Introduction

I traveled to Haiti with a group of a dozen friends from my church. It was a great bonding experience for all of us, but especially for us guys. Somehow it worked out that I was the only guy on the trip that doesn’t have a girlfriend, so I spent a lot of time listening while all of the other guys bounced stories back and forth and shared parts of their relationships.

While I listened, I started to notice something. Every guy would talk about his significant other with sincere love and compassion, yet none of those girlfriends were without their imperfections. A common theme in all of their stories was how they worked past those blemishes and disagreements in order to love each other as fully as possible. They understand that beauty is far more than skin deep.

That’s how I saw Haiti. Broken, messy, far from perfect, yet all of the Haitian people we spoke to described it with just as much love and sincerity as the boyfriends in our group. That’s why the only way I can think to describe Haiti is Beautiful as a Person.

A major part of our focus while on this trip was, “Slowing.” We wanted to consciously take time to disconnect and focus on the country and the lessons it had to offer us. After all, we were only going to be living in the country for less than 8 days and we wanted to make the most of it. To me, this meant leaving all of my technology (except my camera) at home in the US. This allowed me to experience the country a lot more like the locals, even though — to my surprise — just about everybody in the country has a cell phone.

Not What I Expected

I rather intentionally didn’t do much research before entering the country. This is an uncommon practice for most photojournalists, but I didn’t want my perspective in the country to be shifted by a preconceived notion of what Haiti is. I wanted to experience everything as fresh as possible and I wanted my photos to showcase my cultural naiveté.

What I found were two things. The first was that Haiti is far poorer than I imagined. I knew it was, “The poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere,” but I had no idea what that looked like, and it surprised me. The average income in Haiti is $2.25 USD per day. I traveled to Haiti with $200 in my pocket and it occurred to me very quickly that it would take the average Haitian person three months to work to earn that money. For many it would take even longer. Yet everyone we encountered lived well within their means. Nobody believed they needed a little bit more to be happy. For many, survival is their motivation, for others it’s building a decent life for their kids, but nobody in the country defines their self-worth with what they own.

Despite all this, the Haitian people are empowered. It goes back to what I mentioned about the country being Beautiful as a Person: The Haitian people love their country like they love one-another. They know it’s imperfect, they know it’s a fixer-upper, but they have not lost hope now, nor after the earthquake, nor will they ever. And from those that we talked to, they’re going to spend the rest of their lives working to make Haiti a better place for their children and their children’s children.

The other thing I discovered is that Haiti is visually stunning. I know I said earlier that beauty is more than skin deep, but even on the surface, Haiti is stunning. On more than one occasion I didn’t even feel right taking a photo of the scenery before me because it already looked like it was a scene from a photo.

Moving beyond the skin-deep beauty, the country has a rich beauty in all of its stories and culture. The organization we partnered with, Expedition Ayiti (which I’ll talk more about in a bit), provided us a couple of guides that helped us interact with the Haitian people throughout the week. This proved to be one of the most memorable things about the entire trip. The people there were all living a life so different than my own and yet the feelings that they felt were all very familiar.

What We Did

A large portion of our trip was spent traveling around the country. We were very rarely stationary. Our flight in gave us a quick overview of the sprawl of civilization on the island. Then, driving gave us an up close look at the various towns and villages. But hiking was what allowed us to slow down and really experience what Haiti had to offer.

Driving

I’m not sure what I expected when I considered being driven around Haiti, but whatever it was, it was much nicer than this. The first thing we did after leaving the airport in Port-au-Prince was pile into a van that was just large enough to fit all of our team. We were pressed shoulder-to-shoulder with limited air conditioning on a sunny, 90° day.

As if that doesn’t sound nice enough, driving in Haiti is basically a free for all. Whatever traffic infrastructure was in place in the major cities was knocked out during the earthquake, leading to major traffic jams at each and every intersection in the city. The strategy at these intersections was, from what I could tell, to squeeze your vehicle into any opening you could find, even if that meant bumping and scraping against the vehicles around you.

Driving in the more rural areas presented its own challenges. Even the main highways through the country are, for the most part, completely unpaved and completely unmaintained. Thankfully, the rain held off for the entirety of our stay since the rainy season in Haiti can often make major roads impassable.

All of this being said, however, the drivers in Haiti (at least the licensed ones) are all very skilled and understand the way things work on their nation’s roadways. On more than one occasion I had to force myself from screaming at an intersection and trust everyone knew exactly what they were doing. Was it always true? Probably not, but I’m going to keep believing it was.

Hiking

The hike was conducted by Expedition Ayiti, a Haitian-American startup that allows cultural tourists to backpack through the Haitian countryside while simultaneously learning about the Haitian culture and the rich stories of its people. We were led by a guide named Junior as well as the company’s cofounder, Doug Taylor. The two proved to be an invaluable duo as we traversed the windy trails, each of them offering their seemingly limitless wealth of information about the sights around us.

Between our hikes, we were based in the city of Pignon. There we had a relatively nice home to retreat to between hikes. During the day we would hike out to another town or village, spend the night there, and drive/hike back the next morning. This was a really cool way to format the hikes, since it gave us a place we could call home. We had neighbors that we got to know throughout the week, we made friends, we shopped locally, we got a true taste of what it would be like to live in a Haitian city.

