“Haiti is a complex land!” he said and laughed. “Here’s another proverb for your collection.” He knew I loved learning Haitian proverbs. “Tout sa ou we se pa sa.”
I smiled, liking the sound of it, but I hadn’t understood it. “One more time?” I asked him.
He said it again, more slowly. “Tout . . . sa . . . ou . . . we . . . se . . . pa . . . sa.” He smiled expectantly, waiting for me to get it.
“Everything you see . . . is not that?” I asked, translating it literally. I thought for a moment. “Oh, like ‘Nothing is as it appears,’” I said, laughing.
“Ah-ha!” he said, and laughed too. “Yes, Aaron!”
“Tout sa ou we . . .”
He nodded enthusiastically, grinning, waiting for me.
“One more time?” I asked him.
“Se pa sa!” he said. Then he repeated it once more. “Tout sa ou we se pa sa!”
“Tout sa ou we se pa sa!” I said slowly. “I think that’s a good one for this situation, Père Eddy!”
He laughed again and then looked at me with earnest seriousness. “We will send a social worker from the mental health team to evaluate Janel so we can confirm he is able to consent for surgery and make sure he is prepared for this journey.”
“That’s a great idea,” I said. “I think that would help him, and it would help us too. Thank you, Père Eddy.”
“Thank you, Dr. Aaron, for standing in solidarity with this poor young man!” he said passionately. He smiled, grabbed my shoulder firmly, told me we’d keep in touch, and walked off.
I returned to the staff house from the hospital to pack my suitcase, lost in thought. I was hesitant. But Michelle, Anne, and now Père Eddy all thought there was no need to hesitate. We had funding. We had housing. And these two had led to hospital approval. Now all we needed was a visa. Martineau had said he was working on that. After months of overcoming various hurdles, we were finally close to achieving our goal of getting Janel the care he needed.
I should have been excited.
I should have been happy.
But I felt uneasy about the whole thing.
* * *
Waking up tangled in my mosquito net, soaked in sweat, my mouth parched, I saw it was still dark outside the small window over my bed. The electricity had gone off, waking me up as the fan spun its last few rotations, leaving the hot, humid air hanging heavy. The faint smoky smell of burning trash wafted in from outside. I wasn’t sure if it was the silencing of the fan’s hum that had woken me or the crowing roosters, barking dogs, and grunting pigs outside that had been masked by the whir of the fan before the power went out. What time is it? I wondered as I unraveled myself from my mosquito net. I was leaving that morning, and my ride to the airport was scheduled for 6 a.m. Maybe it’s almost that time anyway, I thought.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed and peeled my sweat-soaked pajamas away from my skin. Standing and walking slowly with my hands held out in front of me, I felt for the room’s small desk in the darkness. I made contact with the desk and patted across it with my hands, searching for my phone. I found it and pushed a button on it. Now a small square of light glowed in the darkness: 3:28 a.m. Ugh. The outdoor sounds seemed to be increasing in intensity. Or maybe I was just noticing them more. It seemed unlikely that I’d be able to fall back to sleep.
The light on my phone faded to black, plunging the room into darkness again. I noticed the odd feeling of something rubbery under my foot. Was it the edge of my flip-flop? No, it felt squishier than that. I pushed a button on my phone again for light and brought it down near the floor. A small yellow frog. I jumped back. It didn’t seem to be moving. I nudged it gingerly with my toe. No response. I picked up my flip-flop from the floor and nudged the frog a bit more firmly with the edge of it. No response to that either. It was dead. Did it come into the room at night and die? Or did I step on it in the darkness and kill it? I would’ve noticed that, I thought.
I remembered seeing a frog perched in the corner of the shower the night before. I worried it would jump on me while I was showering, but it didn’t. It never moved, and I wasn’t sure if it was alive or dead. Was this the same one? I picked it up on the edge of my flip-flop and used my phone light to navigate my way out to the entrance of the house. It felt at least 10 degrees cooler outside. I tossed the frog into the darkness, came back into the stuffy heat of the house, and rinsed off my foot in the shower. I looked in the corner with my phone light. The frog was gone.
I lay back down on the bed and covered myself with my mosquito net. Half awake, I thought about Janel’s bulging-eyed stare and Père Eddy’s Tout sa ou we se pa sa and a dead yellow frog and about how I was sad to leave and glad to go home at the same time, dozing off for a few minutes here and there and then being awakened by a crowing rooster. Can’t they wait until dawn like they’re supposed to? I wondered. I turned over and tried to fall back to sleep.
By the time the driver picked me up at 6 a.m., the sun was coming up. As we drove through Mirebalais, there was already a lot of activity. Men in baseball caps herding cattle. Women carrying buckets, bins, and basins on their heads, bringing items to sell in the market or clothes to wash in the river.
As we navigated the winding mountain roads back to Port-au-Prince, the valleys below looked green and fertile beneath the morning mist, nothing like the barren, parched earth I had seen from the plane on the way in. After we arrived at the airport, I made my way through security to the departure gate.
Unlike my flight down to Haiti, on which I had seemed to be one of the only non-Haitian passengers, the gate for my return flight was filled with non-Haitians—mostly Americans. They stood out not only because they were nearly all white—almost nobody I’d seen for the last two weeks had been white—but also because they were often in large groups with matching T-shirts adorned with alliterative slogans on the front, like HELPING HAITI and HEALING HAITI and I ♥ HAITI and HAND IN HAND WITH HAITI and the clever IT’S A LOVE HAITI RELATIONSHIP. Many of the T-shirts had religious imagery or biblical quotations on the back. I wondered what these groups—many with school-age children—had been doing in Haiti.
I had overheard conversations in the Port-au-Prince airport and on flights to and from Haiti about people spending a week playing with children in an orphanage or laying a few bricks for a new church—what has come to be known as “voluntourism.” For personal, religious, or other reasons, visiting volunteers have developed a desire to help those less fortunate than themselves. The intention is noble, but is a one-week volunteer trip truly helping Haitians or Haiti?
There are said to be more than 10,000 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in Haiti. That’s one for every 1,000 people. And yet Haiti remains one of the poorest countries, with some of the worst health, education, and sanitation statistics in the world. Some organizations do phenomenal work helping individuals and communities. Yet their efforts are rarely coordinated with the government or one another, and funding comes and goes. Sometimes aid groups even do harm, unintentionally or, in the worst cases, intentionally.
Well-functioning organizations surely know how to incorporate short-term volunteers with no experience into projects in which their efforts can contribute toward some larger long-term goal. Yet I couldn’t help but wonder if, instead of traveling to Haiti, it would be more helpful to have would-be voluntourists donate the price of their plane tickets to large humanitarian organizations with skills and experience in Haiti.