Travel Notes: Haiti – May 2013

Here are some notes about my recent trip to Haiti. These are lengthy, so don’t

feel bad about skipping ahead to the photos. – John D. Wagner

May 17, a Friday. I have been traveling here in Haiti, mainly around

Port Au Prince with its five million people, for the last three or four days

with my friend and business associate Will Forest. Will has a very good

idea to bring baseball making back to Haiti. Recently, ESPN took a strong

interest in our story, in part spurring this trip, and we ventured here to

meet some of the Haitians who used to be involved with Rawlings, which

made all their baseballs here before moving operations to Costa Rica and

China in the early 1990s. Rawlings move out of Haiti was because political

“stability” eroded after the exit of the dictator Baby Doc. His departure –

although he’s now returned to Port Au Prince – was followed by the rise of

a series of elected presidents, leading to the current president, Sweet

Mickey, a pop singer, not exactly known as a class act.

You can't help but notice the obvious about Port Au Prince (called

PAP) and Haiti at large, because it rises up into your ears and nose and eyes

like heat blasts that you can barely stand and turn away from: Haiti is an

astonishingly poor country, so broken, so crippled by broken things, that it is

difficult to fathom the daily circumstances of those living here, who

somehow find a source of fortitude that I would find hard to muster in the

face of their circumstances:

The unrelenting grind-you-

down poverty and absence of

even resources, where

everything has to be cobbled

and improvised and

scavenged; the filth and lack

of privacy; the dignity that’s

missing in so many daily

interactions. The poverty and broken infrastructure – byways that no one

could vaguely even call “roads,” the near complete lack of clean water or

refrigeration; the on-off electricity – is far worse than anything I saw in

India or Nepal, and even worse than what I saw in Vietnam. Blows the

mind. That said, the poverty is not absolutely everywhere, because there’s

a tiny sliver of middle class people, some of whom we met. But the

unspoken rules, the consensus by which most people are able to live and

interact decently with trust, seem to here have broken down, and civic

order has been driven down here. You can’t tell which cars are really

police because so many people with cars have sirens, and many have

installed police lights; now both the police and the fake police are ignored,

Street market, PAP

unless the cops roar through the block in bully pickup trucks, masked,

wearing bullet-proof jackets, knee pads, shin guards, jackboots, and flashing

bulked-up automatic weapons. When driving to Jacmel, a city on the coast,

we were leap-frog-passed multiple times by an ambulance with blazing lights

and siren – and I thought, Well, maybe it’s not so bad after all; you call the

Haitian equivalent of 9-1-1 and they come out to get you – only to realize that

the ambulance crew was just three guys joy riding, pulling cars over; maybe

it was stolen. Even lower-mid-range

restaurants have guards armed with

shotguns at the door, so you can eat

safe from bandits. Nearly everyone

you meet here on the make, trying to

hustle you with a story for gourdes

(the non-convertible currency), or sell

something, anything, from the wild

vegetables they may have picked from who knows where, to broken

appliance parts or parts of tools, which are heaped in piles in the grim

alleys, as sellers looking for buyers, traders. Vast numbers of people –

mostly young men – have nothing to do and idly line the streets and parks,

some setting up as vendors, offering their goods – again, many of them

heavily used, broken things – staged in some semblance of a display on

woven crude grass trays, or laid out on sheets of filthy cardboard or plastic.

The sellers sit on their own scraps of cardboard nearby, maybe moving a

bit as a slice of shade shifts around with the sun. By the thousands, lining

the streets and allies, they sell everything imaginable. Gum, blackened beef,

live chickens, bags of water, butchered chickens – hacked up and laid out,

with no ice on plywood tables, swarming with flies – cell phone parts, sex

Central Market, PAP

!

by the hour, charcoal, skewers of goat, shoes (many people sell single

unmatched shoes in haphazard piles); wire, lotto tickets, jellied candies,

gum, hammered metal art, DVDs of Mr. Bean, or luminescent orange and

silver freshly caught fish – again with no refrigeration – skewered through

their gills with bamboo staves, and slid close together one upon the other

upon the other, offering a gorgeous overlapping symmetry, all the more

contrasted by the fact that so little symmetry here. And the garbage

wallows in the street, almost like a

multicolored oversized freak chunky

hail that’s fallen; the Haitians throw

away everything and I mean everything

in the streets. Plastic bottles by the

thousands, plastic bags, candy

wrappers, food scraps, human shit, piss

and animal bone, plastic spoons and

forks, Styrofoam clamshell cases, husks of corn and mangos…it all goes into

the gutter. And when the thunderstorms come, all the trash runs off with

the grime and dirt and soot from the diesel smoke to flow in tributary

rivulets that join streams to eventually form torrents downhill, streaming

with a putty-gray runoff, chunky with garbage, which has the texture of

sour milk.

