Thesis Presented to

The Faculty of Alfred University

The calm before the storm

By

Jenna Howland

In partial fulfillment of

the requirements for the Alfred University Honors Program

May, 2021

Under the Supervision of:

Chair: Dr. Mellissa Ryan

Committee Members:

Dr. Susan Morehouse

Whitney Hubbs For Mom

And my Grandma

Who told me to “write a book” Introduction

I’ve been writing in circles for about four years. The same story has been written and rewritten on paper so many times I never thought I could actually finish it. It’s likely I’ll keep writing it for years to come. This essay will be the start of something that I need to keep working on as long as I can.

It’s strange looking back on how I started this project, because I was such a different person. I tried to write about my story for the first time during my freshman writing class.

The assignment was simply to write an essay about something we knew well. I fiddled with a few subjects, but then it occurred to me that I knew about one topic sort of well, maybe better than the average student. I wrote about my time in Haiti, titling it “Deadly Sex and

Destructive Winds”. I remember being proud of the title. For the first time I felt like it was an outlet for me to write. I had a deadline and a reason to actually complete a thought about my experience. Even better, I had someone who would actually listen to me very closely.

I was exhausted when I finished writing the essay. It took so much out of me to even complete a mere 6 pages double spaced. If I told myself then I would write a 30 page essay on the subject over the course of one semester, I don’t think I would believe myself. It was the first time I had really thought about my experience in depth since I had come back. In fact, I spent much of my time trying to run away from the experience, and it was intense to live through it again with every word I typed. I think it had tapped into a lot of trauma in an unexpected way. I had used my coursework before as a means to distract myself, and it felt like worlds colliding. I don’t think it’s surprising that it bit me in the ass later. Maybe some part of me thought it would be done if I could just write it down quick enough, and then I would just be over it. The end of my Freshman year came and went and I realized it was all with me, I was still carrying this story with me, and a decent grade on my paper about it hadn’t really helped. Repression is obviously not a sustainable tool that will carry you through any trauma. The shadow of death that loomed over me in my childhood had seemed to weaken me, and it was only a matter of time before I snapped.

All the while I was writing. It was informal and somewhat infrequent, but every once and a while a burst of inspiration would compel me to write stuff down. However, I was still frustrated. I didn’t know what to do with my story yet. The thought of writing a novel would creep into my brain every once and awhile, but it seemed so abstract and impossible that I never really seriously considered it. Only really put together people wrote novels, and I was certainly not put together.

My writing was all compiled in a blog that I had to create for a class my freshman year. I think most people hated the assignment but I loved it. I treated it like a diary even when the class ended and renamed it “keyboard therapy” I always tried to keep a diary as a kid but I never really could commit. They would all start off the same way, “I’m starting this diary to to write every day”. It never really worked out like that. Personal writing is one of the more difficult things for me to sit down and actually work on. I think it’s hard for me because it’s actually good for me.

A year I wrote my essay, I sent an email to the one who inspired me to write anything in the first place, Professor Morehouse. She was the only person I could think that might be interested in helping me, the only one who seemed to take a story from a 20 year old seriously. I explained that I wasn’t quite done with my story, and it was like she was expecting it. The wit and wisdom essay contest gave me a chance to revisit my writing. The winner got a forum to talk about their subject. With a thrill I realized it was the kind of thing I had been waiting for. I had written my story down but it was for an English class. I finally got the acknowledgment I wanted from a professional reader, but now I wanted a real audience. I wanted my thoughts to be recognized.

I lost. I was ashamed to admit to myself that losing had upset me, but I knew my work wasn’t complete yet. My essay was decent and gave me a chance to articulate some word vomit on paper, but I wasn’t satisfied yet. It was only my first try at really trying to dig into something complex, and I didn’t have the opportunity to process what it meant. I still don’t quite know. I know now that it’s okay not to know things and there is merit in asking questions. I also know that I can continue to work and produce writing without a deadline or any kind of recognition.

I started from scratch at the beginning of the semester after digging through all the content I had written over the years. Since I had been using my blog as some kind of therapy, it was mostly incoherent yet passionate rambling. My committee members all agreed that none of it was really usable. I would have to start fresh. I think they were almost hesitant to tell me that because they thought it would scare the shit out of me to discard about 50 pages of writing to write a 30 page thesis. It kind of did, but it was also kind of relieving. Since I wrote my original essay I had been slowly adding more and more disjointed and sometimes poorly written pages. Dr. Morehouse told me I carried around this story with me like a heavy backpack. She was right. The more I looked at all my past writing the more it haunted me thinking how it all fit together. It was a blessing to purge it all and start from the beginning.

It was a strange thing to dig through my memories and fit into a kind of continuous storyline. It felt like I was grasping around in the dark most days until I finally landed on some relevant memory. It was a process made all the more difficult because of my dedication to erasing it all from my memory when I got back. Above all, writing this made me appreciate writers and critical readers more than ever. It is one of the most difficult things I’ve done in my college career, and at several points I thought I would never finish it. Luckily, I had the support of a first rate committee. Each of my members deeply understand how much of a struggle the creative process is. I owe them gratitude for guiding me through the process of finishing my thesis, and also offering endless wisdom.

They treated me not like the dumb kid I might have thought I was, but like a young critical thinker that they could guide.

