Will Boyce
Bonjou Tout Moun,
As we descended the stairs from the plane on Wednesday morning, the smells and sounds of Port-au-Prince filtered through the slow ebbing of our twleve-hour red-eye. Tuesday had passed paradoxically in a scattered blur and yet with a simultaneous vivid and myopic focus. I awoke that morning with such immediacy, with the weight of my cumulative physics-final flooding away all reminence of the mornings soporific haze. A parallel, less conscious corner of my mind began highlighting and prioritizing the countless details that stilled needed to happen before flying out just hours after the exam ended. As I said, the day passed paradoxically, in a scattered blur and with a simultaneous vivid, myopic focus.
Yet here I was in the Caribbean's tropical, humid heat that had a density like we were walking under water withut the weightlessness. Haitian Compas music, as part of the welcome wagon displaced through the disembarking passengers in a raw, acoustic simplicity – four guys, a few instruments awkwardly hand painted with Western Union advertisements. I couldn't help but smile, in fact I couldn't stop smiling. I was home to a certain degree and there was a familiar nervousness and excitement rumbling below the surface. The excitement was that I was returning to Haiti. A country inextricably woven into who I am, a relationship that began at such a young age (14) that it is impossible to say which parts of myself it impacted. Yet this time, after months of preparation, planning, conjoling, and convincing I was leading a group of my peers. It was a bit like being 8 years old and showing someone for the first time the contents of my super-secret box that I kept tucked in the deepest shadows beneath my bed, not quite that personal but personal none the less. It was exhilerating and the Haitian airport didn't disappoint. Haitians have never had lines especially not our coersive and omnipresent social line etiquette. We all just piled into the immigrations room and milled about until we miracuously were shuttled forward. The official customs business is simple and fairly easy, but a simple thing like the baggage carousel breaking down produced, with only slight hyperbole, a total breakdown in social order. In a mob-like fashion though without violence or malice that the term mob conjures, the passengers swarmed the 4 square foot hole as our bages were being fed through by hand from the tarmak. This hap-hazard method would get the job done, but what irked me, what I could feel erupting in with such vehement ire was just how completely ILLOGICAL it all was. Yet I also loved it, in fact, I could have cheered them on for the same reason and to watch this inveterately American side of me baulk and insist that this way of dispersing bags was the wrong way to disperse bags was equally amusing. I had stepped out side my comfort-zone enough to hear but not take too seriously my cultural expectations of how things ought to happen. Granted most would agree that its in-appropriate to hurt yourself or others, but nothing like that was going down hear. This was luggage and there was no real hury.
There are only a few situations where you see how cultures and common laws cultivate social norms which are re-inforced by varying levels of social etiquette. Some may believe that certain social behaviors are rigid, stuffy, and de-humanizing while others just down the street will see them as indications of classiness, sophistication, and appropriate public decorum. Yet standing in the unvetted Haitian chaos as everyone grabs, tosses, stacks bags unceremoniously throughout the terminal, and in such stark relief to Newark International airport in New Jersey, it read like a glaring neon sign that said "Appropriateness is Cultural" and that almost everyone unconsciously believes that their appropriate behavior is THE appropriate behavior. What makes it so hard is that when the underlying rules shift so dramatically, the anxiety is real, and it feels as if the plane is coming in for a landing and the control tower has suddenly gone silent, or it feels genuinely disrespectful when we don't receive thank you cards or a nod of appreciation when holding open the door for someone. What I have learned is that I'm too mired in my cultural up-binging to see things clearly. Somethings will always feel off and yet not be in any way disrespectful, and so I feably try to shift my attention toward peoples intention rather than their behavior. Here in Haiti, in the apparent chaos, at least from my frame of reference, the rules of the game had changed radically and I loved it! Nothing like spending time on Mars to see the Earth that before had been too close and too consistent to reveal how profoundly it had shaped me and how naïve was my sense of volition. Welcome to Hait!
