Last week I visited the Baie d’Orange community in southeastern Haiti. It was less than a two-hour drive from where I live, and only about an hour from where the road ends in Peredo. I have wanted to sit down and write about my experience there each day since, but have found myself speechless. Worse than that, I have spent the week on edge, out of balance. My current state is best described in Creole: tèt chaje, or overwhelmed. But this morning, when No Impact Man suggested that there are moments we feel that everything is just as it is meant to be, I couldn’t help but open up this document and start typing.

Baie d’Orange, Haiti is a place most people have never heard of. Even fewer knew of its existence before the first deaths from starvation were reported there in November 2008. Haiti was hit by four powerful storms in August and September, including two hurricanes. I have blogged here before about the devastation, and the hunger that is becoming famine in Haiti. I have even written about Baie d’Orange and how Guypson’s visit there made him older, how it changed him to see and touch the people and their desperation.

Now it’s time to tell my story. The first thing that blew my mind was the riverbed in Peredo. When you leave our village, Cyvadier, you travel east through Oban, Raymond les Bains, Cayes-Jacmel, Kabik, Ti Mouillage and Marigot before Peredo, which is a port town where the road ends. I often talk about Haiti’s distorted riverbeds and the story they tell about erosion. No one can truly grasp the vastness of the devastation of these riverbeds from a photograph, you just can’t comprehend how huge the destruction is. So we decided to make a video on the camera to share the experience of crossing the wasteland that is the Peredo River. It takes more than two minutes to cross the riverbed in a Land Rover. You bounce across a field of white rocks and limestone sand, mixed with fertile soil from the mountainsides above. Each time it rains, all the land that has been stripped of trees loosens and begins to wash down the mountain. Most of it ends up in this riverbed, silting out down here on the coastal plain, forcing the water to run off to the edges, constantly widening the riverbed.

After we passed the river we looked at each other, catching our breaths. Then we began to observe the ravine behind the houses. This was not a riverbed at all, but only a run off from the storms of 2008. It was so vast and breathtaking that we decided the only way to share the true size of it was to make Guypson go out to the middle (below).

As you turn away from this site, you enter into a deeply carved canal between homes. This road was filled with flood waters and rain for more than thirty consecutive days, and it lowered the roadway more than ten feet below the houses on either side of the street. We drove down into the rut and I felt a chill in my spine, imagining water rushing down towards me.

Climbing off the coastal plain, we followed a dusty road that zig-zags up a mountain that is named for the fact that it is so steep that if you have an accident there, even a dog won’t be able to find you. Several SUVs passed us on the road, with their windows up and the air conditioners on. They spewed dust out behind them, suffocating all the people on the sides of the road. It was just that time of day when schools are letting out, and more than once we watched a school yard fill with dust from a passing truck. These vehicles were heading to or from the same place as we were, and we talked about how international organizations seldom recognize the impact they are having on the way to their destination.

As we climbed higher we had a stunning panoramic view of the mountains and Caribbean Sea below. The ocean is four colors here, from lightest aquamarine to darkest slate blue. There were many new scars on the mountains since my last visit here three years ago and most were formed during the 2008 storms. We turned off the car to take pictures and had our obligatory break down (the Land Rover refuses to behave on road trips) and as we waited I got motion sick just looking through the empty space to the deforested mountains before me.

We finally turned off the main road to Baie d’Orange once we were on top of the mountain. I was surprised at how good the road was, and Guypson explained to me that this is a truck route, and that trucks have been delivering food aid here for the last couple of months. When Baie d’Orange hit the news, the local elected officials (called CASECs) were overwhelmed with the job of handling all the help. Most notably, Medecins san Frontieres, Save the Children and the UN World Food Programme have been providing nutrition and medical assistance to the people of Baie d’Orange. These big trucks had carved a decent road through the orange soil of the village.

That’s right, in Baie d’Orange the soil is orange, and after having the car breakdown on the sunny side of the mountain, I had already had enough sun. The soil is orange, the sky is blue and then the cabbage! Such a dark and beautiful green against the earth. My head was starting to hurt and I hadn’t seen anything yet. On some level I forgot my body while in Baie d’Orange; I was overwhelmed by everything there, trying to take in so much while trying to feel none of it. It’s like my friend Anne used to say, “To be truly empathetic would probably destroy us.”

We pulled the car up behind the distribution center near a small stage. There was an event happening, and USAID t-shirts were everywhere. The first thing I noticed was all the babies and small children. Each woman was surrounded by a small group of ti moun (kids) and there was very little open space. We were on the top of the hill in the open sun, and there was barely a spot of shade. To our right, a blue plastic tarp was hanging over small benches, a waiting area for the most desperate cases of malnourished children, in need of medicine and supplements. There were very few men in the area.

I met the woman with the twins behind Mèt Benesoir’s house. He is one of the CASECs of Baie d’Orange, and KONPAY worked with him to distribute the emergency food rations we brought when news of the famine broke in November. I was ducking behind his house to escape the eyes of the crowd waiting in his front yard. Most were lined up to receive cards for the food distribution, others sat in groups around the yard. A generator was making noise on the porch and when I approached someone kindly grabbed a chair for me to sit. I couldn’t do it though, couldn’t be the only white person in sight and also the only person sitting on a chair!

