It has been a few weeks since my trip to Haiti and return, yet I found it really hard to write about while I was there and almost as hard upon being back. It is such a different world there—a chaotic place where nothing makes sense, least of all the suffering of the vast majority of the people. Haiti is a country that reeks of suffering and misery, more than anywhere I’ve ever been. You can feel it in the stifling heat, the relentless sun, the smell of urine and unwashed bodies, and the glazed, blank, hopeless look in people’s eyes. It permeates the atmosphere.
The thing I find the most difficult to grapple with emotionally when traveling to developing countries, and in Haiti especially, is the profound divide between our world in America and their world. We know of almost none of the hardships that they must endure, and they are able to experience none of the luxuries and characteristics of American life. You might as well be going back in time when you step into Haiti—people living in huts, people starving, without clothes, urinating and sleeping in the streets. Huts and cement buildings, corrugated tin roofs and side walls, trash littered everywhere on the crowded streets.
This is how I imagine many people had to live before the Industrial Revolution and the beginning of the modern era. Suffering and pain have always been inextricably tied to life, and there is nothing inherently wrong with suffering—it makes us stronger, reminds us we’re alive and that life is a fragile thing, and is something that can develop and shape our person. Before the last 100 years or so, this kind of poverty was just a fact of life, shared by most of the human race. The difficulty I have in accepting the kind of suffering that people face in Haiti and many other places globally in this modern age is how unnecessary it is, and how unjustly distributed. There is no reason in this age of modernity for people to live like that. It is unfair, and it is morally despicable for some of us to be born into a life where we feel entitled to manicures, private jets, vacations in the Bahamas, and weekly trips to the mall— when meanwhile millions of people wake up in the morning unsure of whether they’re going to be able to find enough work to be able to feed their children a meal of rice that day.
How can we live in a world with such discrepancies? Why do the great majority of people seem to ignore it? How can we live with ourselves? What possibly can justify our continuation of our exclusive lifestyles of luxury and waste, when other human beings-- our fellow human beings-- are born into life on the dirt floor of a thatched hut, born into a life of poverty and disease and a ceaseless lack of security?
These are the questions that continue to materialize as a persistent lump in my stomach when I see how other people, other people just like me but born into a different life, are forced to live. And the worst knowledge of all is the cold facts of history—this is no accident. The reason that some people are rich and some are poor is that history has determined who the victors of society have been, and our wealth has been built on the backs of the ancestor’s of today’s poor. The injustice is not only that the fortunate of the world happen to be born into wealth and a stable society, but that all of their fortune has been taken from others, built upon the stolen resources of others. These others who are now living in poverty. It is no accident of history, but a result, a visible outcome of imperialism, consistent colonization, and historical abuse of resources, human beings, and whole societies. I, like others, may not be directly responsible for these historical (and present) crimes, but I have certainly accepted the fruits of them in my life, without really caring about how they were obtained.
I don’t know what the solution to this, the problem of our times, is—but I do know that it begins with people waking up to the reality of our world and accepting the startling truth that perhaps we are not entitled to something just because we are born to it.
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