Travel Notes: Haiti – May 2013
Here are some notes about my recent trip to Haiti. These are lengthy, so don’t
feel bad about skipping ahead to the photos. – John D. Wagner
May 17, a Friday. I have been traveling here in Haiti, mainly around
Port Au Prince with its five million people, for the last three or four days
with my friend and business associate Will Forest. Will has a very good
idea to bring baseball making back to Haiti. Recently, ESPN took a strong
interest in our story, in part spurring this trip, and we ventured here to
meet some of the Haitians who used to be involved with Rawlings, which
made all their baseballs here before moving operations to Costa Rica and
China in the early 1990s. Rawlings move out of Haiti was because political
“stability” eroded after the exit of the dictator Baby Doc. His departure –
although he’s now returned to Port Au Prince – was followed by the rise of
a series of elected presidents, leading to the current president, Sweet
Mickey, a pop singer, not exactly known as a class act.
You can't help but notice the obvious about Port Au Prince (called
PAP) and Haiti at large, because it rises up into your ears and nose and eyes
like heat blasts that you can barely stand and turn away from: Haiti is an
astonishingly poor country, so broken, so crippled by broken things, that it is
difficult to fathom the daily circumstances of those living here, who
somehow find a source of fortitude that I would find hard to muster in the
face of their circumstances:
The unrelenting grind-you-
down poverty and absence of
even resources, where
everything has to be cobbled
and improvised and
scavenged; the filth and lack
of privacy; the dignity that’s
missing in so many daily
interactions. The poverty and broken infrastructure – byways that no one
could vaguely even call “roads,” the near complete lack of clean water or
refrigeration; the on-off electricity – is far worse than anything I saw in
India or Nepal, and even worse than what I saw in Vietnam. Blows the
mind. That said, the poverty is not absolutely everywhere, because there’s
a tiny sliver of middle class people, some of whom we met. But the
unspoken rules, the consensus by which most people are able to live and
interact decently with trust, seem to here have broken down, and civic
order has been driven down here. You can’t tell which cars are really
police because so many people with cars have sirens, and many have
installed police lights; now both the police and the fake police are ignored,
Street market, PAP
unless the cops roar through the block in bully pickup trucks, masked,
wearing bullet-proof jackets, knee pads, shin guards, jackboots, and flashing
bulked-up automatic weapons. When driving to Jacmel, a city on the coast,
we were leap-frog-passed multiple times by an ambulance with blazing lights
and siren – and I thought, Well, maybe it’s not so bad after all; you call the
Haitian equivalent of 9-1-1 and they come out to get you – only to realize that
the ambulance crew was just three guys joy riding, pulling cars over; maybe
it was stolen. Even lower-mid-range
restaurants have guards armed with
shotguns at the door, so you can eat
safe from bandits. Nearly everyone
you meet here on the make, trying to
hustle you with a story for gourdes
(the non-convertible currency), or sell
something, anything, from the wild
vegetables they may have picked from who knows where, to broken
appliance parts or parts of tools, which are heaped in piles in the grim
alleys, as sellers looking for buyers, traders. Vast numbers of people –
mostly young men – have nothing to do and idly line the streets and parks,
some setting up as vendors, offering their goods – again, many of them
heavily used, broken things – staged in some semblance of a display on
woven crude grass trays, or laid out on sheets of filthy cardboard or plastic.
The sellers sit on their own scraps of cardboard nearby, maybe moving a
bit as a slice of shade shifts around with the sun. By the thousands, lining
the streets and allies, they sell everything imaginable. Gum, blackened beef,
live chickens, bags of water, butchered chickens – hacked up and laid out,
with no ice on plywood tables, swarming with flies – cell phone parts, sex
Central Market, PAP
!
by the hour, charcoal, skewers of goat, shoes (many people sell single
unmatched shoes in haphazard piles); wire, lotto tickets, jellied candies,
gum, hammered metal art, DVDs of Mr. Bean, or luminescent orange and
silver freshly caught fish – again with no refrigeration – skewered through
their gills with bamboo staves, and slid close together one upon the other
upon the other, offering a gorgeous overlapping symmetry, all the more
contrasted by the fact that so little symmetry here. And the garbage
wallows in the street, almost like a
multicolored oversized freak chunky
hail that’s fallen; the Haitians throw
away everything and I mean everything
in the streets. Plastic bottles by the
thousands, plastic bags, candy
wrappers, food scraps, human shit, piss
and animal bone, plastic spoons and
forks, Styrofoam clamshell cases, husks of corn and mangos…it all goes into
the gutter. And when the thunderstorms come, all the trash runs off with
the grime and dirt and soot from the diesel smoke to flow in tributary
rivulets that join streams to eventually form torrents downhill, streaming
with a putty-gray runoff, chunky with garbage, which has the texture of
sour milk.