The hike was my favorite part of our trip since it gave us an opportunity to get away from the more developed parts of the country and see the true poverty that makes up a majority of the island. Unlike most successful cities in the United States, which are located along a body of water, Haiti’s most successful towns and villages are located along one of the nation’s three main highways.

When you get away from those highways, you get to see something that’s very rare in today’s globalized society. Entire villages that operate without outside trade; completely self-sufficient. The food that feeds the town is grown in the hillsides beside the town, the water is pumped from the local well, and the schools and churches are managed by the local people.

It was easy for me to look at this way of living and immediately feel sorry for the people there, that they had no way no produce anything for the people outside of their town, yet nobody seemed upset about it. Everyone we talked to expressed how thankful they were for their lives, for their farms, for their family members, etc. It was a very powerful image that forced me to reflect on everything that I have — that they could never dream of — which I take for granted every day.

Beyond the towns, there were a couple of points during the hikes in which no civilization was visible. In fact, the only way I knew I was on land that had been walked before was by the beaten trail beneath my feet. This was when the beauty of the landscape really shined. The only words I was able to use to describe it in the moment of experiencing it was, “otherworldly”. I was constantly struck by the way in which a nation that was so poor had the richest scenery I had ever seen.

What I Observed

By taking time to slow down and really experience every moment, there was a flood of information to take in and process. Eight days is a very short time to truly understand the story of an entire country, and I’m confident that there’s a lot that I missed. But from the things that I did observe, the takeaways were life changing.

Favorite Stories

One of the things that was most peculiar about this trip and possibly the one I’ll miss the most was hearing, “Blan!” shouted from the distance everywhere we went. “Blan” is the Haitian word for “white” and it is used as a slang term to describe white people. It’s not always a positive term, but every Haitian child under the age of 5 but still old enough to talk shouted it with a smile and a wave, so we started instinctively meeting their shouts with an immediate, “Bonjou!”

Despite how their parents may or may not have felt, the kids all seemed to unanimously love seeing foreigners. Doug pointed out how many of them are young enough to have never seen a white person before. The reason they shouted “blan” is simply because they learned the term and finally had an opportunity to use it.

On one of the afternoons, we played soccer and other playground games with a group of kids that met up in the streets after school. After a brief game of street soccer, they challenged us to a real game later that week. A few of the members in our team, Nichol and Austin (both can be seen in the photo above) played soccer while in college and accepted their offer. To everyone’s surprise, they went on to win that game 2–1, earning the respect of the youth of Pignon for many years to come.

Finally, I would have to say one of my favorite parts of the trip was seeing how much the Haitian people love to share what is theirs, no matter how small or large. In Haitian culture, it is normal to give the guests in your home the best that you have, even if that means you have to live worse than before. The equivalent in our culture would be if a friend came to your home to crash on your couch for a few days and you instead said, “You take my bed, I’ll sleep on the couch.” I loved this philosophy and I’m eager to apply it to my hospitality values here at home.

Aid

Despite how fun our trip was, I can’t go without mentioning the real reason for our visit. In addition to simply meeting the Haitian people and hearing their stories, we wanted to see how foreign aid was helping and hurting Haiti and which outside actions were working and which weren’t. Wilber, a man living in Cap Haitien, put it best. He compared foreign handouts to the food stamps program here in the US. It’s a system put in place to help people in their time of need, and the intentions behind it are always pure. But as time goes on, you create a dependence. If a family can work 20 hours per week and afford to eat with food stamps, what’s their motivation to work 40 hours? And what happens when the family doesn’t get any more food stamps, or the country doesn’t get any more handouts?

This is the picture that aid agencies and NGOs need to understand if Haiti is truly going to have a chance to grow. Change comes from the inside, and while it can be helped from the outside, careful steps need to be taken to ensure that the intended help isn’t actually hurting.

Of the many organizations we encountered in Haiti, one of my favorites was the Fuller Center for Housing. The Fuller Center worked very simply: if someone without a home proved they could afford a $15/month mortgage payment for two years, they would have a home built for them. The houses are simple to construct and, most importantly, are constructed by Haitian hands using locally sourced materials. Not only does the Fuller Center give people a place to live, but it also gives the people of Pignon a place to put their skills to work.

Conclusion

Haiti, despite being the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, is a country that is rich in beauty, love, and culture. And I believe those are things that aren’t without value. Slowly but surely, the people of Haiti are learning how they can use all of these advantages to build a bigger and better Haiti for the future generations.

After the earthquake in 2010, when Haiti lost over a quarter of a million people in less than a minute, it would have been simple for them to lose all hope of ever becoming a developed nation, but the Haitian people became more motivated than ever. I think the reason foreign organizations continue to pour their efforts into Haiti, even 6 years later, is because they see how much this nation is ready to take the next steps into a flourishing, developed future.

Haiti has taught me that there is more to my value as a human being than the possessions I own and the money I have. It’s about the people around me and what I do to help them. It’s about taking time, like I did on this trip, to learn more about life beyond my bubble. Similarly, it taught me that there’s so much more to the lives of others than what they have. There are rich experiences in every human’s story, many are eager to be shared if you just take a moment to listen.

When I say Haiti is Beautiful as a Person, I mean it’s imperfect. Yet, despite this, it has an incredible story to share. It’s trying its hardest to be the best it can be given its circumstances, and it’s that struggle which makes it human, and it’s that struggle which makes it beautiful.

Haiti will always hold a special place in my heart and I am eager to return one day.