I owe Dr. Morehouse for believing that my project could be something more than just a short essay for her intro writing class, and always offering her incredibly valuable wisdom and experience. Without her, I am not sure if I would have ever been confident enough as a writer to start this essay.

In addition to Dr. Morehouse I owe Dr. Ryan for taking so much time to edit and guide my writing into something readable. I also owe her for reassuring me that I was on track when I felt deadlines start to creep up on me. I always left her office feeling much better about my work. I owe Whitney Hubbs a debt of gratitude for always being a mentor and keeping a critical eye on anything I show her. She always asks me the tough questions that I sometimes might not want to hear, but always improve my work

The person I owe the most to is undoubtedly my mother, who I look up to the most in this world. It was an obvious choice to dedicate my thesis to her. She brought me into this world with a special blend of kindness and insanity, and supported me every step of the way. She is definitely one of the craziest people I know (even in public) and I am so grateful and proud to be her daughter. As a fellow writer, she has also encouraged me to stick with the process every day even if it gets tough.

I also dedicate my essay to my Grandmother. She was one of the kindest people I had the pleasure to know, and instilled me with a sense of creativity. When I got back from

Haiti all she encouraged me to do was write, but at the time I wanted nothing to do with the story. I was certain I would never write anything about my experience, certainly not for other people to read.

I am so lucky that I have so many people in my life who push me to reach new heights and be bold. 10/4/2016

It’s true what they say, about the calm before the storm. When I had fallen asleep that night it was eerily quiet. The trees were still and serene. The energy had shifted in the air somewhat, but I think that’s because I knew what was coming. The day before we had been sort of casual about it, even joking.

I was woken up at about 1 in the morning by some rough winds. It wasn’t too intense yet, but it was still unsettling. Eventually the windows began to rattle, and I realized how delicate my apartment really could be against the hurricane. It hadn’t even reached its peak yet.

When my windows really began to creak I thought it would be best to keep myself as far away as possible. Something began to take hold of me. A familiar feeling from all my years of restless and anxious sleep, but now it was real. This was fear. I had myself perched on a chair with a few belongings I wanted to keep safe. I clutched onto my cell phone like it could offer me any kind of solace, but the towers quickly went down after only a few hours.

I was in this. No one I could call for help.

I tried to read, and it worked for a while. I needed to keep myself immersed in something just to distract me. But after a while, even that didn’t work. The wind became so deafening after a while that I couldn’t focus on anything. I was immersed in this awful, high pitched whistling, like a swarm of mosquitos, followed by a deafening roar. There was no way I could distract myself. When I was younger and too anxious to fall asleep, I could always fall back on watching movies or reading to keep myself too busy to think. But this was impossible. There was nothing I could do to distract myself, and no one could save me. No one could hear me scream for help, and even if they could there was nothing they could do. I was at the complete of the storm, truly alone for the first time in my life.

For some time, my thoughts centered on how I would relay this experience. When it was over, I could tell my loved ones how pounding the wind was. How relentlessly it kept pushing at these thin barriers around me. How the outdoors seemed to blend in with the indoors. Bits of debris like sticks found their way into my apartment. The wind crept in, and I felt a subtle drizzle of rain. I was damp. Damp and cold in Haiti, where it got so hot a fan could hardly wave away the heat. My hurried attempt to wrap myself in a thin raincoat and a sheet, glasses pin pricked by stray raindrops. When it was over I could tell them what it was like. How the wind surrounded me, permeated my brain. When it was over.

By that point I had situated myself as far away from the windows as possible. The thought of being close to them scared me. I could picture debris crashing through, broken glass scattering. I perched myself on two chairs pushed together and waited. It was all I could do. Just wait.

The wind reached a certain point and I realized there was no way I could distract myself because I didn’t want to. Vague thoughts of mortality crept in waves as my apartment floor took on a thin layer of brown water. Through the dark, the only thing I could see were the loose outlines of palm trees, bending so easily. We had wondered before which trees would come down. Walking around our gated compound, checking things when it was still quiet. The half hearted attempts we made to prepare, not sure how bad things would really get. Would I die? There wasn’t any way I could die in this. No one had told me. Hell, we had been almost joking about the storm leading up to it. Roxanne joking that we would get out of work. Saying over drinks that we would be fine. walking around town the day before, yelling to those who would listen.

“Storm tomorrow.”

In my perch, the only thing I wanted was for the winds to stop. Just to die down for a moment. It had been hours, and the storm had not even reached its peak yet. I could only blankly stare out the window, clinging to my sheets. Watching the trees bend. It went on like that for a while, not sure how long. Time seemed to all blend together. When the light began to peek into the windows, I knew the worst was here. It had to be. The wind became so deafening I was sure it would blow me away. Emily had told me 7 am would probably be the worst of it. The edge of the eye passing over us slowly. Caught in a washing machine. It was a slow moving, aggressive storm. Taking its time to rip up everything in sight before slowly moving on.

I started to think I could hear screaming. Sometimes through the wind I thought I could hear it. Agony. Was I hearing things? Was the wind playing tricks on me? I decided to open my door. It took some time to wrench it open, the wind pulling it shut. Trapping me. Eventually it came loose. The air left my lungs, heart dropping dead into my stomach.

