Traveling

My car left Customs yesterday and arrived in the Embassy.  To say I was overjoyed is a gross understatement.  Due to the security environment, I am only permitted to drive my car, ride the embassy shuttle, request motorpool, or bum a ride from someone else.  But now that my car is here, I just have to wait for it's CD plates and I will be able to go practically anywhere (minus the red zones).

The red zones are unspeakably dangerous and no blan who has ventured into them has emerged in the post-earthquake era.  There aren't any photographs of what the red zone looks like, but our best placed assets and our most skilled artists worked together to create this rendition of what it probably looks like:

You can see why it's called the red zone

Consular work is amazing in that I speak to scores of people everyday.  I speak to more Haitians in a day than many people do in a week.  Even though some of the interviews can be as short as several minutes, I see a remarkable cross-section of Haitian society, from people who are illiterate to people who are successful professionals.  I see men and women who are unsure of the number of children they have and who sired them and I see nuclear families.  I see Americans of Haitian origin who make very good salaries and legal permanent residents who make peanuts as home health aides  petitioning for their unmarried sons and daughters and their brood of children, many of whom are unemployed or bereft of any marketable skills.

The problem is, I only see people who want to leave Haiti.

Personally, I find it vexing to see a steady exodus of people leaving Haiti while the entire world is pumping money into Haiti.  But what would you do if this was an unsurprising sight if your country?

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If I was Haitian, I like to think I would learn all about Haitian culture and history, draw inspiration from the fact Haiti stopped Napoleon well before his infamous retreat from Russia, realized the Enlightenment ideal that all men are created equal well before Europe did, and helped guide African colonies to independence, and commit myself to Haiti’s renaissance as a proud, respected, and truly sovereign nation.
 

But that’s hard.  Really hard.

That is hard to do at home.  And we're rich and powerful and smart!  We outsourced a lot of the work of defeating the Nazis to the Soviet Union and our president flew a fighter to defeat aliens!  But it’s been six years since President George W. Bush told the American people we “are addicted to oil” and yet we’re still debating the veracity of global warming.  We have not made significant progress on reforming our immigration policy or updating our tax code.  Like Haitians, we obsess over the Americaness of our President.

Besides we glorify the individual who leaves everything to seize his future in a new land.  My family left Ireland, Russian-occupied Poland and White Russia, and Rumania for America.  Millions upon millions left the Old World for the New to start over in a country that let them be.  Can I criticize anyone here who did exactly what my ancestors did?

The bottom line is I can't.  I could make a lot of arguments about brain drain in Haiti, political sensitivities in the United States, assimilation concerns, sheet costs of absorption, etc., but the reality is each person should have the opportunity to realize his potential.  That, distilled to its essence, it what America is all about; it will make our country better in the long run, even if makes Haiti worse in the short run.

I don't know if the opportunity to move and try something should be a right, but without the chance to do something different, whether it's the liberty of leaving work later and driving home without relying on the shuttle or starting over somewhere new, there isn't a lot of hope.  And without hope and by extension, confidence, how will a nation ever summon the courage to grow?