Side by side, vendors sell identical items, many lined up ten or twelve

in a row with identical things for sale: bananas, potatoes, onions, limes,

peppers, crackers, cooking oil, honey, garlic, eggs. Some cook from wok-

like vats – salvaged from barrels, pots – filled with boiling who-knows-how-

old oil, into which they float plantains to bubble and fry. Old drywall

buckets lined with burlap filled with icy cokes and Fanta are propped on

Central Market, PAP

vendors’ shoulders and hauled into the dead-stop-stand-still traffic – a still-

life with cars – as the hawking boys stand insistently at car windows

knocking with the back side of their middle finger knuckles, tapping on the

cars’ darkened windows, insisting on a sale. Turnip-like greens, still

clumped at the roots with the life-blood soil that Haiti is bleeding into the

sewers and the sea, are stacked in abundant bunches at roadside, along with

carrots, watermelons, more and more mangoes, peas, cabbages. It’s all for

sale by person after person, block after block.

Mixed between the food for sales are the vendors, one after another,

of personal adornments: used jewelry, bracelets, earnings, pins, bottles of

fuel, rum – the bottle caps cracked so who knows what’s really in there –

perfumes, masks, stones, live turtles craning their necks to the limit to get

out of the fetid water (pregnant women milk the turtle blood through an

incision on the neck, for a tea they

think protects them), tethered kittens,

a live rabbit held up by its ears for sale

at roadside. Anything and everything is

for up for grabs for a price, for

pennies. But watch where you step.

The grates that are meant to cover the

storm drains have been stolen, to be made into chicken grills, and there’s

unmarked, gaping holes everywhere, which drop down 5 or 6 feet straight

down to the putrid water and trash below.

When we went to the Marches de Fur, a crammed two-structure

pavilion where you can buy crafts, some vendors adopted us, protectively –

very cautious not to overexpose us to other vendors – as they took us on

a tour of the place: We saw Voodou artwork – dark leather stitched tightly

PAP street scene

and grotesquely on crude wood models; soap stone sculptures, tobacco,

hammered tin in the shapes of moons and fishes, and eventually we ended

up, ta dah, at our tour guide’s booth. Just looking today, just looking, we told

them. Back tomorrow, when we will maybe buy then... Ok Ok Ok, you

remember me? Yes. We will. And when Will went to tip the kindly man

who had shown him around the dignified man refused the tip, even in his

desperation for a sale. I had my own guide, named Jean – “same name as

me,” he said in real astonishment at the coincidence when I introduced

myself; delighted, “same name as me, amazing, no?”

We had arrived here in Haiti on a Tuesday night, and the hotel that

we'd booked had, of course, mismanaged the van that was supposed to pick

us up. “Twenty minutes” they kept saying, whenever we called, as we

borrowed the local cabbies and hanger-on’ers’ phones to dial. We were

going to Petionville, up the mountain, above PAP. A one-eyed cab driver

named Samuel pleaded with us that “We are all from the same company” –

whatever that meant – begging us to take his ride for $50, then $40, and

then $20. Two others fixers who’d latched onto us – we made videos of

them saying they were just there to help people – didn't even have cabs but

billed themselves as “helpers,” hawked for tips with helpful advice about all

things Haiti, the music, the hotels, where to find the party, how to dress.

We had to pay for each phone call, and eventually we tipped out the

helpers a meaningful $5 for fending off other cabbies and hanging with us

until the hotel van finally arrived. While we had waited, a new Toyota

pulled up, with the seats still wrapped in plastic, and the driver Alphonse

waved us over, because he'd heard we were asking about car for the day to

Jacmel, a nearby city, and he undercut Samuel who'd bid $150, offering

$120 and a nice clean new ride.

