David Gets Ready To Go To Jèrèmie
I leave for Haiti quite soon. So let’s get down to it. Why am I going?
I first went to Haiti when I was 18, in May of 2006. At that point I was vaguely interested in public health, but much more interested in diversion. I had all of the typical “aha!” moments that folks often get when they gain ‘perspective’ from traveling to poor countries. In short, I really fell in love with the country. This fact only became more apparent when I returned and did a lot more reading.
When I came back, I read C. L. R. James’ The Black Jacobins for the first time. I re-read it this summer, and was amazed by how that book is as relevant now as it was in 1938. Placing the current ‘plans’ for the reconstruction process in Haiti into the historical context that James lays out is frustrating, disheartening, and in my humble opinion, vital. I also read a lot of Noam Chomsky’s writing on Haiti. However ‘unbalanced’ he may be, especially in his unwavering support for Aristide, his unwavering support for genuinely democratic processes is something to be admired and replicated. As a historian and a US citizen, he’s done an incredible service by detailing the French and US (and British and Spanish) atrocities committed in Haiti. He demonstrated all of this in an ultra-condensed manner at a talk he gave in June in New York, followed by a hilarious Q & A. If you are interested in Haiti and don’t know much about it’s history, the video of this talk is set within the context of reconstruction and is well worth a viewing. Point being: as my knowledge of the salient albeit shameful role the United States has played in this history of this important country increased, so did my desire to return. When I started college, I got in touch with the foundation I am working for to give them a heads up: in four years, I was coming back. In the meantime, I had to do college.
Though I thought college would be a lot of writing essays on Plato and Kierkegaard (which admittedly, I sort of love doing that kind of thing), I thought of myself as a pragmatic anti-academic. And there I was, in a Liberal Arts school. Luckily, I happened upon the field of Medical Anthropology. As I studied more and more, I began to see the inherent flaw in thinking about academia and all things practical as mutually exclusive. We need better journalism, more ethnography, open and alternative dialogue, thoughtful technology, a great synthesis! Academia has a huge role to play in all of this. This was my big takeaway from college.
I also got really interested in health care as a profession at some point in college. Enough, at least, to drag myself through four of the worst science courses that NYU has to offer and then take the MCAT. Still interested in the practical and political aspects of intellectualism, biomedicine represents a skill set that I think I really want, and a career that includes a lifelong science course. In exploring the cultural variations in everything through my anthropology studies, the human body—though by no means a universal entity—has some element of human sharedness, however differently folks may think about it. And we do think about it very differently. Health is a basic human need that is bought and sold. The human implications of this are hard (impossible?) for many of us to fathom, and whenever I get a glimpse of them it really hits me in the gut. In short: I like science, blood and guts, people, and seeing people feel okay. If I can play a part in delivering that to the people who need it most, I’ll feel good about the work that I am doing. I’m still not certain of the way in which I will contribute to health care delivery, but I hope this trip will help me discern some of that.
I do have my fair share of reservations, however. My place within the global health movement is a huge question mark. It is pretty apparent that I will be gaining more from this trip than I will be giving. Without any real skills to offer that Haitians don’t already have themselves, I am just another set of hands and another mouth to feed. The folks in this line of work that impress me the most are the people I have worked with for the past three years at Doc to Dock, namely because despite working from an ill-lit, cramped warehouse in Brooklyn, without any recognition save a five-second round of applause at an annual gala, they do a tremendous amount of work and bring about an incredible amount of change. Redistribution. They work very hard in the shadows, and they do it all with grace. This trip is not about me giving back, really, but about me getting my bearings, building some context, attaining some perspective. I am giving my time, yes, but I can’t genuinely say that I have much more to offer, or that I couldn’t do just as much if not more good work writing grants from some cubicle in New York. Selfish? Not entirely. But I have good reason to moan when someone waxes poetic about how great the work I will be doing is. Who knows? When it comes down to it, I am not going to help the people of Haiti. I am giving my time, but I am going to be gaining much more. I am going there to learn, and I have a lot of learning to do.
What I will be doing is twofold. Firstly, I am a PR journalist/photographer, writing stories about Haitians’ interactions with the foundation in order to give potential donors reason to believe in the efficacy and importance of the work that the foundation is doing. Secondly, I am a mapmaker, using GPS to map the rural and mountainous health outposts that are serviced by the foundation. More on this later, and updates to come.
