waiting could not give up-not if they wanted to eat: They would be using the kerosene to prepare their own and their children’s food. What was annoying to me could threaten their health, their well-being.

But I was annoyed. It’s funny how petty we can be.

Suddenly there were five naked little Haitians boys swimming in the river with us. That’s when I felt that our group was part of a landscape. I say they were swimming, but they really weren’t quite, and neither were we. The river didn’t offer enough of a space to really swim. At least not in early March, well into the dry season. What they were doing was turning underwater somersaults, jumping around, and splashing. Generally: They were cooling and showing off. We ourselves were relaxing in the river’s strong current of cool water or drying on the warm rocks.
Toto and Jean-Reynald had been talking about the hike for several weeks, consistently telling me how far we were to go and how early we would have to leave. We would take off at 6:00 in the morning on Madigra, or Fat Tuesday. Kanaval would be in full swing down in Pòtoprens, but we would hike away from the noise and the crowd, up into and over the mountains, and down into the valley below. So we woke up at about five, we packed some sandwiches, and went for a walk. There were eleven of us: Madanm Kastra’s son Byton, Jean-Reynald, his younger brother Nikson, two of their cousins, Toto, Clébert, Richard, Erik, my friend Juan who was visiting from the States, and
me.

The most stunning fact about the whole walk for me was the dirt. It’s light or medium brown and rocky around Ka Glo, where trees, shrubs, and grasses flourish. Though Ka Glo is no rain forest, it is pretty lush: shady and comfortably cool most of the time. As we hiked up the hill, through Ba Osya and Blancha, the soil got darker and richer, less rocky. By the time we reached the small high plateau around Grifen and Divye, it was black. This is prime farming country, relatively flat. The peasants grow vegetables here – carrots, onions, lettuce, cabbage – stuff that won’t grow well in the heat down below. These are some of the gardens that stock the markets in Grifen itself, and in Bwa Moket and Petyonvil below. The houses around Grifen reflect what the gardens are worth. They are large, solid stone houses with expensive tin roofs. Many are nicely painted.

But as we walked up beyond Grifen, the soil began to change. First it started to redden. It became lighter in color and harder, too. By the time we reached the near side of the ridge, it was bright red, the red I remember from Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Up near the ridge, there were few large trees and very little grass. The shrubs were more succulent, less leafy. The gardens along the steep slope are large, but that hardly seems to help very much. There are few houses, and they are small and weather beaten. Most are made of woven sticks and mud.

As we crossed over the ridge, onto the other side of the mountain, the soil changed again. It turned white, grayish white. It looked like dirty sand, but it was more like powder. We were walking down the road as if through ashes, in places several inches deep. On this interior side of the mountain, there were few plants at all. It was barren, a desert waste. Lifeless gray dust all the way to the plain below. Just as there were few plants, there were few people. But there were a few. Somehow they scratch out something of a life on this unearthly terrain.

And we descended. By the time we got to the bottom, we had been walking for almost five hours. There was a shallow river there, where a few people were bathing and a few others doing laundry. Having crossed over the ridge, we lost the breeze. It was noon or so, and hot. So we hurried across the river to some shade, and thought about what we wanted to do.

The guys had determined to visit Belle Fontaine, where one of our neighbors had once taught school. But when we got to the shady oasis near the river, some market women told us it was another three hours’ hike. They were there trading at a small grocery – the only one for miles around, I was told. They pointed us instead towards Basanble, a small place about 30 minutes away, where the water would be a little deeper and there would be space to play soccer. It would be, they said, a little hard to find, so they assigned two little local boys to walk with us there as our guides. We had a ball and a picnic lunch with us, so the boys were glad to go along.

So we ate and we swam and then started to head back. When we got back to the grocery, there was a truck waiting to leave. We were more or less out of gas ourselves, so we jumped at the surprising chance to get a ride most of the way home – especially since the truck’s route would include the hard climb up through dust back to the ridge above Grifen. It was five goudes apiece, about a quarter these days, for a space to stand and hold or hang on. Baggage – we had none to speak of – would have cost extra, but other passengers brought plenty. For example: The mid-sized pig tied tightly to the truck’s flat bed squealed in pain or fear all the way back. We had to get out and walk a couple of times when the combination of the steepness of the slope with the depth of the dust made the climb too hard, but after an hour’s rough ride we were just above Divye, less than an hour from home.

As we walked, or dragged, back down, we talked. In twos and threes, the little groupings shifting as each of us slowed down, sped up, or took a short rest. Clébert tried to convert Juan to Adventism, using a homemade language, a sort of compromise between his own Kreyol and Juan’s little bit of French. I talked with Byton about his work: He’s an apprentice cabinet-maker. We got back to big and very welcome meals, which we gladfully ate, lots of questions about how tired we were, and cold water to bathe in. It was a great day.

