I'm leaving for Haiti tomorrow night...I'll take the train to Penn Station, a taxi to the airport, a direct flight from JFK to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic...then I have to call someone named Dante to pick me up and take me from the international airport to the other airport and then I'll fly from Santo Domingo to Port Au Prince, and then somehow I'll end up in a rural, mountainous area about 40 miles from PAP called Fondwa. It's a multi-purpose trip - a tour of the damage in Fondwa, a conference about how to rebuild this community and university and meetings with some of the grassroots organizations who I will be working with on some future projects. The University of Fondwa has a Facebook page you can check out...
I'm not really thinking about how intense it is all going to be. If one did think about such things too much or be bothered by such thoughts, well, nobody would go and help them. But, I think once you've lived and worked in an apocalyptic disaster site, it gets in your blood. I have to recommend a couple of books that I'm reading now - Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster and Beverly Bell's Walking on Fire: Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance. When people look at me curiously, wondering why the hell I'd want to go visit a place of such suffering and devastation, I guess I have a different take on it. On the one hand, it's bearing witness to this devastation and this is always a powerful thing to do. But mostly I see, as Solnit does, "the extraordinary communities that arise in disaster." Contrary to the reigning disaster narrative, people are not helpless (the people who are living through it always do the bulk of the work, before the media arrives, before the government arrives, and before the professional macho, male disaster rescuers arrive). I go to learn about and support the strength, resilience and resistance in Haiti, the country with the only successful slave revolt in history.
One final note...I have this recurring dream (once or twice a year for about 20 years) that I have to leave quickly for an international flight and I am not packed but have to leave anyway...it's always a horrible feeling. This has been a somewhat last minute trip and I'm feeling like this dream state is trying to take over my waking state...very strange. I'm almost all packed though, so no worries. I think I'll have the dream tonight, but then I will never have this dream again.
