Mischa Berlinski: Peacekeeping

Balu showed me photos of the house that he built for his family. The house was large and concrete, surrounded by a low wall. It was the Africa the Discovery Channel never shows: Balu had a subcompact car in the driveway, and there was a flowery little garden. Mrs. Balu was a pretty lady of substantial girth in a magnolia-printed dress, and the little Balus were obviously having some trouble sitting still for the photo, all smiles and teeth and elbows. Then there were Balu’s eight brothers and sisters and their wives and their children and a congress of cousins and the elderly Mama Balu, Papa Balu having gone to his sweet reward.

I asked everyone I met on Mission to show me their families, and all the photos always looked like Balu’s: the concrete houses, the fat wives, the children, the new car, the flat-screen television. There was something reassuring and wonderful about those photos. If you understand those pictures, you’ll understand something about the world we live in.

When Balu gets back home to Tanzania, he’ll be showing Lady Balu and the Baluettes photos of his life on Mission. Somewhere in those photos there’ll be a photo of me and a man named Terry White. For reasons known only to himself, Balu insisted on taking a picture of me with Terry — he seemed to think, because we were both Caucasian American males, that we formed a natural set, like unicorns. He got the two of us lined up in a row and said, “Now you make smiles! You are beautiful man!”

Terry White! Who would believe such a name if it wasn’t his? No novelist would dare choose such a name in the context of Haiti. If you are white and walk down a Haitian street, someone will shout “blan!” at you within a minute; and if you walk for sixty minutes, you will hear sixty voices shouting “blan!” It meant “white!” and it meant “whitey!” and it meant “foreigner!” It meant “Hey you!” Sometimes it meant “Gimme money.” Sometimes it meant “Go home,” and sometimes, it just meant “Welcome to my most beautiful country!”

In the photo Balu took that afternoon, Terry the White and I are standing in a dirt field with some banana trees behind us. Terry W. had been deputy sheriff in the Watsonville County Sheriff’s Office in northern Florida, not far from the Georgia border, and nothing in his appearance ran contrary to stereotype of the southern lawman: he stood about six feet tall, with broad shoulders and a thick waist, heavy legs, and a pair of solid boxer’s hands. I later learned that he had been on the offensive line in high school, and you could see it in his chest and feel it in his calluses. In Balu’s photo, he has his arm draped over my shoulder: I remember its weight, like a sack of sand. His face was square, not handsome, but not ugly, the kind of mug that you would be unhappy to see asking for your license and registration, but would find reassuring when he pulled up beside your stalled Subaru on a dark night on a lonely road. His short dark hair was interwoven with a subtle streak of gray. He was wearing military-style boots, cargo pants, a gray T-shirt tight across his broad chest, and a khaki overshirt to conceal his sidearm. He gave the impression of brooding, powerful strength; a short, restless temper; and sly intelligence.

Terry was in Haiti as a so-called UNPOL, or United Nations Police, assigned to monitor, mentor, and support the fledgling national police force. The Mission was established in 2004, when the former president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, fled the country in the face of a violent rebellion spreading down from the north. In his absence, the new government of Haiti, lacking legitimacy, popularity, and power, and confronted with a nation in chaos, requested the assistance of the United Nations Security Council, which responded by creating this vigorous, well-funded multinational peacekeeping mission.

The theory behind the Mission was this: In his time in power, Aristide had dismantled the military and neutered the police force, fearing, not without good reason, a coup d’état from one or the other. The coup came nevertheless; and now the future of the country and the eventual guarantor of security and domestic tranquillity would be a new police force, the Police Nationale d’Haïti (usually referred to by its acronym, the PNH), which the United Nations would train and equip. For this purpose there were about two thousand UNPOLs in Haiti, distributed about the country, of whom there were about twenty-five in Jérémie: a dozen francophone West Africans; a pair of former antiterrorist commandos from the Philippines; four or five French Canadians; a couple of Sri Lankans; a Romanian woman; two Turks, both named Ahmet, hence Ahmet the Great and Ahmet the Lesser; a Jordanian; and one American — Terry White.

Now, I should say straightaway that people either liked Terry very much or could not stand him; and when people said they couldn’t take him, I understood. He was a know-it-all: “What you gotta understand about voodoo…,” he said when I mentioned that I had been visiting local hougans . “What you gotta understand about the African law enforcement official…,” he said when I mentioned one of his colleagues. He wanted to argue politics: “What liberals don’t understand…,” he said. He didn’t let the argument drop: “So you really think…” He told me how many people he had tased, and he offered to tase me to show me how it feels. He called Haiti “Hades,” which was amusing the first time, but not subsequently. He called his wife his Lady. He was vain: I told him I got caught in a current down at the beach and came back to the shore breathless; he told me that his boat once capsized in the Florida Keys, leaving him surrounded by sharks. Even Terry White’s kindnesses had about them some trace of superiority: “If you ever hear a noise outside the house at night, just give me a call,” he said. “You stay inside. I’ll come down and check it out.” Between men, those kinds of declarations have meaning.

All that said — I liked him. He was, for one thing, a good storyteller and an effective, if cruel, mimic. When you talked to Terry, time passed very quickly. This was a kind of charisma. So when he told me about an argument he’d had with a colleague a couple of days before, I was all ears.

They’d been headed up to Beaumont, Terry said, and the whole way out, Ahmet the Great was talking about some lady they saw lifting her skirt and taking a leak on the side of the road. She was balancing this big basket on her head at the same time. There was a decapitated goat’s head covered in flies visible in the basket. “You gotta figure the rest of the goat was in the basket, too,” Terry said. Granted, maybe it wasn’t the prettiest spectacle in the world, this lady dropping to her haunches—“You probably wouldn’t paint the scene with oils and hang it on the living room wall”—but she did what she was doing with a heck of a lot of grace, for a big lady.

“What you got to realize is that those animals weigh upward of forty pounds,” Terry said. “Just try it, peeing like a woman with a goat on your head.”

In any case, it was Ahmet the Great who opened the discussion that day on the way to Beaumont.

“In my country, is big shame for lady pee,” Ahmet said. “Is never something lady do.”

Terry said, “In your country the ladies don’t pee? I can’t believe that.”

“In my country, is big shame lady pee like animal in streets. In my country, lady pee like lady.”

“And how does a lady pee, Ahmet? Riddle me that, my brother.”

“Not like cow or animal in street.”

This argument went round and round, up into the mountains and down, past seaside Gommier and pretty Roseaux and muddy Chardonette, one of those arguments that start out as banter but before long start to rankle, just two guys in a car, each thinking the other’s an asshole.