The hotel van finally swung in, just as it was getting dark. And up to

the hotel we roared, through the pocked acned streets, with line upon line

of cars leap-frogging each other to get a few feet ahead in the scramble-

mad traffic. White UN Land Cruisers were in the mix, with western white

drivers flinging their hands up in frustration as they were passed and

shunned to the shoulder. Vendors lined the road. Even in the pitch black.

Their offerings lit by tiny fires or burning heap of trash. Those little lights

illuminated, maybe, a small orderly pyramid pile of canned milk, or sodas in

a bucket, a live captured bird or two, crackers still in wrappers cattycorner

stacked as you see them in stores. Then, just as quickly as we’d joined the

calamity upon leaving the airport – 90 minutes for us to go maybe 6 miles

in the stifling traffic – we burst from the

street chaos through the gates of the

fortified compound of our hotel. Sudden

quiet. Warm lights. (There’s a generator.)

The driveway newly clean and wet. The

staff in clean uniforms. An elevator with an

LED to read out for the floors, beeping to

mark each floors as it lifted us. Ice made

from purified water. A kind of splendor. Maybe 12 guests in the sprawling

150-room place, so new you could smell the sheetrock mud.

That first night, Will and I met Max Conde, who had a drink of water

while we ate red snapper, potatoes, fresh rolls, and I drank Haiti 5-star

rum; rocks, lime. Rum with a bite; molasses bitter. Max, a tri-lingual,

dignified man, with rimless square glassed and a fine shirt – a Queens

College NY grad; two daughters resettled in the States – spoke with us

about the people he’d lined up for us to meet in Haiti. We’d meet the men

Will and Max

who ran a leather tannery. We’d meet the man, Marc, who used to run the

baseball floor operations for Rawlings. Max had been the manager of

Rawlings’ overall operations, which employed 10,000 Haitians.

We headed to bed. I took a shower and saw an odd notice by the

sink. I knew the hotel water wasn’t for drinking, but the note said it also

wasn’t appropriate for shaving either. Use bottled water for that too,

provided.

Our business meetings weren’t

until Thursday, and so the next day,

Will and I had a full day free, and we

headed to downtown PAP to see some

sights, such as there are. At the hotel

lobby we got the director of security –

a bean stalk of a young man named C. Francisco – to tell us what bus to go

on to get down town. But he was hesitant and astonished we weren’t

going to take the hotel jeep for $40. We wanted to take the combi for 30

cents. As we left, Francisco was so eager to help, and he walked out of the

hotel grounds, stopped the bus, and talked to

the driver personally and told him to tell

them to take care of us, his friends. White

people on combis are a rare sight, and we got

plenty of looks, as we leapt on the filthy bus

to sweat out the downhill crawl to city

center, vendors swarming around the window as we sat there.

Down town, we leapt out of the bus when we saw some of the

recognizable grounds of the national palace, the famous building that

crumpled in the 2010 earthquake. The palace was, in fact, our first

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objective. We swore we were right there, but all we saw was a fence – no

palace. We asked and asked – Will speaks French and Spanish – and people

kept saying, Yes, that’s a fence. That’s a fence, yes, they said, as we pointed

to the fence, not realizing that the palace has been bulldozed and there’s

nothing there. Only the fence. We then headed to the national museum,

which co-serves as the tomb of Toussaint-Louverture, Haiti’s brilliant

liberator, the only person ever to force Napoleon to retreat. Small, maybe

the size of a couple of classrooms, the museum has but one, really, notable

exhibit, and that’s the anchor of Columbus’ ship The Santa Maria. It was

starling to see it there, something Columbus had likely touched, dangling

from the ceiling, a rusted claw from 1492. But it was the first raspy hook

into the West that tethered Columbus to an island that he would ravage, as

he and the microbes that his crew carried would ravage a hemisphere and

change the trajectory of generations.

With our museum tour done in 15 minutes, and no other museums

around (the 2010 earthquake had wiped them out), we decided to get a cell

phone, to buy one, with a Haitian number. So, we walked into the Digi-

Cell office, only to see long lines, and I almost said, Let’s bag this, because it

being the third world, or the fourth world, it would clearly take hours to

get the phone. Until the manager saw

us, the white people, and moved us to

the front of the line. He got us our

contract and a working phone in

minutes.

