My respect for Mèt Anténor has only grow since I got here. As a full-time teacher and the principal at a public school with three hundred young children in it, he works almost constantly. Recently, several days into his Christmas Break, he was going into school again as he had every day of his vacation so far. A worker was coming to the school to do some repair work and he felt he had to be there, not just to supervise, but to lend a hand. He was a handyman before he was a teacher. This he views as one of his duties.

He spends a lot of his time wheezing his way up and down the mountain. The walk up is very visibly taxing; his asthma a constant burden. But someone needs to make the deals that will get the school the supplies it needs and get those supplies delivered, and someone needs to get down to Petyonvil to pry scarce resources out of the school district’s main office. These duties are also his.

The other day as I was walking downhill with him, a father of one of the children came up to talk with him. The man was angry. He explained in dramatic terms that his child, a first-grader, couldn’t go to school that day. The wounds his teacher had inflicted on him the day before hadn’t sufficiently healed. The father agreed that it was right to beat children in school, right even to beat the naughty ones with a belt. But you don’t beat a
first-grader with the belt’s buckle, and you don’t use the belt when it’s just a matter of a wrong answer in class. He re-enacted the event, removing his belt and demonstrating on an imaginary child in front of him how to whip with a belt (not with the buckle) and how not to. Mèt Anténor listened sympathetically. He agreed with the father’s outrage. He had been forced to hire a young, inexperienced woman to teach the first-graders this year, and
to pay her out of a combination of almost-nonexistent petty cash and his own pocket. He was short a teacher, and the State wouldn’t or couldn’t help. He listened to the father, and said he would reprimand the teacher. This too is part of his duty. As we continued our walk, he was shaking his head.

He has a lot of duties, but he manages them, some better and some worse I suppose. He has a degree from a school of education, twenty years of teaching experience, and almost fifty years of life experience on the mountain to guide him. I met another, quite different principal at our workshop in Lazil, though, and I’d like to talk about him.

There were almost thirty people at the workshop, some of them quite young. I assumed that some of the teachers and principals had decided to invite students, and I was glad of it. On the way back to the house we were staying in, I walked with one of them and we spoke. I don’t remember his name, but he looked about fifteen. I suppose that means he could easily be eighteen or nineteen. I asked him whether he was a student, and when he said that he was a principal I lost my breath. In fact, he had been a principal for three years.

What that means is that he runs a small, private school well out in the country. He has four teachers, including himself, and one hundred students divided into four classes. Primary school is six years in Haiti, so students who would finish have to go elsewhere for the last two years. The students each pay one hundred gouds for the school year, which leaves him with ten thousand gouds to run the school with. Right now, there are roughly 17.5 gouds to the dollar, so that amounts to a little over 550 dollars. With that, he must pay four salaries. The school year is nine months long, so he has about sixty dollars a month to cover all four salaries. That’s fifteen bucks a month for each teacher. This is without taking out whatever minimal expenses he has for school maintenance and supplies. Life might be cheaper in Haiti than in the States, but it’s not that much cheaper.

This would be bad enough, but he hardly could be old enough to have finished high school, and couldn’t really be going while he’s running his own school. The nearest high school is simply too far away. That means that he’s doing this work with very little education of his own. He can’t have much experience yet, either. He simply hasn’t had time. What’s more, he can’t really be doing much studying on his own. The money he could at best be making is not enough to afford him any leisure. A best case, and a very likely, scenario is that he lives with his parents, goes to school in the morning, and works his family’s land with his father in the afternoon. He can hardly have time and energy to do much more than open the text book that has his students’ daily lesson, and write that lesson on the chalkboard for his students to copy. It’s unlikely that they have copies of the textbook of their own.

Belose and I talked about the situation later that day. The region has no economy but farming. All the most promising young people leave to go to high school in Leyogann or Pòtoprens. The two high schools that are closer are each about a two-hour walk away. When they leave school, whether as graduates or otherwise, the young people they stay away. They look for work in the cities, where they can better hope to save some money for marriage, where they can hope, as we say, “for a better life.” The young people who cannot manage to get out of the area, whether because their families can’t afford to send them or because they weren’t strong enough in elementary school, have few options, very few. One of them is to teach elementary school. The pay is worse than bad, but any cash they can get their hands on helps a lot.

But this also means that the schools are bad: poorly educated teachers working in the most difficult of circumstances. As I was shaking my head, Belose explained why such schools are nevertheless a very good thing. They are cheap, cheap enough to be widely, if not universally, affordable even in rural Haiti. And Belose insisted that the brightest children somehow learn in them despite everything, that there are kids who go through them and then can continue their education in better schools. But these schools are good, she explained, even for the other students, the ones who never do get any education beyond what these schools can provide. In her region, there is nothing to do but farm.

The schools are better than nothing. They provide an activity, whether they are quality educational institutions or not. They’re a place where the children can come together for a break from their difficult lives at home. They represent the chance to spend a few hours each day freed from hard physical labor. They are a chance to chance to read a little, to write a little, to learn a little math, a chance to have however impoverished, however small a share in the life of the mind.

Erik’s elbow was within inches of my chin. His hip was jammed solidly against mine. We might have been playing basketball for all the pushing between us, but we weren’t. We were packed into the back of a small pick-up truck, a tap-tap, with a dozen or so others, leaving downtown Pòtoprens for Kafou, a suburb just south of the city. We were headed to the first meeting of a group we will lead for teachers and parents in the pre-school division of a large Catholic school on Bizoton 53, a road right off the main route, most of the way to Kafou.

I had the right-hand seat closest to the driver’s cab, and Erik was directly to my left. We were squashed tightly into our little space, but we could look out the window above the cab in front of us. He was reaching across my face, holding on as best he could. There was nothing else for him to grab. My feet were propped up on the truck’s spare tire, leaving my knees most of the way into my chest. As we watched a sports utility vehicle of some sort bearing head-on down on us, I wondered how bad the collision would really be. But the S.U.V. flashed its headlights, cut swiftly in front of us, and parked on what was for it the left side of the street. No harm, no foul. Erik said, “It’s chaos.” It seemed really funny at the time.

Now, unless you mean “chaos” very literally and are very good at math, it is a hard thing to describe. That’s just not what language seems to be for. Language puts things in an order, and whether it’s an order we make or one that we disclose, it’s an order nonetheless. An order, not chaos.

