He’s wearing his favorite apron, which always makes me smile and a little bit horny in that post-feminist, “fuck machismo” kind of way that has taken on new meaning since moving to Cuba and marrying a Cubano.
“You’re awake! How do you feel? I’m making soup,” he says, gathering me in his arms.
Already I feel better, but dread what comes next.
“We have to go to the clinic,” he commands, encircling my waist and helping me to the couch. “You need to see the doctor and will probably need a cast.”
In the States (from where I’m self-exiled for a lot of reasons, including the dynamic that puts quality health care out of reach of the poor), a sprained ankle is usually treated at home using the RICE method: Rest, Ice, Compression, and Elevate. But not in Cuba where health care is free and there’s a doctor on nearly every block.
Even after so many years here, I’m still not used to health care as a right and on demand. Part of it is due to my hand-to-mouth upbringing and what amounted to the Christian Scientist’s approach to health care with which I grew up (i.e. suck it up, you’ll get better some day, some way). So I’m neither used to going to the doctor, nor do I like it. But how can I say no to a man in an apron who’s tending me and a pot of soup?
We’re summoned fairly quickly at our community clinic and attended in an examination room lit by a bare bulb over a wobbly desk. Doctora Yenly is young and thorough—declaring it a bad sprain without ordering X-rays, instead performing a clinical exam at which Cuban family doctors excel (not entirely by choice: X-rays and lab tests are expensive and use scarce resources, so are usually left as a last resort). Dra. Yenly prescribes ibuprofen and rest, plus I’m told to keep all weight off the bad foot for two weeks.
“You’ll have to find a pair of mulattas,” she says, escorting us out of the examination room. With that parting piece of medical advice, she gives us each a kiss on the cheek and sends us hobbling on our way.
Once we’re out of earshot, I turn to my husband. “What was that about the mulattas?”
My question is met with that same stumped pause that overcomes parents when their kids ask what holds up the sky? or why is the ocean blue? Suddenly he bursts out laughing.
“Not mulatas, mi vida,” annunciating slowly and clearly as if he were speaking to a six-year-old asking about the sky and ocean. “Muletas, you need a pair of muletas.” Only when he mimes tottering around propped up by something do I understand my mistake: I don’t need two hot chicks of mixed race, but simply a pair of crutches.
Like so many times before and since, Cuba succeeds in making me feel like that six-year-old, pointing up such silly, laughable mistakes. But rest assured, I’ll never forget the word for crutches—I just hope I won’t have cause to use it again any time soon.
2. Anvil
It’s dark still, but I can’t sleep. The drone and clank of earthmoving equipment through the long night, the acrid burning garbage fumes pressing down, and chirping cell phones conspire me awake. But above all, I’m roused today, like all days, by the “gringo alarm clock”—incessantly crowing cocks. It’s astounding, the number of roosters, hens, and chicks running around our tent camp at the defunct military hospital in central Port-au-Prince.
I’ve never understood how folks keep track of their free-running fowl in the developing world. How do they know which of the chicks pecking at the hard, packed earth is theirs? How come they aren’t stolen? Why don’t they make a run for it, the dumb birds? Here, just a month after the earthquake that cursed Haiti even further, I’m doubly baffled by chicken behavior—how can they run around willy nilly with so many hungry people about?
When I emerge from my blue igloo, a speck in the sea of tents belonging to the Cuban medical team, the sun is just rising, and with it another day of hunger, amputations, and crookedly knit bones for Haiti. Already I’m sweating like swine. The heat here—suffocating and foul-smelling—is like only one other I’ve known: New York City subway cars in the old days, before they had air conditioning. In this pre-dawn moment, as the sun and soldiers begin to stir, an ominous light hovers above the clearing where clothes lines are strung. Walking towards the wrinkled bras, t-shirts, and jeans hanging as listlessly as the girl I saw dying of malaria yesterday, I’m convinced the metallic, cold light is being thrown by fluorescents. But it’s just an odd, eerie light hanging over the piles of dried almond leaves littering the ground.
