Return to Haiti

Last Monday I moved from New York to Port-au-Prince, Haiti with a few books, a camera and my laptop. I walked out the Toussaint Louverture airport into the dusty and crowded road,  two months after my first trip here and almost six months after a devastating earthquake shattered the city and the lives of hundreds of thousands Haitians.

Champs de Mars, Port-au-Prince, March 2010. (Photo by Alice Speri)

As my friend Jean Baptiste drove me to Natacha’s home, in Musseau, I watched Port-au-Prince move past my window, remembering my first time on this same road. At that time it had looked the way I had imagined Hiroshima must have. This time it didn’t. Rubble still filled holes that had once been buildings, but the piles of debris seemed a little more orderly, as if someone had combed them together and paved passages around them. People hanging around the kiosks   that lined the Route de Delmas  looked more bored than lost, while the frantic street activity around them reminded me more of any busy  junction in many of this world’s overcrowded cities than it did the desperate scene from hell it had looked like a few months ago, when no one knew where to go and everyone took to the streets. The colors looked different, too, and the stores that had reopened for business interrupted the files of abandoned building shells and gray cement blocs with patches of brightness. I couldn’t tell if it was fresh paint, or just the rain, that washed Port-au-Prince of the dust that since the earthquake had been everywhere. I saw less UN military tanks,  and wondered where all those that had lost limbs in the earthquake had gone.

In other words, Port-au-Prince felt different. But I wasn’t sure it really was, and for a moment I feared I had just become accustomed to it. It always amazes me how quickly shock and horror turn into routine.

“Are things getting better?” I asked Jean Baptiste, my friend in the Haitian National Police, who liked being assigned to patrol quiet corners of the city, where he can pull out his phone and listen to hip hop hits. K’naan’s “Wavin’ Flag” is the song of the moment, and has made it to his ring tone. I’ve been humming this song since I got here.

When I get older, I will be stronger, they’ll call me freedom.

Jean Baptiste smiled, like he often does, instead than answering. He doesn’t like talking politics, but when I jokingly force him to, he tells me that with disasters, in Haiti, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. He tells me people are sick of the government and they are sick of MINUSTAH. He asks me not to go to the protests that are happening downtown with increasing frequency (he knows I will), and when I ask him what the alternatives are and what he thinks will happen next he just smiles.