Side by side, vendors sell identical items, many lined up ten or twelve
in a row with identical things for sale: bananas, potatoes, onions, limes,
peppers, crackers, cooking oil, honey, garlic, eggs. Some cook from wok-
like vats – salvaged from barrels, pots – filled with boiling who-knows-how-
old oil, into which they float plantains to bubble and fry. Old drywall
buckets lined with burlap filled with icy cokes and Fanta are propped on
Central Market, PAP
vendors’ shoulders and hauled into the dead-stop-stand-still traffic – a still-
life with cars – as the hawking boys stand insistently at car windows
knocking with the back side of their middle finger knuckles, tapping on the
cars’ darkened windows, insisting on a sale. Turnip-like greens, still
clumped at the roots with the life-blood soil that Haiti is bleeding into the
sewers and the sea, are stacked in abundant bunches at roadside, along with
carrots, watermelons, more and more mangoes, peas, cabbages. It’s all for
sale by person after person, block after block.
Mixed between the food for sales are the vendors, one after another,
of personal adornments: used jewelry, bracelets, earnings, pins, bottles of
fuel, rum – the bottle caps cracked so who knows what’s really in there –
perfumes, masks, stones, live turtles craning their necks to the limit to get
out of the fetid water (pregnant women milk the turtle blood through an
incision on the neck, for a tea they
think protects them), tethered kittens,
a live rabbit held up by its ears for sale
at roadside. Anything and everything is
for up for grabs for a price, for
pennies. But watch where you step.
The grates that are meant to cover the
storm drains have been stolen, to be made into chicken grills, and there’s
unmarked, gaping holes everywhere, which drop down 5 or 6 feet straight
down to the putrid water and trash below.
When we went to the Marches de Fur, a crammed two-structure
pavilion where you can buy crafts, some vendors adopted us, protectively –
very cautious not to overexpose us to other vendors – as they took us on
a tour of the place: We saw Voodou artwork – dark leather stitched tightly
PAP street scene
and grotesquely on crude wood models; soap stone sculptures, tobacco,
hammered tin in the shapes of moons and fishes, and eventually we ended
up, ta dah, at our tour guide’s booth. Just looking today, just looking, we told
them. Back tomorrow, when we will maybe buy then... Ok Ok Ok, you
remember me? Yes. We will. And when Will went to tip the kindly man
who had shown him around the dignified man refused the tip, even in his
desperation for a sale. I had my own guide, named Jean – “same name as
me,” he said in real astonishment at the coincidence when I introduced
myself; delighted, “same name as me, amazing, no?”
We had arrived here in Haiti on a Tuesday night, and the hotel that
we'd booked had, of course, mismanaged the van that was supposed to pick
us up. “Twenty minutes” they kept saying, whenever we called, as we
borrowed the local cabbies and hanger-on’ers’ phones to dial. We were
going to Petionville, up the mountain, above PAP. A one-eyed cab driver
named Samuel pleaded with us that “We are all from the same company” –
whatever that meant – begging us to take his ride for $50, then $40, and
then $20. Two others fixers who’d latched onto us – we made videos of
them saying they were just there to help people – didn't even have cabs but
billed themselves as “helpers,” hawked for tips with helpful advice about all
things Haiti, the music, the hotels, where to find the party, how to dress.
We had to pay for each phone call, and eventually we tipped out the
helpers a meaningful $5 for fending off other cabbies and hanging with us
until the hotel van finally arrived. While we had waited, a new Toyota
pulled up, with the seats still wrapped in plastic, and the driver Alphonse
waved us over, because he'd heard we were asking about car for the day to
Jacmel, a nearby city, and he undercut Samuel who'd bid $150, offering
$120 and a nice clean new ride.
