Have you been to Haiti? Personal experience 20 days in hell

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

An island where the "totalitarian regime" of Fidel Castro did not reach. What is wrong with the country, which should, according to many representations of Heaven on earth, where bananas themselves fall into the mouth?

I don't know why I was coming here, really. Only the lazy one did not dissuade me. But I know exactly why I ran away from here at breakneck speed and did not turn around, it was scary to stumble and stay here even for a moment. From the very first day, I started looking for hope here. I taught Creole to make it easier to understand what was happening, I lived all this time in a family, followed my local with my tail, met with his friends, enemies and everyone with whom his life was connected. I talked a lot, asked a lot, answered their questions even more. There was not a day when I did not think, did not examine, did not analyze.

There was not a day that I did not want to give up, give up everything and just evaporate. There was not a second that I felt at ease and comfortable here. It was difficult for me to bring myself to start writing this post. It seems that he still stinks, I still want to cough and blow my nose, remembering all the horrors I saw in this small but very ugly country.

Haiti - you don't want to live here and it's scary to die here. Their future is not threatened by big changes, this is the eternal deep bottom of the development of civilization. I really tried to make out the light, really. I tried in vain to believe, to find even a spark of hope here, but instead I found only 10 depressing facts, which, if you think about it, are also clear evidence that change is not coming. Here everyone is kapets. And that's why.

1. They believe in God

These people, in principle, believe in anything that defies explanation. They believe in everything except themselves. They believe in voodoo, lines on the hand, divination, curses, spirits, light and black magic. For many, even the shape of the globe is still not obvious here. And this is not a joke, not an aphorism taken in order to describe their lack of education, this is the pure truth, from which the hair stands on end. People spend whole days hanging out in churches, raising their calloused hands to the sky, and in the evening they come to their wretched ruined house, where six small children are crying, and there is nothing to eat at home.

God is everywhere: he is depicted on the windows of minibuses, in shop windows, he lives in the names of establishments, everything here is saturated with his name. Casual passers-by talk about him, they sing songs about him, and everyone asked me about him, with whom I had a chance to talk. "Do you love Jesus?" they say. “I don’t believe” - I answered each time. At this moment, their eyes go out, emptiness and misunderstanding appear, all systems fail.

It is not accepted here not to believe, here it is generally not customary to ask questions, doubt, think and have your own point of view. Everything has been decided here for a long time, there is a God, because your mother will tell you so when you begin to understand human speech. Mom will make you just like her. Blind, stupid and incapable of thinking. You will continue the lineage of slaves, no one will give you a choice. Here they are afraid of hell, but once I told them: "You have nothing to fear, you are already in hell, you even call it your home."

2. They are stupid and uneducated

I saw their schools, leafed through their notebooks, textbooks, and for me everything slowly but surely fell into place. Do you know how many pages there are in a textbook on, say, geography, which is designed for one year of study? 42 pages. Half of them are pictures, the other half are absolutely worthless dry facts, mainly about the nature of Haiti, and the following countries are marked on the world map: Europe, Africa, USA, Haiti and China.

And it was not by chance that I called them countries, because everyone with whom I spoke believes that this is so. Thirty, forty-year-old men were extremely surprised when I said that Africa is the name of the continent, and that there are many, many different countries, there are different languages, different religions and different traditions. That Europe is the same story, that it is like a locality, a zone like that, and that there are also many different countries, each of which is unique and unique in its own way.

This is how children learn, 40 pages a year. And so on for each subject. History of Haiti - 46 pages, Fundamentals of Social Education - 50, Mathematics - about that too. The Bible is also included in the compulsory school course, so even if your devout mother does not do this, school will definitely give you faith in miracles. They talk constantly. There is always a lively dialogue in Haiti.

Here people are little silent and little thought, they are constantly arguing about something, shouting and indignant. This is mostly a banal discussion of the latest rumors. Like, there yesterday the car turned over, and three days ago they shot two of some peacekeepers, the other day Jesus heard my prayers and sent a good dinner, yesterday she braided her pigtails, she cried … Truth is not born here, nothing is created or being invented, it’s just, apparently, it’s scary to be silent here, so they talk about what they see.

3. There are too many giving birth here

I lived in the same house with seven children. The owner of the house had three of them, plus a woman lived with us, whom he sheltered for a while. She has four more. In the next house, the woman has five children, her neighbor also has five. Here the girl becomes a mother as soon as her body becomes physiologically suitable for this. At the same time, I have not met a single whole family in which both parents would be. They do not think, do not plan, do not prepare, they simply breed poverty and squalor.

