I once almost went to Haiti. My sister, who lived there when I was in high school, and returned there for her doctoral research, was in the country conducting interviews for her dissertation. We planned to rendezvous in Port-au-Prince and spend two weeks wrapping up her research and visiting her friends. And then she fell off a rock and injured her leg, the result of which was a thigh-length cast and a truncated trip. (Interested readers may also want to read about zombies and roosters and foreign girls wandering the Haitian mountainsides.)
Three years later, thanks to the same sister, I have a new plane ticket and hope to arrive in the capital next week (I have learned not to count planes until they touch the tarmac). This means, of course, that we get to go shopping for gifts. Would you prefer markers or crayons, if you were six? Coloring books have undergone quite the face lift in the last 20 years—they feature Disney characters, or Barbie, or worse, and have more stickers than places to color. We hunt down an air pump, so I can pack a deflated soccer ball. P—finds cleats at the thrift store, but my sister doesn’t know where they’d find a soccer field. All the books at the thrift store are Disney, or Barbie, or worse.
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