I’d read about Haiti, I’d dreamed about Haiti, and I’d had many late-night conversations in stilted Spanish about Haiti. But when I left Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic (DR), to travel west toward Haiti on the island of Hispaniola, I could not believe what I found.
Even if I hadn’t known that the Massacre River—named after it ran red with blood in 1937 when the Dominican dictator, Rafael Trujillo, ordered thousands of Haitians killed—demarcated the border between the two countries, I would have instantly recognized where the DR ended and Haiti began. Although the geography of the DR becomes barren in the western part of the country, it is lush in comparison with the scorched-earth visage of Haiti.
I had lived in Santo Domingo for several months by the time I ventured into Haiti. I was teaching literature at a bilingual school for mostly well-to-do Dominican students, where it was a challenge to relate Nathaniel Hawthorn’s The Scarlet Letter to the lives of Dominican teenagers imbibing the 1999 headiness of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera.
The school at which I taught put me up in a Florida-style apartment with tile floors and large windows. The building’s doormen, Jaco and Bobi, were Haitian residents who, like many, came next door to the Dominican Republic seeking greater material wealth than the abject poverty back home. I got to know Jaco and Bobi quite well, and heard them tell stories in a funny mix of Creole and Spanish about how they were scared to go anywhere without their identification cards for fear they would be detained by the Dominican police. In the DR, looking Haitian—which means your skin is a couple shades darker than most Dominicans—is a liability.
I became fascinated by Haiti. The country lies only 800 miles south of Miami, yet garners little attention from the United States, except for the occasional boat of would-be illegal immigrants that is detected and turned away. The country is always on the list of the top ten poorest nations in the world. The landscape, even, is sick: the trees have been burned for charcoal, which sells for just enough money to buy basic food in Port-au-Prince, the capital.
And Haiti’s neighbor on the island of Hispaniola, the Dominican Republic, has a long history of racism against its darker-skinned and less fortunate counterpart. Dominicans—and this is a generality that certainly does not apply to everybody—have a tendency to look down upon Haitians, rather than seek to improve the lot of their island mates.
I had to take at least three different guaguas, or public buses, to get to the border of the two countries. The last guagua I took was a little white van, driven by a Dominican man who quizzed me on whether I was married; why not; where I was going; and what on earth I was doing. My blonde hair and freckles were not just an incongruity. They were shockingly foreign.
The roads were no longer paved, and I was not sure I was going to reach my destination, which was the house of a friend who was working in the Peace Corps, building an irrigation system close on the border of the two countries. Every so often, we would pass a small house with a tin roof that seemed to be bursting with people. The wealthiest abodes might have a chicken roaming in the front yard. Others no doubt subsisted on the potato-like yucca and rice, and could only dream of meals of meat.
As the day waxed and the sun started to fall into the horizon, I began to panic. I wasn’t exactly sure if I was headed in the right direction. Surely, if it became dark, I could knock on the door of one of the homes and ask to spend the night. Perhaps I could claim a corner of a room until the sun rose again. What if I could never find a ride back to Santo Domingo?
