For people who have never been to Haiti or airline staff working the route, I worry the chaos that often occurs on these flights reinforces racist stereotypes that have been propagated about Haitians across the ages. From “savages and cannibals” in 1884 to “unthinking black animals” in 1920 (in National Geographic); from “illiterate, superstitious, disease-ridden and backward peasants” in the 1970s to “hungry, Satan-worshipping drug addicts . . . branded with the scarlet H [of HIV]” in the 1980s and 1990s. Haiti was referred to as a “black hole” by Vanity Fair in 1989 and a “shithole” by Donald Trump in 2018. When we are primed by such stereotypes, we are prone to reinforce them—we may notice and remember what fulfills our preexisting beliefs rather than realize, for example, that most people on a flight to Haiti are following all of the normal procedures just like us.
Increasingly, all flights to Haiti have either a Creole-speaking flight attendant or an additional Creole-speaking staff member there just to translate. On one flight, I heard a Creole-speaking crew member amend the usual safety information announcement to address nearly all of the unexpected things I’d seen regularly on flights to and from Haiti. When she mentioned an infant changing table being available in the bathroom, she added, “So please don’t change your baby in your seat.” When she said the bit about not tampering with bathroom smoke detectors, she added, “When you’re in the bathroom, please lock the door,” and she explained how. She also noted, “In the bathroom you will see a blue button that says ‘flush.’ Please press this after you go so the next person doesn’t see what you did.” After finishing with the formalities of what to do in the unlikely event of a water landing or a loss of cabin pressure, she stated, “If you brought something that doesn’t fit below your seat or above—like a television—please tell us so we can check it. If you don’t know how to read your ticket, ask us so we can show you to your seat. You can’t walk around while the plane is moving on the ground, taking off, or landing. If you do this, we won’t be able to get you where you’re trying to go.” She concluded, “Now it’s time to turn off your phones. Say goodbye to your son or daughter, tell them to send you five thousand dollars, and hang up.” The passengers erupted in laughter.
I wondered if the other flight attendants had any idea that she had tailored the standard safety script to try to avoid some of the common mishaps and misunderstandings on these flights. And I wondered if they realized that each element of what must seem so “backward” to them has an important explanation rooted in Haiti’s dire poverty and the historical forces that gave rise to it.
Another striking aspect of flights to and from Haiti is the line of a dozen or more wheelchair-bound passengers waiting to board. I initially presumed this was a depressing reflection of the number of disabled patients in Haiti due to lack of access to healthcare and the more than one million people injured in the 2010 earthquake. But the more I traveled to Haiti, the more I noticed that among the elderly and infirm passengers who clearly needed wheelchairs, some wheelchair passengers looked quite well, and quite well-to-do. Once I thought I even saw someone who had boarded in a wheelchair later walking around on the flight, but I wasn’t sure it was the same person. Could it be that some passengers were using wheelchairs as a sort of VIP experience to be carted around at the airport and board first? I felt bad for even thinking this. But Haiti does have its elite, the less than 0.1 percent who hold all the wealth and live lives of luxury while most of the population struggles to survive.
The privileged are not hard to spot on these flights. Once I saw two very well-dressed light-skinned Haitian women become upset when they discovered their seats were in the last row in front of the restrooms. They called the flight attendant over and explained in perfect, barely accented English that they absolutely could not sit in the back of the plane.
The flight attendant looked at their tickets. “But that’s where your assigned seats are, ladies,” she explained kindly.
“You can’t make us sit near the bathroom!” one of the women scolded her.
“No, no! Absolutely not!” the other chimed in. “We have allergies! So we most certainly cannot!”
“Yes, very bad allergies!” the first woman concurred, nodding vigorously. They stood with their arms crossed, refusing to sit in their assigned seats.
The flight attendant looked at them quizzically and then shrugged. She said she would see if there were empty seats in another part of the plane.
These ladies reminded me of the rare wealthy patients we see in our neurology clinic at HUM who come because they have heard a foreign neurologist was visiting. They always try to be seen first without going through the normal registration process, which we of course politely refuse. Rather than the usual neurologic complaints of our local patients—headache, seizures, paralysis—these wealthy patients almost never actually have anything wrong with them, at least nothing neurological. They nearly always complain of nothing more than a vague malaise, which we had come to jokingly call “Petionvillitis,” since it seemed to be described only by healthy and wealthy people from the rich Portau-Prince suburb of Petionville. I had never been there, but colleagues told me it was like stepping outside Haiti: fancy restaurants, luxurious hotels, and government officials dressed like movie stars eating dinner with security details surrounding them. Though we reassure our Petionvillitis patients that with a normal neurological examination it was very unlikely they had any underlying neurologic condition, they often try to convince us to do CT scans of their brains “just to make sure.” Even after we kindly refuse, they tend to linger in the clinic, seemingly just to chat, until my colleagues and I insist we need to see our other patients.
These rare wealthy visitors to our clinic conduct themselves so differently from the rest of our patients, who often patiently wait all day to be seen, sometimes even sleeping the night before outside the hospital on a blanket, a folded cardboard box, or nothing at all to ensure they will be seen early enough on the day of their appointment to make it home before nightfall, or before the late-afternoon rains make the river they have to cross to get home too high to safely traverse.
On one flight, I was traveling with a Haitian colleague from Mirebalais, and I decided to ask her about my wheelchair theory. “I’ve noticed that there are so many people in wheelchairs on these flights. Some are clearly quite elderly or look sick, but others, they look okay. I don’t want to judge, but do you think some people could just be using them as a sort of VIP chariot?”
She laughed. “Let’s study it,” she proposed, smiling.
She had just undergone surgery herself, and so we boarded early in the needing-more-time-down-the-jet-bridge group just behind the wheelchair passengers. Sure enough, as we approached the door to the plane, we saw one well-dressed woman dexterously shimmy out of her wheelchair, step over the footrests, and walk confidently onto the plane—in high heels!
My colleague looked at me with a surprised smile. “Maybe your hypothesis is correct!” she whispered, trying not to laugh.
Another gentleman we had noted in the wheelchair line looked young and healthy. He was dressed in a neatly pressed white suit. I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he had been in an accident or had some type of childhood-onset illness that had left him paralyzed but he was otherwise well. We later saw him walking up and down the aisle talking to friends throughout the flight and easily navigating the chaotic baggage claim area in Port-au-Prince.