The Latest From Haiti...via Wyoming

(Note: This is a couple of days old and contains literary nonfiction. That is, the quotes aren't exact but rather an attempt to capture the gist of the conversation.)

The Latest from Haiti, via Wyoming

So, we are spending the evening in Cody, Wyoming at the home of Couchsurfing member Blacktent, otherwise known as Pat. At present, Heidi and I are holed up inside her fifth-wheel travel trailer, which she has set up in her driveway for people of our ilk. She was gracious enough to host us on less than 24 hours notice and, after arriving around 7pm, providing us with some very interesting conversation…some of which I will share with you now.

Pat is in her late fifties and, although her hair is slightly frazzled (as a result of smoking), is an attractive woman with a slender face. (I have little doubt that she had to fend off gaggles of suitors in her earlier days.) She was a traveling nurse who spent more than two decades of her life roaming the world (for leisure), while bouncing from gig to gig in order to support her wanderlust. A little more than ten years ago a contract brought her to this tourism-based town, where she also found love. Sadly, her husband succumbed to colon cancer last summer, leaving the former gypsy of few possessions with a house, barn, four horses and a couple of pickup trucks.

Today Pat is another statistic amongst the ranks of the unemployed, having not worked for a year. She spends her days entertaining weary and wayward Couchsurfers who, no doubt, provide her with some much-needed companionship following the untimely, although not unexpected, death of her husband.

After welcoming us into her home and offering the obligatory drinks, she returns to her roost on the couch, an eclectic mix of music (ranging from Loreena McKennitt to Kenny Rogers) playing quietly in the background. After some polite conversation she begins to feel more at ease with our presence and heads over to the wood-burning stove, where she sits upon a stool and grabs an American Spirit cigarette from the pack on the floor. She cracks the door of the stove ever so slightly, allowing the orange glow to emanate as the fire crackles more audibly.

Pat recently offered to volunteer in Haiti, where she spent two weeks administering aid in camps. Her primary camp had 1,800 residents but the work was slow. “Most of my job was little more than putting on band-aids or changing dressing for those who were seriously injured in the quake. A few amputees were being fitted for prosthetics too.” She goes on to recall that the sounds of the camp were not those of sadness and despair, but children laughing and basketballs bouncing on the hard-packed earth. “You know, they're island people and they just kind of go with the flow.”

As she exhales another drag she recalls the variety and sheer volume of non-Haitians in the country. There are your “do-gooders” (as she called them), the journalists (or those representing themselves as such), and “the Palm Beach types,” with designer suits and fancy wristwatches, eyeing that piece of damaged oceanfront property as a site of a possible five-star resort to be had for a song.

As we continued talking I recalled my time as a journalist, loathing how the slant of some stories was chosen even before the reporter walked out the door, in order to get the true pulse of the people. “There was this one guy shooting a documentary,” she began. “He was kind of a Michael Moore look-alike: middle-aged, not quite as fat, but with that droopy dog-faced look. He was filming a documentary and his focus was the misery of the Haitian people.” This “documentarian” would go into the absolute worst slums of Port-au-Prince in order to find what suited his angle, even if it was in direct contrast to what the majority of the Haitian people were experiencing.

“We were doing really good things at our camp,” she continued, and so they invited this man and his all-female crew over to illustrate what’s going right on the island nation. “Well, he looked around for a minute and didn’t like it, so he left…completely ignoring this side of the story.” Meanwhile, the only misery Pat saw was in the eyes of this man’s crew, sick of being ogled and hit-on by their creepy and lonely employer.

Pat said there were three types of NGO (non-governmental organization) workers present in Haiti. First, were those who enjoyed the nomadic lifestyle, managed to get funding for it and, perhaps, did some good along the way. Next are the overly altruistic and idealistic types, who believe small deeds can change the world. And, lastly, are those like her: just bored and looking for a way to lend a helping hand. Perhaps this is an overly-simplistic categorization of the types of people who offer their services to those in need, but it does cover a majority of them. (I would venture to throw a fourth category in there, which includes the people who are sent by a higher order, believing the only real help they can provide is to convert the heathens.)

“The fact is things aren’t so bad there. At the end of the day there was plenty of beer, and it was cold and cheap, so things had to be pretty good.” Once again, she explained that these were island people…but not just any island people: they were Haitians. For decades, and perhaps centuries, the majority of the nation’s inhabitants had been subjected to, what you and I would consider, destitute living conditions, corrupt governments and sub-standard healthcare. Now, at least, the countryside was teeming with do-gooders taking part in the trendiest of relief efforts, offering bottled water, socks and medicine.

If only someone would start working on a plan to dispose of the plastic bottles, shipped in by the plane load, piling up in the streets amongst the other mounds of trash.