A Circus of the Senses Flanked by mountains and the leeward side of Hispanola, Port-au-Prince streches up receeding hills, ascending in social class with each degree of elevation, with Cite Soleil pressed at its bottom against the ocean and resolutely bordered by a refinery and a river on either side. Haiti's open sewer system makes the flattened low-lands the least desireable. Even the marginal slope, from the top of Cite Soleil until it reaches the marshy bay, helps to define the complex class hierarchy amongst the poorest of the poor. The higher above sea level your house is the less often swelling sewers will flood inside your home. Cite Soleil is one of the most densely populated area's in the world, 200,000 to 300,000 people in 2 square miles. As you descend toward the ocean, the quality of homes detereorates from contrete blocks to corrugated tin to wooden poles with cardboard walls, an area known as Cite Carton. This unimaginable density and poverty intensifies the individual's drive to exaggerate class differences based on miniscule things, perpetuating classist disdain for the ultra-poor in the community. It's density also presumes throngs of kids - playing, yelling, chasing me at times in spurts of curious revelry followed by a shy embarrasement when I turn to greet them. They're like children everywhere, except instead of feeling like one distant cousin you're meeting for the first time, its ten to fifteen every few blocks.
It is impossible to explain the intensity of the poverty. We often conceptualize poverty into a generic form: paucity of things, derelict buildings, encompassed by a over-all feeling of despondency. Yet the on-slaught, the dense and mulitplistic sensorial experience of poverty in Soleil can not be accurately described or imagined. Soleil's sewage filled canals, black with industrial sout, petrol coated mounds of plastic bottles floating motionless in stagnent rows 2-3 feet deep and 1 foot wide, like a grid, slicing between homes that are only 7-12 inches apart in places. The smell compounds disparate elements of the entire city into each inhale, thick and heavy in the tropical sun: coal-fire ash; diesel smog; frying oil; composting waste; smells of livestock like pigs, goats, and chickens; and sweaty human beings. Electrical wires reach out from roof to roof supporting hanging clothes above street vendors selling their wares with often pristine pyramidal mounds of fresh fruit lining the road. The combined sounds of Cite Soleil is really lound 23 hours a day, in part because Haitains are the most verbal and physically expressive people I've ever met, similar to my experiences in southern Italy but even more so. Laughter, singing, joking, arguments that erupt in yells and then fizzle in seconds; hoards of children playing and yelling - competing with their infant siblings muted within the homes; cars honking in morris code; vendors advertising their goods; singing and music coming from multiple directions (one of the most important aspects of Haitian social and religious life). There is a brief respit, as the rising sun breaches the mountains behind Port-au-Prince, slicing through Soleil towards the ocean. During this mystical hour the silence in Soleil is gently distrupted by just the sweeping of brooms, the quiet singing of mothers, and Catholic alms from the daily ceremonies. Haitians are emphatically clean in their clothes and homes, their white blouses and pressed shirts seem to defy the entropy you'd expect. Soleil is the dirties, dustiest place I've ever been and their pride and the sense of dignity is ever apparent in their spotless attire. I would return after a days work looking like I had just stepped out of the mines. I don't know how they do it. Soleil is a circus of the senses – music, sewage, laughing children, malnutrition, and abominable living conditions; and yet, and this is one of the most important personal insights that I've gained over the years, is how strong there is an inclination for me as foreigners to myopically perceive the most severe of, the worst aspects of, a complex environment like Soleil. When I first began living in Soleil in my early twenties, I would walk out my door and I unconsciously saw and heard only what re-inforced my perception of the Haitian's condition of misery and hopelessness.
I remember when this began to shift, and it wasn't just the broadened perspective that comes with prolonged experience. In the next segment, I'll go into the internal process that facilitated a change in perspective. During my later trips, from 1996 to 2000, I would live and work at a hospital run by Mother Theresa's Missionaries of Charity brother's in Cite Soleil. Although the brothers were from all around the world, the compound was mostly Haitian staff and patients. I enjoyed the immersion of livinging amongst Haitian's, working on my Kreyol and creating relationships. I also appreciated the brother's monastic lifestyle as many of you know I spent some time as a Buddhist monk.
I awoke one morning in the usual cacophony of sounds, except this time my consciousness singled out the gentle singing of our neighbor as she hung the morning's laundry. Every morning hence, I awoke to her singing. A new layer of perspective slowly began to take root, to spread into my moment by moment experience of Soleil. Day by day I'd notice things like teen age couples flirting on the front stoop, people singing together, parents gooey with joy over a new born child. Soleil in all it's glaring poverty and suffering came to have an evenly balanced spectrum of the same human experience that we all share, yet until then I hadn't quite seen it. Not that I was oblivious to this side, but that it that my perception focused on the difficult. The average life span in Soleil is shorter, there's more sickness and hunger. But also, like everyone, they fall in love, they laugh and joke with friends, infants beam at the sight of their parents, soccer games form amongst friends, they dream of better lives and hope the same for their children. It's the same human condition - the routine of work, the responsibilities of parenting, the emotional symphony of daily life…and bit by bit it occupied a balanced portion of my experience in conjunction with the difficulties.
