My first glimpses of Port-au-Prince came largely through rolled-up car windows, and it was difficult, at first, for my brain to parse what my eyes were seeing. Haiti’s capital spread out around us like a puzzle of sound and light. The visual textures of urban life I’m most familiar with were largely absent: in their place was a discordant eruption of colour and movement.
Cars. Engines. Honking. Small lottery ticket booths fresh-painted in bright white and green. Palm trees. Mud. Low-ceilinged concrete shops. Goats. Garbage. Open sewage. Hand-painted store signs and handmade market stalls. Barefoot children. Rubble. The remnants of abandoned United Nations compounds; the psychedelic art of the famous tap-tap private taxis.
Eventually, these puzzle pieces fell into place, and the picture that coalesced then was one of pure hustle. Everywhere I looked, people were hard at work. Women weaved in and out of traffic, carrying massive bunches of bananas. Men pushed creaking wooden carts piled with bricks or scraps of metal. I watched a tap-tap roll up onto two wedges of concrete next to the road, that served as a drive-in mechanic shop; its workers leapt into action, kneeling under the vehicle to start tuning it up.
There’s little traffic control in Port-au-Prince; driving is mostly a matter of jamming your vehicle through the congestion. Every time we jolted to a halt, men would rush up to our windows, showing off their wares: bottles of water, small cans of engine oil. The street activity was chaotic, constant, buzzing. The air was hot and heavy, but the city was still breathing.
I didn’t understand Haiti then, and I don’t now, but I’m trying. To understand Haiti, you first have to learn its history. It’s the story of how an enslaved people overthrew their French masters, and were forced to spend centuries repaying the debt of their own bodies. The story of how a proud country, hoping to be a beacon for the world’s oppressed, would come to spend its independence being ruthlessly exploited, abused and harmed by those promising to “help” them.
I won’t recount all that history now, but here is an excellent and comprehensive video on the subject. If you watch it, you’ll see that Haiti didn’t become a failed state either overnight, or by accident. The suffering of Haitians is immense, but it was never writ in stone. A great deal of it is the result of games played by far more powerful players; and that part of the story has always been out of Haitians’ control.
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I never wrote much about my brief time in Haiti. It wasn’t enough to know what to say. Yet this week, I feel compelled to reflect on the memory of that visit; I did have another subject for this newsletter, but recent news temporarily washed it away.
In case you missed it: this week, Haitians suddenly became the target of xenophobic attacks, including by Donald Trump and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance. The first shots began with the accusation that, in Springfield, Ohio, Haitian immigrants were eating people’s pets. There’s little evidence of this, and Springfield police have said there have been no such credible claims.
Yet that didn’t stop anti-immigration agitators from zeroing in on Haitians further. In Twitter threads, accounts with large followings shared video clips from media reports, showing mud cookies for sale in Haitian slums, streets piled with rotting garbage, and a public slum toilet — a shack with a hole in the floor — emptying into sea water used for cleaning clothes.
They’re not sharing these images out of any desire to call attention to Haiti’s intense suffering. No, the rancid implication (or sometimes even explicit explanation) is that Haitians must like eating dirt, like living in garbage, like washing clothes near a toilet — or are just too stupid to avoid it. Therefore, the argument goes, they’re genetically inferior, and we must thus never allow them into “our” countries.
This is, of course, patently racist garbage. Haitians are not the first poor people to eat earth, to acquire some needed minerals and quell hunger: it happens in the American Appalachians too. And anyone who has seen Toronto during a garbage strike wouldn’t be too surprised about the state of trash when there’s no service to collect it.
It doesn’t matter. Those who are primed to find an ethnic out-group to hate dutifully took the new direction. By Friday, Haitians in Ohio were keeping their children home from school amidst threats and fears for their safety, and some schools even closed.
I’m not an expert on Haiti. I was there for only a week in 2019, which is meaningless in terms of acquiring any special knowledge. Nearly 12 million people live there and know more about Haiti than me, as well as many more who have Haitian relatives or who have spent years working in Haiti or studying its history.
Yet if nothing else, that week in 2019 was at least enough to ensure that, for me, Haiti is not a place that lives only in the imagination. It’s not lines on a map, or a newspaper headline, or an extreme travel YouTuber’s report from Port-au-Prince’s most infamous slum. And I’ve certainly spent more time there than the ghouls using Haitians to whip up anti-immigration sentiment now.
When people try to confront them: “Oh, if you think Haitians are so great, why don’t you go to Haiti?” is a retort I’ve seen more than once.
