he announcement abruptly breaks the silence of the pressurized cabin, as the flight attendant shouts in clipped Creole
what sounds like an urgent message to the passengers. For a French speaker, hearing Creole spoken is somewhat like being roused from a deep slumber and listening to someone expound upon quantitative easing- you understand about 40 percent of the words spoken, but they stubbornly refuse to form any coherent nexus. Startled, I wait for her to switch to English to glean the details of our impending doom. "Ladies and gentlemen, please greet the person next to you, the person behind you, in front of you. Introduce yourself. You see, we do not have any pens for the customs forms, so please make a friend and share with him or her. "What ensues is by far the chattiest flight I have experienced, although my travel partner and I had our own pens and decided not to partake in the festivities. We exchange a bemused look that says, "only on a flight to Haiti."
The fun of a trip to Haiti actually begins long before you board a flight for the island. It begins when you tell your friend working at the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince to save a long weekend for you because you're coming to visit and he stares at you incredulously (and then follows up with you by e-mail no fewer than three times to confirm that you are actually, really coming to Haiti on vacation). It continues when you book your JetBlue flight on their website, and feel the frisson of excitement when you click on Confirm & Pay and know an adventure is in store. And it recurs each time you gauge the reaction of friends and co-workers when they ask you if you have any plans for the holiday weekend and you nonchalantly reply that you're heading to Haiti. Responses typically range from, "Didn't they have a massive earthquake?" to "You mean, on a volunteer trip?" to (the snarkier) "Why, were flights to Mogadishu booked up?" Yes, it's true that the fitful recovery from the 2010 earthquake is still ongoing, and that the island still desperately needs aid and development, and that the news filtering up to the U.S. from Haiti invariably involves disputed elections, cholera or immigrants. However, it's also true that Haiti has made significant progress since the earthquake, and its fledgling tourism industry is on the upswing. Perhaps Haiti has had enough matching-t-shirt-clad church group do-gooders of questionable utility and now needs tourists along with the jobs and investment that they bring. So more than anything, I was going to Haiti to find the answer to the question "Is Haiti ready for tourists?"
Haiti
Portes Ouvertes?
Photos by B. Baldwin
Writing by Brian Corteville
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