You can report a feeling, though. For example: Three hours later, on our way home, at an intersection in downtown Pòtoprens, Erik was witty again. He said, “I don’t think my senses are supposed be able to take in this much information at once.” Although I had been ignoring almost everything around me for several minutes as we walked up Ri Mirak, looking for a ride up to Petyonvil, I immediately knew just what he meant. We were walking up the street, trying to find a Petyonvil tap-tap nearing the end of its trip
downtown. We knew that if we waited until it reached its final destination and started on its way back to Petyonvil, where we wanted to go, it would fill up, and we’d have little chance of pushing our way on to it. So we were hoping to jam our way onto to one before it reached its end-destination, before its last passengers could get off.

Let me try to describe the scene that was around us, Erik’s “chaos.” Noise of every sort on every side: CD stores and car stereos blaring a wild blend of the latest music of every style; car horns beeping; street merchants and tap-tap packers shouting; engines roaring, humming, gurgling or squealing; people yelling and arguing; dogs barking; wheels screeching. Cars, trucks, busses, motorcycles, wheelbarrows, pull-carts and even bicycles
swerving on every side, in every direction. Mobs of people everywhere: waiting, running, walking, shouting, fighting, talking, eating, selling, buying, begging, laughing, choking, crying, struggling. Smells of kerosene, gasoline, coal, diesel, frying food, burning tires, sweat, perfume, urine, garbage. Dust, dust, dust covering colored signs; covering brightly painted tap-taps; covering all the cars, busses and trucks; covering graffiti; covering walls; covering buildings; covering people; covering dogs; covering merchants’ wares; covering street food. Trash everywhere. Filth. You wipe the sweat off your forehead with your hand, and your fingertips turn black.

This was our first cross-town trip together, but I had made the trip twice already. There’s no simple way to get to Kafou from where we live and work without crossing the center of the city. Finding yourself in downtown Pòtoprens is striking in the worst way. I say this though I know that there are places here – I once visited one – that are considerably worse.

I am very comfortable in my village on the mountain. Erik is in another, less affluent village, but he’s comfortable too. The people around me are pretty comfortable as well. Though there’s no one in my neighborhood with any sort of economic security, there’s no misery to speak of, either. “//Nou pa pi mal, gras a dye//” (We’re no worse, thank God), Madanm Anténor likes to say. When she’s angry, in fact, she will tell her children that they have things too easy. I suspect that none of the families in my neighborhood has cash reserves just in case . . . But every child in the neighborhood goes to school, they dress decently, eat well, and have safe and solid homes. The village is, excepting its roosters, quiet. On Saturdays or Sundays, as the case may be, they have the leisure to spend much of the day in church – whether Adventist, Catholic, or Protestant-other. In short: Things aren’t so bad there.

And even in the harder cases, they get by. Toto’s mother, Madanm Boby, is widowed, but her five children in the States help support the four here that still depend on her. Madanm Kastra’s blindness and ill health hurt her family: It leaves her daughters especially with a lot of extra work to do, and it deprives them all of a second income. But they manage. Bòs Jean-Claude’s hypertension keeps him from working, but Madanm Jean-Claude is
a successful merchant in at the market in Petyonvil – she sells flip-flops – and they have her aging but competent mother to keep house. Between her flip-flop sales and the land they farm, they manage to support their 5 children, her mother, his oldest brother, and a nephew – my friend, Big Elie – without any evident difficulty.

Then I find myself downtown. There’s something that one sees on almost every face there. In the faces of the better-off, of the folks from Delmas or Petyonvil or elsewhere, young people who are heading home from school or adults struggling to fight their way home after a long day’s work, or who are not done with work yet, who are bustling back and forth, trying to get their work done, one could call it “stress.” It’s a tightness, a strain, a gritting of the teeth. At best, a sad resignation.

But there are other faces, too. And for what I think I see in those faces – when I can bear to really look at them – a word like “stress” fails to say nearly enough. It seems too trivial a word, almost flippant, disrespectful: street boys packing the busses and tap-taps, hoping the drivers will give them a goud or two; venders weaving on foot through unpredictable traffic, at risk of life and limb, hoping to sell cold drinks out of the heavy boxes they carry with them all through the day; and beggars of all ages, young and old, man, woman, and child, dressed in rags or worse, with withered faces and withered limbs, wounded and suffering.

Talk of “what to do about it,” or “how to help,” starts to feel terribly shallow. I don’t have the resources to intervene dramatically in any material sense, and I don’t know where to find the strength to show helpful solidarity – if mere solidarity would be truly helpful. I often, too often, find the need to simply, guiltily look away.

For all the misery I see in the chaos, in little corners of open space, there are street boys playing soccer with an empty plastic bottle or a small bundle of rags or the tattered remains of a ball. They laugh, and that’s part of the chaos, too.

It all seemed so funny at first, even though it shouldn’t have. Erik and I were standing in the yard outside the police station in Kafou chatting and watching the goats graze. It had been a long day already, and watching the police goats grazing in the hot Kafou sun was just the relief we needed. We were talking about a Sixty-Minutes report we had heard about. It was about the money USAID had spent to help Haiti improve its justice system. Erik’s mother had taped the report, and he said he would bring it back to Haiti with him.
Apparently, the report was quite scandalous, as Sixty-Minutes stuff often tries to be. The Haitian who told me about it had said that USAID had spent $5 billion here with nothing to show for it. Erik and I were trying to figure out if the number could have been right. It seemed unimaginably high.

Four or five men were talking behind us to the left as we leaned on the back of Belose’s car. Only one was wearing a police uniform. They were laughing, clowning around, looking for all the world like a high school clique or a small cluster of college frat boys.

The scene shouldn’t have seemed funny to us. The reason we were at the station was that we had been in an accident, and Belose’s car had been damaged. The damage didn’t seem that serious, but it will most likely cause her terrible inconvenience and no small expense if she chooses to have it fixed.

But it had, as I said, been a long, long day. We really felt we needed to laugh. Erik and I joked about finding the men’s room as we each took a turn walking to the wall surrounding the police station compound to water the weeds growing there.

We were on our way back from Lazil, where our colleague Belose is from. She’s the bookkeeper for Limyh Lavi. Her father is a successful farmer, but also an important peasant activist and organizer in their region. He works nationally as a trainer for teachers of adult literacy and an evaluator of literacy programs. He had asked us to come to Lazil to introduce our work to local school principals and teachers.