Okay, I have. Now what? The suffering in Haiti is immense, no doubt. But I cannot think of a more evil thing than to wield images of that suffering to attack those who suffer, in order to gain votes or political power. The cruel cynicism of such an act is breathtaking; Haitians deserve so much better.
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I didn’t sleep well in Haiti, and on some nights not at all. I was anxious most of the time, spooked by the risk of kidnappings — which strike Haitians most severely — and the occasional pops of gunshots somewhere over the hills. Those could’ve been from villagers slaughtering livestock, but still put me on edge. I felt very vulnerable. It’s not so much that you’re always in danger in Haiti; you aren’t. But you are keenly aware that should the worst happen, there’s little to protect you.
My constant state of tension did, at least, produce some funny moments. At the place we were staying, a luscious mango tree spread its branches over the metal roof of our bedroom. Sometimes, a ripe fruit would crash down above our heads with a deafening bang. Every time this happened, I’d leap straight out of bed, and half out of my skin — much to the amusement of my calmer friends. It’s a very strange thing to say, but I’ve slept more soundly through ballistic missile attacks than I did any night in Haiti.
Yet the most challenging part of my time in Haiti wasn’t the lack of sleep, or the heat, or the lack of security. It was, rather, the sense of despair I felt coalescing in my guts, every time we left the compound. For most of our trip, I didn’t know where to find an optimism in what we were seeing. Haiti was beautiful, and much of it is calmer than the violent imagery the news tends to seize on. (This is the value of being present in a place, rather than just reading: even very ethical news coverage is inherently tuned to crisis; you don’t see where things are peaceful.) But you couldn’t avoid seeing just how desperate many civilians’ circumstances had become.
Look, I’ve been a journalist for a long time. Our work tends to bring us to the places on earth that hurt. I’ve seen poverty and incredible trauma, and tried to write about those things with care. The trick as both writer and human, I learned long ago, is to look for the hope. It’s usually close to the surface, easy to find: hope always wriggles into the cracks, sprouts, and survives.
Yet for most of my brief time in Haiti, I struggled to see hope. This was not due to the people. I found Haitians to be proud, and remarkably resourceful: the average Haitian certainly works harder than I’ve ever worked in my life. The difference is that I live in a society built on a stable framework of complex systems, one that functions to ensure my effort is rewarded. Social services in Canada may leave much to be desired, but for the most part, they do carve out pathways to build at least an adequate life.
For most Haitians outside of a tiny elite and middle-class, there’s no such path. They work hard, and their only reward is survival. There’s nothing functional around them on which they can build a future. One thought I kept having in Haiti is that its people are more or less on their own: there’s not enough to help them. The country is flooded with NGOs and religious ministries that provide aid — food, schools, health care — of varying quality and consistency, not to mention ethics. But you cannot build a country on charity alone, and the gaps in support yawn more like chasms.
So if you’re born in a slum in Port-au-Prince, it’s difficult to imagine how you’d even begin to find your way out. You start with nothing, and almost nothing is given. You live in a hovel with a curtain for a door and a rust-eaten tin roof through which rains regularly pour through. You have no sanitation, no electricity, inadequate health care and never enough food. Your education is spartan, at best; the literacy rate in Haiti is only 61 per cent. There are few jobs to sustain you, few places to live that are safe, no resources to improve your conditions. You want to find new scrap metal to repair the roof? Okay, with what money? Every cent you scrape together goes to staying alive.
Look, I’m not an expert in these subjects; I don’t know where you’d even begin to fix Haiti’s problems. What left me struggling to find hope was it didn’t seem like anyone else knew either. The solution can’t come only from the outside, that much is certain; besides, Haitians are rightly suspicious of outside help, given how often they’ve been exploited and abused by those sent to “protect” them.
Yet the conditions for many Haitians are so desperate, it was hard for me to see where to find a hope from within, either. It’s not for lack of trying. We met many determined local people on our visit: the warm-hearted Haitian women who ran an orphanage on love and a shoestring budget live vividly in my memories. They didn’t have much, yet somehow managed to ensure the kids were fed, had a safe bed, and got an education.
But when a nation’s civil structure has collapsed so completely that too many citizens’ mental and physical energy is fully consumed in just surviving, there’s not enough left to build a more stable, functional system. Or so it seemed to me, anyway.
This produces a bleak sort of cycle. One day, we visited a government school by the coast. (This itself is rare; up to 90 per cent of Haiti’s schools are run by NGOs.) The school had no running water, so we were puzzled to see a long open-air sink with no apparent function. A teacher told us it had been built as part of a sanitation project, and fed by a large metal water cistern. Shortly after it was built, the cistern and sink taps were stolen to be sold off as scrap metal.