Everything was gone. A few trees stayed limply rooted to the ground, but they were bent and balding, hardly holding on. I was surrounded by debris. Everything. Piles of leaves, concrete structures crumbled and scattered. Tin roofs ripped from homes stuck out from the palms. I stood there in shock for a moment before closing the door. I couldn't see anyone so it must have been my imagination. The screaming.

Some time later the wind began to calm down and I was sure I heard a voice. Not a shapeless scream, but a voice saying something. Calling for Emily? I opened the door again. There was Roxanne, making her way through the debris with her husband. Her was just up the hill, normally masked by the thick cover of trees. I could see it now, what was left of it anyway.

She reached my doorstep and said “My house is gone.” So matter of factly. Then she went right next door to Emily’s apartment. When I closed my door I laughed. Nothing about it was funny, but I couldn’t help it. Roxanne’s house was gone. The woman in charge of construction for HHF, who coordinated building thousands of homes for poor Haitians.

Last night she assured me her home was one of the strongest in Jeremie. That she would be fine. That she would send down a bird call to let us know she was ok. I was so sure she would send a bird call. If her home went down, what about all the others?

The wind finally calmed down at what must have been about 8 in the morning. My phone was dead. This was the eye. I went next door to check on my neighbors. Emily and

Roxanne and her husband, hunched in some blankets. They wanted to see if we could scavenge a few things from what was left of their house. Her husband wanted apple juice.

Books and laptops. Whatever we could pick out. Whatever was left.

We waded through the debris and faced water up to our knees in the wreckage. The walls were swollen and broken up in places, and the roof was almost gone. Roxanne told us that looters had got into the compound, the gate swept away by the wind. They had tried to come into what was left of her house, but her husband had a taser. Was this real?

Someone said the eye of the storm would last about an hour. When we got back to the apartment I coyly asked if I could stay with Emily for the rest of the storm. Like I was asking for permission to use the bathroom at school.

“Please could I not be alone the rest of the hurricane?” Of course I could. It was light out now. We could peek out the window and see people starting to wander the compound,trying to carry solar panels from the clinic. Emily tried to yell at them to go home, that the storm had not stopped yet. They couldn’t hear her. I wonder if they had a home to go back to. Picking out what they could from the wreckage.

We stood at the window until the winds began to pick up again. What was it in the first round? About 8 hours? We only had to endure another 8 hours of brutal winds. At the very least, I didn’t have to be alone. Emily had tried to keep her apartment dry to some extent. I don’t remember as much about the second half. It wasn’t as frightening with this group. Things felt more certain. Roxanne’s husband briefly brought up their second home in Gomier, a village close by. She was sure it was gone anyway. Roxanne had been outside for some of the storm before it got really bad. She faced the wind head on. Felt it. She had seen her home fall apart around her.

The storm was still bad, but it didn’t reach the peak like it did before. We tried to keep ourselves occupied. It seems we had almost the same thoughts. They wanted to write a story about the storm. To think about how we would tell this story.

We began,

“Being in the storm felt like being in a washing machine”.

June, 2016. Four months before the storm.

When I was 18 I was apathetic. High school felt like floating in the lazy river at a waterpark. I saw a straight path out ahead of me (a gap year, college, a job), but I didn’t work towards anything with any particular vigor. There were a few things I knew I was good at, but nothing amounted to any real kind of passion. I was so lost after years of self doubt, nothing even seemed remotely possible. I didn’t seem to care anymore.

My mom didn’t exactly pressure me to pursue any particular life path, but she put certain expectations on me. I was always going to college, as was everyone in my family and my community. An alternative simply did not exist. I didn’t have the capacity to think of something different anyway. Part of me felt like I was floating towards some kind of imminent doom, like I wouldn’t make it to my 20s anyway. In reality, I didn’t want to do anything. This was unacceptable of course. My mother was always doing three things at once. She was always rushing out the door, coffee mug hanging on her pinkie. Holding 10 things at once. I was supposed to be a go getter like she was. I was supposed to run marathons with her and apply myself. All I felt capable of doing was laying around my room,watching the time tick by.

I had been closing myself off from the world since I was a child. I always wanted to do everything on my own, even when I needed help. One day in the second grade I didn’t have a chair in class. Instead of asking for one I just knelt on the ground. My teacher approached me and asked why I didn’t ask for a chair. I had a habit of just not telling people stuff.

I wanted to sit in my room, but my mom always kept me busy with competitive swimming, even though I wanted to quit. When I was younger I competed in 3 sports, took art classes, and played violin. Eventually it whittled down to just swimming, and I didn’t even want to do that anymore. Sometimes I was so over going to practice that I would just sit in my car for two hours and wet my hair before returning home. I was tired. Tired because I felt like I had been fighting a losing battle with my mental health for as long as I could remember. I was so anxious to do everything on my own because I felt like no one could really help me. All I wanted was to be alone.

I applied to college with no particular interest, almost missing every deadline because I simply did not care. It was expected that I would take a gap year because my parents already tested the concept out on my brother. For a few months after high school he travelled in a gap year program with other wealthy kids from around the US. They did a silent meditation retreat in India. Climbed the base of Annapurna in Nepal. Just wild enough so the kids could find themselves, but still structured enough so the parents funding the trip could keep their peace of mind. Enlightenment with a safety net.

