Haiti by Day and Night

The honeymoon phase is over, the intestinal worms have moved in and hospital stays are a little more frequent as dehydration rears its ugly head more often than it should. After a five day hike through the Haitian mountains, heavy pack loaded, I am more than ever enamoured by the people of Haiti. Although it is no secret that many, if not all, depend on the business of charcoal - that is deforestation in the name of survival, trees still do exist here and there. It is no longer the lush tropic it once was and erosion is now on the forefront of this nations' greatest problem. A dish of Rice and Beans is the staple, seasoned by imported bouillon cubes and families use charcoal as fuel for their fires day in and day out. Dust blows and cacti grow with malice. With bare bones, these people have put what really matters first. Family and friends. Even with houses made from mud, sticks and old weather-beaten tarps, resiliency shines. The days are peppered with soccer games and hair braiding. Women sit and cook, squatting over these little piles of burning charcoal and babies run naked in the streets, feet calloused and uninhibited by the sharp gravel. Laugher prevails. Anse-a-Pitre by night. Men ride their motorcycles up and down the only paved road in town, vying for the loudest muffler. Shadows run long by light of the full moon and wafts of fried plantain fill my nostrils. It is a happening village. Young people clamour around street food vendors and cell phone stands in the gutters. I hear more laughter and squint to see the smiles of white shining teeth in the dark. I read Thoreau while sleeping in my tent under thundercloud skies that never quite reach me. It strikes a chord in relation to a life I have once lived in the West, (or still do?) and what I see here: "An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion. Our life is like a [wonton] Confederacy,(18) made up of petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a local man cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment. The nation itself, with all its so-called internal improvements, which, by the way are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the only cure for it, as for them, is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan (19) simplicity of life and elevation of purpose."