So on the second day of meeting one girl, she told me directly: "I like you, let's make children." And this proposal was not at all about sex, no, it was about children, just children, period. "Do you have children?" - the second question that is asked to you when you meet, right after "where are you from?" "Why do you need so many children?" I asked more than once. “Well, how else is it? This is how we live here. I love them."

If these people were a bit smarter and more honest with themselves, then they would easily find the true reason for this childhood madness - there is nothing else to do here. So your life has at least some minimal meaning and purpose, otherwise you will simply exist without purpose and reason. There are so many children here that walking down the street you immediately notice that there are more of them than adults.

And if it is completely honest and cynical, then these people are simply producing new mouths that are absolutely useless up to 15 years old and do not bring any benefit to either the family or the state. If every Haitian gave birth to one child, but at the same time tried to give him the best that he could, it would be a completely different country. But this will not happen, because God ordered to be fruitful and multiply.

4. They beat their children

I have never seen such an aggressive and strict upbringing in my life. Here they hardly talk to children about their misdeeds, they do not explain to them why this is good, but this is bad. They are simply beaten for any offense. For a small one they do not beat much, if something is broken or broken, then the screams of the poor child will be heard by everyone living on the street. They even have their own tricks.

For example, the most common punishment is a belt over the palms. The child himself unclenches his palms and holds them out to his parent, who already decides whether to hit five times or ten, for example. Here they do not run from a belt, here they do not cry for their debt, here it has been the norm of upbringing since childhood. The owner of the house where I lived, in my mid-thirties, shot at people three times, and killed one of them. There is death here, and the path to it lies through a "happy" childhood.

"Don't you think that it is precisely these methods of upbringing that then affect children when they grow up?" I asked him. “Everything comes from childhood, every fear, every insult born in childhood will go with you throughout your life. You’re wondering that children then grow up into gangsters and shoot at each other, here’s the answer to all your questions. You yourself make them angry and ruthless, since childhood. You yourself, no one else."

“I never thought about it. I do not like to beat them, they just take me out with their antics. " "Believe me, you can decide everything with words, and if not, then you shouldn't give birth, it means that you are simply not ready to raise a good person." He said that he understood, but he didn’t understand a damn thing, and no one here will understand this anymore, everything has been going on as usual for too long, it’s unlikely that the biting sounds of a punishing belt and children's sobs after blows will ever subside here.

5. Only priests, voodoo, drug dealers and cops live well here

The priests cut big bucks here. For the fact that he will pray for you, put a pretty penny in his pocket. If the prayers helped and you succeeded, for some more time you are obliged to pay him for this success. Did you manage to move to America? Kindly send the pastor a couple of green gifts, he was the one who prayed for a visa. Mom recovered? It was the priest who saved her. Pay him.

Do you want death for your enemy? Then you visit a black magician. He will dance to the sound of a drum, conjure, curse, you just pay him money. And no one will joke with either priests or voodoo here. They still believe that they are real wizards. True, taking off their cassock, they turn into ordinary gopars with a dirty gorgon and gangster habits, but people do not see this, they are blind, deaf and helpless. The best house in the village where I lived was owned by a woman who once sold drugs.

In fact, the police simply do not exist here. They do not patrol the city, they do not guard your peace, they just exist, and I once shook hands with a couple of them while walking with my "guide". Both times they stood in plain clothes outside the lottery ticket shop and just chatted with their buddies. I don't know what they are doing, but their work is clearly not for the good of the common people.

6. They don't understand medicine

The level of their medicinal knowledge is so meager that it is sometimes even surprising that these people live up to forty years. They begin to get sick from childhood, they are already born sick and with multiple deviations from the norm. I saw children with six fingers on one hand, I saw pieces of skin peeling off a small child living with me in the same house every day, and when his mother combed her hair, there was almost no hair left on her head.

I saw ulcers on the head of another child with whom I lived. There is no health here, here there is a continuous unsanitary condition, dirt and disease. When I said that they all need vitamins in huge quantities, I was told that they had no money. "Then why the fuck are you continuing to procreate sick children?" I asked. "This is how we live, it's okay." Adults constantly swallow some kind of pill.

