Greetings From Port-au-Prince, Haiti
(AKA One of the Most Dangerous Places in the Western Hemisphere)

I've been down in Miami, Florida, for the past couple of weeks, and last week cruised down to the Dominican Republic. I used to live there from 1992-1994, and wanted to go back to some places that I used to know. Before going, I checked the State Department's website for travel advisories and found the following:

Crazy. Seeing that meant one thing: my trip was going to include Haiti. Note the part of the travel warning that says:

As of the date of this Travel Warning, fourteen Americans were reported kidnapped in 2008. Most of the Americans were abducted in Port-au-Prince. These kidnappings have been marked by deaths, brutal physical and sexual assault, and shooting of Americans. The lack of civil protections in Haiti, as well as the limited capability of local law enforcement to resolve kidnapping cases, further compounds the element of danger surrounding this trend.

If you're curious to know more about the security situation there, you might read the section titled "Crime" on this page of the State Department's website.

A little further investigation revealed this article in Forbes magazine, titled World's Most Dangerous Destinations. (A slideshow of said feature can be viewed here.) The article rates Haiti up there with Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe. All signs were indicating that this trip would be a shining example of "adventure travel" at its finest...

Suffice it to say it was going to be a sketchy trip. Before flying out of the States, I registered my itinerary with the State Department, and after an extended journey from Santo Domingo to the border town of Jimaní, I called a friend and let her know where I'd be. ("Umm...if I don't call you back to check in by this time tomorrow, would you mind calling the US embassy for me?") Given the obvious risks, my plan was to go in, swing through the capitol, and get out as quickly as possible.

I've been to a few other poor places before: Newark, Patterson, the Bronx, and Harlem in the early 1990s; TJ and the whole of Baja; Honduras; Morocco; and the Dominican Republic. The social situations surrounding poverty always make me feel a little uneasy. And international borders of poor countries are always pretty crazy; the crowds, the smell, the mud, the noise, the people selling things you have no need for, the hustlers trying to help you along...the chaos is always a bit striking. (Morocco had been the most notable situation that I had seen, to date.) The border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti was pretty bad: homeless Haitian kids begging for money, desperate people trying to move back and forth across, and despite crossing through the Dominican immigration and customs station, there was very little order and governance in the place. It was a mess. And it was interesting because on the Haitian side there was surprisingly little there—only some disused concrete buildings and a small, dilapidated market with stalls and people selling various things that made a dollar store look like Neiman Marcus. I walked down the dusty road that extended away from the border crossing and to the west. Crowds of people moved up and down the road on foot. Large trucks were parked on the sides (some were broken up and abandoned). For 20 Gourdes (about 55 cents) I caught a ride on a motorcycle 3 miles up the road to the Haitian immigration and customs post. I paid 500 Gourdes (about 14 dollars) to have someone bypass the line and go directly into the office to get my passport stamped, and then I walked back outside into the hot sun and found a pick-up truck that was loaded with people going toward Port-au-Prince. Things settled down once we got a few miles away from the threshold. I started to ease up, notice the wind on my face, the details of the countryside, the sounds...things seemed to get quieter. I wasn't sure if it was getting safer, though...

The total journey to Port-au-Prince took about 2.5 hours. Along the way I had to get off and find new rides in Croix de Bouquets and at another point just outside of central Port-au-Prince. I walked most of the distance through Croix de Bouquets—about two miles—to get to the next stop where I could catch a ride further along.2 As I reached the other side of town, it was a very strange feeling to be standing on a street in shorts and a t-shirt and see a convoy of armed UN troops in flak jackets roll by in white trucks. The deeper in I went, the scarier it felt, and the more removed from help I imagined myself being if anything went down. I just wanted to keep moving. I jumped on the next "tap-tap" (the characteristic multicolored buses and converted mini pick-up trucks in Haiti) and got going. Thirty minutes later I was in Port-au-Prince. I caught another ride further in to the center, about a mile along. And the further along I went, the more shocking the scene became. Burned out buildings, unfinished construction never to be finished, people everywhere selling junk and nobody buying, piles of garbage and filth...squalor, ruin, desperation—my uneasiness from fear started to shift into something new: an increasing sobriety about the world and human reality, informed by what was starting to become (and would soon be) an absolutely unbelievable environment of social ruin. The truck stopped. I hopped out and gave the guy 50 gourdes. I walked further down the street, towards where it got more crowded.

