At times I’ve found it hard to be inspired this week. The work has been tough, the days have been long, and I’m settling into that point in the deployment cycle where I’m feeling tired beyond the simple fact of not getting enough sleep. Simple things can bring a smile to my face; a big bunch of vibrant lilies one of our team housemates bought for the coffee table, an unexpected gift of chocolate, booking a trip to the field, a particularly funny joke around the dinner table, realising the lasagne for tonight’s dinner is vegetarian, seeing a couple of kids forgetting for a minute the disaster around them and playing like normal Friday evenings should be at their age.
And yet I feel like I’m missing the action. I’ve been in the office almost all week trying to close on a grant we might not even get with a particularly difficult donor. For lunch I walk down two flights of stairs to an air-conditioned cafe and bring my sandwich and smoothie back up to my desk. In the evenings we’re on lockdown so I get into the car, come home and don’t move outside these four walls until the following morning. Sometimes I catch myself thinking - Where is Haiti? I haven’t seen it lately. Perhaps it got lost on my desk under that pile of notes I was sifting through. Perhaps it got trapped on my computer when I was replicating my e-mails. Perhaps it silently snuck away whilst I was answering that urgent phone-call. Perhaps I never really saw it at all…
Haiti is all around me and yet in my whirlwind of work I lose it, only to find it in a different place each week. This week it was with the drivers.
I have been driven around a lot in the last few days – meetings, working groups, workshops, cluster meetings, house to office, office to supermarket, supermarket to house. Truth be told, I like travelling. I like the act of being physically ‘in transit’. It’s my thinking time. My breathing space. I never really noticed the drivers. They were simply part of my refuge from the madness of the office, and I was grateful for their collusion in the silence I so desperately needed for 5 minutes, 15 minutes, an hour.
So it was surprising to find myself restless this week in the car. Wanting to talk. Heck, wanting to talk in French if it came to it, eager to learn something new and ease the boredom of long traffic queues. I told myself it would improve my French, that it was good to get back into it after so long, that it was an important skill to develop.
I started with the man who drove me back from the dumpsite on Monday afternoon. After ten minutes of my laboured French and plenty of slow repetition on his part til I understood his answers, he suddenly asked me in fluent English why I was speaking French to him. That put me in my place. Smarting and slightly humiliated, I explained to him that I thought it would improve my language skills and insisted in continuing our conversation en francais. Turns out he’s got a great sense of humour and enjoys playing football at the weekend with his mates.
The man who drove me to the Cash Working Group – he was into football too. Spanish football. He likes listening to commentaries of the matches on the radio, and is a particular fan of the Argentinian team. His favourite player is Messi. Mine too as it happens. I got a hi-five for that.
Now the man who drove me to the Early Recovery Cluster meeting was an innovator. He’s only been working for the organisation for 2 weeks, mainly because there are no other jobs going and he’s got to make a living somehow. He’s actually a computer scientist by trade – lives with his mum and 3 brothers and wants four children. We debated the merits of marrying young, marrying old, not marrying at all. Having 2 kids, having 4 kids, having no kids. Listening to music in your free time, playing sports, hanging out with your friends. Working in development, working in relief work, working in computer science. Travelling everywhere, travelling somewhere, travelling nowhere. My French has rarely improved so quickly in such a short space of time! He’s got this idea. He thinks the organisation I work for isn’t well known enough. He wants to write a short magazine telling people about the work we’re doing here in Haiti and distribute it around the city. Last time I spoke to him, he was putting the finishing touches to his proposal.
The man who drove me into work this morning sings solos and harmonies in an a capella group with his friends. They’ve made a CD and he put it on in the car this morning. The song that lasted us most of the short drive from the house to the office was written specially to express some of their feelings in the aftermath of the earthquake. It was in Creole and I couldn’t understand a word of it, but I like to hope I picked up a sense of what they were feeling.
And to round off my language adventures, the man who drove me home tonight learnt English fluently from the Oxford English Dictionary. He recommended that I might like to try and learn Creole from a similar source. I couldn’t say for certain but I’m pretty sure there was more than a hint of good humoured sarcasm in his suggestion… He too had only been working for the organisation for two weeks. He was actually a university student training to be an accountant before the earthquake.
Ironically he’s now the regular driver for our finance team.
So this week I’ve been well and truly put in my place by a plethora of multi-lingual, intelligent, qualified, humorous, good-natured, experienced Haitian drivers. Such rich experiences – such a poor country. Yet somehow, it completely adds up.