This would be different. I wasn’t going to Haiti with some structured group. I would be working with an organization. It was hardly a job. Me being able to live in Haiti was something like a favor my mom could call in. Being on the board of the Haitian Health

Foundation gave her an in with the coordinator, Nadesha. While on a trip back to the US

Nadesha stayed over at our place when I was almost done with my senior year. She was there for some doctor’s appointment but she was also sort of there to meet me, to see if I could be a good fit for the program. At dinner my mom was trying to get me to look at prom dresses again, last minute. I waved her off, not actually caring about prom (or anything).

When Nadesha asked when the prom was and my mom explained it was the next day, I seemed to impress her. I think she interpreted my not caring about prom as having my priorities in order.

“I like this girl”.

HHF normally didn’t want 18 year olds to work in Haiti for longer than a week. It was fine if they went on a little mission trip, but actually staying for months was kind of out of the question. An 18 year old didn’t have any real skill sets. I could sort of fake it by piggybacking off my mom. Nadesha would never have hired me without her connections.

How could I say no to an opportunity like that? Part of me wanted to just not go. I would take a gap year, but just save myself a trip and a year wallowing alone in my room. But of course, with my humanitarian mom, that wouldn’t even be in the question.

How could it be with the way she raised me? I was supposed to be insatiably curious, wanting to travel the world on my own without the training wheels. It’s like she had been training me for years to be this adventurous free spirit. She had shown me some of the world holding her hand, and now I didn’t even want to be a part of it. I didn’t see myself as a part of the world, it felt more like I was actively fighting against it.

For years I thought there might just be something wrong with me, like I was a dud.

It seemed like everyone else had passion, like they were ready to enter the world. My friends were applying to Ivy League colleges, fretting about their GPA while I cut math class.

Not caring. There were things I was good at, but I never really thought I could actually make a life out of them.

I didn’t really talk about my plans with anyone. My friends didn’t even know I was planning on living in Haiti for a while. Eventually I brought it up in a sort of off hand way, but I didn’t go in depth. I felt like a fraud anyway. Like this was something someone else should be doing. Someone more qualified or at least someone who gave a shit. Most things in my life were just kept private. I would often make sort of self-deprecating jokes. How I was going nowhere in life. How I would just burn out, never find a place or a job. There was nothing I was good enough at to really pursue. At least I could put off college for a while with this trip. I could take a break while my friends studied neuroscience and journalism.

10/5/2016. The morning after the storm.

We wanted to go outside eventually. The storm had pretty much spent by the late afternoon, and it was time to assess the damage. Emily said I might see dead bodies.

Gripping my arm. I nodded solemnly at this like I could handle it. Like it was obvious. I had a habit of pretending these things were ok; like I was so desensitized and grown up it was fine.

So, we went outside. I tried not to slip in my pitiful sneakers, lacking any real traction;

The only ones I had. Raincoats and glasses. Clothes as dry as they could be. Off we went as a group.

It was a hike to the clinic now. We usually took a van in the morning all together. My feet did not touch earth, almost slipping over palm leaves. The gate to the compound, a great metal structure that had seemed immobile, was gone now.

We stepped over the ripped up gate, in town now. I thought I was on a movie set.

Some disaster movie. This wasn’t real. People were walking around like zombies.

Everyone was outside. There was no indoors to go to, I supposed. Homes split clean in half by fallen trees. Homes reduced to rubble. A whole life, a whole family swallowed by wind.

Everything they’ve ever known, gone. As easy as a kid kicking an ant hill. I guess that could have been me. We tread carefully over the power lines, snaked around tree trunks and tin. It was drizzling softly now. Ever so lightly now. Just a ghost of the storm now. When the wind picked up a touch we held our breath. It was over, wasn’t it?

We needed to see Nadesha. As director of HHF, she would know what to do. How to move forward now that it was over. She lived at the main clinic, Klinik Pep- Bondye (clinic of God). An ironic home for her considering she was a strident atheist.

I liked hiking as a child, so I tried to pretend that’s what I was doing. One step at a time, climbing over tree trunks. Watching for power lines. Downtown the church’s roof was stripped down, completely collapsed. Apparently people had been hiding there. To think of all the people hunkered down together without a roof, in the house of God, praying the winds would finally cease.

I think it took something like 40 minutes to get to the clinic just up the road. The chapel stayed up, and this pissed Nadesha off greatly. Of all things, the chapel. A miracle, no doubt. Shattered glass was strewn around. I wondered why my windows didn’t break.

All the employees in the clinic were walking around, assessing damage. Nadesha stood on the front lawn. It provided a view of the ocean from up the hill. It was normally a lovely view from here. Palm trees lined up near homes, cramped together leading to the beach. The view was different now.

Everything was stripped away. Only a few trees up, stripped of all fruit. Homes swept easily into the waves. A bald landscape. She stood and just stared for a while. We waited there with her. Waiting for her to speak. To express relief that the winds had stopped.

“This is a disaster” We were in a disaster zone. The kind of thing that is reported in the news. The sort of natural disaster I would hear about and think, “wow that’s awful”. I listened closely. Her standing there in a T shirt. She said some things in creole, which she didn’t do very often.

She hardly spoke the language despite living there.

