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Raising Nate part 6 - Chaos in Haiti [1]
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Date: 2025-04-27
Haiti has always had trouble for as long as I’ve known it. But in the summer of 2018, trouble became chaos, and it never really went away. Gangs seemingly exploded overnight, kidnappings and killings didn’t quadruple they multiplied by over 100 times. No one was safe, not the wealthy, not the middle class, not the destitute. No one.
This is also the year I fell sick and spent 4 months in and out of the hospital. It was an ordeal, and I have sequels but I’m as good as can be now.
We lived next to a police station, and it was a target for those creating chaos, a week didn’t not go by without the smell of police gas filling our house, I had to teach the kids (Nate’s friends from the neighborhood were always over during that time) to hide under the bed, close windows and doors and hole wet towels over their face, we made makeshift masks. More than once, we found shell casings in the yard, once outside the bedroom door on our little balcony.
3 other events mark this period (2018-2021) for us. The first was the day it all started; I was at work when riots broke out all over the country because the then president J. Moise raised the price of fuel. The riots spread like wildfire and violence was rampant, everyone sheltered in place, a rock was thrown through the glass door of our workplace and almost hit a 5 month pregnant client (she later gave birth prematurely but the baby and her were okay)… from noon on… we crowded the inside rooms as rioters threw rocks, tried to breach the gates and everything else… around 9 pm things started to calm down but it still wasn’t safe to leave because there were road blocks with burning tires everywhere. Around midnight a brave soul came to pick up his sister, they were going right by my street, so I jumped in the car… when I got home, I found Nate in the yard with his sitter waiting for me crying and shaking.
The second one, Nate ran out of albuterol I had to go get some at the pharmacy, Nate saw me getting dressed and started to get dressed also, I say “No baby, I’ll be right back”… Nate looked at me dead serious and said ‘No, if you’re going, I’m going to, if we die we die together”. I undressed and asked a neighbor to go grab the med for me.
The last one, Nate again was ill, severe asthma attack, meds were not helping… but there was no fuel to turn on the generator and work the nebulizer, we hadn’t had electricity for almost 3 months, our inverter was dead, the batteries long useless as we had run out of money and could not replace them. My phone battery was almost dead, but on one of my WhatsApp groups I asked for help and there was a pediatrician on the group, through WhatsApp he helped me find stuff around the house to alleviate Nate’s symptoms so the meds would work.
That’s when I decided to leave Haiti. I had lived through earthquakes, coup d’etats, riots, hurricanes, been shot at, received death threats… but I would not put my child in danger like that. It was time to leave, maybe we could come back later when things calmed down.
By this time Covid was here and I was scared to death that Nate would catch it, with his asthma I feared it would be a death sentence. For the first two years of Covid we practically became recluses.
Coming soon part 7 – leaving Haiti
Muriel Vieux
#TheAmericanHaitianPoet
November 2nd, 2023
#Woke #SocialPoetry
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