HAITI

Traveling to Haiti shivers me all over. I've been there before. The trembling starts in my spine and climbs the stairway to my brain. Then Memory plunges its crookedness to the tips of my toes. I shudder and twist in my airline seat. I press my hands against my forehead to squeeze out images of what I know.

This time I’m not alone in my journey to a world God forgot. My buddy, Disbelief, is my companion as our airplane lands.

Packed into the exiting queue like sausage filling, we stumble our way toward the open door and ride the surge to leave the plane. Holding my carry-on against my chest, I grab the handrail and step gingerly down each descending tread.

“Look,” Disbelief says to me. His trembling finger points to the formation of men in riot gear positioned in front of us. ”What are they going to do?”

My eyes follow his direction. “Automatic rifles,” I whisper to myself. A ripple of terror pinches the chambers of my heart. Fear and Uncertainty accompany us as we shuffle into line and face the armed militants guarding the customs alleyway. Their cocaine eyes burn us as we twist and turn among the pack, feeling as if we'd done something wrong.

Again I whisper, “If they arrest us, they’ll disappear us.”

“Don’t overact,” he whispers back, placing a comforting hand on my shoulder.

We hobble along past the menacing sentries, clutching our bags with both hands as we escape to the outside of the terminal and merge into the sunlight, comforted that they did nothing.

Still eager to act the tourist, and not feeling a flinch of apprehension, Disbelief slaps me on the back and says, “What a relief! Let’s take a taxi for a jaunt outside the town.”

The vintage of the cab is unknown to me. Its door creeks open and scrapes closed, but it IS a capsule of refuge from the world outside as we are delivered away from town. “I can’t believe what I’m seeing,” my fellow traveler says as he raises his hand to his mouth. “There’s no pavement! People live in cardboard shacks! The women carry massive cans of water on their heads!”

The driver seems to ignore us. He continues to stare ahead and negotiate the rutted roadway, but without turning his head, he says, “We are very poor people. There’s no money for anything-- not for homes or pavement or water for buildings.”

As we bump along, humid air flushes onto us through the open windows and the missing windshield. It pats us down. On both sides of the car, fields spotted with makeshift structures dot the landscape, some host banana trees and meager primitive gardens. Here and there, men and women and children work the fields, their bodies bent in hairpins as they toil barehanded in the soil. The sun beats down on them.

“How can they live this way and survive?” I ask the driver.

“Many don’t,” he says. “They just whither away and die.”

“Please pull over for a moment,” I say, “I want to watch those workers in the field.”

“Okay, but you can’t take any photos,” he says. “Some Haitians believe that photos steal their souls away.” He pulls over and parks alongside the open field.

My eyes rivet to the scene. A woman in a knee-length cotton skirt and simple blouse bends there with her hair tied in a head scarf. Near her, a man wearing short cotton pants and a T-shirt, arches from his hips to the ground. Their fingers never stop working.

While sweat drifts down from the man’s hairline, he yanks plants out of the ground and piles them near the woman, backing up as he straddles each planted row. She shakes the dirt from the roots of each plant and with a wicked twist of her wrist, snaps off the leafy top. She then ties the greens in neat bundles and stacks them along the way as she follows him. From time to time, she returns to toss the roots into a large decorated bowl, then moves back to follow the man.

There is rhythm to their efforts. They never stop.

In a sudden realization of what had happened, I lifted my head from my crossed arms and realized I had nodded off at home while sitting at my desk. I had been looking at the hand-carved wooden box I guarded from my 1967 trip to Haiti, fifty-four years earlier. It rested on the shelf above my computer. During sleep, I relived the past.

---

*The box with its carving of a man and a woman working a sun-parched field, remains on that shelf today. Thank you for reading this story which is based on an experience that took place in Haiti in 1967. If you enjoyed reading it, please let me know and I will post another story from my life of adventure. Jim