Through the Glass Doors

It was March 8, 2010, less than two months after the earthquake. I had a suitcase, a plan to stay for three months, and the phone number of one man — Gilbert, a pastor in Port-au-Prince I’d spoken with for hours but never met in person. I hadn’t been to Haiti before. I’d barely known where it was on a map until the news started carrying images of pancaked buildings and tent cities a few weeks earlier.

The first thing I heard was music.

I stepped off the plane and walked down a corridor toward baggage claim, and there was a band — three or four musicians playing kompa, a Haitian rhythm that sounds a little like salsa but carries something heavier underneath it, something that swings and aches at the same time. They were playing for us, for the passengers filing past them, and a few people smiled or nodded, but most just kept walking. Even inside the terminal, the heat was stifling — the kind that doesn’t lift. I didn’t know yet what I was walking into. None of us really did.

The baggage claim was a warehouse. There was no proper carousel — just workers pulling bags off a conveyor belt and arranging them in rows on the floor. You were supposed to scramble through the rows to find your own. The moment passengers converged on those bags, whatever system existed dissolved into chaos. Suitcases were tipping over. People were going in every direction. Young and old men circled the crowd, offering to find your bags for a price.

One of them came to me. I told him I had three bags. He nodded and set to work. Forty minutes later he came back with two. The third, he couldn’t find. I was sure it was gone but he went back in and started searching the warehouse again while I stood there, watching, willing it to exist. When he finally reappeared with it in tow, I could have cried with relief. I paid him five dollars. My first hour in Haiti dripped out of me in droplets of sweat and sticky perspiration, and I walked toward the exit already exhausted.

And then I was standing at the glass doors.

I pushed through them and stepped out into open air, only to walk straight into another kind of chaos. About twenty feet of pavement between me and a chain-link fence, and on the other side of that fence, a wall of people. A few dozen Haitians, maybe more, all pressing forward, calling out, reaching through the links, trying to get the attention of anyone who’d just come through. They were offering rides, taxis, help with bags, directions — I couldn’t understand most of what was being said. The sound of it all — the shouting men, the cars and trucks passing, the planes overhead, the helicopters — was a cacophony of noise I had no frame of reference for. I had never been anywhere like this in my life.

I turned to a man standing near me who looked like he spoke English.

“Have you done this before?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“So what do we do here?”

“Are you waiting for somebody in particular?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Wait until you see them,” he said. “Then go out.”

That was really great advice. He was a Brit, with two younger Americans, and he had a cell phone in his hand, trying to call his own ride. I stood near him and scanned the crowd on the other side of the fence, looking for Gilbert. Minutes passed and I couldn’t see him. I asked the Brit if he’d try calling Gilbert’s number — the only number I had, the only contact I had in Haiti. He tried but the call didn’t go through. His own calls weren’t connecting either.

My anxiety was sitting in my throat by now. I could hear it in my own voice. I asked one of the younger Americans if he’d watch my things for a moment, and I walked over to a low wall and climbed up on it — a better vantage, I hoped, or at least a way to be seen.

Then, miracle of miracles, I spotted it. A small handwritten cardboard sign on the other side of the fence, held up by a man looking through the rails. It said Kelly.

I thought: I’m probably the only Kelly in this group.

I climbed down, and leaving my bags with the American, walked over to the fence.

“Gilbert?” I said through the links.

The man shook his head. In broken English, he explained that his name was Liberton, that Gilbert couldn’t come, that he’d been sent to collect me and take me to Gilbert’s house. His face showed the same relief I felt — that I was here, that he’d found me. I wanted to cry, but no, I told myself. Stay together. “So nice to meet you,” I said. “I’ll get my things and come out.”

Back at my luggage trolley, the Brit and the two Americans smiled at me. “You’re alright then?” the Brit asked. I nodded and thanked them, and pushed on toward the gate.

That was its own ordeal. A throng of men pushed forward to be the one who “helped” me — I assumed saying no thank you was enough, but it wasn’t. I kept walking, holding my bag, trying to move in a straight line toward wherever Liberton was leading me. Beggars approached too, some following along, hands out, eyes on me, all hoping for some form of kindness. I had packed granola bars, and I handed them out as I went. They took them and came back for more. I pressed on toward the van.

I wasn’t frightened exactly, but I was overwhelmed in a way I hadn’t been prepared for. There was no orientation for this, no guidebook that could have told me what it would feel like to step out of an airport in Port-au-Prince two months after the worst earthquake in the country’s history and be met by the sheer force of that many people, that much need, that much noise and motion and heat, all at once.

I climbed into the front seat of the van. As we began to pull away, children — boys, mostly — banged on the windows and pulled at the door handles, opening them to reach in. Liberton told me to lock my door.

I sat there and thought: Wow. This is overwhelming. This is truly overwhelming. I had no idea that the drive through the city would be even more so.

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I have thought about that first hour many times in the fifteen years since. About the Brit with his cell phone, and the American who watched my bags, and Liberton holding up his cardboard sign. About the granola bars, and the children at the window of the van.

I didn’t know it then, but those were the first faces of a country that would come to mean more to me than I could have imagined when I packed my suitcase in Palo Alto. I didn’t yet know about Pi Gwo Byen, or about a boy named Ti-Ten, or about the twelve children who would, the following January, become the founding class of our school. I just knew that I was here, that I was overwhelmed, and that whatever came next would begin with the drive into Port-au-Prince.

That drive, and the months that followed, are part of a longer essay coming soon as part of a forthcoming collection. “Why Haiti” is the third in a series of six narrative essays charting the story of Greater Good Haiti — from first arrival to founding, to today.

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This blog is extracted from “Why Haiti,” the first in a series of six narrative essays charting the story of Greater Good Haiti — from first arrival to founding, to today. The full essay will be part of a forthcoming collection.

If this story moved you, please consider supporting our work at greatergoodhaiti.org/donate. Every gift goes toward the school, the daily meals, and the children whose lives we have the privilege of being part of.