She said all the progress that HHF had been in the past thirty years was gone. Just like that. One night. One storm had destroyed everything. I saw her eyes scan the mountains, lifeless and dead without a thick coating of trees. One word slipped out of her mouth that made my heart sink.

“Famine”.

The trees were gone, and any fruit they produced was being picked out of the wreckage. Anything the land could provide was gone. It would take years to grow back.

Years to start bearing fruit again. In the meantime, what would the people have to eat?

We knew it would get dark soon enough, so we started to walk back within an hour.

Back through the power lines to our flooded homes. In the dark we could recount more stories of the storm. Gather what food we saved, eat together. As we walked back I realized how stupid I was to think it was over. That the worst had passed because the wind finally died down. It wasn’t close to being over, a town shattered completely. The worst part of the storm hadn’t even hit yet.

August, 2016. Two months before the storm.

It was easy getting there. I was used to stuff like this. Getting on a plane with my mother, boarding passses tucked into a bag. The heavy suitcases that barely passed the weight limit, stuffed to the brim with art supplies. I had some idea I could teach art to orphans, at least originally planned to, but it wasn’t needed. Nadesha didn’t want to host an

18 year old teaching kids to finger paint. She decided I would help developing a sex education program, something I was obvious underqualified to do. Fresh out of high school. Hell, I was still a virgin.

The plane to Miami to Port au Prince was packed with two kinds of people. There were the finely dressed Haitians, all elaborate hats and pressed suits. Headed home or visiting family. Then there were the bright eyed groups of mission trips. You could tell by their enthusiasm, but it was made all the more obvious by their neon matching t-shirts.

Practical sneakers and stinking like sunscreen and DEET. Easy to spot.

I wondered where me and my mom fit in. We wore regular street clothes, just the two of us going. Plus I was going to stay there longer, possibly for the rest of the year depending on how it went. I was already sort of jaded somehow, scoffing at the excitement of the well meaning charity groups. My mom told me that everyone went to Haiti with a hero complex, like they could save the country with a week long trip. I was determined to not look too naive, adopting a sort of cynicism without understanding it. I actively tried to not look excited, like I had done this before.

It was something like a 7 hour drive on rough dirt road to Jeremie, a town in the

Grand'anse region of Haiti. Headquarters of HHF. On the way we stopped for gas and drinks. I went out to stretch my legs and a little girl approached me. She had memorized this sort of robotic script in English, telling me that she needed money for school. I lit up a bit, feeling slightly confident. Competency in French was the only real skill I had come with.

My accent was passable enough that I could walk around Paris without getting scoffed at. That made me a little more confident in coming here, like at least I could hold a conversation.

I tried to respond back in French, asking her about school. She stared at me blankly for a moment, then started again with her same scripted speech, enunciating each word.

She couldn’t speak French. She spoke Creole. I thought they were similar enough languages that I could hold a conversation, but she couldn’t understand. French was taught in school. The kids I would work with in the sex ed program presumably wouldn’t speak

French either.

We arrived at dusk. The closer we got to Jeremie the more I wanted to turn around and just go home. This was a common occurrence when I traveled. I always liked plane travel and long car rides, but I didn’t actually want to leave home. We arrived at the main clinic to Nadesha and her husband, Rueban waiting for us. This is where week long volunteers stayed, where my mom would stay. Apparently that wasn’t me. Since I would be more long term I was granted an apartment down the road at a secondary clinic.

The Center of Hope was about a quarter mile down the road. It was behind a heavy turquoise gate that needed to be opened by security. Safe. The compound held a small clinic for high risk pregnant women to stay, and some other housing. That was generally the mission behind Haitian Health Foundation. To protect girls and women, the most vulnerable in the population. I would live in a small apartment complex, really just two apartments cramped together up the hill. Me and Emily would live side by side.

When we opened the doors the first thing my mother commented was how spacious it was. Linoleum floors, sunny and warm. A large bedroom with a queen bed, surrounded by large windows that let in lots of natural light. My new home for the next few months. Really, I was being moved into my first apartment. I hadn’t thought about that. That night I slept alone in the dead quiet and ate the snacks my mom had packed for me. Echoes of home.

My mother stayed in Haiti for the next week and worked on birth control distribution for the area. I could still kind of cling on to her, being introduced to others as Dr. Perkins’ daughter. My identity was attached to her. It made more sense that I was there with her, not alone.

I had no real idea what to expect but luckily I was hardly in charge of the program. Of course I wasn’t. Emily was really the one running this program, and I was sort of like her assistant. She had lived here before for about a year after she graduated from UCONN, and now she was back after a stint working in college recruitment. She couldn’t resist coming back to Haiti. My mother always told me this country stuck to your heart.

Emily was sort of my boss but we connected right away. She was funny and outgoing in a way that I always wanted to be. She connected with people. I was almost ten years younger than her but we were still closer in age than most of the other employees. Plus we were both American, which wasn’t common in this town. She handed me some textbook on basic sex ed and told me to start leafing through it. At least I had some homework to ground this, like I was still in high school doing busy work. I could do that, take notes.

