It always seems to rain when I go to Port-au-Prince. Fittingly, it was pouring at 5 a.m. when I left my hotel room Friday morning. The weather matched my mood.
For weeks, the March 19th flight I had booked out of Haiti was a thing in my distant future – an important date stamped in my mind but always far off enough that I didn’t need to devote much head space to it.
The reason for my temporary exit from Jacmel has to do with my usual role as the Globe’s global food reporter – I won a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT in Cambridge called ‘Food Boot Camp’.
The fellowship launches next week, and promises to be the primer of all food policy primers.
Starting Friday, I began trying to switch gears, detaching a bit from Jacmel. It’s not going to be easy.
I ignored the lump in my throat and the churning in my stomach until we had scaled the mountain outside of Jacmel and wound our way back down and through the cratered roads of Leogane.
When we reached the outskirts of Port-au-Prince I willed traffic to slow things down. But we sped through the city’s streets, wreckages that are now familiar to me. It was the fastest ride I’ve had through that city yet.
In the airport line, I could barely talk to James, our fixer. I hugged him goodbye and got in line with some young aid workers who had already started to cry.
On the plane, I sat in silence beside John, a newspaper circulation manger from Fort Worth, Texas. He introduced himself to me after about an hour and a half. He too, he said, had been trying for the whole flight not to burst into tears.
We agreed that Haiti – Jacmel in particular – has a way of getting into you. It’s a tough feeling even for a writer to describe.
The other day, Jacmel’s deputy mayor wrote me an email that said, “The keys to the city are yours.” The notion gave me a warm feeling all over.
Jacmel feels like a second home now, one I’ll be back to for sure in a couple of weeks for the Globe. And it’s a place I know I’ll be drawn to for the rest of my life.
That has mostly to do with the people, countless numbers of whom let me tromp into their lives – tents, porches, kitchens and businesses – over the past six weeks, no matter the day or time.
Although several wanted money or guarantees of help, many more willingly talked over and over about their personal destruction and the life philosophies that keep them going.
I’ve filled ten notebooks of interviews with people I’ll never forget – people you’ll meet, see and interact with in the coming weeks as we launch phase II of our project. When you meet them, you’ll be able to experience first hand what I mean.
While I’m gone this next little while, the Globe’s deputy foreign editor, Philippe Devos, will be taking over the reins on this blog. Follow him as he tries to figure out how to set up a social network that will better connect our friends in Jacmel with Globe readers around the world.
It’s a tall order given the rarity of Internet in Haiti! No doubt he’ll be able to do it though.
I do have one piece of advice for Philippe – a phrase that James, our fixer, habitually uses to describe why things never go quite right in his country even though, somehow, they always work out.
“That’s Haiti, baby,” he likes to say, usually with a grin and a shrug.
Good luck, Philippe!