I don't think I can really descibe how things were in that area that I walked through. It was incredibly crowded. There was a large truck trying to push its way up an extremely crowded street. People were selling anything they had to sell: used clothing from the United States, brightly-colored plastic household items, soap, rice, fish, crabs, meat...everything was motion, congestion, noise, heat, humidity, stench. Chaos. It was like a Hieronymous Bosch painting...things happening everywhere in every small and large place, with no overall theme or idea but that of a thousand horrible individual stories being played out simultaneously. At the macro level, it was all just static on the TV screen. I saw an old woman selling underwear out of a large basket and sitting quietly on the ground in the middle of all the turmoil; I saw another person selling rotting food; I saw people unfolding huge bundles of clothes to lay out on the ground and sell; I saw piles of rice, polluted water, flies, and garbage everywhere. A man was struggling to pull an old engine on a wagon that looked older and heavier than the engine itself did. Nothing made sense. The buildings seemed disproportionate and empty, yet filled with people. Everything was in disrepair. I noticed paint peeling off of balustrades maybe 20 or 30 feet above. I thought that I should be taking photographs of all these things—but then taking pictures just seemed intensely trivial and irrelevant in the middle of such an incredible, horrible, and very immediate situation of other people's lives. And I didn't want to actively draw attention to myself. I was the only light-skinned person that I had seen in hours in an unfamiliar and dangerous place, and had moved like a specter thus far on my journey. I had to get out of there.

I walked up a hill and glanced behind me. With some distance between me and the place, I saw it there, in the pit of it all, at the center in all of its decaying glory: the old slave market. It looked like something out of a nightmare. A hot, crowded, smelly, midday-sunlit nightmare. God damn...this place truly was a disaster...a giant social disaster extended out of a disastrous history. It was like I had descended into hell, and it was very much like Sartre said: Hell is other people...

As I got toward the end of the street at the top of the hill, I turned around and took another look. Incredible. Things had opened up a little. I pulled my camera out, took a blurry photo, then made my way straight for a bus. We drove past a large rotunda with a giant hand in it. I saw the airport as we went by, and the ghettos and urban areas eventually faded into disused industrial areas and suburbs. I listened to the music blasting inside the bus. Haitian rap music is incredible. I discreetly took out my camera and started shooting video from inside the window until my battery died. I thought about how much suffering I had been seeing in the country, and how much the people suffered for lack of responsible leadership.3 It was Hobbes' human condition: "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (if 17th-century interpretations of human society can be relevantly applied in the 21st century).

The ride out of the capitol was faster than that coming in. It was uneventful. And I felt that I hadn't seen enough. That short experience left me unsatisfied. I wanted to go back and document it (maybe when I could pay a few locals to watch my back, interpret, and otherwise get me access to places). There is a story there that needs to be told: the one of all those little details in the painting—the thousand individual horrible stories...

I changed vehicles in Croix de Bouquets and got on a truck heading out through the countryside, toward the border. The ride was relaxed. People would crowd in and be mostly silent for the bumpy ride. Occasionally the truck would stop to let someone off or to pick someone up to ride up to the next town. Somewhere out in the middle of a stretch of sugarcane fields the truck stopped to pick up an old man who looked to be about 80. He was wearing rubber boots, a threadbare shirt and pants, and carrying two old machetes in leather sheaths. He held the machetes together in one hand, at midpoint along their lengths. Everyone crowded in to make room. He got in, the truck started rolling along again, and this old guy just started busting on me. I had no idea what he was saying, but he was just cracking these real casual jokes about the American in the truck and making everyone else laugh. I would smile graciously and he'd just keep on going. I'm sure he was saying stuff like, "Look, the American has no idea what I'm saying. I'll say something offensive and he'll just smile. Ah...see? Look at that! He did it again! Hahahahaha!"