Lazil is a two or three hour hike from the main road that leads from Leyogan to Jakmel. We had held the seminar there the previous day for almost thirty people. We planned on leaving Lazil at 5:00 am to get back to Pòtoprens early, but we had been delayed. Belose’s mother was returning with us, at least as far as Leyogan, and she had been thrown off the mule she would ride for that initial hike to the main road, where Belose had left her car. Fortunately, she wasn’t injured, but it must have really hurt. She fell with her full weight on the wooden chair she had used to mount the mule. The mule bumped into the chair, was startled, and started jumping and turning until it threw her off. We took some time waiting to see if she was alright. Eventually, she got on a different mule, and we went off.

Belose’s mother had some errands to do in Leyogan before we could drop her off there, and this took some time, but finally we left her at her sister-in-law’s house and headed home. By the time we got to Kafou, the suburb that is the southern gateway to Pòtoprens, it was almost noon. Predictably enough, we hit traffic, thick stop-and-go traffic. We sat in the dusty midday heat, and resigned ourselves to what looked like it would be a long, slow ride.

We were sitting in that traffic when an oncoming truck approached very, very close to our left side. Suddenly it whacked us, scraping along the back fourth of the car and taking the left rear light with it. As we later learned, it had been hit on its right side by another, smaller truck. This other truck sped away to avoid dealing with responsibility for the accident, but Belose and the driver of the truck that hit us stopped to discuss what to
do. Eventually, both drivers drove to the local police station to file a report. Erik and I stood outside the station, as did the truck driver’s assistant. Erik and I talked, while the driver’s assistant leaned on his boss’s truck and waited. He was behind us, between us and the group of four or five young men.

He seemed like a nice, a friendly man. He had patiently explained the accident to me while Belose and his boss were first speaking. He was short and slender, dressed in a ragged t-shirt and dusty long pants. Driver’s Assistant can hardly be a very good job, but it is a job nonetheless. He smiled as he spoke to me, and I could have continued to talk with him, but I had been up since four, and it seemed so much easier to talk in English with Erik.

As Erik and I chatted, we saw one of the young men walk over to the assistant, yelling at him. He took a very large, chrome-colored pistol out from under his shirt and began jabbing the assistant in the gut with it. The assistant backed away towards the truck’s cab, opened the door, and started to get in, but as he tried to close the door the other man held it open and grabbed him. He dragged him back out of the truck, and began slapping him on the back of the head. He shoved him with both hands from the truck to the road outside of the police station’s front gate, slapping his head with his left hand and holding his pistol with his right. Then he turned back and joined his little group. They clearly found the whole thing pretty funny.

A few minutes later, Eddy left the station to talk with Erik and me. He had been inside helping Belose file the accident report. I told him what Erik and I had seen. When he looked out the station yard gate, he saw the driver’s assistant standing there waiting. He had been beaten and threatened with a gun, but he wasn’t going to leave. For one thing, he was angry. For another, he had a job with the driver. Jobs are hard to find here. Eddy went out to talk with him.

When Eddy heard his story, he rushed into the station to get Belose. He figured it would be best for everyone if we left the station as quickly as we could. But while he was getting her, another one of the young men walked out of the station yard. Soon, he and the driver’s assistant were arguing. He grabbed the assistant, and started dragging him back into the police yard. He had a gun, and he held it with one hand while he slapped and grabbed with the other. The assistant did nothing. He vainly tried to shield himself from the blows. The other men soon walked over to join their colleague. A second
slapped at the driver’s assistant, while a third tried to trip him. They all were shoving the assistant through the yard, towards the station house. Apparently, he was under arrest, though it’s very hard to imagine what for.

By now Eddy, Belose, and the driver himself were rushing out of the station house. The driver began pleading respectfully with the men to leave his assistant. Belose, on the other hand, asked them what they were doing, and asked them sharply. One of them shoved the driver’s assistant into her, and began asking her what business she thought it was of hers. She told him that, even though he had a gun, he was only a man, and that he should remember that. Soon she and the man were exchanging angry words. He was
standing, his face within an inch of hers, threatening her, and she wasn’t backing down. Eddy was yelling to her that we should leave, trying to get her to the car. The cop was screaming that he could arrest her if he wanted to or could shoot her, too. She was yelling back that he was right, that he could, that he was the one with the gun. The driver continued to plead respectfully, now apparently for Belose.

Eddy got her into the driver’s seat, and we all got in. She backed up, and we drove away. We drove straight to the office of the Inspector General of the National Police to file a complaint. There we spent the rest of the afternoon. It’s easy to imagine the men back at the station exchanging high-fives and laughing after we left. It’s hard to imagine, hard even to want to imagine, how the driver and his assistant spent the rest of their day.

More and more often, I spend time in the evening sitting in the pantry with Madanm Anténor and her three children. Mèt Anténor himself eventually joins us, but not until Frenel gets home. Frenel, his youngest brother, is our next-door neighbor. He commutes daily to Pòtoprens to his job as the inventory and shipping manager at a small export-oriented factory. He leaves for work by 5:30 AM, and might not get home until 7:30 or 8:00, but Mèt Anténor waits for him patiently on the front porch of the decaying structure, now uninhabited, that sits between the ones in which their two families dwell. This house-between belonged to their parents. It is where they and their middle brother, Mesenn, grew up.

Mèt Anténor doesn’t like to go inside for the evening without talking with his brother. They chat about their respective days, about community gossip, about national and international news – such as either of them might have heard. Or they share a joke or two. Neighbors might join them: their cousin, Bòs Jean-Claude, a retired stonemason, or Toto, the 20-year-old I hang around with, or Casnel, the oldest son of Bòs Castra, Jean-Claude’s older brother. But whether others join them or they talk alone doesn’t seem to matter that
much. The brothers want some time together every day. It’s a habit I’m intensely jealous of.

I myself have been leaving these chats on the porch to go into the kitchen earlier and earlier to watch Mèt Anténor’s three children doing schoolwork around a single table by the light of a small kerosene lamp. This can be quite a spectacle. Much of the work that each of them has to do is the memorization of texts in French.

Now, none of them knows French very well, so they don’t much understand the texts they have to memorize. But even if their French was better, understanding the texts would hardly be to the point for them. In class, they will be expected to recite what they have read, not to analyze, discuss, summarize, or explain it. Mistakes are punishable offences.
Last night, little Valouloun told me that she has a test on ten vocabulary words each day. Students receive one hard stroke across the palm with a ruler or a crop for each wrong answer. Such beating and humiliation is par for the course.