A week floated by and I realized that my mother was suddenly leaving me. No one to cling onto anymore. I had Emily, but without my mother I felt like I wasn't supposed to be there without her. I had traveled around a lot in my childhood, but she was always right beside me. Now she was leaving me. I was just some kid living here all of a sudden just taking notes on a textbook. Before she left she pulled me and Emily aside and assured us how important this program would be. We would teach young girls self esteem and will power. That they were strong and important. We would protect them from STDs, from teenage pregnancy and domestic abuse. Girls not too much younger than me. We could teach the most vulnerable girls to lift each other up.

“No big deal, you’re just saving the world”. She said it in a sort of joking way but with sincerity that moved me. I felt my cynicism lift a bit. I felt for so long that I was never really a part of anything important. That I couldn’t do much to help. But my mother even believed in this, and that meant something. I watched her van pull away to take her back to

New England. I would make it through this, even make a difference.

One month before the US election, 2016

There was a period of stillness after that seeped into everything. It was more silent than usual, of course. Normally at night I would hear Carribean music blasting in the streets, but it was quiet now. A period of mourning. People grabbed what they could of course, gathering whatever fell off the trees. But that wouldn’t last long. We needed more resources here, especially with what was starting around us.

A few days before the relief workers came in droves, drones buzzed around us from overhead. International journalists were trying to get an aerial shot of all the wreckage for their news sites.

People were packed into the school by my house. The building was just a few walls that stayed up, now home to as many people that could fit, crammed together like sardines. There wasn’t even a place to go to the bathroom, everyone presumably shitting in the corners or right outside. That was more dangerous than I thought.

A local doctor told us it “smelled like cholera” around what was left of the town clinic.

Hardly a hospital in the first place, really. More like a few concrete walls that could house people. Once I had been there and seen a few chickens running around while a woman got a pap smear.

I guess “smelling like cholera” meant it smelled rancid. Cholera was a horrific disease that could kill in less than a day. Crowds of people were dying of dehydration from all the diarrhea and vomit. The tepid water that flooded into the slums was teeming with bacteria.

Drinking it, festering in it; it could easily mean a death sentence.

I worried briefly that I could maybe catch it and be killed, but someone quickly put my anxieties to rest. Nadesha told me, “You wouldn’t die of it, we wouldn’t allow that”. So casually. Cholera actually was pretty easy to cure with the right resources, but of course those were limited. Because of who I was, because I was white and American with a mother on the board of this charity, I could be allotted antibiotics and fluids.

The trucks came in about a week later as soon as the roads were enough, and suddenly everything was busy. White trucks with logos from all kinds of organizations.

CARE international, the UN, UNICEF. They were packed with all kinds of doctors and nurses and relief aid specialists, shipped in from the United States and Europe, overwhelmingly white. Suddenly Klinik Pep-Bondye was an epicenter, people coming and going from the trucks all day.

I was still there with Emily, in the center of it all even though I really didn’t belong. Of course we still showed up to work. Where else would we go? It was sort of an unspoken thing that our program was cancelled, or at least put on hold indefinitely. My work underlining pages from a sex ed book was for sure done, though. Nadesha briefly sat us down and sort of cynically gave us an option to leave if we “couldn’t handle what was going to come”. I don’t think it was a real offer, because she probably didn’t actually want to deal with moving two girls out of Haiti, right when everyone was coming in. We told her we could handle it. We wanted to help how we could. I wasn’t really told what to do in the meantime, so I tried to find a use for myself, hanging around and trying to package up rice and count water purifying tablets.

People couldn’t quite place me. I looked young, but I was white and hanging out with all the other relief workers so I must have had a purpose. Sometimes a stray nurse or relief aid worker would approach me and ask about shipments or something, and I would have to wave them off. I wasn’t really supposed to be here. I wasn’t flown out in a plane like these people to run into the wreckage.

It was very uneasy. I felt like if I wasn’t doing something with my hands at all times I was wasting time. I was displaced, too. They kept moving me around. Nadesha gave my apartment to a few engineers and moved me into the clinic where temporary workers normally lived. I would stare out of my window sometimes, which had a view of all the commotion near the gate of the clinic. I could see a group of journalists chatting together, huffing cigarettes and holding cameras over their shoulders. These people seemed so confident here, like this was just another day at work for them. All I could do was try to stay out of the way. Late October, 2016

I settled into some kind of routine. Every morning I walked through the stocks of spaghetti and rice and counted, writing numbers on a pad of paper though no one had explicitly asked me to. It gave me some sense that I was doing something productive. I clung to any sense of work I could do to keep my body in a constant flow of work.

Sometimes I was approached and my role changed based on their perception of me.

I was asked to hose off a nurse’s sneakers, clogged with red clay. Someone asked if I was the one who made the coffee, who made beds. Once I was handed a radio and was asked by some nameless voice about medicine shipments. I was some kind of chameleon wandering around the clinic.

I settled on putting together food kits with a few other Haitian women. We formed some kind of assembly line packing all the stocks I had counted. Spaghetti, water tablets, rice tied in plastic bags. My creole improved working with them, and we could hold conversations. One woman told me about her daughter and produced a photograph from her clothes. I later told another relief worker that I felt like I had connected with her, that she had shared her family with me. He sort of scoffed and told her she was probably just trying to make me feel bad for her so I might sneak her more supplies. I was taken aback by this. Was I naive or was he just a cynical asshole? I had felt connected with these women to some extent. When we took a break for a moment once, they had shared a granola bar with me. “We all share”. But at the same time, I think they saw me as some kind of supervisor.

