Traveling can be hard in Haiti. But its difficulty can be hard to write about, too.

For one thing, one doesn’t want to whine. I’m constantly in busses and trucks with Haitians whose need to get around the country is more urgent than mine and who put up with troubles much more genuine than the little inconveniences I face. For another, one tends to run out of suitable images, pictures that communicate the difficulty well.

On Monday, I came across a solution to the latter of the two problems: As I watched the two young men standing in front of me on the bed of the truck, holding tightly onto to its ropes as their well-ironed jeans bunched up around their ankles, I knew I had come across an image. The guys were so afraid to let go of the ropes which they clung to that they couldn’t be bothered to reach down and pull up their pants. An older gentleman seated next to me eventually reached over and pulled up the pants for one of the kids. He carefully tucked in his shirt – This was a message: The young man’s shirt had been distinctly un-tucked. – and then hitched up his belt. I followed his lead, reaching over and doing the same for the other. I left his shirt, however, as untucked as I found it. I’m not in any position to deliver messages.

They were lucky. One of their companions had shrunk to the bed of the truck, unable to weather the battering he was taking. Seated on the floor, with his head between his knees, taking the very same battering, he vomited. A lot. The nice man next to me explained that his heart had been overturned too much. A couple of market women were sitting next to the young man on the floor. Unflustered, they helped him to remove his jersey, to wipe himself and his backpack off with it and some rags they had with them, and to settle himself in for the rest of the ride. The kid took a lot of teasing, but he seemed relieved by their help, and he gave himself up silently and unresistingly into their hands.

We were all on an afternoon truck from Okap to Wanament. Okap is Haiti’s major city in the north, and Wanament a large commercial town right on the border. The road between the two cities is terrible, just terrible. Strangely so. It’s a very impotant commercial route, constantly travelled by trucks, busses, motorcycles, and cars of all sorts. Oh: bicyles, horses, donkeys, and mules as well. Some people even walk.

So there are strong reasons to make it a good road. It’s wide in most places, but rough, covered entirely by bumps and holes and ruts as it crosses the northeastern lowlands. There are rocky, gravelly stretches and broad, swampy pits, six-ten inches deep with oozy brown mud.

Most of the trucks that work the whole length of the route are a size or two larger than big pick-ups. Some are much larger. More importantly, perhaps, they’re higher off the ground, so the bumps, the holes, and the various gashes in the road don’t bother them much. Drivers really keep them moving. And the trucks transmit that motion, every bone-rattling bit of it, to the parts of their passagers that they are in direct contact with.

I was sitting on a hard, narrow wooden bench, along the side of the flatbed. I had been one of the first to get into the truck because I just missed getting onto the previous one, so I had a reasonably good seat. It had taken me some time even to get to the Wanament station in Okap, so I was anxious to finally get to the city of Wanament itself.

I had walked out my door at just before 4:00 AM. Busses leave Pòtoprens for Okap from a station at the very base of Delmas, about two hours away. The first part of the journey from my house to the station takes longer in the early morning because you have to walk all the way down to Petyonvil. The trucks that normally take you there from Malik don’t start working until after 5:00. So it was after 5:00 when I got to Petyonvil and found a truck loading up for the trip to the base of Delmas. To make up for the extra time you spend walking at that hour, the rest of the trip tends to be quicker because you don’t have to deal with the Delmas traffic, which can be considerable.

When I arrived at the station at around 6:00, two busses were loading competitively for Okap. It seemed clear which would finish loading first, so I bought my ticket and got on.

It was past 7:00, and we were still sitting. The bus certainly seemed full, but drivers won’t leave until they’ve sold all the places that they think they can sell. The bodies of the busses are old schoolbusses, which are grafted somehow onto larger, higher truck frames. They sell three tickets to a bench, and people making the long trip tend to bring lots of luggage, so one tends to feel pretty packed in. They also sell a certain number of reduced-price, standing-room places, so you can easily have large adults very close to you in every direction.

And then there’s the music. Haitians like it loud. Really loud. Our driver had one cassette tape full of popular Haitan dance music, and it was coming at me in waves from 6:00 AM until I got to Okap at around 2:00.

We finally got going around 7:30. The other bus was nowhere near full by then.