So the children don’t think about their assignments too much. They chant them. Not surprisingly, the mundane prose texts they are working on turn into a kind of poetry. Just as English speakers can tend to slip into increasingly regular iambic pentameter when they recite syllables without attending to meaning – Eva Brann once suggested that flight attendants, when they thoughtlessly recite pre-flight safety information, are examples of this – just so, these children turn their assignments into verse, non-sense verse, as they recite them over and over again. With Kasann, Ti Papouch, and Valouloun all reciting at once around the small kitchen table, the music turns post-modern: atonal, a-rhythmic. Cacophonous chatter.

But it’s beautiful chatter, because they’re beautiful children, and because each is reciting with all his or her heart. They are positively insist that they like the work. Their reasons might not be very good; they might be complicated; they might take a little reflection to put together, but they insist they love this uncomprehending memorization nonetheless.

When their father finally comes in, Valouloun lunges for him. She’s the youngest by far. At six, she’s four years younger than Ti Papouch, and she is very much her daddy’s little girl. I’ll give an example of this. Mèt Antenr eats separately from his family. He is served, as I am, in the formal diningroom that doubles as my bedroom. The rest of the family eats in the kitchen/pantry where the children study, too. All except Valouloun. She alone will presume to cling to her father’s side as he eats, preferring any tidbits he might feed her from his plate to anything that might sit on her own.

Valouloun lunges for her father, because he sits with them to help them study, and she expects first shot at him. She’s just learning to write, and she sits on his lap as he teaches her to write words. French words. As she successfully copies each one, she laughs with delight, and gets up and walks around the table showing off what she’s done. Everyone, including Papouch, who’s only ten himself, knows well enough to admire her work. As she nods off to sleep, her father will turn to work with the other two, drilling them with math problems, checking the work in their copy books, listening to the passages they recite.

Madanm Anténor helps them as well. She went to high school as a girl, and must have been a good student. She seems to remember much of what she learned back then. I try to help with English, beginning Spanish, and with math if I have no work of my own that I must do. I can’t do much: My eyes don’t hold up to work by lamp light very well.

While we work, Madanm Anténor also finishes the day’s housework. She washes dishes, or makes us ginger tea. She might get a start on the next day’s work – by ironing the children’s school uniforms, for example. Or she’ll sit behind one or the other of the girls to fix their hair: brushing, braiding, turning, twisting. It means a lot to her for them to look just right. She irons the ribbons that she uses for bows.

For a middle-aged bachelor/scholar like myself, the domesticity of the scene is still unfamiliar. I’m still more used to books, dictionaries, student writing, e-mail, the occasional telephone call, and my beloved espresso machine. But I have to say I rather like it. Just as I love the sense of community that develops in a good class, I enjoy sitting with my new family, knowing that it makes me part of something much, much larger

For someone with a high tolerance for 20th century American romantic ballads, one of the great ones must be “Maria”, from West Side Story. It opens with a sudden jump of a seventh, almost a full octave, from the first note to the second. That leap draws us into the beloved’s name. In Maria’s absence, her name itself becomes the object of our wonder as we hear her lover sing it.

We use that same interval – a seventh, or close to it – when we call Sayil. We start low with “Sa,” then reach high to draw out the rest: “yeeeeel.” He answers with an equally high-pitched “Wi,” or “Yes.” Sayil is the full-time resident housemaster at our office in Delmas, just outside of Prtoprens. He does daily general cleaning, keeps an eye on the water filters, pumps unfiltered water from the ground-level cistern to the roof for showers, sinks, and other plumbing, and does various odd jobs. He is also responsible for just being around, being a presence. He’s not very tall, but he’s a very large-framed, well-fed-looking man. If it wasn’t for his bright, eternal smile, he might be scary. He gets a very small salary and a smaller little house, which he shares with his wife, Jidit, just inside the office compound. What is certainly not any part of his job is to be a good friend. But he just as certainly is one.

Let me give an example. At the end of November, Erik was sick enough that we took him to a nearby hospital for a couple of days. The little community hospital was not much like those in the States. There were, for example, no candy-stripers. There was no automatic means of communication between the room he was given and the nurses’ station. The nurses did make occasional rounds, but not many. The usual procedure here is for a friend or family member to stay in the hospital room with a patient, sleeping in a chair or on the floor, partly as an advocate – to help him or her communicate with nurses and doctors – and partly to run errands, to get the patient things that he or she might need. For example, a hospital might not stock the medicines its doctors prescribe, and a family member must be available to run to the local pharmacy.

Settling into the hospital room was slightly complicated. It involved several trips for various of us back and forth between it and the office. The walk wasn’t far, not more than 15 minutes, but it was well after dark, and so safety felt like it could be an issue. Sayil went to the hospital once in the early evening intending nothing but a short visit. This in itself was surprising to us, because we felt he hardly knew Erik. At that point, Erik
rarely came to the office, staying instead in Gwo Jan, the community where he lives and learns Kreyol. Sayil stayed for quite a while, though, sitting quietly as we spoke in English. Sayil speaks no English. We were nervous and uncertain of our situation, and Sayil would answer occasional questions for us as best he could. Then he went home. He returned, however, to escort various of us back and forth. Twice, in fact. He took the time, late at night, to help his foreign friends feel safer.

Nor is it his job to bring music to our lives, but he does. He has a smooth, sweet falsetto voice, and he sings almost constantly as he works, mostly evangelical church music in Kreyol. He sings quietly, so the house is never full of his music. But any little room you turn into might surprise you with his song. Imagine living or working in a large house where at any turn you might run into Rev. Al Green, quietly singing “How Great Thou Art.”

And it’s not his job to make us laugh. But if something falls or breaks or slips, he’s quick to say “oops-see-daisy,” and it’s hard not to giggle. That’s just the smallest sample of a wit both friendly and lively. His high-pitched laughter is truly contagious, too.

Sayil has been working in this office since before I came for my first longer visit to Haiti in the Summer of 1997. He continually watches foreigners come and go, keeping mental track of all of us and befriending all who are willing. He notices the little progress we make in Kreyol, the weight we gain or lose, whether our hair is longer or shorter or, in my case, more gray. He learns our nicknames. He pays attention to us.

I’m given to understand that his job with us is a pretty good one. It’s hard to find any jobs here. For someone like Sayil, with little if any formal education, the odds of finding one that pays decently would be slim. He’s his parents’ oldest child, and he’s spoken of a younger brother who had the opportunity to go to school, even quite a bit of school, and who nevertheless doesn’t really “//touche//,” or “touch.” That’s a Kreyol way of saying that he doesn’t make much money. So even with an education, Sayil might do no better than he does: a small salary and a situation that keeps his expenses low. He’s from the countryside, the area around the inland city of Hinche, and he’s got a small amount of money invested there. To be specific: He owns a cow that his father is raising for him.

