Incredibly, I've been back in country for three weeks. Not that work hasn't been a total blur, because it has. But I find myself looking through the Haiti Lens from time to time, seeing the thing here (the grocery store, orderly traffic, toilets that flush) that would be very different or downright impossible there. It's not really a new feeling; having an actual context in my head for comparison is the change. Now that I think about it, I wonder that I don't flip that lens down more than I have. I could speculate on that, but I'll save the screed on American oblivity for some other time.
I had thought I might have one more post in me on Haiti, but, oh my, one's not going to do it. Look at THIS one. I felt like tonight was significant because I finished off my malaria meds: one the week before, one the day you go, one the day you leave, and one for each week after. We were under full-length mosquito netting every night, all of us, so exposure was pretty tiny. I don't remember getting one or two bites. The annoying thing is that I can't seem to shake the cough. I guess I should check for....whatever. Croup or whooping cough or hanta virus, maybe. But probably not malaria.
Now, after a completely bonkers, 50+ hour week at work, things are a bit calmer. And rainier. Which means I can reasonably expect to be indoors for an hour to give a brown bag. Brown bags are lunchtime talks, usually having something to do with a related aspect of work (plants or birds or how replace your own sewer pipe with the cutlery you have lying around the house), but every once in a while someone will talk about a trip they've been on. Hi. Happily, work is full of curious, not to mention inquisitive, people, so I may actually need to book a bigger room.
But it's hard to know where to start. Haiti is such a different world that saying you've been there is a little like saying you've been to the moon or to Mecca or the somesuch. And I don't think it's just perception. I think the difference is substantial and real, although it feels less alien to me and more like just friggin' complicated. I can't even answer the most basic questions about the week in a simple way. This from the guy who's always trying to boil it down to the essential. It's my 'summarizing hat.' No good.
Because Haiti is so different. I've spent each of the last two Sundays talking and musing with Mari Kay, and Jim, who went last year, all of us trying to make sense of this last trip. And we've been there! Mari Kay's been four times, and STILL it's this crazy foreign place. People ask me if I'd go back again, and, in my mind, I turn to Mari Kay: are we going again? I don't know. I think it's too soon for either of us, for any of us, to say for sure. We put up with a fair bit over the course of the week, much of it personality-based, maybe more of it culturally-based. It's a frustrating and rigid and patriarchal (oy) week. C'est Ayiti.
And I don't think we even see the half of it. We walked through the village twice a day, and were rarely asked for anything. One smart-aleck 9-year-old asked me for $5. That's it. Where else in the developing world can obviously Western folks go and not be treated like a meal ticket (and, by the way, I understand that point-of-view, uncomfortable as it is for Westerners)? I mentioned in passing how different our drives to and from the airport were. It's easy to see how much greater the possibility for tension would be in other parts of the country. Throw in massive restrictions on where teams could go (you better believe for our own good...) and it's pretty clear the teams work in a massive bubble of Willem's creation. Which...okay. Personally, I didn't even do patient care, so I had less interaction than the rest of the team. I was fairly well cocooned upstairs in the pharmacy storeroom.
And, yet....I see it. There's a reason Willem shoves a .45 into his pocket when he drives to the airport. It doesn't take a lot of imagination. So much chaos, just around the corner. Just waiting for a particularly hungry day. Or an especially wet hurricane. Or a new influx of typhoid. Or, hell, you name it. C'est Ayiti.
And the question is still: do we go back? This year our team worked with 773 people in 5 days. Many of them walked several hours, maybe even a day, to see us. Despite all the BS and phleh, the team helps a lot of people. There's still a calculus that needs to be done, an emotional cost-benefit analysis, if you will, that's still being computed. We have a big team reunion in a couple weeks. Stay tuned...
