What Haiti Has Given to Me

The view while standing on Île à Rat, also known as Amiga Island

For those that don't know much about my personal life, I am a Midwestern boy from Cincinnati, Ohio and I am married to the wonderful Senska Madgscherly O'Donnell, MBA 🇭🇹. For those that don't know much about her, she is a Caribbean girl that grew up in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. As we often say to ourselves, we are from two different worlds! In 2021 we established Womenful Voice, a nonprofit dedicated to helping women and girls in Haiti. I could write many different articles about the work we do on behalf of our nonprofit in Haiti, but I don't want to write yet another piece of content about Haiti's struggles; there is enough of that to see across every form of media that exists. Instead, I want to take the opposite approach: rather than writing about the things I've tried to do for Haiti, I want to highlight what it has done for me.

I have traveled to Haiti seven separate times since 2020: sometimes for personal reasons, sometimes for nonprofit reasons, and sometimes for both. I've been to several other countries in my life as well but Haiti stands out for being the most unlike the others. This drastic difference has forced me out of my comfort zone in the best kind of way and has truly changed my mindset towards life and how I see and understand the world. And so without further ado, I wanted to share some anecdotes from my time in Haiti and what I've learned from it.

Understanding What Culture Actually Is

Inscriptions on a rock right at the bottom of a beautiful waterfall. These are vodou markings connecting the living and their ancestors with the land on which they all lived. My Eagle Scout "leave no trace" brain had a hard time with this!

In my experience, when most people try to describe a culture, whether their own or another, they tend to mention things like food, music, dance, clothing, holidays, and rituals. While these things are certainly manifestations of culture, I now see them as the most superficial aspects of it. Culture truly goes much deeper than that, it is infused within the very fiber of our being and dictates the way we interpret the world around us and how we operate within it. It is said that fish cannot see the water within which they swim, and in this way humans are the same with culture: only by being removed from your water can you come to realize what water truly is.

The first time I visited Haiti was in December 2020, smack dab in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic with lockdowns, masking, social distancing, limited gatherings, constant testing, and all the rest of it in full swing. In the US all these mandates eventually became highly politicized; I'm not going to put myself in the middle of that debate, but that context for my first visit to Haiti is important. I flew into the capital city, Port-au-Prince, and it was like COVID didn't exist. In a city of roughly three million people and over a span of about four days, I saw maybe ten people wearing masks. Again, I don't mention this to cast judgement or to enter the political debate around COVID measures, but merely to highlight something that struck me. While most of the rest of the world was panicking and enacting all sorts of restrictions, with many people taking even more strict measures of their own accord, Haiti just... wasn't.

Another striking moment came during one of the many times when I was visiting the city of Wanament, next to the border with the Dominican Republic. It's no secret that Haiti's infrastructure is underdeveloped, and that is even more true in a smaller town like Wanament. In Haiti, outside of resorts or major city centers, typically the only cold beverage you can get is the national beer, Prestige. When electricity is limited, space in the refrigerator must be properly prioritized! So one day in Wanament, as we're going about our business we find ourselves with a bit of time to kill before we move on to our next task. So I hop into the nearest bar to get a cold beer to help me cope with the hot, tropical day and the staff at the counter waiting to serve me were three kids, by my judgement roughly between the ages of six and ten. I asked for a Prestige, they gave me my beer, I gave them some cash, and that was it. As someone who practically grew up in a bar because that was our family business, this interaction was mind-blowing. All the strict rules and rituals around alcohol in the US, from having to be a certain age to serve it as a waiter in a restaurant to showing an ID every time you buy some no matter how old you are, poof!

What these two experiences (along with countless others) revealed to me are that there are real, meaningful cultural differences between peoples and that these cultural facets have broad, cumulative impacts across their respective societies. Things that I assumed were just how all people are, turns out are just how my people are. Where before I would react or respond to things without a second thought, now I pause. Do I truly understand this person's intent, or am I interpreting it through my cultural lens? Are they expressing something that I don't understand, or just in a way that I don't understand? Overall, I am much less sure of myself now when interacting with people from different cultures because I have a better grasp of just how different their thoughts and expressions can be. And I am glad for it, because being unaware of your own ignorance is a dangerous thing.