At the end of the day they asked me to report back what we had done. I was a bridge between them and the people in charge. This was a power dynamic. Hungry mouths crawling towards these life saving stocks of supplies, guarded by white folks who could deem who was worthy. Who could be allotted tools to survival. Hell, maybe she was actually trying to manipulate me for supplies, but would it be the worst thing? But it was distasteful to beg in some of these relief worker’s eyes. I saw resentment in some as crowds of people loitered around the clinic to find clean water.

Some time later I was invited to tag along on one of the distributions of supplies. I had been making these kits for a while but I had no idea how the distribution even worked.

A white truck was packed with as many kits as possible and covered tightly with a tarp.

Someone told me that a rogue CARE truck had botched a distribution, making the deadly mistake of keeping a truck uncovered. The truck had been swarmed and apparently someone had been shot.

We arrived at a building in some community. I had no idea how the location had been chosen, maybe somewhere a bit more discreet than the center of town. A crowd of people who had been selected to get supplies that day. It was sort of a barn filled with people. Packed to the brim, really. Roxanne was there, clearly the one in charge of this. Just me and Emily and Roxanne with about 50 hungry people, waiting for their nutrition kits.

Roxanne yelled to close the door to this building, and a few people did. She stood against a wall and began to list off one family at a time to collect. At some points the door would creak open and she would scream to “Ferme la port la!” I tried my hand at it too, but it was much weaker, much quieter. I wasn’t used to yelling orders like this. Someone got in who wasn’t supposed to be there and grabbed a kit, running out the door to many people yelling all at once. Roxanne sort of sighed and said, “They will all share it anyway.”. It didn’t actually matter; this was sort of just a symbolic distribution. The real distribution of supplies happened after the trucks pulled away, and the community shared everything in their own way. You can give a food kit to a particular family, but there is no real control once they are out of the relief worker’s hands.

I thought about how I used to think this stuff worked. I would get those charity pamphlets in school and in church, a kid with a distended belly and wide eyes emblazoned on the front, asking for donations. Just a few dollars can fill this kid’s bowl with rice. Like there was some kind of order in the world. Like there was this holy mountain of stock and these white folks could choose who ate that day, based on how cute the kid was. This is how this stuff actually worked. A crowded room at the brink of chaos, handing out food kits that might not even be seen by those kids.

November, 2016. One month after the storm.

It had happened so quickly that I didn’t even really have time to think about it. One day in November I was just sitting in the turquoise office I always sat in at the clinic, buzzing around with flies. Most of the relief effort had become sort of stagnant. The temporary workers that came in the white trucks in droves had left, gone on to the next disaster that struck somewhere else in the world. Funding had almost trickled to a stop from the US because the news cycle was consumed by Trump after he had won the presidency, only about a month after hurricane Matthew. No one cared and I couldn’t understand why. Didn’t people know we were still here? Things were slow again. I had no idea when I was going to leave, maybe another month or something. I desperately want to go home just to feel in my element again, and selfishly to talk about something else other than the storm. For something to occupy my brain. Then Emily told me she was leaving the next day, and that I could come with her. It had become too dangerous to get to Port au Prince by truck. Tension was brewing here, I could see it. I heard gunshots outside my place sometimes now. Before the storm, guns weren’t as big of a deal. Once I was sitting at the bar and a friend told me that every once and a while someone might pull out a gun and let off a little “Pop pop”. All in good fun, but if it happened we should probably leave without finishing our beer. Gun violence wasn't really a concern before the storm, but the election was supposed to be happening for a

Haitian president and the country had been without any coherent leadership for months.

Now with the storm and the relief effort grinding to a seeming halt, people needed someone to lead. To do something.

Election day came and went with no voting, they had to postpone it because there was nowhere to even put a voting center with all the destruction. Some kind of anger was brewing and it was understandable, but Nadesha decided she should move all the white people out if possible. I guess she worried I might have been kidnapped or something.

Looking back now, it was a real risk, but it wasn’t why I really wanted to go home. I just wanted to be a normal kid again. I wanted to talk to someone who wasn’t a disaster relief expert and spend hours mindlessly surfing the web.

Suddenly I booked a flight out from Port au Prince in two days. We would leave on a little chartered plane the next day and spend a night at a hotel in the city, then it was on to the US. I was going home just like that. I could disappear from this life and go back seamlessly to my old one, be an 18 year old again

The first thing I wanted to do when I touched ground in the US was eat something. I had landed in Philadelphia to meet my family. Of course, my mother was running a marathon the same weekend that I was coming home, so I had to meet them there. I felt sort of annoyed this was the case. I just wanted to slip back into my old life unnoticed, but I had to land in a different state, get adjusted to a new place. They met me at baggage claim and we headed straight to my choice, Chipotle. Something fast and convenient and filling. I was suddenly overwhelmed by the speed of everything. People were bustling around to claim their bags impatiently. I was so aware of every sound now, every flashing advertising and billboard, the urgent calling for passengers over grating intercoms. Everything was too loud and too fast now. I can recall my mom telling me what it was like coming home from the peace corps in the mid 80s. She had touched down in LAX and cried from all the noise, from everything all at once hitting her in the face.