It’s a long ride to Okap. Six-eight hours depending on an unpredictable range of variables. There’s a ten-minute stop for snacks in Pastrel, just north of Gonayiv,a little less than two-hours from arrival. The people around me on this trip all seemed very nice, but they were also, quite uniformly, large. I was pressed firmly into my place for the whole ride. We chatted a little bit a couple of times, but the music and the heat and the fatigue didn’t leave a lot of room for dialogue skills. It was easier to pretend to sleep.

The leg from Okap to Wanament is much shorter, but much harder, too. I arrived in Wanament, a little ragged, but none the worse for wear, shortly after dark. Technically speaking, I had both – and I believe I’m using these words correctly – contusions and abrasions on the part of me that enters a room last. But they’ll heal.

And that’s the point I suppose. They will heal. And I am none the worse for wear.

It is tempting to get wrapped up in the little discomforts that belong to the kind of work I do. But such temptations – And they are very real: I had great fun writing a fuller, anatomically more vivid version of this piece for a friend. – are a distraction.

They are rooted in the most intimate, the most fundamental aspect of the privilege that I grew up with. I am accustomed to an extraordinary degree of physical comfort: pleasant places to sit; quiet places to converse; easy, roomy ways to get around.

Facing – maybe “facing” is the wrong word – a hard, narrow bench on a heavily-rutted highway might actually be as good for my soul as it is bad for my rear-most parts. It can remind me that comfort is a privilege. It might just make me stronger.

But whether it’s good or bad for me or for anyone else is not really the point either. The road is not there to teach me a lesson. Struggling to draw a lesson from it is as much of a temptation as the temptation to playfully whine is.

The road is not a challenge. It is simply the one route from Okap to Wanament for those who want to or need to make the trip.

I think the market women understand things best. They just sit in the truck, discussing the day’s purchases or sales, talking about their families and their friends. And if someone throws up, they take care of him.

The Creole word for a demonstration is “manifestasyon”. It’s the word used to describe the times that people take to the streets to protest. They might be objecting to the murder of a popular figure or the high price of various commodities or the firing of a university official or the presence of U.N. peacekeepers. Monday evening, for example, crowds converged on a luxury hotel in Pétion-Ville called the Hotel Montana. It had been used as the headquarters both for the peacekeeping mission and the electoral council. Hotel management was intimidated enough to tell both the U.N. and the council to set up residence elsewhere.

Yesterday, I had to walk through one demonstration, and this morning demonstrators are in the street outside Frémy’s home in Darbonne, where I am as I write. The most striking thing, perhaps, about the two demonstrations is how similar they were. It’s surprising because the reasons for the two demonstrations, though they were both focused on the February 7th elections, were so different.

Since last Friday at least, Haitians have been anxiously awaiting the results of the elections. Voting went splendidly on Tuesday, with Haitians all over the country making great sacrifices so that they could participate in elections that were long overdue. I have written about how well they went in the corner of Lagonav where I spent election day – See: AnElectionAfterall – and as I returned to Pòtoprens on Saturday I learned that voting had gone just as well in other areas. The electoral council had said that results would take three days to tabulate.

From the start, though, it seemed clear that René Préval was certain of a large victory. He was president from 1995-2000, between the two interrupted terms of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Préval entered the election campaign relatively late in the game, and he didn’t do a lot of campaigning, but the sector of the population that had supported Aristide – the poor – got almost uniformly behind him. They are the large majority in Haiti, so if they vote and vote together, their candidate cannot fail to win. And they have been voting. Their candidates – whether Aristide or Préval – have won every successful election since the departure of Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986.

If Aristide was known for his enchanting rhetoric, for his extraordinary ability to put a dream into memorable words, Préval is known for straight, simple talk. When he did finally hit the campaign trail, his stump speech was the farthest thing from what you’d expect from a populist. He would ask large crowds to raise their hands if they were unemployed. In Haiti, where unemployment is said to be over 60%, hundreds or thousands would raise their hands and cheer. And then Préval would say: “Listen carefully to what I’m telling you: I cannot promise you I’ll create employment for you. That’s not what a government does. I will try to create a secure and stable country where the private sector can invest. They are the ones who can create jobs.” His seeming frankness appears to be part of what has made him popular.