That sleeping pills to sleep better under the crying of suffering children, then antibiotics for any reason. As one person told me, "Antibiotics cleanse the blood, so if you have a headache, the blood is contaminated and needs to be cleaned." In general, I got the impression that they consider pills to be the norm and that they need to be drunk constantly to feel good.

7. They live in the trash

There are no garbage cans, no garbage trucks, garbage is thrown at the feet, and later the same children with ulcers on their heads and peeling skin play with it. And when it rains, the streets turn into rivers of smelly garbage. Each village has its own trash field, which burns very beautifully in the evenings, causing a slight attack of nausea with every breath. Here is a kapets, friends, and not a drop of hope. I still have before my eyes a picture of an absolutely naked man clearing a clogged and overflowing sewer system.

He was head over heels in shit, piss, dead rats, scraps, and whatever the human race is trying to get rid of. There were no gloves on his hands, his nose and mouth were not covered with a special mask, he was absolutely naked. I still remember his empty eyes, I remember the indifference with which he pulled out all these impurities, I remember, I could not look at it for a long time.

8. They are being deceived

Like all poor and forgotten countries, Haiti constantly feels on its shoulder the kind and gentle touch of white charming priests who send crowds of missionaries and young preachers here. They come to numerous shelters, of which there were about five only near my village, and tell the kids that Jesus will definitely hear their prayers, and everything will be good. At the same time, the ratio of children who were adopted here to those who were simply pissed with holiness in their ears is extremely disappointing.

It so happened that I had a chance to visit one of these shelters three times. A white pastor with a calm look is a former mafioso who, according to my friend, in the past made a lot of money here, collecting donations for these children via the Internet, taking, of course, a substantial percentage for himself. Now he, however, has settled down a little, but the sight is still rotten. There is no smell of hope here, but only a sickly smell of holy lies and feigned virtue.

Their government does not want improvements, at least that's the impression I have personally. Instead of creating fertile ground here for all kinds of foreign investment, they are only tightening the screws.

One peasant was going to build a toll road, good, high-quality, as is done in the neighboring Dominican Republic, but the government broke such a tax on the activities of a novice businessman that construction became simply inexpedient. There is almost no electricity here. In cities it is given for about two hours a day, and when these two hours are, no one ever warns. In the villages, however, there is no such luxury. For all 20 days that I have lived here, I had a chance to see a burning light bulb for only an hour.

9. They are beggars

They constantly borrow money from each other, and since every Haitian has at least five siblings and about thirty cousins and cousins, this process is catastrophic. I was personally present when my nigga borrowed money from a new member of this bottomless family every day. I remember how he borrowed 50 rubles from a saleswoman in a tent, whom he did not even know, I remember how he had difficulty knocking money out of two guys whom he himself had once lent.

Here debts are not repaid on time, here no one ever has money, here everything is shaky and unpredictable. Here, even classes are often canceled at school, because the teachers were not paid money, and they simply refused to go to work. Here you can take a minibus, and in the end pay less than it is worth, simply saying that there is no money today, and the children have nothing to eat at home. And there will be no big claims to you, this is Haiti. Here they constantly talk about money that no one has.

10. They are the same

This is the first country on my way where I am not afraid to generalize, I am not afraid that the reader will condemn me for my one-sidedness and for “one size fits all”. They are the same, everything. In Haiti, since childhood, you are left with no choice: how to wash, how to cook, what to think about, what to ask, where to go, what to want.

I remember they corrected me in everything: how I wash my T-shirts, in which hand I hold the soap and how I drive it back and forth, how I peel vegetables, when I cook a meal … You may not believe me, I would not believe it either, but all these they perform actions in exactly the same way.

They equally hold on to the handle of the column when they pump water, wear the same buckets on their heads in the same way, cook in the same pans in the same way, wash the dishes in the same way with ordinary washing powder, crumble laundry soap into water in the same way, wash things in the same large basins in the same way, sing songs about Jesus, while they are washing … Scary? I was very much. Haiti is a country in which complete chaos reigns, here you could do anything, even walk on your head, no one will fine you for it, but people themselves choose to be the same. In everything. Creepy.

That's all, I am no longer here, I no longer breathe this smell, I no longer see this nightmare, I will not return here, goodbye, damn country. No, I did not hate these people, like any other representatives of the human race, some of them helped me, others put a spoke in the wheel. I don’t feel sorry for them, I have no anger, I don’t want to save them or, on the contrary, to exterminate them. This is their personal hell, and I still showed you a little bit of this nightmare. Peace for everyone.