The Other Side of Haiti
A slice-of-life introduction to my favorite country.Nothing new to read here yet (I promise I'm working on it), although I've stumbled upon a worthy bit of recommended reading, if you're interested.
"From Haiti" (fromhaiti.blogspot.com) chronicles the life and times of a foreigner in a very strange country. Paired with sharp photographs and wry commentary, brief posts outline a U.N. observer's first-draft reaction to a nation as unflappably absurd as it is insouciantly corrupt. (A recent post on "Los Chanchos Jesucristo"--the "Jesus Christ Pigs", who scavenge for food by "walking on water" into the bay of Cap-Haitien--captures the former point perfectly; a post on the mob violence marring the recent elections excellently portrays the latter.)
Although the blog requires a working knowledge of the Spanish language to fully experience, non-speakers (like me) can limp along using Babelfish, a Web-based translator which renders every Spanish sentence into a readable, if absurdly circuitous, English counterpart. (Run through Babelfish, even such a seemingly simple inquiry as "do you know what this is?" morphs into the oddly existential "to that you do not know what is this?")
Firsthand observations of Haiti have always been rather rare and hard to come by. Even scarcer have been empathetic versions of the same. Over the past century, the Western media has tended to present Haiti to the public eye as a haven for despots and a witch doctor's playground, the world's first black republic now the hemisphere's poorest nation--gaunt and hobbled, an AIDS-addled wisp of its former self.
To be sure, Haiti is all of those things. But to those who have invested their lives into Haiti, who have buried their hearts there as David Livingstone buried his in Africa--to those whose emotions are forever entwined with the people of Haiti and the daily burdens that they bear--it is also much, much more. And that is the primary reason I recommend this blog to you. Bit by bit, post by post, Baturrico is authoring a long-overdue introduction to the unseen side of a nation which continues to evoke my heart's deepest longings, and remains the object of its profoundest affections.
posted by John Adams @ 9:33 PM
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