Out the door, we wandered into

the central market is Port Au Prince, which was nothing more than an

endless maze of alleys and strings of vendors – with their piles and piles of

!

charcoal, limes, potatoes, watermelon chicken, bread – amidst streams of

raw sewage and the ubiquitous never-ending trash. A calamity of chaotic

activity, a calamity, and loud too. We were looking for an alleged location

where metal art and found sculpture were for sale, but we soon gave up

(the map we had was worse than useless) quickly overwhelmed, we

punched through a side alley after three blocks, and high-tailed it to a

nearby hotel we’d spotted, where in the sudden calm, under the gaze of a

SWAT-team armed guard, we watched NGO workers on wi-fi Skype to

HQ, and others had ducked out of the chaos for lunch, a drink. Will calmly

got on Google Hangout and video-con-called his wife and son. A cubano,

and a coke please for me; cleanest thing I could think to order.

We were exhausted. It was 11:15AM.

After a bite, we trekked back out again, got lost looking for the

Marche de Fur, and eventually hired a motorcycle taxi. I negotiated one

rate, and then the driver put both Will and I on the back. Three grown men

zooming through the crazy streets. No helmets. The hot exhaust pipe all

too close. I yelled to Will over the crazy noise not to be shy and grab me

around my waist. I grabbed the driver’s, and – chin to shoulder to chin to

shoulder – we roared off through the chaos, dodging all manner of on-

comers, on foot, bike, car, truck, motorcycle, combi, taptap bus. We

passed another motorcycle stand where I’d earlier asked for a price, and

the man I’d spoken with saw us on the competitor’s ride. He started to run

into the street, screaming “Hey!” We dodged him and eventually pulled into

the Marche de Fur market, where we were again swarmed and begged, as

we wandered from stall to stall, trying impossibly to stay anonymous.

By now, the sun had peaked, and we were tired of being hit on – a

small crowd was following us around from stall to stall, please please have a

look, just look! – and I grabbed a

motorcycle back to the hotel, making a

video of nearly the entire trip from the

driver’s point of view. Will stayed

behind to change some money,

somehow getting a cut in the streets

and bleeding all over the bank counter, which the unperturbed teller

mopped up with a tissue, as if it were spilled coffee. He took his own

motorcycle back later – taxis or buses would have taken two hours to

cover what a motorcycle could do in ten minutes – but not before a hard

luck story of domestic abuse and deportation separated Will from $8, a

small fortune in PAP. What a haul, the guy must have said, staring at all that

cash.

We both showered off the grime, and I called Alphonse, the van

drive. He was delighted to hear from me, Jess, Jess, Mr. John, Jess, I remember

you! And we booked the van for $120; he’d pick us up at 7:30AM, when

we’d meet Max and follow him to the tannery.

At dinner time, we wandered on foot and found a semi-clean-looking

chicken place, with an armed guard sat on the porch with a shotgun. Will

and I had dinner, told family stories to each other, and wandered back to

the hotel, stopping at the bar. A couple rums and lots of talk with the staff

– they all wanted to join the baseball company that night – before we

crashed, having not really done all that much that day but shopped for 15

minutes in the swarming craft market, changed money, and gotten a phone.

!

Thursday morning, Alphonse showed up with the spiff new van, a bit

late. Max was late too. Everyone is late in Port Au Prince. It’s the stifling

traffic. Once in traffic ourselves, we could easily have walked far faster than

the van. But for the filth along the streets and the heat, we would have

done it.

We found the leather tannery, navigating past the shotgun guard at

the gate, and another shotgun guard

at the inner door. We expected a

Haitian for the meeting with the

tannery owners, but in walked a 24-

year-old kid just out of college from

Ipswich, Massachusetts. “Hi,” he

says, hand out for a shake. Dan’s

the name. Dan Gallagher. Like we

were meeting at Starbucks on Newberry Street. Bottles of cool water all

around. We tell our story. Baseballs. Yup. Bringing them back to Haiti.

Gonna hire a bunch of people. He’s thrilled. Says the Haitians love to

work. Said the morning after the 2010 earthquake, with a quarter million

people dead, everyone came in to work on time. Everyone. Even though the

police used the grounds around the factory to stack all the dead bodies.

