Yesterday Patrick and I were on one of many drives up Rue Delmas on some benign errand. Rue Delmas is one of the main thoroughfares in Port-au-Prince taking traffic all the way from the coastline up the mountain to Petionville. Along this route--the closest main road to our house--is a variety of stores, local markets, merchants of food and household items, supermarkets, hair-cutteries, pharmacies, medical clinics, an embassy, clothing and furniture stores, bars and restaurants.
Traveling on this traffic-congested route always provides the opportunity to practice traffic-jam meditation, or "how NOT to get road rage when going 1 mile-an-hour up hill in first gear, breaking, accelerating, breaking again, breathing in black exhaust fumes and sweating profusely."
Along the route we are also afforded the opportunity to join in piecemeal conversations with all sorts of people. Weaving through traffic are men carrying burlap sacks of little water sachets on their head, others hauling boxes of frozen pop and energy drinks for sale, women peddling gum, youth with woven big baskets filled with fried and salted plantain chips, and street kids with their rags ready to wipe down your car for a few goudes. Aside from those on foot passing by the window, you can also often share an exchange with a fellow driver in the lane next to you, or communicate in the sign-language of tap-tap drivers who can tell you to "slow down, someone is crossing" or "go ahead and pass" or "watch-out, I"m coming through" all with a wave of their arm. Yesterday, as I was inching through a crowd of street kids, a tap-tap driver caught my eye, smiled, shook his head and said, "dezod" (trouble) like we were two neighbors sitting on a porch swing watching the children up to their antics again.
Because we are on Rue Delmas almost daily, a lot of the merchants and street kids know our car well. One grumpy pop seller often berates us for yet again not buying an energy drink from him (what would I do with all that energy? I'm going 0.5 miles an hour!!). A happy gum saleswoman with a carefree smile always finds us in traffic because Patrick consistently buys Winterfresh gum from her. Even on non-purchase days, she smiles and waves, jogs up to our window and asks about the "ti bebe." The street kids, however are the most consistent at recognizing us and hanging from our window.
Yesterday, one of the kids who has a bright smile that wraps completely around his face and lights up his eyes, grabbed a hold of the window, stepped up on the running board and essentially road up the route with us much to my internal discontent. He laughs at my warnings to take care, don't fall, don't get smooshed. When I ask him to jump off, he tells me to open the door so he can ride inside. He is about 8 or 9 years-old and life on the streets has made him tough and spry, but hasn't damaged his sense of humor or his infectious smile.
"I want to go home with you! I'm burning here on the street!" He asks us this each time we see him, always with a bright smile and laughing eyes that disguise the hunger and likely desperation behind his situation. "I want to go overseas with you." We play along in this conversation, "but our bag isn't big enough to fit you in." He has one right back for us, "I have a bigger one and I fit quite well. I'm little, you know." "i'll come home with you, I can sleep in your car... show me the way."
Looking into his laughing brown eyes, its hard to think of reasons of "why not." We have room, we have enough food. Heck even a night in our back seat would likely be safer than a night on the street. Honestly, sometimes I don't know why not. The real reasons "why not" seem sort of sorry excuses when looking into the face of a child. Such moments continue to fan the fire of the internal struggle of being white and privileged in Haiti. We came here to be a presence aside from the work we do. Simply being a presence is sometimes the biggest challenge of our days.
So like every other day, our hitchhiker eventually hopped off our car when he spied another friend in the street. "Another time," he said, waved and disappeared into the snaking traffic, likely to hop on another side bar and solicit money, food or maybe a place to sleep from someone else. Soon, another familiar face from the street was in our window wondering if today was the day we've started to hand out money. "I'm hungry." And we repeated the conversation, the joking, the rationalization, the struggle all over again.
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