A More Communal Mindset

The road up to Citadelle Laferrière, an imposing fortress built on the top of a mountain by the newly freed slaves in the event the French tried to return. Still impoverished and with nothing else to lose, many gave their lives in building it.

Human beings live with one of the most interesting dichotomies in the animal kingdom: we are the most intelligent creatures on Earth, leading us to be acutely self-aware of our individuality, yet we are not physically imposing enough to live on our own and so banding together into communities drastically increases our ability to survive. We are not loners like bears or leopards but we are also not drones like bees or ants, and though we are sort of herd-like as elk or antelope we are each too individually different to move together as seamlessly as they do. In every human society there is a natural push and pull between the needs of the individual and the needs of the community, and every society naturally tends to lean more in one direction than the other. The US leans heavily on the individualist side of things whereas Haiti leans more in the communal direction. Neither side is necessarily "better" or "worse" but there are certainly tradeoffs to be made between the two. And only by fully understanding what both entail can balance (between the two) or acceptance (of one's preference) be achieved.

Most times when we go to Haiti we go to Wanament, and when we're in Wanament we typically stay at my father-in-law's house. His house is in the heart of the city, and of course he has many friends, family, and other acquaintances who live throughout the city. My wife, having lived there during high school and with all the work we're doing through the nonprofit, also does as well. Whenever we are at the house, every day there is a constant stream of people coming and going. It could be aunts coming over to help cook, relatives paying a visit to catch up while we're in town, or neighbors just stopping by to say hi. Morning, afternoon, or evening, it doesn't matter the time of day. In an individualist culture, unannounced visits can be seen as imposing upon the person you are visiting, as "inviting yourself over". But in a communal culture, the thought process is the opposite: it would be rude if I didn't go and say hi to this person today, especially if they are only visiting town for a few days. 

Though Wanament is the place I've visited most often in Haiti, I've visited other parts of the country a fair bit as well. On my first trip there in 2020, after spending a few days in Port-au-Prince, we hopped in a car and drove towards Hinche, a small town in the center of Haiti. As we're going, our driver mentioned that he had a relative that lived only a short detour off of our route and so we agreed to make a brief stop for him to say hi. The main road to Hinche was paved but most of the roads shooting off it were not, and eventually we turned onto one of those dirt roads. After stopping briefly at a farmers market in one of these remote communities, we resumed driving down the dirt road through what seemed like uninhabited jungle. A short while later, our driver turned into a hole cut in the wall of underbrush, and a few dozen feet down this path we came upon a small house. In this little house was a man and his family living off of the land around them; they had a small flock of guinea fowl and cultivated fruits and vegetables from the trees and brush around them. Anything they lacked, they would trade for at the farmer's market we had just visited. After some brief introductions, the man immediately began gathering some of his bounty to share with us: in front of us he laid a giant pile of cassava, old rice bags filled with multiple kinds of wild orange, and an entire stalk of small bananas. It did not matter to him that the only one of us he actually knew was our driver, or that our relationship with this driver was as clients paying for a service; all that mattered to him was that he make his guests feel welcome.

In my own life now I try to temper some of my more individualist tendencies and embrace a more communal mindset. I will always tend to be more individualist as that is how I was raised but I do believe everything must be balanced and so I make deliberate efforts to do more for the people around me now. Not being afraid to stop by someone's house on short notice, asking and providing favors rather than calculating an even split, being open to anyone visiting my house without my foreknowledge, and making an effort to be a welcoming host to all who come through my door are just some of the ways that I'm trying to be a more communal person. Perhaps counter-intuitively, as this arrangement might seem to make one's life more chaotic at first glance, it rather has given me a greater sense of peace. Sure my plans or expectations on any given day might get a little disrupted sometimes, but I also know that I have a well of goodwill to tap into whenever my own need arises. And that gives me an even greater confidence that I'll be able to ride through all the little punches and curveballs that life throws at you every day.