For someone arriving at London’s Heathrow International Airport, it’s easy to believe that we all live in one world. Thousands of miles from Miami, Chicago, San Francisco, or New York, one is faced with so much that is perfectly familiar. I was at Heathrow for the second time in two weeks, and the fact that I was on my way back from Düsseldorf only added to the impression. More so, perhaps, than in Miami or in Düsseldorf, I found myself in a shopping mall, but not infinitely more so. I was looking through the same stores, selling the same sorts of things, made by the same companies: French perfume, Scottish whiskey, Italian silk ties, Japanese cameras, Iranian caviar, Belgian chocolate, American sunglasses. Heathrow may be an extreme case. Not all airports carry caviar. But it hardly seems all that extreme.

I used a payphone to wish my grandmother a Happy Valentine’s Day, and only needed to enter my Working Assets Long Distance code to charge the call. My small provider was connected through a larger American firmer-probably MCI or Sprint-to something called “Worldcom.” When I punched in my card number, I heard the same familiar operator’s voice welcoming me to the system and giving me simple recorded instructions for dialing the States.

The spectacular array of languages that I heard and the looks and forms of dress that I saw amplified the effect all the more. Flights seemed to be coming from everywhere and to be going everywhere: Dubai, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, Lagos, Oslo, New York, Seoul, Addis Ababa, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and Athens make up only a very partial list. And all the people, going to all their various places, speaking all their different languages
were buying the same French perfume, Scottish whiskey, Italian silk ties, Japanese cameras, Iranian caviar, Belgian chocolate, and American sunglasses. I found it all pretty stunning.

I was hungry, so I stepped into a not-quite fast-food restaurant, one very much like scores of American chains. It offered, among other things, American-style grilled burgers and sandwiches, various pasta dishes, several stir-fries, and espresso. There certainly was no hint of Britain in it. Even the chips were called french fries. I didn’t have a British pound on me, so I paid with my Visa card. The same card I had used to pay German marks for a train ticket to meet a Turkish-German student in Bielefeld who’s interested in alternative education, the same card I had used to pay French francs for a textbook in French on auto mechanics that I ordered over the internet for my friend and neighbor in Ka Glo, Toto.

Which brings me back to Haiti. The reason I ordered the book is that although Toto goes to a for-him-expensive auto mechanics school in Pòtoprens, descending an hour by foot and another thirty minutes by tap-tap every day, and although he spends significant time every day trying to do homework, he doesn’t have access to the book his teachers use, or to any other book on auto mechanics. Few of his fellow students do. They take dictation in French, or copy texts that their teachers write on the blackboard. Then they learn their lesson by heart.

My point is not, however, that Toto’s school stinks. I don’t really know that it does. My point is, rather, that Toto lacks something that those like me who were sipping double espressos at Heathrow, enjoying our one world, probably take for granted: If we are students in a school, we have access to school books. And that is just one obvious way that Toto-and here he stands for almost all of the Haitians I live and work with-lives in a world apart, without a share of the Heathrow-world. It least without a share in any positive sense: It is worth knowing that Toto, like many young Haitians, pays close attention to whether his sneakers have three stripes or a swoosh or another of the fashionable trademarks.

But my point is also not that Toto, or anyone else, should have more access to the consumer-world. Nor do I wish to preach against that world. I myself am only too comfortable shopping on the internet, I enjoyed my Heathrow espresso, and was glad in Düsseldorf to be able to buy a Steiff animal for the daughter of a friend whom I would see when I got to JFK. The sermon against consumerism is some else’s job. It’s a true sermon, though, and I wish I knew how to respond to its truth.

All I really want to do is describe my own sense of the interconnectedness among the places I visited during a twelve-day trip from Ka Glo, Haiti, to Wesel, Germany, and back. And I wanted to note how deceptive, how one-sided, that sense seems to me to be. For surely there is also a close connection between the tightening unity of London with Miami and Düsseldorf-and, for that matter, with Singapore, Dubai, and Tokyo-and the
poverty I see in Haiti every day.

Sunday we killed Miki. We had been planning to kill her for several days, but somehow couldn’t quite manage. We were all too busy Thursday and Friday. Then came Saturday, the Sabbath in our mostly Seventh Day Adventist community. On top of all that, it was a hard thing to resolve ourselves to do. Much, much easier to procrastinate. But Sunday, Madanm Frenel insisted, and with good reason.