The difference in style between Préval and Aristide is clear from the emblems each has chosen for the political alliances they’ve led. These emblems are important not only because they crystallize a message but also because many voters lack reading skills so that it is by the emblems they vote, especially for candidates below the presidency whose pictures they may not be able to identify. Aristide’s emblem is brilliant. It’s “bo tab la”, a picture of a small table with chairs. It means “a place at the table”, and it’s a clever way to suggest that Haiti’s poor want their share, too. Préval’s is much less sophisticated. It’s “lespwa”, or “hope”, and the picture that accompanies it is of a healthy, green leaf.

The only real question as the votes were being tabulated was not whether Préval had one, but whether he had won the absolute majority he would need to avoid a March 19th run-off with the second-place finisher. It would be a tough row to hoe, because with 34 candidates opposing him each would need to average only 1.5% of the vote to made a second ballot necessary. Even so, Préval’s margin of victory seemed certain to be large.

But on Friday, only very partial results were released. More were released Saturday and Sunday, with Préval hovering the weekend at around 50%, briefly climbing to 52% Saturday night before dropping to 49% and then 48% percent on Sunday. And then the counting stopped.

Accusations of fraud began to surface. Even within the electoral commission, statements were made by some members suggesting that other members were manipulating the count to ensure that a second ballot would be required. Those attempting to manipulate the vote might have hoped that, if they could just get the opposition to Préval down to one candidate, they might be able to beat him head-to-head.

On Monday, things started to heat up. Préval’s supporters took to the streets in Pòtoprens, fearing that the election was being stolen from them. Throughout the day, various leaders asked Préval to make a statement, telling his supporters to quiet down, but he declined, saying that he was not the master of the Haitian people and that he would need to consult with other members of his political organization before he could issue a statement.

That evening, his supporters demonstrated outside the Hotel Montana. He finally made a statement, saying that he and his colleagues believed there to have been inaccuracies and downright cheating in the counting of ballots, that he believed he had the absolute majority he needed to take office without a second ballot, and that he would make certain that his team very closely watched the final tabulation to ensure its accuracy.

Tuesday was very quiet. I had been in the countryside on Monday, but I had to spend Tuesday doing some work and running some errands in Pòtoprens. I got in and out of the city without any difficulty, except finding busses and trucks that were on the road. Apparently, Préval’s statement had convinced his supporters to wait and see.

But Tuesday evening news broke that ballot boxes and ballots had been discovered partially burned in an area north of Pòtoprens where trash is left. It’s not yet clear what the stuff was doing there, but fears of fraud became more urgent, and Wednesday Préval’s supporters shut down Pòtoprens by taking to the street.

Wednesday afternoon, I had to get from Fondwa, in the mountains between Léogane and Jacmel, to Darbonne, where I had work scheduled with Frémy on Thursday. The problem was, the route between Jacmel and Léogane was blanch, or empty. The trucks and busses that work it were nowhere to be seen. Eventually, I got a ride from a guy driving his own car across the mountains toward Tigwav. When we got to the base of the mountain road, at Kafou Difò, he would turn south and I would head north, but at least that would get me part of the way. In the worst case, I figured I could walk from there to Frémy’s in two or three hours.

I headed on foot towards Léogane, and that’s where I came across the first demonstration. Protesters had blocked the road – one of Haiti’s main highways – carrying posters and banners with pictures of Préval and his party’s emblem. They were dancing and singing. To say that they were peaceful doesn’t go nearly far enough. They were downright friendly, inviting me to join them, chatting with me as I made my hurried way. And it’s worth emphasizing this point because, especially for Haitians that don’t know me or what I am doing here, I can’t help but represent the same foreigners whom they believed to be complicit in the effort to steal the election from them.

They understood my hurry, and did not hinder me as I made my way. When I got sufficiently in front of them, I found a working tap-tap and made my way to Darbonne without further incident. I spent the night at Frémy’s. I heard news of the day’s protests in Pòtoprens, and they had been uniformly peaceful.

When I got up Thursday morning, I learned that Préval had been declared winner of the first ballot and given 51% of the vote. The official announcement was made in the middle of the night. I headed to downtown Darbonne as I always do first thing when I stay at Frémy’s, to drink coffee at Jaklèn’s. She’s a coffee merchant in the morning and serves beans and rice later in the day.