The hotel van finally swung in, just as it was getting dark. And up to
the hotel we roared, through the pocked acned streets, with line upon line
of cars leap-frogging each other to get a few feet ahead in the scramble-
mad traffic. White UN Land Cruisers were in the mix, with western white
drivers flinging their hands up in frustration as they were passed and
shunned to the shoulder. Vendors lined the road. Even in the pitch black.
Their offerings lit by tiny fires or burning heap of trash. Those little lights
illuminated, maybe, a small orderly pyramid pile of canned milk, or sodas in
a bucket, a live captured bird or two, crackers still in wrappers cattycorner
stacked as you see them in stores. Then, just as quickly as we’d joined the
calamity upon leaving the airport – 90 minutes for us to go maybe 6 miles
in the stifling traffic – we burst from the
street chaos through the gates of the
fortified compound of our hotel. Sudden
quiet. Warm lights. (There’s a generator.)
The driveway newly clean and wet. The
staff in clean uniforms. An elevator with an
LED to read out for the floors, beeping to
mark each floors as it lifted us. Ice made
from purified water. A kind of splendor. Maybe 12 guests in the sprawling
150-room place, so new you could smell the sheetrock mud.
That first night, Will and I met Max Conde, who had a drink of water
while we ate red snapper, potatoes, fresh rolls, and I drank Haiti 5-star
rum; rocks, lime. Rum with a bite; molasses bitter. Max, a tri-lingual,
dignified man, with rimless square glassed and a fine shirt – a Queens
College NY grad; two daughters resettled in the States – spoke with us
about the people he’d lined up for us to meet in Haiti. We’d meet the men
Will and Max
who ran a leather tannery. We’d meet the man, Marc, who used to run the
baseball floor operations for Rawlings. Max had been the manager of
Rawlings’ overall operations, which employed 10,000 Haitians.
We headed to bed. I took a shower and saw an odd notice by the
sink. I knew the hotel water wasn’t for drinking, but the note said it also
wasn’t appropriate for shaving either. Use bottled water for that too,
provided.
Our business meetings weren’t
until Thursday, and so the next day,
Will and I had a full day free, and we
headed to downtown PAP to see some
sights, such as there are. At the hotel
lobby we got the director of security –
a bean stalk of a young man named C. Francisco – to tell us what bus to go
on to get down town. But he was hesitant and astonished we weren’t
going to take the hotel jeep for $40. We wanted to take the combi for 30
cents. As we left, Francisco was so eager to help, and he walked out of the
hotel grounds, stopped the bus, and talked to
the driver personally and told him to tell
them to take care of us, his friends. White
people on combis are a rare sight, and we got
plenty of looks, as we leapt on the filthy bus
to sweat out the downhill crawl to city
center, vendors swarming around the window as we sat there.
Down town, we leapt out of the bus when we saw some of the
recognizable grounds of the national palace, the famous building that
crumpled in the 2010 earthquake. The palace was, in fact, our first
!
!
objective. We swore we were right there, but all we saw was a fence – no
palace. We asked and asked – Will speaks French and Spanish – and people
kept saying, Yes, that’s a fence. That’s a fence, yes, they said, as we pointed
to the fence, not realizing that the palace has been bulldozed and there’s
nothing there. Only the fence. We then headed to the national museum,
which co-serves as the tomb of Toussaint-Louverture, Haiti’s brilliant
liberator, the only person ever to force Napoleon to retreat. Small, maybe
the size of a couple of classrooms, the museum has but one, really, notable
exhibit, and that’s the anchor of Columbus’ ship The Santa Maria. It was
starling to see it there, something Columbus had likely touched, dangling
from the ceiling, a rusted claw from 1492. But it was the first raspy hook
into the West that tethered Columbus to an island that he would ravage, as
he and the microbes that his crew carried would ravage a hemisphere and
change the trajectory of generations.
With our museum tour done in 15 minutes, and no other museums
around (the 2010 earthquake had wiped them out), we decided to get a cell
phone, to buy one, with a Haitian number. So, we walked into the Digi-
Cell office, only to see long lines, and I almost said, Let’s bag this, because it
being the third world, or the fourth world, it would clearly take hours to
get the phone. Until the manager saw
us, the white people, and moved us to
the front of the line. He got us our
contract and a working phone in
minutes.
