A walk around our block is always a walk to remember. Sometimes I just want to forget that we live here. Sometimes I just want to do something about it…faster than it can be done. Other times I just want to walk and watch, learn and listen but most of all love however we can along the way. This was one of those walks.
We set out. The street dog that won’t leave our house because we loved it a little tags along too. The biggest pig I’ve ever seen stands in our path. A mommy goat and her two babies shuffle along beside us. We attempt to cross a patch of road covered by trash and sewer water almost stepping on a mother hen and her chicks pecking along in front of us. A baby cries loudly in the house across the way. I try not to think about why she might be crying. We hear a mother down the street tell her child to go ask the white people for some food. The child obeys and tells us he is hungry. We tell the child to go tell his mother. He looks at us confused. Then we tell him to tell the mother to come talk to us herself. The mother hears us speaking Creole and realizes we heard her before. A few kids who have been watching us curiously for the past few weeks point at us calling us the “blan hatian”. I first take this as a complement that the word “hatian” followed the usual “blan” but then wonder if the kids have labeled us real “white haitians”–as in the lighter skinned Haitians that are not foreigners like us– or if we were being labeled as bourgeoisie. Wait. Never mind.
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