Heading to Jaklèn’s, which is at the tap-tap station in downtown Darbonne, I came across the second demonstration. The street was full of Préval fans, chanting his name and dancing. This time they weren’t protesting fraud, but celebrating his victory. The street party continued for a couple of hours.

I started to think about what someone who didn’t understand Creole and didn’t know what it was about might have made of it all. The two events resembled nothing more than celebrations. With Kanaval, or Mardi Gras, right around the corner, they could both have appeared to be warm-up parties, preparations for the main event.

Part of me thinks that the joyousness even in Wednesday’s protest reflected something fundamentally Haitian: the ability to be cheerful at moments of discontent. One of the ways that Haitians react when they hear about a misfortune, or see someone in pain, is by laughing. It has taken me some getting used to, but I’m beginning to see the wisdom in such acceptance.

But part of me thinks that something very different was at work this time. It was as though, even as they protested against what they believed to be fraud in the making, they knew that they would win out in the end.

The confidence they seem to have in Préval gives reason for optimism. If the powerful sectors in Haiti and abroad that oppose him can be convinced to accept his victory and work with him for the next five years, Haiti might finally begin to make the progress that his ally, Aristide, promised years ago: “From misery to poverty with dignity.”

Yayi and Kaki

I’ve wanted very badly to share this picture of Yayi and Kaki ever since I took it a few weeks ago. They are from Upper Glo, the steeply sloping collection of small clusters of homes across the road from the wealthier cluster, or lakou, I live in.

The boys say that they are good friends. When I asked them what that means to them, they thought for a minute. Then Kaki, who’s on the right, said “Si m wè yon moun k ap bay Yayi yon kou, m ap tou antre.” That means that if he saw someone hitting Yayi he would jump right in. I have mixed feelings about the sentiment. I’m glad that they have each other to depend on, but I’m sorry that fighting was the first thing that popped into Kaki’s mind.

Fortunately, that’s not generally what they’re doing when I see them. I see them when they come down to the water source by the great mapou tree in front of our lakou. Fetching water is an important chore around where I live. Larger kids and adults will come to the source with five or seven-gallon buckets. Littler children come with gallon jugs. The smallest bring one jug, larger kids bring two or three, until they are big enough to carry a bucket instead.

As important as the chore is, it does not tend, for the children, to be very business-like. They’ll spend a good deal of time at the clearing just playing before they fill their jugs and head home. One of them might have a ball or a handful of marbles or some elastic bands. These are toys of choice. But an upripe grapefruit or a bundle of rags can substitute for a ball, and games like tag can be played without any equipment at all.

The other place I see them is in our lakou, where they will do small chores for various of the households. They might get a couple of pennies for their trouble, but they are more likely to just get a thank you and bite to eat, which seems fine with them. They might sweep or carry small loads of sand or rocks for construction, and though they can often be counted on to get their little tasks done, they are no more serious about their work here than they are under the mapou. Kaki in particular is quite the clown, and he seems to like nothing more than to make Yayi – and anyone else who is willing to look at him – laugh.

As I was thinking about this photo, I began asking myself why it seemed so important to share it. I wanted to figure out something that I could say about it. The fact that the boys are cute hardly seemed reason enough. After all, it doesn’t really seem to have anything to do with my work.

But the more I thought about Yayi and Kaki, the more I realized that their relationship to the various bits of work that they do sheds light on my relationship to mine.

Two facts have pushed me towards thinking about my relationship with my work these days. On one hand, I have a truly outstanding colleague at Shimer who has decided to take a leave of absence from teaching because, at least in part, he would like to be able to make his non-working life more interesting. When I say that the person I’m thinking of is “outstanding,” I mean the word literally. My colleagues at Shimer are all very good, but this one stands out for his thoughtfulness, his diligence, and his openness to learning. He’s a model. On the other hand, I’ve been in conversation recently with a group in the town where I grew up that is willing to have me come and speak to them about my life in Haiti. That group seems at least as interested in the life I live among my Haitian friends and colleagues as it is in the particular educational work that I came to do.

The latter point was, at first, a little surprising to me. I think of myself as a classroom teacher. It’s true that a lot of my activity in Haiti has more to do with helping other teachers establish conditions within which they can work in a classroom – the collaboration with Fonkoze is only the most extreme example of this – than it has to do with any direct contact between me and students. Even so, helping shape classrooms is the heart of what I think I do.

