I make a lousy tourist. Cameras give me the creeps regardless of whether I'm before or behind the lens. Dining out nearly always leaves me unsatisfied, with the sour taste of thinking that I could have prepared the very same dish for a quarter of the price. Tramping around the obligatory "sites" with all the other ogling pilgrims prey to the local genius for siphoning off foreign funds fills me with depressing awkwardness. And I stopped buying souvenirs after a gift-shop in Maine sold to my ten-year-old self a little replica lobster trap that came to pieces in my tender hands before the family car reached Ontario.
This lousy tourist recently found himself in the Dominican Republic, a hotspot for Canadians in flight from the cold. Business rather than pleasure placed me there, although I was well pleased to meet up with fellow laborers in the vineyard of the Lord from the upper latitudes gathered to diagnose, discuss and develop the social works of the Society of Jesus in the Americas north of Colombia. The meeting itself informed and inspired, offering a panorama view of the many worthy pies in which we Ignatius folk have stuck our dedicated thumbs.
The meeting over, rather than bronze my pale flanks among the ranks of other northern whities on the famous beaches of Punta Cana, I accepted the invitation to visit a decidedly non-tourist D.R. destination: Dajabón. Situated on the Atlantic side of the island of Española, this border town is the little but far wealthier brother of Juana Méndez, the Haitian municipality just across the river Massacre (not the kind of name that makes you want to strip down and jump in). It's here that the Antilles province has been working for years trying to alleviate some of the hardships the Haitians suffer for having had the misfortune of being born some hundred meters to the east.
The third decree of the 35th General Congregation sports the subtitle: "Sent to the Frontiers", and arriving at Dajabón I thought to myself, "now we're living out the letter!" I quickly realized, however, that the wild-west images of heroic frontiersmen wresting justice and livelihood from the surrounding uncivilized darkness is Hollywood romanticism of the most exaggerated variety. The frontier is not the stage-set where the good guys fight a great fight and inevitably carry the day. Rather it's the ambiguous place where, due to its fluidity and extremity, anything can happen, including tremendous failures.
Shortly before 8am I was deposited at the foot of the bridge that links Haiti to the DR above the Massacre. The instructions were to keep well to the side so as not to be crushed at the stroke of the hour when the border guards opened the gate. What I took as hyperbole soon proved itself fact, as thousands of Haitians tore past in a frenzy to be the first to buy and sell in the huge market that shakes Dajabón every Monday and Friday. Over 3000 vendors, the grand majority Haitians, haul goods of every description, from towels to bags of juice to chicken feet, to hock amidst a mob-scene, whose irresistible human current sweeps you off your feet and, as says the Gospel of John, "takes you where you do not wish to go" (Jn 21:18).
I watched the stampede pass unabated for at least twenty minutes, wincing at the mere sight of the loads flip-flop-shod men and women of all ages freighted on their heads and shoulders. A mere rake of a man staggered by under two sacks of rice, each one of them three quarters of my bodyweight. Every now and then one of the several DR soldiers would pick out a person, almost invariably a woman, and proceed to pick on her, one hand on his machine-gun, the other pulling at her cargo. Unfazed by the weapon, the woman would put up a fight, screaming as the human torrent flowed past, until the soldier, convinced he would squeeze nothing from his present catch, let her go with a push. The abuse of power was as nauseating as it was normalized.
Just when I thought that the entire population of Haiti had surged past, up came a veteran Jesuit on his vintage moped, determined to show me every good deed that the Society had done in town. We puttered here and there the entire morning, visiting the Jesuit radio station, the Jesuit center for migrants, a home for the elderly abandoned, and other points of pride. Indeed, proud I too became of the efforts of my Ignatius brothers and sisters to secure the dignity of their ill-treated neighbors.
Mere meters from the Jesuit community, my zealous guide, who for several hours had impressed me with his intelligence, compassion and vigor, stopped the bike and declared he felt dizzy. Having seen him take insulin that morning I suspected his blood-sugar had bottomed out and hustled off to the kitchen to find him an edible boost. In the two minutes of my absence, he lost consciousness and was conveyed by passers-by to emergency. I arrived with a now superfluous glass of juice and banana in hand, to meet with an irrational but nonetheless irrepressible feeling of guilt for having hospitalized an overly generous diabetic.
