When There Are No Bootstraps
What I learned driving accross Haiti
We are pushing 70 miles-per-hour on an overworked speedometer. Flying through two-way traffic with a skinny lane-and-a-half of road to work with. The engine sounds like it’s running on a mix of diesel and crack cocaine. There is a dirt path where sidewalks would normally be. The path is full of people who have a dangerous comfort level with fast moving objects. We are weaving between Tap Taps and Mack trucks loaded so full their tires wobblingly rotate over a road destined to conquer every last one of them.
Our driver, who is getting paid ten dollars a day, drives like the vehicle is an extension of his own body. Hurling the car between oncoming traffic and slower vehicles limping away the miles. Somehow he instantly calculates the closing gaps as our vehicle seemingly bends its way through.
At lunch one afternoon, in very broken English, the driver explains his wife has been in Miami for years. He wants to join her but isn’t sure if that will ever be an option. He begins to say how much he misses her and then abruptly stops… almost acting as if he doesn’t know the correct English words to explain. But I hear his voice crack and watch as he instead puts his hands over his heart and his watery eyes tell the rest of the story. He pulls himself together quickly almost embarrassed, unwilling to emotionally push on us the burden he carries. He smiles and thanks us for hiring him to drive and then we drive on.
I’ve been in two fender-benders in Haiti — both were thankfully anticlimactic. Slow speed rear-enders, a scratch here, a tiny dent there. Both drivers got out of their vehicles in the middle of the road and vented a lifetime’s worth of frustrations… there was yelling, cursing but eventually just more driving.
After a few trips you realize this is simply how driving works in Haiti. Sometimes you are flying and the other time is spent in traffic jams accompanied by a symphony of horns, exhaust fumes and people… always people… people everywhere.
On this last trip I was driving through a market and I was hit by something else altogether. The people, some of them standing; some sitting behind baskets of items, knowing no matter how much they sell, they will never make ends meet. It is the hottest part of the day, when the air is heavy, lifeless and oppressive, reminding you that even the air has decided life was never meant to be easy for these people. If you were there you would see people with deep, dark, unbroken, gazes. Staring at nothing… or everything. It really doesn’t matter. Brown eyes so singularly fixed on something that cannot be seen… it speaks to you.
This transcendent stare was not one of hope lost, but hope on hold. It was every ounce of pride and angst and passion and rage — calmly gazing and begging to be released. Their stares told me it was not a matter of IF, but WHEN… and even if the day never came in this life there was a defiance that said This world will never crush me, and so they stare on. Yet another beautiful mind full of un-knowable potential placed on pause, a record continually skipping to the beat of a world hell-bent on eroding away their chance to ever make music again, or even for the very first time.
Some would say these are the wasted lives of an unjust world… but not me. They live their lives in a manner that should warrant great pride. They live a life of unimaginable courage. To just get up in the morning and do it all again. To continually show up for their life on hold must be a fight so deep and powerful it could easily be the single greatest battle of hope the world will ever see.
And that was when it hit me — the greatest stories of hope in this world are buried and dark, they are heartbreaking but immensely human. They are stories of hope tragically unfulfilled… but somehow never wasted. On this trip I saw the lives of those on pause who take on despair with courage and nothing more than a stare.
Since when is hope only hope if it is eventually rewarded? When did we start believing all hope has a happy ending? When did we decide the world’s bravest hopeful are hopeless?
Nathan Mueller is founder and CEO of Zennify and ScaleStation Foundation. Twitter: @natejmueller Essays: www.medium.com/@natejmueller