At the same time, I’ve always taken the name that Frémy and I gave our project quite seriously. We call it the Apprenticeship in Alternative Education, and though “apprenticeship” is slightly misleading as a translation of the Creole word, “aprantisaj,” that Frémy initially chose, it succeeds nonetheless in putting emphasis in the right place. I am in Haiti, first and foremost, as a learner. It is because I am learning that I think I can help others do the same.

But when I think of what I am learner here and how and in what situations I am learning, then the line between what I might, according to some conventions, identify as my work and what I would identify as my private life begins to blur. It loses its meaning. Because surely I’m as much of a learner in conversations with people like Yayi and Keki as I am when I’m trying to figure out an essay by Piaget with colleagues at the Matenwa Community Learning Center or when I’m helping to work out a budget for educational programs with colleagues at Fonkoze.

And I have the good fortune to be able to make the same claim the other way around: Just as I can see my everyday life as part of my work as a learner, I can also see what might conventionally be called my job as a part of my everyday life. I do not leave my home life to go to work, nor do I leave work to go home. It is one life.

Concepts like “time off” and “overtime” and “vacation” only make sense if you are selling your time to someone who’s assignng you to do something you’d rather not do. Make no mistake: I know perfectly well that there are lots of reasons why someone might choose to or might have to do this. But, at least right now, it’s not something I have to do.

My work in Haiti has a lot in common with the trips to the water source that Yayi and Kaki make. It’s very had to distinguish it from play, and I can’t think of any reason that I should.

Over the course of the last weeks in January, it began to seem increasingly likely that there would be an election in Haiti.

This is an odd claim for an American to make. The regularity of our own democratic processes means that the question as to whether they’ll be an election never arises. We can tend to be apathetic as election season rolls around. We might be happy or unhappy with the way elections go. Our candidates might win or they might lose. We can distrust an election’s results; we can even doubt the democracy of our democracy. But no one ever has to wonder whether an election will take place. On Tuesday, November 4, 2036 – just to pick an example – I’m pretty sure that Americans will be voting for a president, a set of representatives, and some senators. Nothing like that is really certain this far in advance, but it is pretty likely. There’s even a chance that I’ll participate.

But Haiti has no such history of regular elections. That’s not to say that there haven’t been elections. There have. Presidents have come and gone, some of them elected. Few, however, have completed their constitutionally fixed term and handed their authority over to an elected successor. The country has endured over thirty violent changes in government in the 202 years since it won its independence.

The latest occurred at the end of February 2004, when Jean-Bertrand Aristide was removed from the presidency for the second time. He had been overthrown once early in his first term, in 1991, but returned from exile in 1994 to complete the term. He then handed his office over on schedule to Rene Preval, who was elected to replace him, in 1995. In 2000, he ran again and won.

Exactly what then happened in February 2004 is a matter of controversy. What’s certain is that there were heavily armed groups of irregulars violently approaching Pótoprens from the countryside – Haiti has no regular army – and that demonstrators had taken to the streets in Pótoprens. President Aristide went into exile in South Africa, where he remains. This is true though he also remains a popular figure – perhaps the most popular figure – in Haitian politics.

Since he departed, Haiti has been governed by a Provisional President and Provisional Prime Minister whose constitutional mandates – to organize new elections within three months and then step down – expired over a year ago. Elections had been scheduled three times since last November, but each time they had been cancelled and a new date set.

So it was hard not to retain a degree of skepticism as February 7, the most recently established date, approached. And when we got to the polls at about 6:15 AM, fifteen minutes after they were supposed to open, and found them still closed, and when 7:00 and then 8:00 came and went and they still hadn’t opened, one had to wonder.

My colleagues’ polling place was in Zetwa, roughly a two-hour hike down the mountain from Matenwa. At 3:30 AM, the Matenwa school’s conch sounded. The conch has great value as a symbol in Haiti. The slaves who were organizing themselves into what would become the successful war of independence from the French used the conch to announce the beginning of their uprising. The famous statue of an escaped slave in Pòtoprens shows him with a large conch in hand. In Matenwa, a small boy called Ti Youyout had been asked to blow the school’s conch to awaken prospective voters so that they could prepare to hike down the mountain. A group of us had agreed to meet at the school at 4:00 and to set out together. Folks were anxious to get into line and vote, and I wanted to walk down with the voters and take in the polling place ambience.