John and Marc

And oh boy, Dan’s got the leather for us. Premium goat hide. We

take a tour. The place is a-swarm with workers, machinery, and huge

wooden tumblers, 25 feet high,

which are tanning vats that ooze

who knows what toxins. Chrome

and alum. We love the goods.

Elegant, velveteen pelts. Max

fingers the hides, like they are

talismanic. He looks up, catches my

eye, nods, these are good. Dan says

his Dad, also Dan, will be there

later that day. We swap phone numbers, because – after all – we’ve got

the Haitian phone now, and arrange for lunch the next day with Dan the

dad. Dan the dad is actually Dan Junior, because the grandfather is also

Dan. Three Dans. They’ve traded pelts around the world for decades. I

think no one on earth knows more than the Dans about trading leather.

On the way out, I ask the armed guard if I can

taken his picture, No, he waves me off, without a

word.

Max heads home, working his way back

across the anarchy of the nearby “wholesale”

veggie market by the port – a wasp hive of

vendors, buyers, haulers, garbage, fetid water –

while Alphonse, Will and I blast the van’s AC

and head over the mountains, two hours across the claw of Haiti to Jacmel,

on the coast, to meet Claude “Marc” Peyan, the man who used to make

the baseballs.

Max and Dan, with a tanned goat hide

Tannery, PAP

Along the way, we saw the famous erosion firsthand, and it’s a crime,

a crime to see what’s happening. The farmers have striped the hillsides, not

just some of them, but all of them. They are completely denuded, entirely

bare of trees. They have done this to make charcoal, and to make room to

grow cash crows. To feed their kids. To buy fuel to get crops to market.

But the soil runs off into the ocean, where it clogs the shell fish beds, along

with the raw sewage that streams in brown streaks into the otherwise

cerulean blue wash.

Outside Jacmel, Marc – the man we’re here to meet – pulls up in a

beatup 4x4 and jumps out. He’s 74. Looks maybe like a jazz band member,

maybe the rhythm man. He’s light-

skinned Haitian, and I jump out of

the van to say hi. When he sees

me, even before we shake hands, he

starts right in with a story of

exasperation: “Every time I come to

Jacmel, something happens!” he

says, showing me his expired license

which the police discovered last

time he was here. “See the date?” I don’t have my glasses, but I nod yes.

“Expired! And I didn’t even know it.” He says he’d like to park here,

outside of town, and ride in the van with us, but the guy who owns the

nearby roadside stand, well, Marc said he recently wrecked his car, when

he was building a house for his uncle, who… “Let me run over here and

check,” he says as he slinks off. There’s some confusion, cars are jockeyed

around, but Marc eventually pops into the van, and almost to apologize for

the delay, he hands Will and me Haitian baseballs. From the hay day, from

Claude Marc Payen, baseball maker for Rawlings, telling stories at lunch.

when Rawlins was here. Marc ran the shop floor. Managed the sensitive

winding of the three types of wool that makes up the core. He’s got

photos to prove it, which he holds back as he lights another in an endless

stream of cigarettes. Over extremely ruddy “roads,” we weaved and wove

our way to a hotel by the coast, where we ordered lunch. Marc ordered a

double whiskey. It was, after all, 11AM. He lit his fourth cigarette. A fifth.

He’s 74, and his mom just died at 102, so he said he is not afraid of dying

for 28 more years. “Take me now, though, I don’t care,” he sit and opens

his arms and legs to the heavens and laughs. “I really don’t. Now’s fine.”

I took out the video camera, and he asked me to put it down until he

told us his story. Then we could ask him to retell what parts of it we

wanted on the tape. As he spoke, I nearly wept with the sense of loss, as

he spontaneously told one fantastical story after the other.

Documentarians die face down in the mud in far away places to get

something half this authentic, and I’m aching to turn the camera on,

electrified to capture the man, smoking and drinking and telling us about his

friend, the dictator Baby Doc: “I Loved

the guy! Loved him. But his father wanted

me killed,” he said sneakily, lowering his

voice and looking around for spies. He

sipped on his cigarette. “His bogey man

came after me, twice they tried to shoot

me, and I had to leave for six years. But

Baby Doc, I bought his car, his 504 Puegeot. He loved how clean I kept it.”