Out the door, we wandered into
the central market is Port Au Prince, which was nothing more than an
endless maze of alleys and strings of vendors – with their piles and piles of
!
charcoal, limes, potatoes, watermelon chicken, bread – amidst streams of
raw sewage and the ubiquitous never-ending trash. A calamity of chaotic
activity, a calamity, and loud too. We were looking for an alleged location
where metal art and found sculpture were for sale, but we soon gave up
(the map we had was worse than useless) quickly overwhelmed, we
punched through a side alley after three blocks, and high-tailed it to a
nearby hotel we’d spotted, where in the sudden calm, under the gaze of a
SWAT-team armed guard, we watched NGO workers on wi-fi Skype to
HQ, and others had ducked out of the chaos for lunch, a drink. Will calmly
got on Google Hangout and video-con-called his wife and son. A cubano,
and a coke please for me; cleanest thing I could think to order.
We were exhausted. It was 11:15AM.
After a bite, we trekked back out again, got lost looking for the
Marche de Fur, and eventually hired a motorcycle taxi. I negotiated one
rate, and then the driver put both Will and I on the back. Three grown men
zooming through the crazy streets. No helmets. The hot exhaust pipe all
too close. I yelled to Will over the crazy noise not to be shy and grab me
around my waist. I grabbed the driver’s, and – chin to shoulder to chin to
shoulder – we roared off through the chaos, dodging all manner of on-
comers, on foot, bike, car, truck, motorcycle, combi, taptap bus. We
passed another motorcycle stand where I’d earlier asked for a price, and
the man I’d spoken with saw us on the competitor’s ride. He started to run
into the street, screaming “Hey!” We dodged him and eventually pulled into
the Marche de Fur market, where we were again swarmed and begged, as
we wandered from stall to stall, trying impossibly to stay anonymous.
By now, the sun had peaked, and we were tired of being hit on – a
small crowd was following us around from stall to stall, please please have a
look, just look! – and I grabbed a
motorcycle back to the hotel, making a
video of nearly the entire trip from the
driver’s point of view. Will stayed
behind to change some money,
somehow getting a cut in the streets
and bleeding all over the bank counter, which the unperturbed teller
mopped up with a tissue, as if it were spilled coffee. He took his own
motorcycle back later – taxis or buses would have taken two hours to
cover what a motorcycle could do in ten minutes – but not before a hard
luck story of domestic abuse and deportation separated Will from $8, a
small fortune in PAP. What a haul, the guy must have said, staring at all that
cash.
We both showered off the grime, and I called Alphonse, the van
drive. He was delighted to hear from me, Jess, Jess, Mr. John, Jess, I remember
you! And we booked the van for $120; he’d pick us up at 7:30AM, when
we’d meet Max and follow him to the tannery.
At dinner time, we wandered on foot and found a semi-clean-looking
chicken place, with an armed guard sat on the porch with a shotgun. Will
and I had dinner, told family stories to each other, and wandered back to
the hotel, stopping at the bar. A couple rums and lots of talk with the staff
– they all wanted to join the baseball company that night – before we
crashed, having not really done all that much that day but shopped for 15
minutes in the swarming craft market, changed money, and gotten a phone.
!
Thursday morning, Alphonse showed up with the spiff new van, a bit
late. Max was late too. Everyone is late in Port Au Prince. It’s the stifling
traffic. Once in traffic ourselves, we could easily have walked far faster than
the van. But for the filth along the streets and the heat, we would have
done it.
We found the leather tannery, navigating past the shotgun guard at
the gate, and another shotgun guard
at the inner door. We expected a
Haitian for the meeting with the
tannery owners, but in walked a 24-
year-old kid just out of college from
Ipswich, Massachusetts. “Hi,” he
says, hand out for a shake. Dan’s
the name. Dan Gallagher. Like we
were meeting at Starbucks on Newberry Street. Bottles of cool water all
around. We tell our story. Baseballs. Yup. Bringing them back to Haiti.
Gonna hire a bunch of people. He’s thrilled. Says the Haitians love to
work. Said the morning after the 2010 earthquake, with a quarter million
people dead, everyone came in to work on time. Everyone. Even though the
police used the grounds around the factory to stack all the dead bodies.
