The Comeback

After a four week hiatus in America, the Haiti Oral History Project is getting up and running again. I was so conflicted about returning. I will admit (as I did, often and loudly) that I dreaded going back. To put it mildly, Haiti is a very challenging place that tested me in ways I wasn't aware of and I sometimes failed. But I had already put the wheels in motion for a return trip and those wheels kept turning regardless of what I thought. My professor pulled some strings, broke some rules, and gave me his confidence to come back and do something awesome. But what kind of poor life choices had I made that this opportunity awaits me in godforsaken Haiti? It'd be so much easier to read books and drink beer with my similarly minded friends in Brooklyn, talking shit about the professors we aspire to become. What had I done?

I imagined simply not going. But within an hour of my arrival, the anger and fear in me melted. Tap-taps had new paint jobs, the smell of fritay my mouth water. Graceful women wove through the cars with baskets of avocados balanced on their heads. I started asking the guy who picked up me what he thought about Wyclef. Oh yeah, I remembered, I'm obsessed with talking with folks about Haiti. What is Haiti? Why is it? It was nice to have a month where I could try to talk about something else, but let's be real, I didn't succeed. If I hadn't come back I would have still be wondering the same things, just from afar, while those who engage with me do so first with interest, and then later with kindness. Here there are people who can feed my curiosity, who are as fascinated as I am, if not more so. This is where I belong. So I rented a room in boarding house and moved back. I've met a few of the folks who live here, asked timid questions about where my room is and how stuff works. I have a bed, a closet, a mosquito net, a pile of books, a few photos. It was a redundant of me to take photos of Haiti to decorate my room in Haiti. There will be no (mental) escape.

Underneath ripples of thunder the soft voices of my housemates drift off their balcony and through my window. The electricity flickers on and off. Whatever this becomes will be entirely my own creation. I know that sounds like hubris yet whether or not it is true it is what I believe.

Wish me luck, my friends.