So maybe it’s a good job. But if it is, that says a lot. The compensation is poor, and there’s no way to advance. He can live frugally, and try to save money out of the little he’s paid and the little bit more he makes by selling soft drinks to our staff and our neighbors. But his first child is due this Spring, and one wonders what will happen to his need to save money then.

In the meantime, his is usually the first face to greet me when I come to the office in the morning, and usually the first voice I here. It’s the kind of voice that can make a house, even a house that is more office than residence, a home.

Belose, Eddy, Erik, and I had decided to leave Lazil on Tuesday morning at about eight. It seemed like a reasonable compromise. Erik in particular likes to sleep, but we all preferred to make the two-hour walk from Belose’s house back to her car before the sun could get too hot. Eddy, Erik, and I also wanted to get back to Pòtoprens as early as possible. Erik and I wanted to return to our respective villages early. We would both be leaving on Friday for the States, and we both felt it would be good to have some time at home before we did. Eddy needed to leave again for the countryside to do some research early the next day. He wanted some rest between trips.

Our plans were changed for us at dinner the night before, though. Belange, Belose’s father, decided to go with us. He himself, however, needed to leave at five, he said. He decided we would get up at four so that we would have plenty of time to eat and to load the mules before we left.

So we were outside at quarter to five, quietly and sleepily watching Belange and his neighbor load the mules. One mule would carry large sacks of produce. A second, our luggage. Madanm Belange, Belose’s mother, would ride the third. She had decided to go with us too. She needed to go to Leyogann, and we would pass the city on our way. All three mules would return with Belange carrying sacks of cement he needed.

Madanm Belange is not a small woman. She’s a rural health worker in her late forties or early fifties. She climbed up an unsteady chair, wobbling on un-level ground, to maneuver herself onto the small mule. As she settled into the saddle, the mule stepped to the side. In doing so, it started to trip over the chair she had used. It regained its balance, but it was startled, and it began to buck and twist. Madanm Belange held on for a few moments, but the mule eventually threw her. She bounced off the chair, and hit the ground.

Thankfully, she wasn’t hurt. Because of her work, she had ibuprofen on hand. She took a couple, and sat for awhile, catching her breath. We finally got going at almost six. We figured we could get to the car around eight and be in Pòtoprens by ten or eleven.

But we had to stop by Leyogann for Madanm Belange, and it turned out that she had some errands to do. In a place where there aren’t many phones, and where the phones that there are don’t always work, you take advantage of easy opportunities to visit the people you need to talk with. And Belose’s car was an easy opportunity. Madanm Belange had us drop her at the hospital first. While she was inside, we went by a friend of Belose’s to drop off some produce we had brought back from the countryside for her. Then we went back to pick up Madanm Belange. She would be staying at her sister-in-law’s house that night, and she wanted to let the family know it. Then we went to her sister’s, where we dropped off another sack of produce. We went by the office she does her work through so she could check the time of an upcoming meeting, and then went back to her sister-in-law’s to drop her and another sack of produce off there. The roads in Leyogann were unpaved and uneven. Belose could hardly do better than ten miles an hour in her Honda sedan. Even at that, her muffler spent a lot of time scraping the ground. It was hot and terribly dusty. All that running around took over an hour, but we finally headed towards Pòtoprens. We figured we’d still get there by twelve-thirty or one.

Then we arrived in Kafou and, predictably enough, we hit traffic. We inched along the hot, dusty, crowded road. The traffic was not, however, as bad as it could be, though, and we still thought we’d get back by one-thirty or two.

At about twelve-thirty, we were hit. We were not moving at the time. An empty passenger truck coming in the other direction scraped the left side of the car. Belose went to talk with the driver, and they walked together with Eddy to a nearby insurance office to register the accident. Erik and I waited inside a small roadside restaurant and had a cold drink. Thirty minutes later, Belose and Eddy came back. We had to turn around and drive back to that office so they could take pictures of the damage that had been done to the cars. Then we drove to the police station to make a second report. We got to the station at about two.

As Belose and Eddy were inside the station with the truck’s driver, Erik and I watched what appeared to be off-duty police officers beat up and threaten the driver’s assistant. They didn’t beat him badly, but they did jab him and menace him with their guns, and there was no obvious reason why. Erik and I stood and watched, not knowing what to do. Eventually, Eddy came outside, and learned what was happening. He went back inside to get Belose. He wanted to get us all out of there. As he and Belose were heading for the car, where Erik and I still stood, the police starting beating the man again, dragging him in to the station under arrest. We continued to watch the scene unfold as the man was led away with slaps and shoves and Belose and Eddy themselves were threatened.

The four of us drove from there to the Office of The Inspector General of Police to file a complaint. We got there at about three-thirty, and spent two hours filling out forms, answering questions, and waiting. It was five-thirty by the time we left, six when Belose dropped Erik and me off back at the office. Too late for us to head up the mountain to our respective homes.

I’ve emphasized the time in this account of the events, because my consciousness of time was so much a part of the experience. There was hardly a minute of the day when I felt I was in control, and my constantly wondering when we would ever get back was the most pervasive, if perhaps the least important, aspect of that. I felt helpless all day. I wanted to get home, and had know way to control when I would. But I was helpless in several ways that day.

I watched in frightened silence as Madanm Belange struggled with the mule. Nothing within me knew how to react – helpfully or otherwise. Then I was impatient and annoyed – but helpless – as we ran slow errands in Leyogan, and frustrated and helpless when we hit the traffic in Kafou.

And then I watched a man beaten and dragged away. I had no idea what else to do. The sight of guns was terrifying. There was no real danger that the police would attack a white foreigner and risk the scandal, but that thought came only later. The police were shouting more and more angrily, as was their victim, and the angrier they got, the faster they spoke. Several would be shouting at once, and I understood less and less of what was said. Eventually I entirely lost what was being said. When they first drove the man off police grounds I thought of going to speak with him, but I didn’t know what to say or where doing so would lead. If they sensed that he was complaining to me, they might have wanted to hurt him all the more. He himself was in a rage, and I worried that he wouldn’t be able to slow down enough to explain to me or that, if he tried, he would only get more frustrated and angrier. And besides, I was still scared.

When the police started to threaten Belose, I was entirely at a loss. I watched passively as Eddy finessed her into the driver’s seat and we drove away. The confusion and the fear combined to leave me more helpless than I ever remember feeling. I know that there’s something that I could have or should have done, but I don’t by any means know what, and I have no confidence that I will know any better if I am, God forbid, in a similar situation again. I don’t think I learned anything useful from the experience at all.