John and Marc
And oh boy, Dan’s got the leather for us. Premium goat hide. We
take a tour. The place is a-swarm with workers, machinery, and huge
wooden tumblers, 25 feet high,
which are tanning vats that ooze
who knows what toxins. Chrome
and alum. We love the goods.
Elegant, velveteen pelts. Max
fingers the hides, like they are
talismanic. He looks up, catches my
eye, nods, these are good. Dan says
his Dad, also Dan, will be there
later that day. We swap phone numbers, because – after all – we’ve got
the Haitian phone now, and arrange for lunch the next day with Dan the
dad. Dan the dad is actually Dan Junior, because the grandfather is also
Dan. Three Dans. They’ve traded pelts around the world for decades. I
think no one on earth knows more than the Dans about trading leather.
On the way out, I ask the armed guard if I can
taken his picture, No, he waves me off, without a
word.
Max heads home, working his way back
across the anarchy of the nearby “wholesale”
veggie market by the port – a wasp hive of
vendors, buyers, haulers, garbage, fetid water –
while Alphonse, Will and I blast the van’s AC
and head over the mountains, two hours across the claw of Haiti to Jacmel,
on the coast, to meet Claude “Marc” Peyan, the man who used to make
the baseballs.
Max and Dan, with a tanned goat hide
Tannery, PAP
Along the way, we saw the famous erosion firsthand, and it’s a crime,
a crime to see what’s happening. The farmers have striped the hillsides, not
just some of them, but all of them. They are completely denuded, entirely
bare of trees. They have done this to make charcoal, and to make room to
grow cash crows. To feed their kids. To buy fuel to get crops to market.
But the soil runs off into the ocean, where it clogs the shell fish beds, along
with the raw sewage that streams in brown streaks into the otherwise
cerulean blue wash.
Outside Jacmel, Marc – the man we’re here to meet – pulls up in a
beatup 4x4 and jumps out. He’s 74. Looks maybe like a jazz band member,
maybe the rhythm man. He’s light-
skinned Haitian, and I jump out of
the van to say hi. When he sees
me, even before we shake hands, he
starts right in with a story of
exasperation: “Every time I come to
Jacmel, something happens!” he
says, showing me his expired license
which the police discovered last
time he was here. “See the date?” I don’t have my glasses, but I nod yes.
“Expired! And I didn’t even know it.” He says he’d like to park here,
outside of town, and ride in the van with us, but the guy who owns the
nearby roadside stand, well, Marc said he recently wrecked his car, when
he was building a house for his uncle, who… “Let me run over here and
check,” he says as he slinks off. There’s some confusion, cars are jockeyed
around, but Marc eventually pops into the van, and almost to apologize for
the delay, he hands Will and me Haitian baseballs. From the hay day, from
Claude Marc Payen, baseball maker for Rawlings, telling stories at lunch.
when Rawlins was here. Marc ran the shop floor. Managed the sensitive
winding of the three types of wool that makes up the core. He’s got
photos to prove it, which he holds back as he lights another in an endless
stream of cigarettes. Over extremely ruddy “roads,” we weaved and wove
our way to a hotel by the coast, where we ordered lunch. Marc ordered a
double whiskey. It was, after all, 11AM. He lit his fourth cigarette. A fifth.
He’s 74, and his mom just died at 102, so he said he is not afraid of dying
for 28 more years. “Take me now, though, I don’t care,” he sit and opens
his arms and legs to the heavens and laughs. “I really don’t. Now’s fine.”
I took out the video camera, and he asked me to put it down until he
told us his story. Then we could ask him to retell what parts of it we
wanted on the tape. As he spoke, I nearly wept with the sense of loss, as
he spontaneously told one fantastical story after the other.
Documentarians die face down in the mud in far away places to get
something half this authentic, and I’m aching to turn the camera on,
electrified to capture the man, smoking and drinking and telling us about his
friend, the dictator Baby Doc: “I Loved
the guy! Loved him. But his father wanted
me killed,” he said sneakily, lowering his
voice and looking around for spies. He
sipped on his cigarette. “His bogey man
came after me, twice they tried to shoot
me, and I had to leave for six years. But
Baby Doc, I bought his car, his 504 Puegeot. He loved how clean I kept it.”