At the restaurant we sat and I devoured everything in my bowl. I was almost methodical about eating now. In my apartment in Jeremie I portioned everything so carefully: a handful of spaghetti with a portion of ketchup for every dinner, eating painfully slowly to savor every bite. I saw a man take his half eaten burrito and throw it in the trash so casually and I was struck suddenly. He didn’t even seem to think about it, half absorbed in his phone. I had forgotten about this casual waste. How you can throw away your food without even thinking about it here and just move on to the next thing at the speed of light.

I could bet he wasn’t thinking about Haiti. I guess it hadn’t really occurred to me until then, but no one was thinking about Haiti here. The hurricane had hardly been in the news.

What was I expecting, that people would approach me and ask about Haiti? That it would still be on anyone’s minds here?

I had wanted this; to be back in the United States where I didn’t have to talk about the hurricane all the time. I wanted some kind of escape. But now I was in Philadelphia and it was too much to take in at once. Suddenly there was no one there who got it, all consumed in US politics and their own lives and throwing away half eaten burritos like people weren’t starving in the world. I was back home but it felt too foreign to me, these people seemed alien and so strange, not able to go five seconds without stimulation from their phones or

TV. When did everything start moving so quickly? It hit me then and there that nothing had changed here, this earth and this life was the same as I had left it. I had changed somehow and left a piece of myself in Haiti that I couldn’t get back to, and there was no one

I could talk to here that would even remotely understand.

April, 2021 four years after the storm

I spent years after the storm trying to forget about it. I wanted to slip seamlessly back into my old life, even though it was apparent from the moment I stepped off the plane that it wouldn't really be possible. My mother always said that Haiti steals a piece of your heart, and she was right. I had left something of myself there. I had grown up in such a bubble.

Sure, I had traveled a lot, but I never really had a sense of how fragile life could be, or how much privilege I really had that I was failing to take advantage of.

When I got back home I told some people about the storm in some kind of small talk, off hand way. I told them about the destruction and how scary it was to sit through the storm. Most of what I said seemed to float in through one ear and out the other, especially considering how little news coverage the hurricane really got. Every once in a while I would bring it up, but I was skeptical about opening up to anyone about my story. I assumed they wouldn’t understand. I went from a disaster zone back into my old comfortable life. Back into my room that

I had sat for years in wallowing in my own private anxieties. Closing myself off from the world despite all the privilege I had inherited. Despite my humanitarian mother who guided me gently to see everything the world had to offer. But this time I felt different. I had changed. I tried to close myself off again with the same apathy, but I couldn’t sit still. I resorted to distracting myself in unhealthy ways when I wasn’t doing a kind of mundane job making coffee for people rushing to work. They barely looked at me like I was human.

Once a woman pointed at me covered in chocolate sauce and told her kid “that’s why you go to college”

I wondered how I could get myself to a point where I actually had some meaningful career. In high school I had never thought I would actually get that far. In high school I always joked around that I would work at a barista job forever, but there was kind of some truth to it. I never thought I was capable of anything else. Now I knew I needed to apply myself so I could actually do something. I felt like I was reaching for something I didn’t know how to grasp, because I never had any sense of direction.

I got to college and threw myself intently into my work, even neglecting myself to do so. It’s like I did some kind of complete 180 from high school and felt so useless if I wasn’t constantly doing something with my hands. I felt like I had to make up for all the time I lost to my apathy in high school. I didn’t want to be with my own thoughts for even a second.

Alone in the car or by myself in my room. Clearly, it wasn't a very sustainable way to live so

I burnt out pretty hard. So hard I had to go home and reset.

I went back to work at a parisian style bakery near my home town for a while, and every so often I would use my French on some customer from Quebec. Once a woman asked me how I knew French, and I briefly explained that I had studied the language in school, but mostly picked up on it by living in Haiti for a while. She actually opened a conversation with me about it and seemed interested. I talked to her a little about my sex ed program and how it was cut short by a hurricane before her husband yanked her away to drink their coffees in peace. It was only a few minutes, but I was shocked because I actually felt sort of heard. My professors at school had given me some encouragement, but I kind of assumed they did that because they were paid to. But here was someone who was actually interested in what I had to say. She had listened to me, even though I was some kid working in a coffee shop.

It was then I realized I needed to find some kind of a balance. I think I’m like my mother in a lot of ways, despite the years in my youth I spent denying it, pushing my way around it. We both like to carry this intense weight of the world on our shoulders, like it's our job to fix everything and wrap it up nicely in a box. It’s a tired cliche, but I guess a time comes in a young adult’s life when they realize they are their parents.

I was a kid headed for a disaster whether the hurricane hit me or not. I think I was waiting for some kind of rock bottom to pull me out of intense cynicism and self doubt.

At 18 years old I saw firsthand the raw power of the earth threaten the real fragility of my body, something that took me years to even process. After the wind settled, I witnessed the power of my own privilege pull me out of a disaster zone and back into safety and clean water. Now, at 22 years old I still don’t have all the answers, but one of the most important things I learned was that I didn’t need to in order to have power. I see the power of words and the impact one person can have. I see that I don’t need to bear the weight of the world all on my shoulders. I also see that I don’t have to run marathons or deliver babies in Haiti to be my mother’s daughter and make an impact.