God Loves Haiti

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On a five-meter-high pile of gravel where a blink of an eye ago stood a grand airport and a dozen blue-helmeted soldiers having a smoke and a laugh under a cooling shade away from the blistering Caribbean sun, a young woman in a torn dress and one broken high-heeled shoe sat on her elbows and cried. The world had gone white on her in a very unexpected and violent way. Not the tanned white of the skin tones of the Tuscan neighbors she expected to be sipping coffee with after a transatlantic flight. Her entire world had gone white white, and she was still in Port-au-Prince, her eternally godforsaken hometown, confused as hell. A dense cumulus of dust shrouded her eyes. She felt something had gone irrevocably wrong in the universe. Her carefully laid plan to reach a dream so dear to her that she’d sold her soul for it seemed stillborn. She felt like the smallest person in the world. Microscopic. Unmoored and irretrievably lost. She tried to scan the horizon and noticed what was left of the American jet from whose steps she had been rudely ejected a half-minute ago. The jet sat on its back. Wheels-up in the literal sense of the term. She knew that even the finest jet in the world would have trouble taking off from an upside-down position on a runway composed of rubble and fog. She knew this meant she would be stuck in Haiti for a while longer. On a level that shock prevented her from articulating yet, she would try to find honor in this state of affairs, or at least come to see it as an opportunity to restore honor lost. First her head would have to stop throbbing and her ears would have to stop ringing. The goudou-goudou sound must have done this. The rumble would not go away. She felt submerged in it, swallowed up by it.

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