The voters’ enthusiasm was striking. If someone had told me six months ago that the Haitians I know would be so determined to vote, I wouldn’t have believed them. Most of the people I was talking to back then were professing a lack of interest, and I couldn’t really blame them. What many said was that they had elected the president they wanted – Aristide – and that he had been taken from them. They didn’t see the point of choosing their own president if their choice could then be reversed by powers, within the country and abroad, that were looking after their own interests.

As plans for the election unfolded, voting only seemed to get harder, in at least two ways. First, acquiring the new national identity card that doubles as a voter ID turned out to be a nuisance. One had to stand in a long line – perhaps hours long – both to apply for the card and then to pick it up when it became available. For folks in the countryside, there might be a long walk just to get to where application for a card could be made. Production and distribution of the cards was slow – this was one major reason that elections were delayed several times. Even now, there are those who never received their cards.

Second, a decision was made to minimize the number of polling places. It was argued that this would maximize national and international observers’ ability to keep an eye on things, to assure that voting was both fair and safe. But it also meant that many people would have to walk for hours to cast their votes. Our two hour walk from Matenwa to Zetwa was typical on Lagonav. Plenty of people had to walk farther than that.

And when people started picking up their registration cards, many discovered that they had been registered to vote a long way from their home, even if there was a polling place nearby. For example, most residents of Zetwa, where my friends voted, had been sent to vote in Zabriko, a long uphill walk for them. Most of my neighbors back in Ka Glo had been sent to Fermat he, either a hard two-hour hike along mountain paths or an even longer trip down into Pétion-Ville, where one could get transportation up the Fermat he road.

But people seemed really determined to vote. They put up with the long walks, the waiting. They ignored their own skepticism. When our group got to Zetwa at 6:15 or so, long lines had already formed, and the lines did not noticeably diminish as the first hours passed without a sign that the polling stations would open.

Finally, all but one of them did open. The organizers decided that the best way to reduce the number of voting sites would be to set up multiple polling stations at single sites. So there were eight separate sites in Zetwa all in the same school, and by 9:00 all but one of the lines was very slowly moving.

The eighth station hadn’t opened by 11:00, and we were really beginning to wonder. A rumor was finally spread by the candidate-appointed observers on duty that they had refused to allow the station to open because the election officials in charge of the station had already signed their stack of blank ballots. This, the observers felt, could easily be a first step towards stuffing the ballot box. It was almost noon when more important election officials arrived from some more central location backed by heavily-armed Argentinean UN soldiers. They marched into the closed ballot station – the local officials had barricaded themselves in – and in a few minutes voting started.

Throughout the day, the atmosphere was festive. Children ran through and around the lines. Friends spoke with friends whom they might rarely see. Vendors sold snacks: cookies and crackers; peanut butter on bread or cassava; fried sweet potato, plantain, and fish; plates piled high with beans and rice; and drinks of various sorts.

It was after 2:00 when all my friends from Matenwa had finally cast their votes. Mèt Abner, the Matenwa school’s principal, was the last, because he simply refused to push or be pushed in a line. He was willing to stand in line for almost eight hours to exercise his civic duty, and that long wait was preferable to any sort of jostling. It’s a sentiment I very much admire.

On the way back up the hill, under the hot tropical sun, we talked about what might come of the election, who would win and who would lose, which races would come down to run-offs in March. It was a slow, dusty trip. There’s been very little rain since early December, and dust covers Lagonav’s roads. It’s several inches deep in places. I spent most of the way chatting with Gertrude, grandmother of my newest godson, born February 3. Gertrude supports her children by walking to the various markets around Lagonav and trading. She rarely misses a day of work, hiking to distant markets nearly every day, so the walk down to Zetwa and back up to Matenwa was nothing remarkable for her. She was dressed up in her best Sunday dress, hat, and shoes. Like Abner, it took her a long time to vote, but she would not be denied the opportunity.

It’s encouraging, but also a little embarrassing to see the commitment to voting that Haitians showed. Consistently low American voter turnout, in a place where it really is easy to vote, belies the “of the people, by the people, and for the people” rhetoric that seemed so important at the beginning of our republic. One wonders what possibilities for change would be open to us if we could learn to engage in the electoral process as Haitians do.