Today in the NYTimes (online) there was a blog post by Ross Douthat on “The Influential Books Game”. Apparently it’s been making the circles on various blogs and I thought, let’s give it a try, shall we? The only rule is, “go with your gut”. Don’t spend 2 hours on this.
I shouldn’t be surprised, but pretty much every book is a direct reflection of where I was, developmentally.
These are in very rough chronological order.
One thing stands out. I’m 29, and these books fall between the age range of 10 and 22. What happened the last 7 years? I read some great books. Books that changed the way I thought about the world (if it were the top 11, not 10, White Man’s Burden would be here). But those books you read growing up, when you’re molding your perspective of the world (not to say that mold ever really hardens–it should remain pliable with the constant application of fresh material), are the ones that stick.
Put some of your most influential ones in the comment section.
Boys Dancing at Port Salud, Haiti from Lee on Vimeo.
In lieu of actually writing my own content (too busy), here’s a collection of some recent Haitian news and developments. Click the link below to keep reading.
Read the rest of this entry »
Click the link below to see a drive through Les Cayes, narrated by myself and Pachu, a friend of mine. Next time we’ll do more narration.
You go across the street from your house. You’ve been hosting a baptism party for the past four hours for the father who works on the grounds where you live. There is a lot of food. Fried chicken. Pork. Plantains, rice, beans, and special hatian coleslaw without mayo but with a good deal of spice. Some people come for the food, and leave when the food is gone, other people come for the beer, and leave when the beer is gone.
You meet two Haitians who speak good English, a 22 year old who is still in secondary school (11th grade) and a 28 year old who is starting engineering school. You are not sure why they want to be friends with you, but they enjoy talking to you in English, and though the conversation stalls time to time, you can fall back on reliable jokes about women and beer and religion. Maybe not religion. There is a constant pull on the rope between Christianity and voodoo, on what is deemed right and proper in the eyes of blancs (white people, foreigners, etc.) and what people actually believe (a mélange of Christianity and voodoo—it is not a question of whether voodoo exists, because it does, it is a question of how much energy and attention one gives it). The bar is called a “resto”, and there is at least one on every block—a home converted into a bar, with a tin roof, tables and chairs, and plenty of cheap cold beer. Some tables have 20-30 empty bottles on them. People come and go, but the place is never packed. Everyone is either stopping by for a quick beer, or leaving to go to the next party.
You drink beers with your blanc coworker and the two haitan men who live with their parents, paying for their beers because it isn’t a big deal (12 beers for $10), listening to everything they have to say. On your way up to buy another round you meet a man whose father lives in Myami (Miami), who speaks pretty good English, who has clearly drank too much. You instantly want to be his friend, despite his intoxication. He has a certain insider-ness to him that your two friends don’t, and you feel immediately as if he will be able to show you things in Les Cayes that your two friends can’t. You ask him what he does and he says, in broken English, that he is here (the bar) every day, he drinks every day, and every day that god allows him to do this is a blessing. You go against your better judgment and take his philosophy at face value. It’s easier that way. And it’s your day off. You just want to have fun.
An hour passes. Maybe two. The man whose father lives in Myami invites you across the street, where you have been hearing music coming from. The man at the iron gate asks for 150 goude per person (4 people x 150 goude = $15). You slip him an American $5 bill instead and are ushered inside. You see what resembles an abandoned parking lot. There is dirt, and concrete walls, and lots of space. Not many people, with a stage built out of wood, poles resembling bamboo propping the whole thing up, with a generator purring underneath the stage, the gasoline chugging along, competing with the man singing. On stage there are perhaps ten to fifteen musicians, jamming away, playing a mix of reggae and Haitian Kompa. The music is exceptional, and yet, there are only 5 or 6 people in this vast, dirt parking lot watching. It is easy for you to see this as a metaphor for Haiti—great promise, lots of talent and hope and energy, with nobody watching—yet you resist the impulse because it is too simplistic, too diminutive.
The son of the man who lives in Myami pulls up stools for you and your friends; you crack open another beer; you listen to music that would be worshiped in most other countries, that would have people lining down the block for the chance to pay to listen to, and you sit in a half-empty parking lot and keep the sensation of surrealism at bay as you try to simply enjoy the scene for what it is—spontaneous, exciting, with that ever present tinge of danger running underneath, because deep down you know that you are not supposed to be there, that this is a moment meant to be treasured by locals, not foreigners, and that your presence somehow diminishes this for others. This is purely speculative of course. You can’t possibly presume to know the other listeners thoughts or intentions—but you do know that as long as you feel as if you are an outsider, others will feel as if you are one too.
On July 17th, the US State Department issued an updated travel advisory for those wishing to visit Haiti. While it’s obviously still not the most flattering of advisories, there’s an important distinction: the previous advisory, issued in January of ‘09, stated that only “essential travel” should take place to Haiti.
Here’s the new language:
The State Department warns U.S. citizens to exercise a high degree of caution when traveling to Haiti. While the overall security situation has improved, political tensions remain, and the potential for politically-motivated violence persists. This Travel Warning replaces the Travel Warning dated January 28, 2009, and is being issued to provide updated information on country conditions, and to alert Americans to ongoing security concerns and on contacting and registering with the U.S. Embassy in Haiti.
You can read the full briefing here.
From Conde Naste Traveler, a surprisingly upbeat, optimistic, just plain nice article about Haiti.
You can call Haiti the Cleopatra of countries—its ravishing natural assets, thrilling history, and magnetic culture have long made select visitors swoon. Its tortured past, however, has made it the Caribbean nation that tourism largely forgot. But this, reports Amy Wilentz, may have to change
Read the rest here.
Nice photo isn’t it? I had a different one, of a slum with some dudes pushing a burnt out car, but I thought, why reinforce all those negative stereotypes we have about Haiti? I think, and this is very much myself included, there is an element of racism in the way we think and grapple with Haiti.
Wow! Self-reflection! Patronization! These are only some of the great things you’ll find on my blog in the months to come. I officially welcome you, and hope you look around. I’ll try to update as often as possible, even if it means sacrificing some of my work in Haiti (priorities), which could possibly result in children learning less than they would have had I not had a blog. Well, guess we’ll never know!
-Lee
PS: If you don’t know where to go from here, some good places to look would be:
Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well, yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless. He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is partly one of time, he would explain. Whearas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than the next, moves slowly, over a period of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he felt most at home.
Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well, yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.
He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is partly one of time, he would explain. Whearas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than the next, moves slowly, over a period of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he felt most at home.
–Paul Bowles, from The Sheltering Sky