So I walked away on the pretense of looking at Benesoir’s broken cistern. The mother was sitting in the tiniest patch of shade under a bush with five small children. Three were babies under one year old. She told me that the two tiny girls, five months old, are hers, and they are the youngest of her eight children. She is thirty-two, the same age as I am, and I didn’t ask her anything else, except if I could hold one of her babies for a moment. I was too afraid she would tell me how hungry they are and I would have nothing to say. Instead, she handed me Joanna, and explained that the twin sitting next to her is Joann.

What do you think about when you are surrounded by people on the verge of starvation? I thought about how cool and crisp the air there felt on my skin. I thought about the colors all around me, the way I added to the vibrancy in my bright red skirt. I thought about the orange hair on the children’s heads and the slack breasts in the mouths of the babies. I held tiny Joanna for a few moments until it was time to go and meet with the CASECs, and she smiled into my eyes.

Our meeting was not a long one. The CASECs were busy and in the midst of handling other international groups, some expected and some unexpected. One of the community leaders explained to us that when the village was in the news, organizations came to give food. This created a lot of fighting in the community. Although they had hoped for a project to create employment, or tools to work in the agricultural gardens, it was only emergency food distribution. In the village there are no households with fewer than eight children. The youngest and oldest members of the community need food, medicine and also clean water to recover.

We hope to work with the local officials to plant a garden that can benefit the community. The land will be cultivated, creating employment in the village, and the harvest will be distributed. Individuals will remit a percentage for the produce, and the funds will be collected and used as community collateral in the purchase of additional land to enlarge the garden. KONPAY will fund the first garden plot, and will subsidize the cost of replicating the project. Not only will the produce give short-term relief, the gardens will improve the quality of the land itself. In addition to the gardens, we hope to partner with the community to build a new cistern to provide potable water, and a tree nursery that will distribute trees that can enhance family-level food security and also halt erosion on already denuded hillsides.

I keep remembering the noise of the generator and the stress of the crowd in Mèt Benesoir’s front yard, and I can’t imagine how he is handling the stress of the tragedy and opportunity that has landed right on top of him. After losing so much to the storms of 2008, Benesoir’s entire life is being turned upside down and he now finds himself in a position of much greater power than he could have expected. The weight of the responsibility must be incredible.

As we drove away from Baie d’Orange, I had the face of Joanna on my mind. All of these hungry people, baking in the sun as they wait for help to arrive. One thing that the CASECs said during the meeting was starting to sink in: “The people are ashamed to come here to get a little rice. Many prefer to die of hunger at home.”

I began this blog by referencing another blog, No Impact Man. Colin and I don’t have a lot in common in terms of our daily lives, but we are both living out of our comfort zone in an attempt to right a wrong we experience in the world – the destruction of our environment. Living in Haiti brings me face to face with the most urgent and painful result of our environmental crisis: the death of children and the elderly in a village where environmental degradation has led to poverty and starvation. Colin and I are also both parents, and becoming a parent has definitely changed my experience of both the world’s environment and the suffering of people here in Haiti.

To get back to where I began, No Impact Man didn’t leave us with not wanting to change a thing about the world. I can’t help but react strongly to the idea that the world is just as it is supposed to be. I fear too many people get comfortable with the injustice of poverty because they live in a place where they can enjoy the view of the snow from the comfort of their home. Most of the world’s population lives precariously balanced on the edge of the kind of desperation I just encountered in Baie d’Orange, and they live without enough food, never mind shelter. So I have to say there is no moment I relax into the idea that the world is just what it is meant to be. It is certainly not meant to be this way.

In the end, No Impact Man’s question shifted quite fundamentally to: “Tell us what you think, in your own personal life, is wonderful about this world we live in? What, for you, makes this planet worth saving?”

That’s a much easier question for me to ponder. I can easily tell you that I encounter a million tiny reasons each day to remind me what makes this planet worth saving, and what is wonderful in the world. From the sunrise over the coconut trees, to my son drawing trucks on the floor with his chalk, to the children singing as they pass the gate on the way to school, to the four colors of the Caribbean sea and the tiny toothless smile of Joanna in Baie d’Orange, there is no shortage of beautiful things. As another lover of Haiti once wrote, “In Haiti all the important things are beautiful. Only reality needs a bit of improvement.” (Herbert Gold)

Haiti is a wicked and wonderful place. It can give such comfort, such peace, but it also takes all innocence, all illusion. You have to be willing to suffer for your moments of beauty, and you have to be able to protect your belief in kindness despite witnessing a daily assault on human dignity. From its moments of perfect beauty, to the disturbing proximity of so much that is wrong in the world – you can’t help but lose your balance, and be a little tèt chaje.

I haven’t been right since my visit to Baie d’Orange, and my partner suggested maybe I should avoid trips like it if they have a bad effect on me. But it is only appropriate to feel bad when you witness something so terrible; it is only normal to have it weigh on you for days afterward. I look at my personal life and the place I call home, and I see the things that are wonderful and make the world worth saving. I don’t get the feeling that I don’t want to change a thing. Instead I get the feeling that I can change a thing, and I renew my resolve do just that.