And every time my hand drifted to the camera, Marc gently says No

with a wave of his hand. He goes on to say how he, this very man living in

the hills in Haiti, was The man who designed The baseball in use today in all

Vegetable Market, the Port area of PAP

Major Leagues and colleges. He explained how he changed its design in the

late 1970s, how Rawlings has tested it for two years before they realized he

was right all along, that the ball was better. He showed pictures of himself

on the Rawlings shop floor. Can we do it again? Bring baseballs back here?

“Of course. We can do anything. Make machines. Balls. I’ll do it myself if

you don’t. We can make anything here.” Finally he lets me tape him with

the video camera, and the stories are just as good, but half as well-told the

second time around. He orders another double whiskey, and takes one

small bite of his huge burger, grabs a stick or two of fries, and talks and

talks…about how Port Au Prince had just 250,000 people when he bought

his house there, and now it has 5,000,000. How Jacmel was a sleepy

seaside city of 15,000 just a few years ago, and now it has 500,000 people.

Story after story of when Marc was young and everything seemed possible;

how great the American team from Rawlings was; how great the workers

were. It was a golden time, a sweet time, he says, repeatedly kissing his

pinched thumb and index finger, as though he were commenting on wine,

pastries. A great man; I loved him, loved that guy he said of his America

boss. And what has he been doing since 1992 when Rawlings left? “I’ve

been trying to relax myself. All this time, just to relax.”

An hour goes by. Two. Alphonse our driver has had enough. I

looked up across the table, and Will seems to be wilting in the heat and

stories and the smoke. It was time to wrap. I got the check and was short

a dollar or two, and I asked Will to dig out some of his cash. Marc sensed

we might to have enough and he pointed to the check, saying, “Give it to

me. What do you need? Give it to me. I’ll just pay it all…” But, no need.

Marc downed the last of the booze, and didn’t even seem tipsy – four

drinks and nothing to eat by 1PM – as he lit another smoke, his tenth or

twelfth; I’d lost track, and we headed back to the van to head back to P AP,

after dropping Marc back at his car.

In PAP that night, after getting the nod from the armed guard at the

door, Will and I ate at a “sushi” restaurant near our hotel which also

served meat. But everything we asked for on the extensive menu wasn’t

available. I finally settled on some blackened beef, which I took one look at

and two nibbles of, before deciding not to finish it. Will had chicken. God

knows, there’s plenty of that around.

Walking back to the hotel, I negotiated with a motorcycle taxi to

come to the hotel at 10:30 and take me to the famous Oloffsson Hotel to

see the famous band Ram, which comes on stage at 11PM. The sprawling

grounds of the Oloffsson, a private residence 100 years ago, is the Hotel

Trainon in Graham Green’s Haitian novel, The Commedians. Greene stayed

there at the Oloffsson. They’ve got a room named after him. But when I

walk out at 10:30, no motorcycle. I wait. And wait. I look for other taxis,

but nothing. Everyone’s disappeared. To where, who knows? There’s just

some bad actors are on the streets. After 30 minutes, I bag it and head to

bed.

The next day, our last full day,

we meet Dan the dad for lunch. He

called a couple times that morning to

say that he’s struggling up the hill in his

car. Traffic. Stand-still traffic. 45

minutes late, he makes it into the

hotel, with sample leather pelts. Dan’s traded all over the world, Iran,

Lebanon, Afghanistan, London. In 1978, he said he and his dad traded one

million dozen cow hides. He’s in Haiti a couple weeks a month. Lives in a

The view from our hotel in PAP

house next to the tannery. His plant manager, Phil, used to live in Haiti as

well, but now suffers some traumatic stress after the earthquake, because

so many bodies were stacked at the tannery gates. When it’s time to order

food, Dan passes, and later mentions that he brings his own meat to Haiti,

because he’s seen what they do to animals here. “There’s not one certified

butcher in Haiti” he says, “for a country that used to export USDA

certified beef.” I suspect he doesn’t eat much unless he sees the source,

prep and cooking. An old Haiti hand.

