My surreal life

There is a dichotomy to the life of an international aid worker. One that you learn to navigate the best you can, one in which you put aside comparisons to your life in the US to those of people in Haiti or wherever you are at the moment. One in which you have to live in the moment without forgetting where you came from. A life in which you see extreme suffering and poverty everyday but also need to be connected to home and the day to day activities of “normal” life.

Life here in Haiti in many ways has a surreal quality to it. There are moments of “wipe lash” between the easy life of the west and the real situation here. One in which you know that even if your material comforts are minimal that of the local population is worse. Yet when I have the opportunity to go out for a nice dinner, spend the night on the “cruise ship” that has been commissioned as staff temporary quarter, and when I get to spend the day at a nice beach resort; I can almost forget what is outside the walls or across the bay.

Then there is a reality check. Yesterday, I had the opportunity to visit two camps each with over 500 people crammed together with sometimes more than one family sharing what is suppose to be an 8 person tent. These are places where access to water and food is difficult and privacy is non-existent.

As we drive through the city, for a block I can imagine what Port-au-Prince use to look like, before the earthquake. There are parts of the city with very little damage or houses that are still standing, having been built to “code”. Then you glimpse a home in shambles, stairs leading nowhere, chairs and televisions broken, and half a floor hanging precariously over the sidewalk. This is a city of ruble. There are piles of it everywhere. As the cleaning effort continues the ruble is moved out to the roads edge and loaded on to trucks that take it to dumping sites outside of town. I saw one of those the other days, a field full of pyramid piles of pieces of destroyed and broken homes lined up one after the other. Yet among the piles there were still people up carefully picking through in case some treasure had been overlooked by the cleaning crews.

There are tents everywhere, every spare space, in a yard, on the sidewalk, on a piece of the road if you must, wherever you can find an open area there is a tent or a tarp hanging up. There are the more formal camps that house thousands of people at times, and where water, sanitation, and food distribution has been set up. Where there is an official camp management system in place. That helps to organize things and maintain order. Many other makeshift camps have no official status and have cropped up in locations that are dangerous with the arrival of the rains and large risks of landslides.

So as my time in Haiti winds down, I have to reconcile all the things I have seen here, the devastation with my life away from here. Each place that I go to that I stay in, that I become connected to through my work, I take a piece of that place with me and I leave a piece of me behind too. The relationships I have built with international and local staff, the experiences that I have. In three weeks seems like 3 months of experiences, at least! So when I get on the plane tomorrow and it flies over UNICEF camp, I will be the one staring out the window with a few tears in my eyes and the hope in my heart that I will some day get to come back be that in a few weeks, months, or years. That I can see this country rise from the ruble that it is now and see it thrive.