When I told Toto how Miki was killed – how Frantzy, Toto’s little brother, and Ti Papouch killed her – he shook his head and said only this: “Yo mechan kamenm.” He was saying that the boys were wicked, or nasty, even though he recognized that the killing had to be done. Frantzy had gotten a rope around Miki’s neck. Then he dragged her, running at full speed, to the galèt, the rocky ravine, a few hundred yards away. He threw her, by the rope, off a cliff. Then the two boys stoned her to make sure she was dead.

Miki was our dog, really Madanm Mèt’s, a sweet and gentle creature. She was very often the first to greet me when I got home at the end of the day. She was always the first one to greet Madanm Mèt. She would sit at my feet whenever I read outside, hoping that I would take a minute to scratch her ears. A thin but energetic little dog that seemed to enjoy being around people.

At the end of December, she gave birth to three puppies. It was her first successful pregnancy. One previous time she had lost her litter because one of the children had kicked her. Soon after she gave birth in December, however, she got sick. She stopped eating, and immediately lost a lot of weight. The two weaker puppies quickly died. Of hunger, I suppose. The third hung on.

And then Miki started to regain her strength. She began eating again. She could stand up and even walk without trembling. It looked as though she would pull through. And the puppy’s strength grew with hers.

Then things suddenly got worse. Wednesday morning I heard odd squealing as I stumbled back in the half-darkness from the outhouse to my room. For some reason Kenedi, Toto’s mother’s dog, had brought her own six puppies to a quiet, sheltered spot near the outhouse. Miki was devouring them. She tore up three of them before we could shoo her off. She got two more on Thursday. Friday, we awoke to discover that she had killed her own puppy during the night. She spent much of Saturday and Sunday morning stumbling around. She would stand up, hobble around for a few steps, lie back down, then stand again. At one point I thought I saw whiteness around her snout, but I’m not sure. A had clear memories of the dog that Gregory Peck shot in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Finally on Sunday, she went after Madanm Frenel’s new puppy. She’s had the puppy only for a couple of days. Her last dog had died suddenly about a week earlier. Toto and I were sitting on my patio, working on his English homework. We tore over when we heard the noise. He managed to chase Miki away, but Madanm Frenel became firm. Her young boys were very likely, despite any warnings or prohibitions, to put themselves in danger trying to protect their little dog. Or simply out of mischief. Mèt Antenò agreed, and he called Frantzy and Papouch over. And they did what they did.

Haiti’s dogs must be among the most wretched creatures on earth. My neighbors were a little amused by how fond I was of Miki. They weren’t really surprised, though. I suppose they think it is the way of foreigners, something “blan.” John’s fondness for his dogs is well-known all over the mountain.

Haiti’s dogs are beaten, broken, and despised. One sees them everywhere. Limping on twisted limbs, their ragged flea-bitten fur hanging loosely over their protruding ribs. Almost all the families up where I live have dogs. And only a few give them any sort of care. They keep them for security. Not as attack dogs, but for the noise they make. They are barely fed, but called thieves when they try to take some food. And “volè,” or “thief,” is a very harsh word in Kreyol. They wander around Bwa Mokèt, looking for market scraps. They wander around Petyonvil and Pòtoprens, looking for God knows what. People think nothing of beating them, of kicking them, of hitting them with rocks.

Children are especially fierce towards them. The boys near Erik’s house broke his dog’s leg by picking it up high by its hind legs and letting it fall. Breny and Christophe, Madanm Frenel’s two boys, think nothing of dropping rocks on puppies when there are puppies around.

I don’t understand that violence. I know that it’s connected to the violence that we all experience and see here every day, but I wonder why that connection is so hard to break.

Ensemble Scolaire Père Basile Moreaux is the only place where I have ever:

1. Taught a class with someone sitting on my lap. (The well-behaved little boy’s mother participates in the class, and she herself was holding her beautiful girl.)
2. Spoon-fed someone in class. (No metaphor here. The little girl didn’t want to eat her beans and rice, and Madanm Aline was busy.)
3. Been vomited on during class. (Not the same week as #2.)

I am having a strange and wonderful experience there.

Père Basile Moreaux is a collection of schools on one campus. It’s directed by an energetic and funny priest, Pè Simon, who’s largely responsible for the fact that the program has developed as it has. There’s a three-year preschool, a six-year elementary school, and a seven-year secondary school. Post-secondary professional programs are planned. It’s in Bizoton, an area on the coast south of Pòtoprens, on the road that leads
through Kafou to Leyogan and Okay. Our connection there is with the preschool, which receives substantial support from the same Haitian foundation, FOKAL, that funds much of our work. We were invited to start a weekly discussion group there by four preschool teachers who were coming into Pòtoprens each week to participate in one of our groups here. The trip for them was two hours each way, and they were having to leave school early to arrive on time. They claimed, and we agreed, that it would make more sense for us to come to them-especially since a group at their own school would allow more of them to get involved. I now go every Thursday, alone or with others, in public transportation I’ve described elsewhere. Their school day ends at about 2:00, and we start somewhere between then and 2:30, depending on how long it takes to get together.