And every time my hand drifted to the camera, Marc gently says No
with a wave of his hand. He goes on to say how he, this very man living in
the hills in Haiti, was The man who designed The baseball in use today in all
Vegetable Market, the Port area of PAP
Major Leagues and colleges. He explained how he changed its design in the
late 1970s, how Rawlings has tested it for two years before they realized he
was right all along, that the ball was better. He showed pictures of himself
on the Rawlings shop floor. Can we do it again? Bring baseballs back here?
“Of course. We can do anything. Make machines. Balls. I’ll do it myself if
you don’t. We can make anything here.” Finally he lets me tape him with
the video camera, and the stories are just as good, but half as well-told the
second time around. He orders another double whiskey, and takes one
small bite of his huge burger, grabs a stick or two of fries, and talks and
talks…about how Port Au Prince had just 250,000 people when he bought
his house there, and now it has 5,000,000. How Jacmel was a sleepy
seaside city of 15,000 just a few years ago, and now it has 500,000 people.
Story after story of when Marc was young and everything seemed possible;
how great the American team from Rawlings was; how great the workers
were. It was a golden time, a sweet time, he says, repeatedly kissing his
pinched thumb and index finger, as though he were commenting on wine,
pastries. A great man; I loved him, loved that guy he said of his America
boss. And what has he been doing since 1992 when Rawlings left? “I’ve
been trying to relax myself. All this time, just to relax.”
An hour goes by. Two. Alphonse our driver has had enough. I
looked up across the table, and Will seems to be wilting in the heat and
stories and the smoke. It was time to wrap. I got the check and was short
a dollar or two, and I asked Will to dig out some of his cash. Marc sensed
we might to have enough and he pointed to the check, saying, “Give it to
me. What do you need? Give it to me. I’ll just pay it all…” But, no need.
Marc downed the last of the booze, and didn’t even seem tipsy – four
drinks and nothing to eat by 1PM – as he lit another smoke, his tenth or
twelfth; I’d lost track, and we headed back to the van to head back to P AP,
after dropping Marc back at his car.
In PAP that night, after getting the nod from the armed guard at the
door, Will and I ate at a “sushi” restaurant near our hotel which also
served meat. But everything we asked for on the extensive menu wasn’t
available. I finally settled on some blackened beef, which I took one look at
and two nibbles of, before deciding not to finish it. Will had chicken. God
knows, there’s plenty of that around.
Walking back to the hotel, I negotiated with a motorcycle taxi to
come to the hotel at 10:30 and take me to the famous Oloffsson Hotel to
see the famous band Ram, which comes on stage at 11PM. The sprawling
grounds of the Oloffsson, a private residence 100 years ago, is the Hotel
Trainon in Graham Green’s Haitian novel, The Commedians. Greene stayed
there at the Oloffsson. They’ve got a room named after him. But when I
walk out at 10:30, no motorcycle. I wait. And wait. I look for other taxis,
but nothing. Everyone’s disappeared. To where, who knows? There’s just
some bad actors are on the streets. After 30 minutes, I bag it and head to
bed.
The next day, our last full day,
we meet Dan the dad for lunch. He
called a couple times that morning to
say that he’s struggling up the hill in his
car. Traffic. Stand-still traffic. 45
minutes late, he makes it into the
hotel, with sample leather pelts. Dan’s traded all over the world, Iran,
Lebanon, Afghanistan, London. In 1978, he said he and his dad traded one
million dozen cow hides. He’s in Haiti a couple weeks a month. Lives in a
The view from our hotel in PAP
house next to the tannery. His plant manager, Phil, used to live in Haiti as
well, but now suffers some traumatic stress after the earthquake, because
so many bodies were stacked at the tannery gates. When it’s time to order
food, Dan passes, and later mentions that he brings his own meat to Haiti,
because he’s seen what they do to animals here. “There’s not one certified
butcher in Haiti” he says, “for a country that used to export USDA
certified beef.” I suspect he doesn’t eat much unless he sees the source,
prep and cooking. An old Haiti hand.