As much as we can’t imagine it, Dan tells us that Haiti is much

improved, especially over the last two years. “It’s so much better now. So

much better.” I’m astonished, glancing out the fortified gates of our hotel

compound at the stand-still traffic and the slums that have crawled up the

hillside across the road. The gates to the hotel can be closed to form a 20-

foot high wall, with sharp spears in the three directions at the top, so

vaulting raiders can’t mount the gates and get into the hotel in, say, a riot

or a coup d’etat or an earthquake or a hurricane or a cholera epidemic.

How fucking bad was it two years ago? He said Haitian wages have doubled

to $2/hour over the last nine years. “And the roads are much better now

too,” he says. Is he joking? No, he’s not. We agree to do business.

Baseballs. He loves the idea. Hand shakes all around as we say goodbye.

Dan’s the man.

That night, I’m still determined to make it to the Oloffsson, even for

a drink and a meal, but Will’s had it with the PAP streets and just wants to

flake out in the hotel room. So, I grab a motorcycle taxi – the driver

initially wanted 700 gourdes, around $18. We settle on 250, around $6. I

put on my sunglasses against the grit and we zooooom through the streets,

racing downhill toward the port, past the old tumble-down turn-of-the-

century homes, crumbling in the heat and neglect, in what was once a

princely neighborhood of compounds, where the presidents and their

families once lived. The next morning, Will and I would be up before dawn

(to discover there’s no hot water) to give ourselves an hour and a half to

go the short distance to the airport, rustling up the van driver, who would

be late, as the hotel clerk told us he couldn’t print our bill because the

hotel was out of paper. So, this trip to the Oloffsson was my last fling with

PAP. We arrived, and my driver burst through the high steel black gates of

the Oloffsson. I grab his phone number as I paid him, and asked him not to

drink any booze before coming back to pick me up in an hour or so. I

wandered the neglected wreckage of the hotel’s gardened grounds;

everything looks tired, exhausted, under layers of paint, but the main house

and the out building still screamed out with the old elegance. I see the

Graham Greene room – there’s a plaque – and imagined Greene wandering

around here, drinking gin; I ordered a beer on the porch from the old

Haitian waiter who shuffled over. “Attendre,” when he pointed to the

menu; I’d wait to order. Just a few people there. An American kid stands

on the porch nearby, down here to negotiate handbag production for his

merchant family. He’s Skyping his family on his iPhone over the hotel’s wifi.

And – small world – he mentions Vermont, and mentions young Dan from

the leather tannery, as he complains that things are falling apart at the

factory, that the help is listless and there’s shit all over the place and dust

coating everything, and that he’s going to fire everyone fucking person he

met today. Sorry grandma, he says, he shouldn’t say the word fuck, but these

people, these fucking people…

I move to the quiet bar, order a cubano, a rum. It’s extremely quiet.

Not much to do. No one to talk to. I shoot a few photos. When I ask, the

old waiter shots of photos of me, but I barely appear in it. The waitress

takes a better shot. I eventually bag it. No Graham Greenes to meet and

chat with tonight. I call my motorcycle, and I wait just outside the gate as

the tropical sun leaps down from the sky. It’s pitch dark, and I’m instantly

the center of attention again in the teeming streets. Everyone in the block

knows I’m there, even in the dark. A man wanders over, says he’s an

alcoholic, needs a drink. Nope. A woman wanders over, says she wants my

numbers. Nope. A mentally challenged man, maybe 40, in a bright soccer

uniform, works me over, all friendly like, asking where I am from. And then

he asks for the cash. Saved by the driver, who roared up in his Johnny Too

Bad bug-eye glasses and vinyl leather

jacket, and I leap on the back of the

motorcycle, put on my sunglasses in the

dark, and hand the soccer player a couple

dollars. We roar off into the pitch-black

streets (many Haitians, including my

motorcycle driver, don’t use their

headlights because they think it saves

power). We zoom through the dark

streets and alleys – I’m dead-sure we’ll fall

through one of the open sewer holes – as the driver gooses the darkened

bike. We careen and lean around corners. The grit of the street is crunchy

in my teeth; there’s no light anywhere. The power must be off. No street

lights. We are zooming headlong in the dark. I just white-knuckle grab the

bike rack and give my fate over to the filthy wind, the darkness… laughing

The waiter’s shot of me at the Oloffsson

with relief for the entire last two blocks when I can finally see our tall, well-

lit hotel, laughing at how crazy it is to be slinging around these doomed

filthy dark streets…laughing at how free I am.