THE MOST INTERESTING WEEK OF MY LIFE

by

James Bryan Cornelius

I never said it was the best week of my life. I'm not even sure that I would do it all again, but that doesn't really matter. Because once you have been to Haiti, you will never be the same. Whoever you are, wherever you are from, you will come home a slightly different person.

Go ahead; I dare you.

We landed in Port-au-Prince at dusk. I lit a cigarette immediately, right there on the tarmac. Looking around, I saw several other people doing the same thing. It had been sixteen hours since we left San Antonio, including the layover in Miami. My brother says that I am one size too large for world traveling. He is correct. I am six-foot-five and two-hundred-thirty pounds. The chairs in coach are getting smaller every year, not bigger. To the contrary, my brother is of medium build, perfectly constructed for riding on top of trains and sleeping in hammocks.

"Be cool," he whispered, '"this is the part I was warning you about."

He had warned me about a whole lot of things. I shrugged and shouldered my backpack. We just cleared customs and were stepping from the safety of a terminal for the first time since our departure. Two dozen negro porters approached us, all of them wanting to carry our luggage. Behind them, a black woman held up a placard that read: SCOTT. My brother's first name is Scott.

"If they even touch your bags, they will want a tip." He raised his voice. Suddenly it was getting very noisy. Everybody was trying to touch my bags. "Just follow me," Scott grinned.

"Je Vais." He shouted. They gradually stopped touching our baggage. He gave them all some money anyway, and we climbed into the cab. It wasn't actually a taxi, more like a micro-SUV. Now that I recall, it was a Geo Tracker, rusty, with a vinyl roof and very bad shocks.

Producing a pinlight, I consulted the map. We were headed for Jacmel, a small coastal town about forty miles away. On paper, it was only one more inch. But it would take us over two hours to get from Port-au-Prince to Jacmel. There is a sizeable mountain range between the two.

The first observation I made, was that my brother and I were the only white people in sight. The second thing I noticed was all the garbage. I don't mean litter, or even trash. I'm talking about raw refuse everywhere. Piles of it, pushed into mounds by the wayside, smashed flat in the streets like some lithospheric layer, drainage ditches completely dammed with plastic bottles and other sundry debris, gray water running in rivulets along either side of every road. Our taxi driver swerved to avoid hitting a burning tire in the middle of the street.

Traffic in Haiti requires more blind-faith than bungee-jumping. There are no police, no stop lights, no yield signs – only big lumbering trucks carrying materials, and a million motor-scooters all jockeying for position in between them. Everytime we came to a standstill, dozens of teenagers rushed our vehicle to sell us something. Everyone was honking their horns at the same time. There were still tent cities on either side of the road, and I was aghast at the sordid living conditons. Port-au-Prince was flat and sprawling. All the buildings looked like concrete bunkers recently shelled by artillery. Filth and squalor baked in the tropical heat. The smell was putrid.

"It used to be a lot worse." My brother Scott told me, recognizing symptoms of sensory overload. This was his seventh trip to Haiti. It was my very first time. "All that stuff there is new." He pointed to a church, still under construction, surrounded by bamboo scaffolding. Scott had allowed me the front seat, but he kept leaning forward from the back, waving his arms between me and the driver. "And over there too." A portion of seawall, right on the bay, had been replaced with cinderblocks and fresh mortar. "And there, see?" A white U.N. steamroller was widening a sidestreet with hot tarred asphalt. To him, these were signs of disaster recovery.

To me, it was pandemonium. The whole island seemed smashed and broken and crushed. About five miles out of the city, we began our ascent. There were thousands of clapboard shacks and thached huts propped precarioulsy about halfway up the mountainside. Then it got really steep. Above the timberline, at the very top of the first ridge, I could see flickering yellow lights. I kept a small pair of binoculars in my daypack. Adjusting the focus, I could see many tiny campfires.

"They're making charcoal." My brother informed me. "It's too heavy to carry the wood down to the towns." He predicted my next question as well. "So, they burn it at the top," he could not shut-up, "and sell it at the bottom."

By the time we reached the first pass, it was pitch dark. There was no longer any electricity at this elevation. The route consisted entirely of switchbacks and hairpin turns, most at fifty degree inclines. It had been hot back in Port-au-Prince. Now it was quite cold, and we were surrounded by thick fog. The Tracker was a ragtop with no heater. I was in cargo shorts and sandals.

"It's a cloud-forest up here." Scott startled me, leaning over my shoulder and shouting in my left ear. "You should see it in the daytime."

I was grateful for nightfall. I would see it better on the way back, once I was acclimated. The only illuminations were the moon and the auto's headlights. I think one of them was broken. To my right was lush jungle foliage. Out the left window was a sheer drop-off. Then the taxi began to point downhill again. When we finally got below the mist, I could see the lights of Jacmel, in a cluster along the southernmost beach of Haiti. It was a grand view, even in the dark, but my ass was sore, and I had not stretched in over two hours.

"I'm hungry, "I told Scott, "and I can't go another mile without a beer."

We're almost to Marco's place." He leaned forward and shouted. "They're expecting us." Marco's house was by the beach. To get there however, we had to go through the middle of Jacmel. Downtown was a blurr of lights and sounds at eight o'clock in the evening (ten p.m. Texas time). World Beat music blared from every other building as we passed. Thousands of people stood in the narrow streets – all of them them black, most of them speaking Creole, and a few of them openly pracitcing Voodoo.. Ladies carried five-gallon plastic buckets of water on their heads, with no hands, and never spilled a drop. Children ran naked through the slanted neighborhoods. Grown men sat around folding card tables and played dominoes for points, just to pass the time, because they had nothing to wager and way too much time on their hands.

The sounds gradually subsided and the lights became less frequent, as we continued down mainstreet, south toward the ocean. The taxi driver stopped when my brother tapped him on the shoulder. "Merci à vous." Scott paid him, and we unloaded our luggage onto the side of the road.

Then the man drove off, leaving us in complete darkness. I kept waiting for my eyes to adjust, but that never happened. I could smell surf somewhere, mixed with just a hint of sewage.

I had this feeling that we were being watched, but I couldn't see a fucking thing.

"It's just down these stairs." My brother Scott pointed the faint beam of his flashlight toward a flight of cracked concrete steps. I could not even see the bottom. We were carrying two fifty-pound duffle-bags each. "I hope they're home, man." My brother knocked on the flimsy hollow door. There were numerous dead-bolts holding it to the jam. Then Scott knocked again.

The person who came to the door was Caucasian, Canadian actually, Quebec to be precise. He spoke fluent French. "Bon Soir." He looked sleepy. "We thought you had been delayed."

"Sorry we're so late." Scott apologized.

"No problem." Marco motioned for us to follow him. "The power has been off for hours." He led us down a narrow hallway and pulled back a tattered curtain. "Please try to be quiet." Marco nodded and then moved aside. "Mpiñata y daughter wakes up for school early in the morning." Then Marco pointed into a dark room with no beds – only blankets on the floor. So I went without any dinner on my first night in Haiti.