It was clear from the start that we would not aim mainly at training discussion leaders for preschool classes. It might be a good idea to lead discussions of texts with children three to five years old, but I’m not sure that it is. I am sure that I don’t know how to do it, and I suspect that there are better things for such very little kids to do in school. On the other hand, the teachers themselves are poor readers in two ways. First, their own limited education has been in French. Kreyol, though native to them, is not the language they would tend to read in. Work at reading seriously in Kreyol can thus be useful to them. Second, the reading that they have done for school has probably been pretty narrowly focused. They read to remember, perhaps word-by-word. At best, they might look to memorize and deliver a summary. They don’t engage themselves actively with the texts they read: They don’t probe, question, reject, or affirm. They don’t judge. They don’t bring their own knowledge and experience to bear.

We believe that such reading as they do is the farthest thing from liberating. We decided, together with the teachers who invited us there, that we could postpone any question as to whether or how to bring Wonn Refleksyon into their classes. We decided that the opportunity to read actively and thoughtfully together would be useful enough in its own right. The teachers themselves had one important suggestion: that we invite the parents of their preschoolers to participate. They felt this could serve to bring more parents into the school. As a result, we now have a group that consists mainly of parents. Plans to get more teachers involved have consistently failed, but we have new parents with us almost every week.

As the group’s work has progressed, it’s character has shifted dramatically. In early meetings, two men who were in the group dominated almost entirely. Each question anyone asked would draw at least one long speech out of each of them. Sometimes two or three. The speeches were really very long, often several minutes – which is longer than you might think. They rarely were closely related to one another, except in as much as they would treat more or less of the same subject. As the orators spoke, others would listen politely or whisper unobtrusively to whoever was closest. After a short series of long speeches, one or the other of the men would turn to me to produce another topic of speechification.

In contrast to our monotonous large-group discussions, our small-group work was engaging from the very first. Participants would talk, in groups of three or four, about their questions and concerns about the text. I would step out of the group, often even leaving the room. (Actually, that’s how I got vomited on. But that’s another story.) Everyone, or almost everyone, would participate actively. The four teachers who had experience in the process worked, both by example and explanation, to integrate the parents who had joined us. The types of questions that the small groups develop have changed quickly. In early meetings, each group would tend to summarize a text and then ask something about the “lesson” in it. Often, they would answer their question in the very same speech. As the weeks have passed, though, the questions have grown shorter and more specific. Particular questions about words, thoughts, or events in the texts. And about our judgments, too. Such questions have tended to lead away from the texts, and our discussions now wander very, very far.

But as they have, they’ve changed in character, too. Instead of two or three men dominating through long speeches about the lesson “we” are to learn, five or six or eight or ten men and women are making much shorter about the texts, but even more about their lives. These speeches may not always be as responsive to one another as one might wish. Perhaps we’re not yet, as a group, engaged enough in what any one of us has to say. But more people are talking, fewer are whispering – however unobtrusively – to their neighbors, and attendance is one the rise.

And it’s important to think about how much mere attendance means here. Bizoton is a working-class neighborhood. For these working-class parents to get dressed up – they wouldn’t come without looking good – in the middle of a blistering Bizoton afternoon to spend two hours of their very hard day reading and talking about stories is one small but very clear sign of what they’re willing to do to be a part of their children’s education.

The meetings can still be odd in some ways. Just one example: Almost any extended silence is likely to bring forth not new questions about the text or about related issues. Instead, the silences invite testimonials for the meetings themselves: how much “we” like them, how “we” need to get more parents involved. It’s something I’ve not seen before, and I don’t quite understand it. But I assume that the tendency will fade as we learn to engage ourselves more and more with texts and with what we have to say about them.

I didn’t know her. As Edwa led us up to the open casket, John said to me quietly that he had never seen her alive. As I looked at the face of dead woman’s corpse, neither older or younger-looking than her 57 years, I thought to myself that I wasn’t seeing her now. She wasn’t the corpse in the coffin before me.

Edwa is a friend and also, as I learned to say in the year I spent working in a Business Office, a vendor. He drives a motorcycle-taxi, and he’s the one we call on. We have enormous confidence in him-so much so that we bought him a pager so that we could always reach him. He is reliable, trustworthy, and a great driver. He takes us around, but also runs errands and hand-delivers letters. On the back of his bike you really feel safe.

