It’s easy to make friends when you’re traveling if you’re gregarious and don’t mind latching onto people and hanging on their social calendars for dear life. I’m fine with doing this. But it’s hard to meet people when you’re traveling in a country where you can’t go out by yourself, or at all after dark, and you can’t go to about half the city at all, and you don’t speak the language, and no one speaks English, and most people don’t speak French, and you stick out like a sore, albino thumb everywhere you go.
So I’m sitting on the balcony of the big, fenced in compound, watching people meander around the streets and enjoying the wind and the cool-ish day, trying to entertain myself with our slow internet and itching to travel. It’s not so much that I can’t entertain myself alone. I’m great at wasting whole days watching Netflix and checking Facebook and masturbating. That’s easy. But I could do all of that at home. I’m in a new country, in a part of the world I’ve barely been to. There’s a whole new culture and landscape and so much new food to eat. And I’m cooped up, behind my high walls, alone in a big house with nowhere to go.
According to the internet, there’s actually a lot of fun stuff to do in tha PAP. Bars and restaurants and movie theaters that charge 2$ a ticket. But being a rich white person, I can’t go anywhere without a driver and someone to meet at the other end.
Which brings me to something I’ve been thinking about a lot. White people here. We’re like macadamia nuts in a chocolate cookie – sort of weird looking, hard on the teeth, the part most people eat around. But we’re easy to spot. It’s weird how much seeing white people comforts me here. It feels sick to me, since I usually kind of hate white people. Even weirder because I know most of them work for the UN or some NGO whose work may be helping in a band-aid short term sense but is probably in the long run making Haiti aid-dependent, corrupt, and prey to corporate predators from the global north who capitalize on natural disasters and poverty to deliberately keep Haitian labor cheap and Haitian land exploitable.
But that being said, every time I see a white person I want to say Hi. And I know I’m not the only one. I was out for a walk with a girl who was staying at the house, another American, and we passed a tall French-looking white woman on the road. I looked at her the same way I would anyone else passing me on the sidewalk, and she just grinned at us. And then I realized – we were white. She was white. We were a tiny piece of home in a foreign land, all because of our race. Which isn’t to say there aren’t white Haitians or black foreigners. There just aren’t very many.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what it might be to travel here if I were black. Would there be the same precaution, the same wariness, the same feeling of being utterly out of place? When I ride down the road on the back of a motorcycle, people stare. A Belgian woman drove me home last night, and the boys in the tap-tap in front of us looked at us like we were two human-size guinea pigs in tutus driving a car. Or something. Not with hostility or with kindness, just strange, almost bewildered curiosity. I have never felt colonialism so deeply. I feel guilty for speaking French, and even worse for speaking English. I am Western arrogance personified.
But when I see others like me, I don’t feel that same hatred or dislike I feel for myself here. I think “PLEASE GOD SPEAK ENGLISH AT ME AND BE MY FRIEND.”
Particularly when I see white people on their own. It’s like seeing a dog walk on its hind legs. The big groups of white people – students, doctors, missionaries – stare at me even more than the Haitians do. The Haitians are, I think, by and large used to white people invading their country and not ever interacting with them. The white people conglomerations though look shocked. Here I am, some white chick sandwiched between two Haitians on the back of a motorcycle. I just look at them, aware of my Oreo cream filling appearance. They stare at me. We stare and are White at each other.
In the glance between two white people here are so many unspoken questions and curiosities. “What are you doing here? Hello, friend whose work I probably don’t approve of but I love you because you’re so obviously a clueless American like me and maybe if we stick together we’ll look less clueless.” In Europe, this might work. Find a traveling buddy and you’ll be more confident and maybe blend in more. In Haiti.. well, a double-stuffed Oreo still looks like an Oreo.
When I see white people on motorcycles, like me, I really lose it. I hate LouLou for driving so slow when they’re ahead of us.
“AFTER THAT WHITE DUDE!” I want to yell, and we’ll speed off into the sunset, pull up beside the stubbled, cargo panted wonder and I’ll say ” What up.” And we will be best friends.
Which takes me back to the question of what it would be like to come here if I were black. I remember talking to a black woman about traveling in Zambia, I think it was. She was with a student group, lots of white kids, and they got stared at and pointed out wherever they went. But not her. If she dressed normally, no one would know she was foreign until she opened her mouth. An invisible minority. I think it must be both comforting and alienating. Or is it how I feel when I travel somewhere like Italy? That race doesn’t seem to be an issue, because I am in the majority.
And yet – being white in Haiti feels more what I imagine colonial settlers felt like than racial minorities in the US feel like. I’m even more easily trusted by the police and the guards. I remember waiting outside the Brazilian Cultural Center while Milo talked to the guard. The guard was instantly suspicious, wondering what the hell this Haitian journalist was doing at his gate. He tried to explain how he was with a friend who was interested in checking out the cultural center. The guard was having none of it. And then he saw me. I spoke to him quickly in French, saying I do capoeira and I wanted to ask about the classes. And boom, we were let in. He laughed when we left and said “Ayyyy capoeira! Parana eeeeee.”
I laughed and finished the song. “Paranaueeee, paraná!” And we left.
The guards at the grocery stores (did I mention there are armed guards at the grocery stores?) smile and nod at me. Because I am white. And therefore, rich. And therefore, to be protected. I hate it on principle, but the honest truth is my alien status makes me feel safe. If I were black, they would ask me questions. Even in a black country, white people still make the rules and colonialism still persists.
I want to hate it, but I benefit from it.
Really, I just want someone to talk to about it. When I see white people around, I don’t really stare at them with curiosity. I more implore them with my eyes, like a dog caught peeing in the living room. Please, understand me. Let me be part of something. Be my friend.
And then we can go out places together, and maybe travel, and you and I can be interesting expat types together and I won’t be stuck in my house writing blog posts that you will never see.