As much as we can’t imagine it, Dan tells us that Haiti is much
improved, especially over the last two years. “It’s so much better now. So
much better.” I’m astonished, glancing out the fortified gates of our hotel
compound at the stand-still traffic and the slums that have crawled up the
hillside across the road. The gates to the hotel can be closed to form a 20-
foot high wall, with sharp spears in the three directions at the top, so
vaulting raiders can’t mount the gates and get into the hotel in, say, a riot
or a coup d’etat or an earthquake or a hurricane or a cholera epidemic.
How fucking bad was it two years ago? He said Haitian wages have doubled
to $2/hour over the last nine years. “And the roads are much better now
too,” he says. Is he joking? No, he’s not. We agree to do business.
Baseballs. He loves the idea. Hand shakes all around as we say goodbye.
Dan’s the man.
That night, I’m still determined to make it to the Oloffsson, even for
a drink and a meal, but Will’s had it with the PAP streets and just wants to
flake out in the hotel room. So, I grab a motorcycle taxi – the driver
initially wanted 700 gourdes, around $18. We settle on 250, around $6. I
put on my sunglasses against the grit and we zooooom through the streets,
racing downhill toward the port, past the old tumble-down turn-of-the-
century homes, crumbling in the heat and neglect, in what was once a
princely neighborhood of compounds, where the presidents and their
families once lived. The next morning, Will and I would be up before dawn
(to discover there’s no hot water) to give ourselves an hour and a half to
go the short distance to the airport, rustling up the van driver, who would
be late, as the hotel clerk told us he couldn’t print our bill because the
hotel was out of paper. So, this trip to the Oloffsson was my last fling with
PAP. We arrived, and my driver burst through the high steel black gates of
the Oloffsson. I grab his phone number as I paid him, and asked him not to
drink any booze before coming back to pick me up in an hour or so. I
wandered the neglected wreckage of the hotel’s gardened grounds;
everything looks tired, exhausted, under layers of paint, but the main house
and the out building still screamed out with the old elegance. I see the
Graham Greene room – there’s a plaque – and imagined Greene wandering
around here, drinking gin; I ordered a beer on the porch from the old
Haitian waiter who shuffled over. “Attendre,” when he pointed to the
menu; I’d wait to order. Just a few people there. An American kid stands
on the porch nearby, down here to negotiate handbag production for his
merchant family. He’s Skyping his family on his iPhone over the hotel’s wifi.
And – small world – he mentions Vermont, and mentions young Dan from
the leather tannery, as he complains that things are falling apart at the
factory, that the help is listless and there’s shit all over the place and dust
coating everything, and that he’s going to fire everyone fucking person he
met today. Sorry grandma, he says, he shouldn’t say the word fuck, but these
people, these fucking people…
I move to the quiet bar, order a cubano, a rum. It’s extremely quiet.
Not much to do. No one to talk to. I shoot a few photos. When I ask, the
old waiter shots of photos of me, but I barely appear in it. The waitress
takes a better shot. I eventually bag it. No Graham Greenes to meet and
chat with tonight. I call my motorcycle, and I wait just outside the gate as
the tropical sun leaps down from the sky. It’s pitch dark, and I’m instantly
the center of attention again in the teeming streets. Everyone in the block
knows I’m there, even in the dark. A man wanders over, says he’s an
alcoholic, needs a drink. Nope. A woman wanders over, says she wants my
numbers. Nope. A mentally challenged man, maybe 40, in a bright soccer
uniform, works me over, all friendly like, asking where I am from. And then
he asks for the cash. Saved by the driver, who roared up in his Johnny Too
Bad bug-eye glasses and vinyl leather
jacket, and I leap on the back of the
motorcycle, put on my sunglasses in the
dark, and hand the soccer player a couple
dollars. We roar off into the pitch-black
streets (many Haitians, including my
motorcycle driver, don’t use their
headlights because they think it saves
power). We zoom through the dark
streets and alleys – I’m dead-sure we’ll fall
through one of the open sewer holes – as the driver gooses the darkened
bike. We careen and lean around corners. The grit of the street is crunchy
in my teeth; there’s no light anywhere. The power must be off. No street
lights. We are zooming headlong in the dark. I just white-knuckle grab the
bike rack and give my fate over to the filthy wind, the darkness… laughing
The waiter’s shot of me at the Oloffsson
with relief for the entire last two blocks when I can finally see our tall, well-
lit hotel, laughing at how crazy it is to be slinging around these doomed
filthy dark streets…laughing at how free I am.