Or as safe as Pòtoprens traffic generally allows one to feel. Even sitting behind him, even with no way to watch his eyes, I am always struck by how alert he seems, by how much he seems to be paying attention to. His head is in constant but very slight motion as he turns from mirror to mirror to various spots of the road-both what’s directly in front of him and what’s farther ahead. On the roads here, more potholes than roads, he weaves so carefully that one hardly ever feels a bump. With him, there are no close calls. He is also, invariably, on time.

But he’s also a great friend, a man in his early twenties with a gentle manner, a gentle little voice and, almost uniquely among the Haitians I know, delicate soft hands. We had been following with concern the decline of his mother – “manman” in Kreyol – for several weeks. When I saw Edwa in early January, she was in the hospital. She had been diagnosed as diabetic, and they had just cut off two toes. She would, he said, be fine-able to walk within a few months. A week later, they cut off her whole foot. A week after
that, she was dead.

Monday night, Coleen, Erik, and I went to the “veye,” which is something like a wake, but even more like a block party. Edwa lives in a poor, over-crowded neighborhood of Petyonvil. It’s a lively and potentially dangerous area, where a fair amount of drug traffic is said to go on. It’s also said, however, that if you aren’t involved in that stuff, and you’re with people who live there, you’re ok. Edwa himself says, for example, that he can leave his motorcycle parked on the street all night while he sleeps in his little room, a short way up one of the side alleys. The very fact that there’s criminal business going on all night provides a certain kind of security.

We got to the veye at around 8:30 or 9:00, but the party wasn’t nearly in full swing. Edwa was running around arranging chairs and tables along the narrow, crowded street. His own place and the alley in front of it had no space for him to receive guests. Men were playing cards and dominos. Woman were chatting. Everyone was drinking. We sat with a cousin of his and shared jokes. Edwa was serving beer, soft drinks, and homemade liquors. Ginger tea and coffee would come later. For the couple of hours we were there, he hardly sat down. He was always working, or grabbing a younger relative or neighbor
to help him. I’m told the party probably went through the night.

What struck me most was the total absence of anything that looked like grief. If there was a sadness visible somewhere deep in Edwa’s large dark eyes, and I think that there was, it was a sadness half-hidden, or trying to hide, behind the smiling, welcoming face of typically extravagant Haitian hospitality.

On the other hand, grief flowed spectacularly at the funeral next afternoon. I went with Coleen and John. I’ve read about expressions of grief like the ones I witnessed there, but I had never seen or really imagined anything of the kind. There were two funerals in the church that day, and they were combined when the priest came to sing mass. But before the mass, the coffins lay open in a different corners of the building. A small brass band was playing by each. As people came in, they filed up to the coffin to pay their respects, or to get a last look. It’s hard for me to know what looking in a coffin is really for: It seems such a strange custom to me. Edwa welcomed everyone dutifully, even warmly, but without the previous night’s smile. I would have expected him to be exhausted, but he didn’t look it. He was, instead, a picture of funereal solemnity. As the occasion demanded.

And there was shrieking. Women, mostly middle-aged women, would give themselves over to spectacular, spectacular cries. Some would fall down, needing the hurried support of those around them. Some would writhe, tossing themselves about, or being tossed about, in their pain. Their companions would collect shoes they had kicked across the room or purses they had thrown aside. They would try to lift them gently into a chair.

It’s tempting to try to explain their wailing. Various accounts are possible. None seems to me much more convincing than to say that the women were overcome by a spirit which let them give themselves over to ecstasies of pain. But that could be well off the mark, and I don’t really know what those words mean anyway. After the mass, I headed up the hill towards home. John and Coleen went to the cemetery.

Edwa has problems: He lost an older sister horribly last year. He had to sell his motorcycle to pay for her funeral. He rents one now, so it’s that much harder for him to save money towards his own future. And his mother’s funeral seemed enormously expensive, too. He’s left as the oldest child, with a younger sister who’s the single mother of two and a little brother in high school. They both depend on him now. But Edwa will surely manage. He has a good job, one that he likes, and he’s very good at it. There are a lot of Haitians much worse off than he.

But I don’t want to leave things there. I’d like to add one more thing. One idiomatic way to call a person “cruel” or “pitiless” in Kreyol is to say that they are “san manman,” or “without a mother.” I’m not sure why this is so. I can imagine several explanations. And now Edwa is without a mother. Nothing would convince me that he will turn pitiless or cruel. But I would say this much: the fact that Haitians use the expression in this way might be a way of thinking about the immeasurable enormity of Edwa’s loss.