Edwidge Danticat - The Butterfly's Way - Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States

"Where is the Columbus one?" I asked.

"I don't know. I am not from Port-au-Prince," replied the man. "Maybe it is the one that used to be near the water."

I walked to the place he indicated. No statue was there. The pedestal still existed, but the sculpture was missing. Someone had inscribed in the cement: "Charlemagne Peralte Plaza." Truman had become Peralte and Peralte had replaced Columbus.

I stood there for another half hour, asking each passerby if he or she knew what had happened to the Columbus statue. I knew the story: I was in Port-au-Prince when Columbus disappeared. I just wanted confirmation, a test of how public memory works and how history takes shape in a country with the lowest literacy rate on this side of the Atlantic.

I was almost ready to give up when a young man replayed for me the events I had first heard about in 1986. In that year, at the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier's dictatorship, the most miserable people of Haiti's capital had taken to the streets. They had loosed their anger upon every monument that they associated with the dictatorship. A number of statues had been broken into pieces; others were simply removed from their bases. This was how Truman came to find himself on the grass.

Columbus had a different fate, for reasons still unknown to me. Perhaps the illiterate demonstrators associated his name with colonialism. The mistake, if mistake there was, is understandable: the word kolon in Haitian means both Columbus and a colonist. Perhaps they associated him with the ocean from which he came. At any rate, when the angry crowd from the neighboring shanty towns rolled down Harry Truman Boulevard, they seized the statue of Columbus, removed it from its pedestal, and dumped it into the sea.

Boarding the van in Port-au-Prince, for the poor southern Haitian village of Jeannette, I intentionally sat separate from the missionaries. This was a humanitarian work mission, not a vacation tour, and I wasn't there to socialize. Instead, I sat next to my friend, Kathy, who had volunteered to provide free dental care to the people in Jeannette for ten days; I was serving as her translator.

Riding in the seat directly behind the driver-a bright young man with many interests and a deep curiosity about life-we spent the time chatting with him in Kreyol . He suggested that we buy the local candy we craved from four vendors at four different stands. "That way, we can help each one make a little money today, instead of giving all the business to just one person." We talked about ways to uplift the country, ways for people to help each other, imagining something like the volunteer systems in the United States.

Kathy and I were going to Jeannette along with the Haiti Mission of the Episcopal Church of Milwaukee, which has been financing a school, church, and mission house in Jeannette for over eleven years. The Mission coordinator had approached me a year before for Kreyol lessons, and had shown me the project's promotional literature, which proclaimed, "Do something for your soul, go to Haiti."

The brochure described yearly "hands on" visits during which visitors could meet and interact with the people of Jeannette and attempt to make a difference in their lives. I decided to go along, paying eleven hundred dollars for a trip back to my homeland. (Although the actual traveling costs were under five hundred dollars, I was told that this trip would be a fund-raiser for the project so I gladly agreed to pay more.)

Our trip from Haiti's capital to Jeannette took four hours. For four hours, the "poorest country in the Western Hemisphere" gave the missionaries, Kathy, and myself its best display of dust, rags, huts, and seaside trash dumps. Kathy wept as we passed a few cadavers of young men in gutters. According to our driver, they were thieves whose bodies no one dared claim, so they were left by the roadside to rot. The members of the Mission seemed unmoved.

At last, we reached the entrance to the small village of Jeannette. Suddenly the missionaries began blowing up balloons and throwing them to a parade of screaming children. The driver shook his head disapprovingly as the children ran dangerously into the road. The missionaries laughed. The scene reminded me of my childhood, watching Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier throw pennies out of his limousine window as he rode through the slums of Port-au-Prince. Had I paid so dearly to come to Haiti to contribute to the further dehumanization of my own people?

During our stay in Jeannette, we were lodged in the priest's living quarters, a luxurious mission house equipped with all the amenities: water, modern bathrooms, and comfortable furniture. A garage was under construction. I learned that it had cost eight thousand dollars to build. The priest was a tall, imposing Haitian man in his seventies. He had a long gray beard that made me think of Rasputin. Always lurking behind the missionaries, he seemed to have disdain for them, even while they were in awe of him and his "projects."

The priest's projects for the people of Jeannette included a small dark church, and two school buildings with tiny dark rooms and blank walls. The teachers' dormitories resembled jail cells. Ironically, prior missionaries had once spent an entire trip stenciling the dank concrete walls of the dormitories "a la Norwegian." A clinic, which the brochures had advertised as well-stocked, had no bathroom facilities, no running water, and no electricity. I was told that even the light bulb that lit the clinic during our visit would be removed by the priest as soon as the missionaries left. I watched as a clinic helper hauled heavy buckets of water to an unsanitary bathroom where medical implements were being scrubbed, while hundreds of patients waited all day to be seen.

Most people in Jeannette must go for days without a proper meal, walk for miles to fetch water, use the bushes as their bathroom, live with infected skin wounds if they can't pay the two gourdes or twelve U.S. cents required to see the nurse in this clinic. Teachers report that the local children are so hungry that many are unable to stay alert in class. The teachers themselves often go without food. A teacher's aide who shares a shack with eight members of his family told me that he could not afford to replace his torn shoes. In the meantime, he watched quietly as the eight-thousand-dollar garage was built to accommodate the Haiti Project's van. People do not need to build elaborate garages for their cars in Jeannette, especially when their homes are fenced in. Leaving the car in the yard or under a simple carport would offer it plenty of protection. With the eight thousand dollars for this garage, the project could have built over a dozen solid homes, or an open-air cafeteria to provide a balanced midday meal for all the students and school personnel, five days a week, for a year.

In addition to obvious wastefulness, the missionaries also showed a lack of sensitivity toward the people of Jeannette. In one instance, the Haiti Project leaders kept the cook waiting long past her working hours and then, while indulging in one of their nightly cocktail parties, declared that, "All she had wanted was to go and party."

A young Haitian woman who had spent an entire morning helping us in the clinic was invited by the nurse to join us for lunch. This gesture displeased the church members, who rushed to take the food away, sending the young woman running from the table in shame. I talked with a man who had designed a number of greeting cards and embroidered several items of clothing hoping that the mission would use them for fund-raising. Project members ignored him, patronizing instead an art shop in Port-au-Prince that was a well-known sweat shop.