Adults are not supposed to be so helpless. I know that we sometimes are, but to be confronted so brutally with one’s helplessness is a hard and humbling thing. Barriers created by confusion and by fear blocked me from being able to do anything. And somehow it belongs to adults to be able to do. Humility may be a virtue, but it doesn’t feel like one. Maybe I don’t understand it very well.

It was a strange walk. I say “strange,”even though a few paragraphs will make “strange” seem like a flippant, an inappropriate, way to describe it. But I don’t know how else to start. It was Wednesday, so I was headed uphill late. By the time I got to Bwa Moket, it was already 6:00 and getting dark. I was ready for a slow, careful walk up the steep and rocky path. I’m not really able to see where I’m stepping in the dark, but if I pay attention,
and it’s not raining too hard. I’m generally okay.

I was halfway through Bwa Moket when I heard my name. It may have been dark, but my pale white skin stood out clearly enough. Frenel, Mèt Anténor’s youngest brother and my next door neighbor, had seen me. He was on his way up too. He commutes daily to a job in Pòtoprens. He’s a bookkeeper at a small factory. He leaves every morning by 5:30 and walks up in the evening. We were in luck today. The driver of a flatbed truck had to get up to Malik, and he was willing to wait a few minutes while people who were on their way up on foot piled into the back. We stood up, holding on to the truck’s sides as he
sped away. The ride would get us halfway home.

As we left Malik to walk the rest of the way, a small group formed. They began to talk. One thing about my Kreyol: I can generally follow a conversation well if I catch the beginning. If, however, I don’t know the context from the start, it’s much harder. At first, I wasn’t even paying attention. I spent several minutes reflecting on the class I had just led. It hadn’t gone well, and I was thinking about why and about what to do next
week.

Soon they were saying something about a machete. That didn’t really catch my attention. Almost every man on the mountain has one, and they use them all the time. Then I heard “wounded,” and I started to listen. I figured there had been an accident. I had never heard of one before, but they use the machetes so much that I assume it must happen now and again. But then I heard “struck,” and my mind started to race. Were they talking about a fight? A murder? An attempted one? I heard “angry” and “depressed.” I felt lost in words. I knew the meanings, but they all seemed too terrible. I was trying to figure things out, but something wouldn’t let me. I recognized moment by moment that something awful had happened, but it was hard to piece together just what. My imagination went wild.

Eventually, I put together the following story: A man from a neighboring lakou had attempted to take his own life. He had reached back and tried to cut off his own head with a machete. He cut himself in the back of the neck, but the motion was awkward, and he wasn’t nearly strong enough to cut through. He was wounded and bleeding badly, but he was alive.

Madanm Anténor was tending to him. As soon as it happened, his neighbors rushed off to find her. She’s no doctor, not even a nurse, but she has some first aide training, is the local midwife, and that’s much more than anyone else in the area can say. She hurried down. As she later told me, she saw right away that she couldn’t do enough. While she fought hard to stop the bleeding, she sent some young boys to find a car to take the man down the hill to the hospital. This itself isn’t easy. There aren’t many cars on the hill, none within 10 minutes’ run from where the wounded man was. And there was no guarantee that anyone with a car would be home. Beyond that, it would be a 10-15 minute drive down to a doctor who might or might not be in Malik, or another 15 minutes’ drive to the clinics in Petyonvil. Somehow, they found a way to get him to a doctor eventually. I’m not sure how. When Madanm Anténor got home, she was not any state to answer questions. It seemed inappropriate to ask.

I did later ask Frenel and Toto a little about the incident. As much as it seemed that the circumstances would allow. I tried to ask whether they knew why the man had done what he did. Sensibly enough, they said it was a mystery. Suicide is probably always a mystery. But it’s not one I ever expected to encounter here. I guess I thought that people with pressing material need would be immune from existential crises. I suppose, however, that there is no place without its share of despair.

Sunday at 5:00 am, when I got up, Kasann was sweeping the dirt yard outside my patio. No one else was up yet. No one told her to get to work. This was Sunday, and she would spend nearly the whole day doing homework: memorizing French passages in textbooks she barely understands and going uncomprehendingly through math problems. Again, in French. No one, as I say, had told her to get to work, but her first instinct upon arising was to take a broom in hand and sweep.

What I first think of when I think of Kasann, what I first see when I look at her, what I first imagine when she comes to mind, are her two enormous, sparkling eyes. Even as small as she is, they may be the largest I’ve ever seen. They seem to see and respond to everything. Everything. And they respond with such laughter as can reside in our eyes. She is a beautiful, beautiful little girl. She loves to laugh. To laugh at me in particular. She imitates my clumsy Kreyol, and then giggles herself into a fit. It’s hard not to laugh with her. I’ve mentioned Kasann before. She is the oldest of Madanm Anténor’s three children, the oldest child in my family here. She’s twelve.

I’ve known her since she was ten, a tiny little thing. But from the very first, she struck me as nothing of a child. She often seemed and seems old beyond her years, decades more mature than her brother, Ti Papouch, who is only two years younger. This situation is familiar to me. I have some experience with oldest sisters, with one in particular, and it seems very much worth talking about.

It may be merely a difference between what we expect of little girls and little boys. Biology, and the different rates at which girls and boys grow up, may also play a role. There may also be a special burden on any oldest child. Whatever the reason, there is something very special about an oldest girl.

Even at ten, Kasann was working constantly, helping her mother with the housework. Though Ti Papouch might be told to do a specific chore on a given day, Kasann does many chores all the time. Ti Papouch mostly plays. He’s the kind of child who seems unable to walk: He either runs or skips. He can’t see a branch overhead without taking hold and doing a pull-up. He can’t cross our yard without doing a couple of flips or walking on his hands. He can’t carry something for his parents without tossing it in the air, twirling it on his fist, or dribbling it with his feet. He’s part of a small, elite group: one of only two boys in the neighborhood able to climb a coconut palm. The other, Petrus, is 22. Papouch can climb, but he doesn’t. If he’s caught climbing a palm tree, he gets a thorough whipping. His parents are worried he could fall. He’s a giggling, laughing, shouting, whining, jumping little fireball.

Kasann, on the other hand, rarely plays, even though when she does get into a game – of tag or hide-and-seek or whatever – she plays with real gusto. She squeals her delight. But on the whole, she’s much too busy: washing dishes, helping with cooking, sweeping the house and the dirt yard. And that’s during vacation. During the school year, she may do a little less work around the house, but she spends every free moment studying: copying or
chanting her lessons or going to her father or to the local teens for help.

