Decompressing

April 6
Miami Airport
2:48pm

This is about the biggest extreme I can imagine right now to life in Deslandes. Bright lights, crappy music, and gleaming floors- and shop after shop after shop of overpriced items that people must buy on impulse? Or are they brainwashed as they wander around?
I’m on a 4 hour layover at the Miami airport, and it’s not very enjoyable.

Sigh. It’s not going to be an easy re-entry. On the flight from PaP to Miami today, the flight attendant offered me a second glass of juice, and I got all weepy from her kindness- in part, due to not having slept much last night and being tired, and in part, because it suddenly hit me, the enormity of the problems in Haiti. It’s not like I didn’t know that already from being there in December, but suddenly, I was able to have a release, and let tears gently stream down my cheeks. I was crying for the darling little faces of the kids I left behind, the kids who are so hungry, yet so generous; for the women who have to carry water such great distances; for the people in the internally displaced persons camps who are literally inches from all of their neighbours’ tents, with absolutely no privacy, for the overworked horses & donkeys bearing saddle soars; for the disparity between the really wealthy and the really poor; for the raped landscape that continues to be burned; for the choked waterways filled with garbage.

I will carry Haiti with me wherever I go; currently, I am feeling displaced in a big mall setting (aka the airport) surrounded by so many white people. Where are the headscarves, the colour, the chatting with people you don’t even know? This is so impersonal, and is replicated in airports around the world. I suppose some people find airports comforting for that very sanitary and familiar environment that is driving me crazy today. I know that once I’m home, my own home, friends and family will envelope me, and that will be a familiarity that will comfort, rather than irritate. Onward to Canada!