Why I Love My Job

It comes and goes, but at the end of today's work I was filled with the sense that the Haiti Oral History Project is very important. It helps that my Haitian translator, Stan, is into to it and is becoming more of a collaborator than a mere translator. The fact that Haitians themselves see value in my work is deeply validating, because ultimately, as Stan said, the preservation of earthquake memories will be much more important for them than for the handful of international academics. Over the course of my interviews, more than one person has told me that I am the first outsider who has been curious about their lives and their perspective on the earthquake. Obviously that fills me with a great sense of pride, but the Project is much bigger than just human-to-human connection.

I have respect for people who are fighting to protect the human rights of Haitians, to guarantee them shelter and health care. But that is not the only work here to be done. These people have seen and lived through terrible things, and now they are in the process of reconstituting lives for themselves from what remains. They are subjects of the crude social and economic experimentation of Reconstruction. For most, the lives they find themselves living are not the lives they want. And yet they are going forward, one way or another, often in spite of institutions that are supposed to be helping them. Let me be clear that moving forward does not mean moving on up. You might ask yourself when you hear news of Haiti, how can people live that way? I assure you that Haitians in the camps are asking themselves the same thing. The experience of the earthquake and the disappointments that followed are being absorbed into generation that will someday be gone. The Haitians who survived are the last ones that who know the world before everything fell down. They are the last generation who can tell you from personal experience how drastically things have changed. The new lives that they build will shape where Haiti will go next. In order to understand Haiti's future, we need the people who have memory of all three worlds: before, during, and after. Ordinary people's stories have incredible value because of the intimate way they present the historical moment and because they have insight into how humanity survives even in circumstances meant to destroy or ignore it. The Haiti Oral History Project is an effort to document and preserve the thoughts and memories of some of these people because without them, the most intimate meanings of the earthquake will be lost.