There are some places that are so awful, and so nearby, you feel like the best thing to do is just let the entire nation in.
I say, give most of Nevada to the Haitians. I’ll go for a couple of years and help them with English and bookkeeping.
Anything.
How can these people endure so much?
Whenever you read about Haiti, you just think, “Can there really not be a speck of wood anywhere? Is it truly all mud slides and Hurricanes (and now earthquakes) with, get ready, 60% unemployment? How can this be?”
What a fucking mess.
Back in the day, I was a short order cook and I worked with all these fabulous Haitian women. I got to practice my French and they got to wash dishes. They were so funny and alive. I mean, those indomitable spirits! I imagine the whole country of Haiti is filled with such spirit. Of course, my sample in Mahwah, New Jersey was too small to extrapolate from.
But now that my memory is kicking in, there was also the garage sale in Ramsey, New Jersey, back in the 90’s, when a huge van pulled up and twelve amazing faces jumped out and my mother said to me, “Keep your eye on those Haitians.”
And she was right. After the twelve of them jumped back into the van, we noticed at least ten things were stolen. Ah, well, garage sale crap. Let the Haitians have it.
What a failed nation. Haiti makes West Virginia look like Bel Air.
Poor place. You know, it’s so random. Enslave people, free them, disenfranchise them, leave them with nothing, abandon them when they get too surly, on a small piece of land, and you just get misery. Okay, it is not so random. It is math. But for the people who live there, it was a random experience to be born there.
Cruel.
Love waves to Haiti. And a boatload of penicillin.
This blog entry, and more like it, is from www.opentrench.blogspot.com
2 comments:
I agree with all of this but my only question (incorrect as it may be) is: If you lived there would you have 11 children?
A church I was attached to for a while had a special ongoing mission to Haiti. It’s true, the poor souls stripped the whole country bare for firewood, until there was nothing left. The Lutherans built a few schools. A few pantries. But I got the impression that it was one step forward, one step back. Not that that matters. We do it because that’s who we are. Maybe love waves and penicillin is all we can ever do.
Indomitable spirit. Yeah. What doesn’t kill you... But who would be tempered on an anvil like that? I'm amazed at the equanimity and charity, even humor, that I'm hearing from some of the Haitian leaders on TV.
There does seem to be a frightful algebra at work, though, an accelerating curve at both ends of the material spectrum in what Nabokov called “this evil and multicolored world.” Life thrives in the temperate zone, topographical, spiritual, and cultural. Cosmological. At the nexus of optimization. That’s the way things are made.
I really like the flavors of your blog, Don. From post to post, and word to word...
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