It was my first day in Haiti when my translator and I were nearly kidnapped. If things had gone down differently that day, the two of us may have ended up tortured and held for ransom. Or maybe dragged out of our car and beaten.
Who knows, because it ended as best as it could for all -- except for the guy we hit with our car.
I thought a lot about that day while we worked on this week's cover story in New Times about a Haitian kidnapping. Things ended much worse in that incident. Thugs killed a federal agent and held a girl for ransom for several days while her family was told she had been tortured.
First, some explanation of how I found myself nearly kidnapped in the hills outside Port-au-Prince. I was in Haiti in June 2005 to write a story about Aaron Jackson, who, at the time, had just opened his first Haitian orphanage. Jackson was living at a homeless
shelter in Hollywood and paid for the orphanage with the money he made as a golf caddy. It was an incredible story, and the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) had agreed to pay for my two-week trip to allow me to tell it.
I arrived in Port-au-Prince on a Monday, a day ahead of Jackson. ICFJ had paid for a fixer,
someone who translates, drives, and generally sets up a foreign trip
for a reporter. She asked me at the time to protect her identity in case
an angry mob ever wants to track her down for what happened. So we'll
call her Marie.
She showed up about an hour late to the airport,
an unnerving start to the trip. The airport in Port-au-Prince may be the
most unsettled place in the city. U.N. troops with machine guns stood on
the roof. Taxi drivers tried desperately to take my bags. Beggars pulled
on my clothes.
Finally, a very nervous Marie pulled up in a
purple and very beat-up Geo Tracker. "Get in quick," she said. "It is
not safe at the airport."
No kidding. She wasn't much on
pleasantries. Instead, she began by explaining that the road from the
airport is one of the most dangerous spots in the city. Snipers hang out
on the rooftops. Gangs wait to kidnap foreigners. "You're a target,"
she warned. I was quickly learning that she wasn't one to sugarcoat.
Reluctantly,
she agreed to give me a quick tour of the sites. We zoomed by the
National Palace, a gleaming white building with two-story columns
and domes on the roof. (Last year's earthquake reduced it to rubble.) A metal gate surrounded the palace, and hundreds of people appeared to be living on the sidewalk out front.
We stopped quickly at the Hotel Oloffson, a historic Victorian-style building. I had read about the Haitian bands that play at the hotel at night. "We won't be traveling at night on this trip," Marie warned.
To
end our sightseeing, Marie drove south into the hills above the city.
The road curved through Petionville, the city's best suburb, where mango
and banyan trees created a shaded canopy across the two-lane drive. The
road dead-ended at an overlook that provided a full vista of the city.
Marie pointed out the slums of Cité Soleil,
the parks filled with the homeless, the gleaming palace in the center,
and the turquoise Caribbean to the west. It was stunning, but that dead
end should have been a clue that the trip was a bad idea.
It
happened about halfway back to the city. Marie had warmed up a bit, and
we were chatting about how she ended up in Haiti. She grew up in
Montreal but had decided two years earlier to come to her mother's homeland.
Unrest had made the city a dangerous place. Friends had been kidnapped.
Many with money had fled the city or the country entirely. She had been
saving up to leave herself when I emailed her. This job may be her
ticket back to Canada.
The air was cooler under the canopy of the
trees, and I had my arm hanging out of the passenger-side window. With
my head leaned out a bit to catch the breeze, I noticed a man dart from
the woods. He was running full speed at our car.
I figured maybe
he was trying to cross the street. It was a ridiculous thought, really,
considering we hadn't seen a car since we started back down the road. He
could've just waited until we passed by. We were going maybe 40 mph.
But he wasn't trying to cross. He wanted to be hit.
He struck the
Geo above the front wheel. He used his arms to catch himself from a
full impact. I pulled my arm in just in time to watch him careen down
the side of the car, bouncing off my door and then the back fender. I
turned to watch him roll down the street, arm over arm, his head
striking the pavement occasionally.
People came out of the woods
immediately. They were on both sides of the car. There were maybe a
dozen or more. I couldn't tell, but I think they were holding blunt
objects, pieces of wood and things. A couple of them had an angle on the
front of the car, and they would block our way in seconds.
Marie
floored it. The Geo likely wasn't firing on all cylinders, so it was
lucky we were pointed downhill. We got by the horde just before they
descended on us. We missed striking a couple of them by inches.
Honestly,
I had no idea what had just happened. I was still wondering if the guy
was just trying to cross the road. I asked Marie if we should call the
cops and report the accident. At the time, my biggest fear was whether
we had just become wanted.
"First off," Marie explained, "we have
to worry about vigilante justice." She explained that in Haiti, if a
pedestrian is struck by a car, an angry mob may go to the driver's home and seek revenge.
But,
she explained, that's probably not why all those people came out of the
woods. "They saw you when we drove up. They saw a white guy, and they
called their friends."
The thought was so foreign to me that it didn't
sink in. It just felt like there had to be another reason for what
happened. The next morning, Marie showed up to tell me she was quitting.
"It's not worth it," she said. Before leaving, she warned: "You should
go home. It's not safe for you here."
It seemed time to report
what had happened. My handler at ICFJ, Patrick Butler, suggested I should probably be on the next flight home. But I hadn't seen Jackson's orphanage yet
-- I hadn't done anything related to the story that brought me there.
So I talked him into letting me stay for two more days.
I spent
the time at Jackson's orphanage, an amazingly caring, warm place in the
center of the city's chaos. I flew home Wednesday. I called my wife
unexpectedly from the airport; I hadn't explained what happened so
she wouldn't worry for the two days that I remained there.
When we published the story about Jackson -- titled "Saint Aaron"
-- I left out my near-kidnapping. Truth is, Jackson is the most
benevolent and giving person I've ever met, and I didn't want my
incident to overshadow any of his efforts.
But I couldn't help
thinking about that day as we finalized this week's story. It occurred
to me that things haven't changed much since I was there six years ago.
People still get kidnapped regularly.
They're tortured. They're bartered. And we ought to know about Haitian
kidnappings that happen to regular people, tourists, and journalists who
have no idea what's happening.
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