Through a Peephole....

Yesterday, Roseval, The Save the Children M&E manager of our Haiti office, accompanied me with his two young darling children, for a circumnavigation of Port au Prince. "APY", the broad smiling M&E analyst, who emerged as the peer trainer during the training sessions (I try to fade quickly as the training "leader" and guide the group through needed topics) also accompanied us.

I had never seen downtown but from my hotel balcony a good 5 miles away or further. We were able to walk about the main Square and see the the Presidential Palace, the monuments of the liberators of 1803. Afterwards, we stopped in at a pizza shop surrounding the huge square, and I delighted listening ot the chilren describe how the one can eat more pizza than the other. Roseval's son hung close by me, even grasping my hand as we walked through the square. I see, at the least, a future M&E anlyst. I saw, and experienced, a couple of difficult events, but it was enjoyable to get out after a long week.

That evening, I noted another correlative of poverty. At night, as fireworks erupted from the Square and the Presidential Palace, I knew that tomorrow my flight would take me out over the city towards the ocean before banking north towards the U.S. I would also see that sprawling shanty town south of the city. Tonight, it was dark. In any developing country, especially the capital cities, you know where the pockets of poverty are, and the areas of the more affluent; the former is dark, while the latter is lit.

There has been something that I have observed each morning that has evoked a couriosity in me. About a mile west of me there is another hill nearly as high where the hotel is located. Even though it is relatively flat, there are no houses, nor farms on it. Perhaps it is because of the nearby cell phone towers. Each morning, I would see a score or so of people wandering across this hilltop in either (that I could see) white shirts or the ubiquitous bright red Digicel (the local cell phone company) T-shirts. The people seemed to not be going anywhere but walking about, a sort of Brownian motion that describes a random motion of microscopic particles in fluid.

I am mentally preparing to leave Haiti. I know that even though I have spent a total of two weeks here on two separate visits with time travled to the rural areas, I still do not know the Haitian people. I have just looked at this country, but I have not understood the poverty, the customs, the politics, nor the economics.

This morning, I once again saw the white and red shirted figures arrayed across the hilltop opposite my balconey, but this time it was perhaps 4 or 5 persons standing in a clearing. It seemed that that were facing me, but I knew that I was invisible to them from this distance. I was if I was still 4,000 miles away in the U.S. to them.

As a child, my grandfather would take me on long drives out into the farmland of the deserts of the America Southwest of Imperial Valley. On our many excursions, he would invariably pull off the side of the road and not speak for perhaps 20 minutes or longer. Then suddenly he would ask me what did I see. He would ask me this since he understood how I thought, and I would begin to describe what I was looking at, all the details. After my pause, my grandfather would then ask me, "but David, what do you see?" He would never just let me look, but to really see what was ocurring with the group men digging a ditch, baling hay, or the thermal steam well construction.

I still largely only look at the world and people about me in this superficial manner. As I looked at the small group of Haitians on the hill opposite me, who appeared to be facing me, I found myself inexpliably raise my hand and wave to them slowly and highly. I thought that I imagined a response. This was absurd on my part, but I did go in and get my small pair of binoculars to perhaps see them. Well, they all were gathered with hands raised while facing each other, oblivious to this affluent American. It is as i thought. Hands raised in this manner is something of a celebratory and ascending motion. with hands raised, one demonstrates lack defensiveness and an acknowledgement of someone, something higher. I do not know what, nor whom, they were acknowledging, but it was certainly not this American peering at them from afar.

There is a book by the American author Erskine Caldwell (Tobacco Road) that I have, but I cannot recall the title. Towards the end of the story there is a curious event of a man who begins to spend increasing time peering through a peep hole in a shack on the back of his farm overlooking a valley. This man had seen this view from outside the shack all of his life, but he became entranced by the peep hole view. His friends and neighbors began to come by and ridiculed his absurdity, but one by one, they each became curious, then all would sit individually for hours peering through the peep hole and not being able to explain to them selves, nor each other why they had become entranced by this view of their immediate world.

When I read this account by the author, it made no sense to me as I read the book, and in fact it seemed a distraction in the novel. But, as I read on, it seemed to occupy a key structure in the books' thesis. I think that Mr. Caldwell was describing how difficult it is for us humans to really see and not simply to look at the people and world about us. Perhaps I had found my peep hole here in Haiti from my secure and elegant hotel balconey. Perhaps...