Heading to Haiti: An internship experience of a lifetime
By: Robin Johnson, HBHE '08
Before leaving for Haiti in June of 2007 to start my internship for the summer, all the news of the country that I had come across cast it in a poor light for a first time visitor. Reports of poverty, malnutrition, unemployment, political repression and violence are the only ones that leave the island through the mainstream media. Flying into Port-au-Prince, I craned my neck to see Cité Soleil out of the window, a fabled slum in the capital that squeezes an ever increasing number of urban migrants into a small tract of land between the city and the ocean. Knowing only the troubles of Haiti before the start of my trip, I was unconsciously on the lookout for signs of depravation and hardship, trying to relate my experience to others’. I still had much to learn about Haiti.
At first glance, my internship experience would seem to contribute to my pre-trip impressions about poverty in Haiti. Instead, it introduced me to a Haiti that almost never makes the news, one that gives me more satisfaction and joy to be a part of than simple humanitarian interest would allow.
My internship was with a Haitian health development organization, International Child Care (ICC), which is a faith-based organization funded by grants and donors based in the U.S. and Canada. Two undergraduates and myself had come to Haiti to evaluate the health effects of ICC’s poverty-lending microcredit program, which was first implemented in 1997. The women in the program live in nine villages throughout a mountainous rural area located an hour outside of the country’s second largest city, Cap Haitien. Our research brought us to each of these nine villages in turn in order to conduct interviews with the program’s clients. Despite the sometimes grating poverty that these women described to us, they had a clear sense of dignity and were often self-possessed in the face of their difficulties. They shared their stories of adversity with us without expectation, and without compromising their pride.
Elsewhere, evidence of hardship was
with us in our daily life in Haiti, from children in our neighborhood with open
wounds that went without treatment to evident weight loss among our friends and
neighbors when we returned most recently in February of 2008. However, the part
of the story that is rarely told is the strength of spirit, national pride and
sense of humor that Haitians possess. The young boys of the neighborhood would
play soccer in the street behind our house almost every afternoon, using
whatever mismatched clothing and footwear were available. They would often call
for us to join them, and then laugh at us when we proved less agile and
inevitably lost. At night, impossibly large crowds would gather around a single
television on a neighbor’s roof to watch teams play in the Pan-American cup, erupting
into cheers as one when a favorite team scored a goal. Women in our
neighborhood would sit together outside their houses preparing food, braiding
each other’s hair, gossiping, and playing with babies. This environment came to
feel like home, and brought a comforting ebb and flow to the rhythm of our
days. 
These impressions are in the forefront of my mind when I think about Haiti. In light of the recent civil unrest over rising food prices in Haiti, these thoughts are frequently replaced by others that are less pleasant, and are unfortunately just as relevant to the lives of impoverished Haitians. Nonetheless, I believe that many Haitians would like to share stories like those above with us in the United States because they demonstrate their humanity, and provide a connection to them as a people. They also serve to mitigate the years of negative press and prejudice that typifies Haiti’s presence in the international community and return to Haiti the dignity and respect that it deserves.