Haiti: Getting in, Getting Around

But—you might raise the objection—who wants to go to Haiti right now? Isn't most traffic in the opposite direction?

Well, for starters, I want to go. I want to show solidarity with my Haitian friends. I want to observe the extent of the damage and see how people are behaving, with my own eyes. I want to pitch tents and clean out Port-o-Sans and feed kids and basically do anything a person with no health-care experience can do (although I am not so strong in the putting-up-tents department, come to think of it).

Packing was weird. Usually for Haiti I pack sleeveless shirts and skimpy-ish though respectable things and a pair of flats; now it's sneakers and hiking boots, a sleeping bag, flashlights, batteries, air mattress, a pillow, and a mosquito net that I certainly will never be able to rig. A friend of mine asked: Makeup? Ok, I added a thing of lipstick. 

Usually I stay in some antique, shambling room in the Oloffson, but now everyone is down in the Oloffson courtyard, which the owner says looks like a battlefield command center, filled with tents and bedding and journalists trying to set up communications. These hacks, as we call them, normally stay at the Montana, which used to have a much better communications set-up than the Oloffson. However, that huge place is now just a lumpy set of plaster and cement flats sharded on top of each other, a big hill of rubble. So the Oloffson courtyard (which is really a circular driveway) is the only alternative. The hotel's proprietor used to have a dog named Papa Dog, for the late dictator Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier; I wonder if Papa Dog still stands guard...

Previous: Amy Wilentz remembers the Hotel Montana and the Hotel Oloffson
 
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