Past the Point of Shock

One Sunday evening, a couple of weeks before Christmas, I went to the Quisqueya Chapel Christmas pagent. From the soft southern drawl of the couple reading the narration to the rail-thin adolescent with a retro-Beatles haircut who was obviously forced to play a wiseman by his mother, it was straight out of the States. Afterwards, the congregation was even invited to stay around for cookies, punch, and fellowship.

As I was making my way to the cookie table, a middle-aged missionary stopped me to chat. After I explained that I had been in Haiti for 4 months with MCC, he noted, "Oh, well then, you've been here long enough that you must already be past the point of shock." Part of me wanted to respond, "Well yes, I was till I came here to your little American enclave." Instead, I shrugged my shoulders and chuckled politely.

Cultural adjustment is a strange process. 99% of the time I live in a sort of numbness to my surroundings (aside from the aforementioned nonstop emotional roller coaster). Life feels normal and I forget that I'm in this land known as the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. But every now and then I do experience moments that cause me to pause. More often that not, those moments seem to come from the contrast created when wealth from abroad seeps in: the man walking into the slums talking on his blue-tooth ear piece, the evening I spent translating the story-line of "Grand Theft Auto" for Bernadette's 14 year old grandson, the missionary church that feels like it never left the States...

Other times, though, the things that cause me to pause are much more haitian in their nature. The water trucks that drive up and down the streets playing an ice cream truck version of the first two lines of Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On." (Though my continued shock at these trucks may actually be due to my distaste for Celine Dion, which would put it in the former category.) The evening I was sitting in a restaurant with friends, making the typical joke that the service was taking so long because they still had to catch our food, only to see a woman walk through the restaurant five minutes later with a fish balanced on her head that was nearly as long as she was tall, and realizing that my dinner really had just arrived. And then, there's always the poverty.

Shortly after I began my work with RNDDH, I went with two colleagues up north to the city of Cap-Haitian to visit 3 prisons. The first evening, when we were comfortably settled into our hotel room, Lelene turned to me and asked, "So, are you okay? Going into the prison today wasn't too much of a shock for you?" Not entirely sure how to form the response I was mulling over, I simply replied, "No, it wasn't too shocking. I'm okay."

The truth is, the entire day had been so shocking for me that by the time we got to the prison, I was in a bit of a daze. Driving through the countryside, I stared out my window in disbelief, nearly in tears. Aside from the general poverty that I'd already been exposed to in my travels through Guatemala, the Ivory Coast, and even Uruguay, there were entire villages under water. Not so far under water as to require the town to be evacuated or to sweep away those who do not know how to swim, but a constant green swampiness that swallowed everything below mid-calf. The sort of flooding that lures villagers into carrying on normally with their lives, but then causes people to die from illnesses that I treat with Pepto-Bismol.

It's a funny thing, shock. When it's not causing me to shake my head and laugh, it often causes me to cry. As an introvert, I tend to experience it as a feeling similar to heart-break as I gradually process, and at times even mourn, a world for which I have no context.

Past the point of shock? Maybe not. But then I don't know that I ever will be.

-L