I’m startled by loud voices, what sounds like a squabble but is just how Haitians communicate, everything passionate, everything a possible argument. It’s coming from the spontaneous refugee settlement abutting our camp, a few families trying to make it one more day. The women and children fill their buckets at our spigot, struggling to protect the liquid gold from sloshing as they pass our tents. Since many Cubans share genetic similarities with Haitians, it’s hard to know who is who. I cover all bases with the smiling fellow sweeping up the almond leaves, starting with bonjour followed by a quick buenos días.
Good day? Let’s hope so.
Hope is as scarce here as ice: that small refugee settlement adjacent to our camp? It was razed while we were vaccinating all comers in the sprawling tent city across from the Presidential Palace. The freshly cleared land, now free of chickens and trash, is being prepared for the new Ministry of Public Health. So they say, but rumors are a staple in the disaster realm. I worry for the families, our neighbors, who were surviving there. What will they do? Where will they go? For now, they’re squeezed into a narrow strip of no-man’s-land with their few belongings—a plastic tub, a cook pot, some clothes—piled outside their tent flap. All day, bulldozers mound detritus closer and closer to the makeshift kitchen the families cobbled together, the women and children doing most of the work.
Later that day it starts raining and doesn’t stop. As night falls and deepens, through those long, dark hours and at daybreak, it’s still raining.
“How did you sleep?” I ask my neighbor, a doctor from Guantánamo who had been serving in Haiti a year already when the quake hit and treats her patients in capable Creole.
“OK, but I wake up tired.”
We all do. Sleep is elusive, especially when it’s raining. With each drop you think of a different patient or person—the malnourished four-month-old; the young girl caring for a trio of smaller siblings; and the twelve-year-old boy who is now the head of his household, made fast a man on that Tuesday. No matter how much good the world is doing Haiti, regardless of the size and sincerity of the tender outpouring, no one can control our most pressing problem: the rain. Perhaps more than any other place on earth, in Haiti circa March 2010, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
Leaving the Cuban camp, we make our way to the primary care post set up in one of Port-au-Prince’s hardest hit areas. Toxic dust fills our eyes and noses and mouths if we’re not careful. There are people living in cars and tents are pitched in the middle of rubble-fringed streets. Even folks whose homes are intact prefer to sleep in tents in the driveway or family courtyard. The earthquake is too fresh in their minds, the massive aftershocks fresher still. Signs on the outside of partially crushed homes read: “Help us! We need water and food,” in three (or more) languages.
Flies swarm over garbage, shit, people. Four-story buildings are flattened like millefeuille pastries—thinking about what lies between the layers is ill-advised. Other buildings dangle concrete-encrusted rebar from skewed balconies like Christmas lights or strings of rock candy. People are starving to death, yet there are mounds of food for sale: fried chicken, grilled hotdogs, and corn on the cob, fresh fruits, vegetables, bread, and rice.
And I thought Cuba was surreal.
Inside the camps, conditions are not fit for cattle, but you wouldn’t know it looking at the children. Smiling and laughing and dancing in spite of it all, no matter that they’re barefoot and bare-bottomed. They’re adorable and wide eyed, playing alongside garbage heaps shouting “blan! blan!” (whitey! whitey!) with affec
tion as I walk by. I flash them the peace and thumbs up sign and dance to music only we can hear. It’s my only way to communicate beyond my high school French. I make them smile, just for this one moment; Patch Adams I am not.
To be honest, the scene here is depressing and some days even all those smiling, jigging kids can’t help me shake it. The stench of shit, piss, and garbage envelops us, unavoidable and constant and the visuals are assaulting: by day, little boys and grown men lather up naked in the street while U.S. soldiers look on through dark shades, guns slung casually by their sides; by night, young girls sleep in doorways hunched beneath pink, threadbare blankets.
It’s fair to say that every last person in Port-au-Prince is sleep deprived these days. There is so much to keep us awake at night—the rain, thoughts of the homeless families, widows with AIDS, TB, anemia, and scabies—but it is the terrible, horrific tales of rape that terrorize my waking moments. What protection can a single mother in an overcrowded, pestilent refugee camp provide her teenage daughter from the men who enter in the predawn to beat and rape innocent children? From the reports we’re getting and the patients we’re seeing, none, it seems.