What I see in Kasann is the unenviable position an oldest sister is in. Madanm Anténor, her mother, sees her as something of an extension of herself. She expects Kasann both to be extremely responsible and to take a lot of responsibility for her younger siblings. Her brother and sister, however, see her more as one of them. They resent the authority Kasann is expected to exercise. They don’t listen to her most of the time. This is true even though they expect her to do things for them that they feel unable to do: Getting
them snacks out of the locked pantry or making them fresh juice are examples.

Mèt Anténor and Madanm have both spoken to me about this. They think it extremely important to teach Kasann everything she needs to know to run a house. I suppose they are thinking prudently about her future, but they may also be thinking about their own. Life expectancies are short in Haiti, and Madanm Anténor works herself weary. She seems to worry a lot about her own health, though I can’t judge whether she has reason to. I wonder whether they are hedging against a need they could have, God forbid, to have someone else capable of running the house. I don’t know.

I think about Kasann’s future whenever I see her eyes. Because her eyes always remind me of her namesake. “Kasann” is a nickname; her full name’s Cassandra. Cassandra was the daughter of Priam, the last king of Troy. Cassandra’s eyes could see the future, though this was, for her, nothing but a curse. She was doomed to see all, but to be incapable of convincing anyone else of her vision. We watch her in Aeschylus’s great play //Agamemnon// walking knowingly to her own miserable death.

I think about Kasann’s future. She comes from a family that is, by Haitian standards, far from poor. But they’re also far from rich. They can hardly assure her what we like to call “a better life.” She is a good, hardworking student, but by no means an outstanding one. Competition for advancement in Haitian schools is fierce. She seems unlikely to get very far via that route. In all probability, she will marry someday and spend her life working from before dawn until after nightfall to feed and cloth her family, and to keep a household running well to make a house a home. Like her mother.

Of course, it is impossible to be sure. Cassandra’s curse is not our gift. But I wonder about the future that little Kasann sees. I don’t know what she imagines for herself. I can’t guess what her future holds. It is, however, hard to imagine one that’s very bright without real change in this land.

The other day I found myself walking home up the mountain at an hour much later than I usually would. It was raining and too dark for me to see, but I am getting to know the path well. I wasn’t really worried. The dark, lonely walk came after a couple of hours of hard riding around, so I spent some time thinking about transportation here and in the States. I’ve written tangentially about transportation before: how crowded public transportation is, how badly one ride bloodied me. I mentioned a motorcycle taxi. But it’s
worth speaking about transportation more generally, and I can do so by talking of an afternoon’s traveling.

It was a Wednesday, so I had a class to lead at the offices of an organization called Pwofod, off Rue Christ Roi. It’s down the hill towards Pòtoprens from our own office, on the other side of Rue Delmas. John, Erik and I left at 1:00 for a 2:00 meeting, and found a tap-tap to head down the hill.

A tap-tap is usually a pick-up truck. The back is covered, and there are benches along its sides. I suppose that they get their name because people knock at the window of the truck’s cab to tell the driver to stop to let them out. The ride down the hill to Kafou Ayewopò can’t be more than a couple of miles, but the midday traffic is rotten, and it can take 30-40 minutes if your luck is bad. Ours was. We were on the verge of getting out to walk – a miserable prospect in the heat of the day on dirty, crowded, polluted Delmas – when we arrived. We paid the driver seven and a half gouds, about 40 cents, for the three of us, and looked for our next ride.

We crossed the intersection to looked for a taxi. We had been using taxis to get to these weekly meetings. But someone called us over to another tap-tap, and he convinced us that his driver would stop at our street. The man was not a driver, nor had he any connection to the driver. He is, for lack of a better word, a tap-tap packer. Men and boys – a lot of seeming street children – hang around various tap-tap stations waiting for a truck or bus to arrive. They jump on before it stops, and begin to yell out its destination: “Lavil, lavil, lavil. Ann ale” (Downtown, downtown, downtown, downtown. Let’s go.) If the driver is satisfied that his truck is filled quickly enough, he might give the packer a couple of gouds. There seems to be no guarantee.

We decided to give the new ride a try. It worked fine. It brought us to within a quarter mile of our destination, though we needed directions to find it. We were so unsure whether we were headed in the right direction that we got out of the truck early, and the driver’s assistant had to tell us to get back on. When he decided we should get off, he stopped the truck himself, and pointed us the way. Our meeting went well from two to four.

The way back was harder. Four is rush hour. When we walked back to find a tap-tap headed the other way, we saw one after another pass us by already packed with people. As over-full as they are willing to get, there are limits, and a driver will not stop if he believes he has no space. There were four of us now. Tito, the Haitian high school student who is Erik’s Creole teacher, was with us. He is part of the Wednesday group. After some minutes waiting, we decide our chances of finding a truck with room for four were very slight, and turn to looking for a cab.

Now, there isn’t much here that sets a cab apart, except that they generally have a red ribbon hanging from their rear-view mirror. They are mostly small, four-door sedans that will take up to six passengers. They are generally about double the cost of a tap-tap, but tap-tap prices are quite fixed, whereas a taxi driver might try to get double or triple his usual fare out of a white person – of course, that’s still less than a dollar. When a
driver stops, you tell him where you want to go, and he quickly decides whether the destination suits him. If he’s willing to pick you up, you get on and are off. But if the cab is less than full, he will continue to stop for more passengers. Each time a potential rider names a destination, he will quickly calculate whether there is a sensible way to add it to his route and either let him or her in or drive off.

We took this cab back to Kafou Ayewopò, and looked for a tap-tap up the hill. It was futile. Everything was packed. We were a little pressed, because John and I wanted to get all the way up the mountain out of the city before dark, so we found another cab. The driver agreed to 75 gouds for the four of us. It was a ridiculously high price, but we felt we had little choice. Of course, it still amounted to very little dough.

Unfortunately, the fares are so low that drivers have little money for maintenance. Many of the taxis are in bad shape. Such was ours. It gasped along up the hill in bumber-to-bumper, stop-and-go traffic until the driver turned to enter a gas station. He was out of gas. He bought a couple of dollars worth, and we were ready to go.