I liked that old man. That guy had lived a long, hard life. I could tell it by the lines in his skin and the calluses on his hands, the clothes he wore, and those old machetes. And yet he was walking a graceful path at the end of it all. His days were too short to worry and feel bad. So, he laughed, and made others laugh. And, by that, it seemed that he was at peace with his existence (and that was quite impressive for what it was).

After an hour or two, signs that we were nearing the border—people, garbage, and what had become a now-familiar countryside—began to reappear. The truck let out when things got crowded again, near the Haitian immigration and customs post. I didn't bother going in to have my passport stamped on exit; nobody would care, anyway. I got a ride on a motorcycle the 3 miles back to the border. It was later in the day. Some of the crowd from the morning had dispersed. Some white people were standing just inside the gate from the Dominican immigration and customs station. They looked like they were in their 50s and had just stepped out of an REI catalog, grinning big and stupid about all the attention that they were getting from the animals in the zoo. I felt tired. I paid US$35 at the office window, got my passport stamped again for Dominican re-entry, showed it to the next official, and walked through the gate. Then I went down the street and made a phone call to my friend. "Hey...I'm back."

I had no desire to be in Jimaní anymore. Or in the Dominican Republic. Or anywhere. The world felt serious. I felt affected. The thought of chilling at a beach in La Romana or Punta Cana for two more days seemed incredibly boring. I went back to the hotel where I had left my rental car, said thanks to the attendant, and floored it to the capitol. I got there at about 8:30 PM, turned in the car, slept in the airport, and stood by on the first flight out of there in the morning.

There are these really surreal differences between the United States and many other places. Coming back into Miami this time was very much like the feeling that you get when you have been waiting for three and a half hours in traffic to cross the border at Tijuana, and you get up to the U.S. Border Patrol checkpoint at about 11:00 at night and the guy looks at your license, asks you what you do for a living, smiles and says have a nice evening, and then you look forward and it's five lanes of open freeway on I-5 all the way up to wherever you want to go. It's like you're about to step about 1,000 years into the future...

We really do have something special and amazing here. So little of the world has this. The privilege is almost hard to get your head around because it's so random. And so easily it degenerates into entitlement. Waiting for the train to go from Fort Lauderdale down toward Miami Beach, I saw a lady casually walking (and putting no effort in to move faster) after a shuttle bus that was starting to roll out, and indignantly yelling at the driver that he was going to make her late getting back to her house. And I saw three railway station workers walking around together, joking with each another, and enjoying their low-stress, low-workload jobs that "don't get [them] paid enough."

I think a lot of people in our society think that the world owes them a living—that everyone else owes them a handout, whether it's free housing, free food, or free healthcare. And maybe it's easy to think that you don't have enough when someone else is driving a nicer car or wearing the newest clothes. But still, many people don't know what they've got. It's really a wonderful thing we've got here. And fragile, too.

Compared with most other places, there is a lot of order in our society. And I believe that we are prosperous here as a society because of that order. Things as basic as traffic laws, or building codes, or taxes that generate revenue for public projects—all these things create a structure that we have the opportunity to thrive in.

I should note that I really am all for things like public health care, in the same way that I'm all for public education: it makes sense, especially in a high-functioning system. However, the attitude of entitlement to use such things with no sense of responsibility or accountability to others is troubling. (If only the public education system were used that way, though.) And that attitude of entitlement is, I think, one of the most destructive currents moving through our society today (and perhaps one of the greatest sources of individual unhappiness). It seems to be present in large sectors; it's all over, and various economic groups.

I believe that, if anything, we are entitled in this life to opportunity: it is the one way that we demonstrate our individual agency. Opportunity is a rare thing in this world; so few have it (or so little of it). And opportunity is something that we create by putting in, not by taking out. We owe it to ourselves to put in.