ou gen...

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.

My mother pulls our childhood paper dolls out of storage—we will be staying with some ten-year-old girls. The options are laughable. We have a Princess Diana paper doll, a Barbie paper doll (both flashing uncanny, white-toothed smiles), a Peter Rabbit paper doll, American Girl paper dolls, and a slew of Edwardian paper dolls that we agree are too dear to part with (we named many them after family members; each is stored in a separate, labled envelope and I can recount their wardrobes in detail). I settle on the American Girls—somehow I feel better that one of them is half Puerto Rican, although I can’t bring myself to include the accompanying story books with "American Girl" stamped triumphantly on the covers.

J—, whose name I have known since I was fifteen, but have never met, is planning to meet us a the airport. My sister emails me his picture, in the event that she doesn’t make it to Port-au-Prince as scheduled.

The news is quiet, if not guardedly optimistic. In June the World Bank, IMF and Inter-American Development Bank canceled $1.2 billion owed to them by Haiti. Bill Clinton was appointed as a U.N. envoy, and visited the country in July. Earlier this week, Parliament voted 55-6 to increase the minimum wage from approximately $1.75 to $3.75 per day. The demonstrators protesting outside Parliament had demanded a five-dollar daily wage. Only 250,000 of the country’s 9 million citizens will be eligible for the wage ruling,

I brush up on my non-existent Creole. In the midst of the list of rudimentary phrases—How are you? My name is… I am sick—appears Ou gen SIDA. You have AIDS.

At first it seems logical. Perhaps a helpful phrase to know. But then I wonder when—how—a foreigner might use this phrase, so bare and stripped of context or compassion. You have AIDS. A doctor, knowing so little of the language, would certainly never be the bearer of such news. Ou gen SIDA. The sentence, I finally realize, reeks of xenophobia and ignorance—the very sins that contributed to the rise of HIV in Haiti. As Paul Farmer argues in AIDS and Accusation, Haiti was long considered the source of the AIDS pandemic—one typical text describes Haiti as a “preindustrial society inhabited by ignorant, diseased peasants oblivious to the outside world”—when, in fact, the rise of the virus in Haiti is more than likely linked to foreign commerce, tourism, and political policies.