The Ability to Appreciate Anything

Perhaps the easiest thing in the world to appreciate, fresh seafood.

I've come to believe that how we frame things in our mind is the single most important way we can take control of our lives and the ability to quickly re-frame anything to be a borderline superpower. Yes reality is objective, it ceaselessly imposes its laws upon us and whatever we feel, both physically and emotionally, as a result of these inescapable encumbrances is real as well. But how we think about it, how we interpret everything in the world happening around us and to us, is completely subjective; a choice. The simplest example of this is the classic cliché: is the glass half full or half empty? The amount of water in the glass changes not regardless of whichever answer you choose. But your attitude about the situation, how you respond to it, and even what you believe is possible to happen next all change based on how you interpret that reality in your mind.

As this man in the jungle was collecting all this food for us to take, he was handing some to us to eat while we were hanging out. In US supermarkets, I had only ever seen a few different kinds of oranges and really only one kind of banana, and now here I was in the middle of nowhere Haiti being handed kinds of both that I had not known to exist. One of the oranges I didn't like, I found it to be too sour and with too many seeds. But another kind of orange I liked quite a lot, it was still more sour than any orange I had had in the US but not quite as sour as the one I didn't like. Each kind, whether I liked it or not, was extremely juicy and my hands got quite sticky trying all these different oranges. Then he handed us a bundle of these small bananas, and in my mind I was preparing myself to eat something that I was certain I would not enjoy. I had never liked bananas growing up and even though I had just eaten a bunch of oranges that I had never tried before, they all still fit within my mental model of what oranges could be (despite my slight confusion that none of them were actually orange in color). Sure I was expecting it to be different than the bananas I had tried in the US but I still expected it to fall in the same category of "do not like". But there was no way I was going to refuse a gift from this man and so I peeled back the skin and bit in. What I experienced then was not simply a delicious banana but one of the most delicious pieces of fruit I had ever eaten in my life. Bananas in the US are fake, my whole life is a lie! I ate three or four more of those little bananas on the spot and was pulling them off the stalk he gave us for the rest of the trip. That man, despite living a life that we would classify as abject poverty, has got the entire material wealth and 350+ million people of the US beat when it comes to bananas.

As we all know, however, there is more to life than just bananas. Eventually we threw all the food he gave us in the trunk and moved on with our trip and, ultimately, our lives. I came back to my home in the US with electricity, Internet access, running water, heat, air conditioning, and all the other comforts of modern life, while that man is probably still living on that same plot of land and doing the same things he was doing on that day we crossed paths. And yet, as silly as it may sound, a major life lesson ingrained in my psyche centers around how that man, despite living a subsistence life likely well beneath one dollar a day, is actually better off than me in certain aspects. Unless I decide to move in next door, he will always have better bananas than me. If I can find something worth appreciating in that man's situation, then I can find something worth appreciating in any situation. And if meaning and value are actually choices, then how I feel about and respond to any given thing in my life is firmly within my control. I can change my emotions by simply changing how I think about what's happening. When my infant son is crying in the middle of the night and I'm exhausted and frustrated and desperate to go back to bed because I have work in the morning, I can simply imagine myself twenty years in the future when he's a grown man who doesn't need dada to hold him anymore. And with that simple re-framing, a situation that had felt like an irritating burden becomes a precious fleeting moment that I cherish.

Conclusion

I have countless more anecdotes and stories of things I've experienced in Haiti that taught me these lessons and others but I chose to share some that have stuck with me the most. Though I still live in Colorado, I carry these changes to my mindset no matter where I go. These lessons have changed who I am, I believe for the better, and that is why I am truly thankful for Haiti. I even eat bananas on occasion now in the US, if I can find small, organic ones. But whether it comes to learning life lessons or eating bananas, in Haiti I don't hold back!