My street is a dirt track

When I arrived in Leogane I found myself desperately looking for houses, for people and for life. I was taken to rue Duval where people were out amongst debris, sand pits, broken houses and makeshift shelters. The street was heaving. Adults children and babies were out in the dark gathered around oil lamps and candles in big white plastic buckets. In an environment that resembled the chaos of a war where a bomb has landed, lives were being lived.

This would not be my street.

My street is a dirt track with many holes, puddles and rocks. My street is a dirt track far away from where I had seen lives being lived. My street is a dirt track through banana fields and luscious green trees. My street is a dirt track where friends and families play in the evening. My street is a dirt track where people wash in the stream, where children do their homework, where mothers hang their colourful laundry in the trees and where they live but I didn’t know it yet. Icouldn’t see this as I arrived in Leogane, it was dark and there was no electricity in the area. I felt the bumps, heard the songs of crickets and other insects, heard the strange roosters that sing after dark, heard the voodoo neighbours sing, heard screams. I heard and felt without seeing life outside the house. I saw the white walls of the house behind the barbed wires and the gate.

I was going to live in a house in a street with almost no other houses.

A huge white house with a small green roof, a porch, four bow windows, grids on the windows. It’s about everything I saw on that night. Inside the house was just as surprising, electricity thanks to batteries and a generator, running water thanks to water tanks and more than enough furniture. It looked like it came out of nowhere. Once in my bedroom I was hit by the weight of the furniture and the size of it. I’ve always lived in modest flats with second hand furniture and home built furniture, this was odd. In Haiti with better furniture than in Europe?

I had prepared myself to live it rough, to have little comfort and make do with it. It was part of the challenge. It seems that part of the challenge is to have more (we’ll always have more) than our neighbours, but to have more than we usually have? I wasn’t prepared for this much of a difference, a gap. A gap that can only make our presence resented and our aims misunderstood.

For a week and a half I only ever heard and felt Leogane after dark and felt a bleak gloomy shadow each time. I felt a dip in me and felt an overwhelming disgust. Tonight for the first time I saw Leogane, I heard it, felt it and shared with the neighbours after dark. Conversations in what sounded like old flowery French and creole brought many smiles on all our faces. Misunderstandings of words got us all to giggle without an end. Invitations to Church on the weekend made us all feel humble and the gap felt slightly bridged. At least for tonight.

Love from Leogane, a new home I’m trying to understand.