The sense of impotence I felt in the face of my host´s rapid decline to senselessness reinforced itself throughout the remainder of the day. In the crowded room of the clinic the Jesuits of community waited anxiously as he groggily came to. All his robustness and wit were, at least for now, things of the past. His body had reached the frontier of its capacity and there suddenly collapsed.
After his transfer to a larger hospital in Santiago, I took to the streets, eager to walk off some of the angst occasioned by the unhappy episode. Before I knew it I found myself again sucked into the whirlpool of the market. By this time the flow had reversed, and a chaotic tide of people and chattels was now rushing out towards Haiti. Again, the same arbitrary and abusive manhandling of random Haitians at the whim of armed Dominican testosterone was patent and perverse. Leaned up against a barrier, I stood witness to the travesty, thinking that, if nothing else, my presence was at least a silent protest against manifest ill.
Well, one of the Dominican roughs in uniform must have heard my thoughts, because after a good long while pushing and barking right in front of me, he turned around and demanded my identity. In the fray, my still self-conscious Spanish could not make itself heard, so he ordered me to the tent where his superiors serenely surveyed the melee. My former protector, now prostrate in a bed many miles away, had told me not to bother with a passport, so all I could offer my interrogators was a card of priestly faculties for the archdiocese of Bogotá, Colombia. Contrary to my hopes, this made zero impression on the military men, and after some back and forth among them they finally marched me off into a crowded office, where I tried to explain myself to a pair of ladies behind computers. Convinced, probably due to my idiocy, of my innocence the women gave me leave, which I gratefully took only to fall back in the clutches of the border-boy with his fully automatic, metallic toy. So back we stomped to the more kindly women, who made it clear to this cocky keeper of law and order that he should let the gringo go.
During the entire adventure, I remained keenly aware that the brusqueness coming my way was nothing compared to the more brutal treatment suffered by the Haitians. Those same white flanks that I refused to darken in Punta Cana, had saved my hide. Meanwhile, the ebony-skinned Haitians caught the brunt of the racism running rampant along this frontier.
No sooner had I regained my freedom then the sky opened up and let down a wall of warm rain. I felt exhausted, indignant, guilty and defeated: the frontier had flattened me. Taking shelter under the leaky overhang in front of a crowded open-air bar, I watched the puddles grow into dirty, diminutive ponds. The fast descent of my Jesuit friend; the flagrant disrespect that ruled at the border, the rude desperation that agitated the market had created a tempest of black emotions inside my chest. The injustice of the world seemed to have gathered above Dajabón and was making its streets a muddy mess.
Assaulted by the latin dance-music booming from the bar, I felt incapable of motion as two wiry Haitians, one of them barefoot, strained like Prometheus behind a broken motorcycle jerry-rigged with a sizeable flatbed. Its wheels nearly rode on the rims due to its absurd load of cement-bags. The tarp on top flapped in tatters, filling me with the sad certainty that wherever the pair were going, they were going to get there with a few tons of useless rocks instead of useable product. As they rounded the corner grimacing and gasping, a slight inclination in the road halted their agonized advance. For what seemed to me like eternity, and to them presumably even longer, the two fought like Trojans to break the inertia. In vain. Their feet slipped in the mud. Their muscles showed through their saturated t-shirts. Their heads bent low in dogged defiance. And all of us sheltered on either side of the street simply observed impassively.
The scene encapsulated for me all that I had come to consider the tragic condition of Haiti, the frontier-country par excellence. A motor that would not work. A colossal historical weight of colonialism and corruption. A population struggling with all its might to move a few feet ahead. A greater population, arms akimbo on the international sidelines, incredulous of the likelihood of progress. The frontier to the impassable, to the impossible, to the damned.
Just when human strength seemed destined to snap, suddenly a third man, a Dominican judging by the chocolate tone of his skin, ducked into the rain, put his shoulder in beside the nearly spent pair and started pushing. My lungs stopped. Inch by inch the deflated wheels began turning. A small but sufficient momentum won, the stranger let off, wiped his hands on his soaking pants and returned to the wall from which he had torn himself. The two, with their broken motor and cement mountain, carried slowly on toward the border. But already the frontier had been crossed. To this day I stand humbled, contemplating the greatness and the grace of those thirty-seven, eternal seconds.