Fortunately, the station was on a steep hill, because the taxi itself was not so ready. The driver had to let it roll out of the station and about fifty feet down a side street to get it started. Then he turned it around and headed back up to Delmas. And we sat there. At this point, the traffic was more “stop” than “go.” We crawled forward for awhile, but then we stalled. The driver didn’t quite know what to do. He was headed straight uphill, with
cars and trucks of all sorts packed in behind him. Angry horns and shouts told him nothing but that he had to get moving fast. The four of us piled out of the car and started pushing.

It is not easy for me to convey what a spectacle this made: three white men and a Haitian schoolboy pushing a beat-up taxi through rush hour traffic. Heads turned on every side. We were lucky: The car quickly started again, and we were off. Soon the driver was able to turn off Delmas to head up the hill via a back way. This went well for awhile, but – almost inevitably – we eventually found a spot in the road were the street was narrowed to one lane by a parked car. The series of full-size dump trucks headed straight toward
us convinced our driver that, all rules of the road aside, they had the right of way. We stopped and waited. The driver kept revving the engine in neutral to keep it from stalling again.

By now we were sitting in three-four inches of grimy, oily, putrid muck. Erik turned and said he didn’t want to have to push again. Not just here, anyway. The laugh helped, I think. After 45 minutes, we made it to the office. It was a long ride.

At this point, John and I wanted to head up the hill, but it was getting dark and beginning to rain. We caught a tap-tap to Petyonvil – not hard to get from the area near our office – and there we looked for a motorcycle.

The most convenient way to get around here is on the back of a motorcycle. Drivers wait at certain central locations to pick up fares. They are more expensive than tap-taps or ordinary taxis, but they have no set routes, and they do a lot of weaving, so they’re not much affected by traffic. Whether they are safe is a hard question. But I don’t feel
especially safer getting around in any of the other ways available to me here. Traffic here is dangerous. Period. But we can’t decide not to get around.

In any case, the cycle took us both, and got us almost as far as John’s place. He lives about a 20-minute walk down the mountain from me. At that point, the road is so steep that the driver couldn’t get his cycle up in the rain. He started to slide back. So we got off, and walked.

I’m not sure that rush hour here is worse than it is in Chicago or Washington or New York. It’s certainly more eventful.

On a recent Sunday, I was in the Catholic church on our mountain. The occasion was a happy one. Frenel, my next door neighbor and Mèt Anténor’s youngest brother, asked me to take some pictures at the baptism of his infant son. I was delighted. I like Frenel, and I had never been to a baptism nor – at the time when Frenel asked – to a Haitian religious service at all. The chance to do someone a favor and see something new had quite a draw.

My preparations were a little complicated. I had a shirt, a tie, and some slacks, but no shoes. Haitians really dress up for church – they dress up for almost everything – so neither sandals nor dirty sneakers seemed quite right. I eventually borrowed snappy dress loafers from Richard, a fast-growing teen who lives down the road. They were a size too large for me, and two for him, but he can’t buy dress shoes every year. He seemed pleased to be doing me the favor, and by early Sunday morning he had shined the shoes to stunning brightness and had delivered them to my room. My clothes looked decent enough, I thought, but the trip up the mountain in my book bag left them looking less than freshly pressed. Not so unusual for me. But as soon as I had them on, the whole neighborhood affirmed that I would have to iron them.

Those who know me well would surely doubt it, but I actually can iron. I learned how in Junior High School. We all took “Home Economics ” in 8th grade. When I was in 7th grade, H.E. was for girls and Shop was for boys, but my 8th grade year was when Massachusetts decided that separating classrooms by gender in public schools was not ok. We all took both. So when the neighborhood said that I must iron, I asked for the coal-filled iron, spread a sheet on the kitchen table, and got ready to start. Neighbors gathered in stunned silence to watch. As soon as I started on the shirt, Casnel decided I
wasn’t doing it right. He shooed me away, and did it himself. When he finished, he assigned Toto to do the pants. I got dressed then, but Madanm Anténor wasn’t quite satisfied. She thought I needed a belt, so she called Toto over and sent him to get his. I put it on, she looked me over, nodded and said I would do.

I walked down the road to the church together with Frenel himself. It’s a pretty little building, with a high-peaked roof and a small steeple. Its pale yellow walls and concrete floor are kept as clean as the sometimes-dusty, sometimes-muddy mountain will allow. It sits up on a slope overlooking the road, with a spectacular view of the plain below. On a clear day, you can see the Caribbean and the island of Lagonav to the west, and the Dominican Republic to the east.

The service was chaotic. The priest only visits once a month or so, and the baptism had to be planned well in advance. About ten children were registered to take part. That itself would have meant ten children, ten pairs of parents, and ten pairs of godparents gathered around the priest on the small platform in front of the congregation. But the population on the mountain is growing quickly. Maybe too quickly. More than twenty infants showed up. There was paperwork to been done. The qualifications of more than ten extra sets of godparents had to be checked. The president of the congregation and his teenage assistant worked furiously – the former almost ferociously – to get forms filled out. They themselves had lots of writing to do, and they had to help the many illiterate parents as well.

Despite their frenzy, we were well more than an hour late. The congregation and the choir chanted prayers responsively while we were waiting. It was terribly hot, there were young children crying and older ones fidgeting all over the place, and time seemed to pass slowly.

In the end, though, it was a beautiful afternoon – an afternoon of lovely prayers and happy people. Our whole neighborhood returned as one to our lakou for a great feast that Madanm Anténor and Toto’s mother, Madanm Boby, had been preparing at Frenel’s house.

Unfortunately, Sunday’s mass was my second in two days. The first trip was not a happy one. The Saturday before the baptism, I went to the cathedral in downtown Prtoprens for a funeral. The brother of a close friend here had died after a long illness. He was a young man, slightly younger than I am. All the usual things you would say about a funeral were true. The man’s family was miserable. Friends converged on them with attempts at consolation. My friend stood in the middle of it all, taking it courageously upon himself
to offer his mother such support as he could. Such support as is possible under the circumstances.

But what struck me most of all was that it was not one funeral, but four. I know nothing of the other three deaths. The four stories were entirely unrelated. But just as too many infants are born here, too many people die here, too. The cathedral cannot handle each funeral separately. Four coffins were before us; four unrelated families had to grieve together.

That’s not all. My friend John and I were at the funeral together. We got there by motorcycle taxi. After the funeral, as the driver drove us up the hill out of Pòtoprens, he told us the following story: While we were in the cathedral, a six-year-old girl had been found dead nearby. It seems she had been sent by her family to fetch water from the local cistern. She lost her balance, fell in, and drowned. Nobody was around to see her fall, no one to hear her cry. I don’t know how many families will be grieving together with hers.