A reasonable first reaction to that story is frustration, even anger. How could thieves do that? Isn’t it stealing their children’s future? Yet if you think a little more deeply, it’s hard to judge the thieves too harshly. If you were desperate to feed yourself or your family, if you had almost no way to secure your basic needs, you’d do what you must in order to obtain them. You’d scrounge for metal. You’d steal, if not-stealing led to starvation.
And you’d eat the mud cookies, if it meant getting a little bit of dietary minerals and a briefly silenced hunger. You’d use the toilet over the beach where people washed their clothes, because that was the only place you could go. You do not have options.
Given the choice of enduring horrible conditions, or simply giving up and dying, most animals — humans included — choose the former. That’s just survival instinct. We are all here because of it; it’s what got our ancestors through times of privation. So it’s no insult to the poorest Haitians to observe they have it too. It is, in fact, a declaration of their humanity: they persist and make the best of it, because that’s what humans do.
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On one of our last days in Haiti, we visited a village school tucked away in the island’s interior mountains. It was not far from Port-au-Prince by distance, but felt a universe away through the sheer difficulty of the journey, a lurching crawl up a precarious and washed-out road. I marvelled at how Haitians made do with the route: at one point, I saw a man casually driving a tiny motorbike up the same steep and inhospitable trail, its a large funeral casket balanced on the seat. It didn’t even look physically possible.
After several jaw-clenching hours, we finally reached the mountain’s upper plateau, where we decided to walk the remaining kilometre to the school. It was quite safe to do so: Haiti’s mountain villages are often more impoverished than coastal towns, but also calmer and more peaceful. At the time, there was no gang activity in the region, though security has deteriorated in Haiti since, and I don’t know what it’s like now.
The village, like most in Haiti, had no running water, no electricity, and little in the way of any visible public service. The main work was cutting sugarcane for a couple dollars a day, or other subsistence farming. The footpaths between fields were paved in plastic trash; empty bags and flattened juice bottles crinkled under our sandals. In the heart of town, some entrepreneurial resident had managed to purchase a couple of solar panels, by which villagers could charge flip-phones for the equivalent of a few cents. Nearby, a blacksmith toiled over an anvil, his hammer ring-ring-ringing as he repaired broken machetes. A line of farm workers waited, holding their chipped and dented tools. The smoke from the smithy fire wafted up into the jewel-blue sky.
The school we were there to visit was run by a church, led by a charismatic Haitian preacher. (We attended his Sunday service a few days later; it was an unforgettably joyful experience.) My friends’ Hutterite community paid for the school’s daily hot lunches, and was in the early stages of planning an underground water cistern that would provide the village with water; the nearest well was an hour’s walk away.
When we arrived at the school, we were beset by giggling children, to whom we were both an interesting anomaly and the inspiration for a spontaneous game. They’d rush back and forth between us, competing to get a hand on our arms; sort of like musical chairs, I deduced, but with touching us blancs. Some snuck out of their classrooms to get a better look, before being ushered back inside by firm but benevolent teachers.
The activity was, for me, a bit overwhelming. I stepped back to the edge of the open-air courtyard, and just watched. As I looked at the kids, I started to notice how all of their uniforms were impeccably clean and neatly pressed. I noticed how all the little girls had their hair beautifully arranged, braided and beaded and decorated with red ribbons and tiny red-and-white plastic baubles.
I pictured how long that must have taken. Pictured how their mothers, hands aching from a day at work in the fields, must sit and lovingly comb their daughters’ hair, for no reason but pride. And I wondered if, given the same difficult life, I would have the same commitment to ensuring that my children always looked their best.
In the end, after we left Haiti, that was where I chose to put my hope: it lives in the people. A people who hold onto their dignity, in conditions which actively insult it; people who daily find ways to survive where I’m quite certain I would not. They are the same people who are now being made a subject of derision and suspicion by the wealthiest people on the planet — people who have something to gain by directing public rage at the most vulnerable targets.
Well, I’m not an expert, but I will say this. I have been to Haiti, and I am not scared of Haitians. I’m far more afraid of those who urge us to mock or hate them, using images of suffering for which they have no compassion to extend or desire to understand. The Haiti I saw was a place of great suffering, but also of abundant life and, yes, hope. I’ll cast my solidarity with them any day versus those who would insult them, to slam the doors shut, and drive them away.
By the way, if you are also incensed about the political rhetoric of the last week and wish to channel that into supporting Haitians, I always recommend Zanmi Lasante / Partners In Health — a Haitian-led effort that provides crucial health care in very challenging conditions.