The rubble, of course, remains. Some motions are made to clear it—in buildings prioritized by the U.S. high command or their private subcontractors (one never can tell) and by men salvaging rebar. It’s part of the permanent landscape it seems, these piles of pulverized rocks and crumbled facades. We just step over and through it every day, on every street. This capacity to move on and around is how Haitians cope—with death squads, foreign occupation, and natural disaster, too.
As for us, we share almost-cold Cokes and Colt 45s sold by Wilfred, a Haitian who set up a small commissary in our camp. Prestige, the local beer, is in high demand and runs out fast. One Cuban nurse, who has been in Haiti for more than two years, takes a long pull on his beer and tells me: “Best to stay anaesthetized.” Beer and moonshine: effective weapons here in the arsenal of cope, including ours.
“Thanks to God, you’re better,” my Haitian friend Madsen tells me when I catch him up on my now-cured explosive diarrhea.
God is very much on the tip of the tongues of the folks I meet here. Jesus is ubiquitous and more popular (but only slightly) than the NY Lotto numbers—a serious vice in Haiti. Alongside the daily numbers—on buses, in barber shops, taped to tents, tagged on partially fallen walls—the Word of God is found everywhere.
Descending the steep hillside upon which is perched a large, makeshift orphanage where the Cuban team is providing free health services, I see a garage door that proclaims: “God loves us. He saved us.” That’s some heavy food for thought and doesn’t help lift the anvil that’s been pressing on my heart ever since I huffed up that hill to where 347 orphans are ill, thirsty, hungry, and too alone.
I wasn’t expecting this unwavering faith. None of my pre-trip research prepared me for the Jesus craze that grips Haiti. Casual conversations peppered with holy references and the massive Sunday migrations through the dust-choked streets by young and old alike, Bibles tucked close, catch me unawares. Heathen though I am, I’m grateful these beleaguered people have something to hold on to. From Tribeca to Cite Soleil, when disaster strikes, believers find succor in their faith. Indeed, I remember something like envy overtaking me as I walked downtown on September 12, 2001, passing full to overflowing churches.
“You’re just cheap. You should give your salary to the church,” a Haitian medical student teases a Cuban surgeon in the emergency room.
My ears prick up at this playful culture clash unfolding. Turns out the medical student gives 75% of her salary to her church and she is trying to convince the surgeon to follow suit. Her beauty and killer smile don’t win him over to the light and when he asks why she would do that, she explains the church is where she finds love and happiness and so is entitled to her earnings. More dense food for thought.
After a particularly terrible sleepless night, I’m assaulted by this godliness. Seems someone in the massive tent city up the block thought it a good idea to blast religious pop on a powerful sound system starting at 6 A.M. sharp. In my mind, food, potable water, and safe shelter would be more appropriate for the thousands now getting an earful of “Merci, Jesus.” Thank you, Jesus? For what I wonder? Later that day, I see a sign and point it out to my doctor buddies: “God is the chef of this house?!” Everyone has a good laugh at my bad French: clearly God is the boss of this house, not the chef. But while He might be the boss of those houses still standing, I’m dubious.
To my God-fearing friend Madsen, whose younger sister just died of anemia, I tell it like I see it.
“No, friend. It wasn’t God that cured my dysentery. It was the Cuban doctors and the almighty power of antibiotics.”
Madsen nods. “You know, we Haitians have a saying here in the countryside: ‘After God, the Cuban doctors.’”
And Lotto.
Who says Haiti’s godforsaken?
Havana-based journalist and author Conner Gorry covers Cuban health and medicine for MEDICC Review, a privileged gig that has sent her to post-quake scenarios in Pakistan and Haiti with Cuban disaster relief teams, as well as deep inside the island’s health system. She has written a dozen guidebooks and maintains “Here is Havana,” a blog about life on the “wrong” side of the Straits, on heinously slow dial-up while smoking her daily five cent cigar. Researching and updating her app, “Havana Good Time,” keeps her (mostly) out of trouble.
