Through the Lens Backwards

  I’ve been to Haiti seven times now and there are still surprises.  My colleague Meer, from the University of Florida lab in Christianville, and the driver, Mackenzie, met me at the PAP airport. Then we went to lunch in Port-au-Prince at a nice restaurant in a hotel. They were serving a buffet lunch. The thought had never occurred to me that one could have a buffet in Haiti. All of my previous trips had been spent pretty much up in the mountains in Baradères, a really poor area far from the city. I had not spent much time in PAP, just arriving and departing. So the juxtaposition of buffet-all-you-can-eat and the poverty and hunger seen in my previous visits was quite astonishing. Then it slowly dawned on me that I had been looking at Haiti through the lens backwards.  I had seen first-hand the poverty, the rudimentary housing, the absence of medical care, the lack of access to clean water. That was my lasting view of Haiti. What I was missing was the upper class, the perhaps 1-5%. There are rich people in Haiti and there is a middle class. And above all, there is a large community of “blan”, the outsiders, people from around the world who have come to Haiti to help. And they live reasonably well. And they can take in a buffet lunch from time to time. Why not?

     After lunch, we stopped at a super market in Petionville, the rich suburb of Port-au-Prince. It was like being back in Silver Spring. Air-conditioned, well-stocked shelves (there was an employee at almost every aisle to stock the shelves as soon as a customer took something) with items that you’d find in your local supermarket.  I stared at a coconut wrapped in plastic.  I remember drinking from a coconut in Leclerc after a medical mission during my first trip to Haiti in 2008. The people of the village had just gathered the coconuts up from the trees near the chapel and offered them to us as refreshment. Now I held in my hand a coconut wrapped in plastic with a price tag (and bar code) on it. Of course, this was not a supermarket for everyone. It was almost like there was a red velvet rope at the entrance to the parking lot. If you did not look like you had the money to shop here, you were turned away. No arguments. The guards have shotguns. I kept telling myself, this is the rich neighborhood. I just never saw it before so it surprised me that it existed.

  But how large are the class differences in Haiti? We have a huge chasm between economic classes in the U.S. also. People would be easily shocked at the difference in living conditions between the very rich neighborhoods of D.C. and its poorest neighborhoods. It is all about perspective. Nevertheless, to sit down to an all-you-can-eat buffet in Port-au-Prince this afternoon was, well, a shock. It was not what I expected, and not how I will be living or eating over course of my sejour here.  Maybe it was a good way to start off: a reminder that so very little separates us from the neediest amongst us.