KATE McCAHILL
Notes on My Father
She takes an anthropological view of a parent.
There aren’t any seats left in the Calcutta domestic terminal, so my father and I sit on our packs. We lean against the grimy wall and pass a bag of nuts back and forth, nuts that have come as far as we have—all the way from Lake Placid, New York. We left for India two days ago, and now, five flights and two airport breakfasts later, we are propped up against these gray airport walls watching the display as it ticks away the names of this nation’s cities. People line up and shuffle out the big main door towards their planes. While they wait to exit through that door, women breastfeed their babies and grandmothers nap. Ladies adjust their veils, lengths of translucent emerald and saffron and turquoise fabric. Fathers buy sandwiches and fat samosas from the snack stand near the bathrooms. My father takes it all in, his latest book unopened in his hands, his khakis creased from all this time wearing them. He is taller than everyone else in this room, but people have grown tired of looking over at us, and so now we’re just being ignored. We’ve accepted that we’ll never get a seat while we wait; speedy grandmothers hover over the emptying ones, poised to rush in and occupy.
Our flight is finally called, and by the time we’re seated on that plane, we’re asleep. When we land in Bagdogra an hour later, we stumble outside into the humid afternoon and blink into the sun that beats off the flattened grass and the distant, snow-capped mountains. The sky, streaked with filmy haze, presses onto us. We hire a taxi for twenty dollars and then ride for four hours, first through mad Bagdogra and its crazed neighbor Siliguri, with the men who stitch mattresses together on the side of the road and those big, unfinished plaster hotels. Bicycles and cows and trucks clot the road, and then finally the city dwindles into fields of tea and corn. The route rises and winds and finally pitches up into jungle, and then we are in the Himalayan foothills. The views are so incredible that I feel guilty sleeping, but I can’t keep my eyes open and neither can my father. While our young driver navigates the curves and blasts American dance music, our heads loll in the backseat and the sky grows dark.
We close our eyes on our first night in India to the sound of the rain on the Dekeling Hotel’s tin roof. When we wake twelve hours later, we look out over the clouds to the distant hills, swathed in green bushes of tea. We eat breakfast and write an email to my mother, who decided she’d be okay with never setting foot on the subcontinent and so stayed home with our cat and dog and my brother. And then we leave Darjeeling, because we ar
en’t here for the cities. We want to be in those mountains, those Himalayas we can see from our hotel room window, the ones my father has always dreamed about. So on that first morning we drive with the guide we hired weeks ago over email to a tiny checkpoint town three hours from Darjeeling. We print our names and passport numbers in a dusty ledger at the offices of the border control, and then, just as the rain is tapering off, we start hiking.
We climb a rocky road that starts out wide, with gentle curves, but quickly grows steep and narrow and studded with ruts. We stop often for tea, for pictures, and to enter tiny monasteries dotted along the route. For the whole of this five-day trek, we will straddle India and Nepal, crossing into one country and then into the other as the trail dictates. We pass men who herd goats and cows who herd themselves, and miles and miles of prayer flags, long faded by the rain and wind but still flapping in tatters. These are the Himalayan foothills, we remind ourselves, breathless.
“Have you ever been anywhere cooler than this?” my father asks me once as we amble past a herd of billy goats. I shake my head, no, but in truth it doesn’t matter whether I’ve been anywhere cooler than this or not. What matters to me is that my father, from the tone of his question, has told me that he has not.
On the second day of our trek, we pass an Indian man in a neon green poncho and a white baseball cap, the visor still flat as the day it was purchased. He stops when he notices my father, puts his hands on his hips and blocks our way, not unkindly. He draws a handkerchief from his pocket and wipes his brow, taking a moment to catch his breath, and then, “Where you are from?” he asks. He doesn’t look at me; he is watching my father. It is perhaps the twentieth time so far that Dad has been asked this, but he still replies enthusiastically: “We’re from the States!”
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