Rice Trafficking

Author’s Note:

I recently began to go through Sebastian Junger’s (The Perfect Storm, Fire, War) writing. I started with War. By the book’s conclusion, I was a die-hard Junger fan. His life is one that I would like to emulate in the future. His essay collection Fire gives Junger’s history through a timeline of assignments, and a thread about who he is develops. What struck me is that he didn’t start writing for a living until he was in his thirties. So I’ve got time, and I’m at peace with the fact that I am not a professional writer. A professional writer would have a book manuscript about his trip to Haiti had it been half as eventful as mine. I’ve only written two stories.

I’ll come back to Haiti later. But my passions and creativity are focused on other adventures. Because really, you need to DO THINGS to have subject matter.

But there’s one more story that I cannot leave untold, because it was the most extraordinary experience of my life. I am too unskilled to properly tell this story right now, but I am compelled to try.

Facing unavoidable failure, I decided to save my reader time and tell it with an economy of words.

Will Eslinger

June 13, 2010

It’s my third day in Haiti. I’m on an old school bus with a group of twenty five Americans and Haitians. We’re leaving Port Au Prince early in the day to deliver twenty bags of rice to a church in the mountains. It has been 53 days since a 7.0 earthquake hit the city. That was why we were here, but it had little to do with today’s mission. A pastor needs rice. We are going to take it to him.

Someone tells us that it’s about a two and a half hour trip up to the church, the road is relatively smooth, and the breeze is nice. The bus’s windows haven’t been closed in years and I feel like I’m being assaulted with a smell. It’s the smells of a city without infrastructure. Sanitation has suffered. Piles of trash and rubble form the only skyline in site. The mountains we are driving towards can be made out faintly through a morning haze.

We’ve gotten stuck in traffic. We’re on a road that intersects a sun drenched street market. I see knickknacks, street foods, rum, sweets, pink cigarettes and fruit arranged on the ground. Behind the goods I can see a line of dilapidated aluminum buildings. I’m looking at a microcosm of Haitian society going about its business. There are pot holes here filled with mud and big enough to bathe a pig. Every pothole I see is the same. Men are walking past with wheelbarrows full of pig intestines and carcasses.

The traffic has broken, I think that we were stuck for an hour.

We’re out of the city and moving into the mountains. There is one-lane to the first bit of the road, it’s paved though. This road curves like mad, but so far our driver has averted disaster with almost constant blasts from his horn. The incessant noise is driving me insane. But I know it’s necessary. The road has one lane, barely.

Everyone has realized that the two and a half hour estimate was very unrealistic. It has been two and a half hours, and the road is still curving, the horn is still blowing, and the ruts in the road are sending vibrations up through the paper-thin sheets into my tailbone, to my spinal column and into my brain.

It’s mid-day, and are temporarily on the other side of hunger and irritation. We stopped for tangerines and coconut candy. I’m really enjoying the sugar rush.

I don't have these people's permission to post these pictures. If you're reading this my old friends, please don't sue me.

We are standing on the high end of a ridge where the road stopped our bus with deep ruts and steep turns. We’ve been here for an hour. Some of the other guy, no, there’s a girl down there now, people, are making make fools out of themselves chasing a goat.

Our translator is back, oddly straddled on the same dirt bike he left in when we arrived. He looks thirsty, dusty and tired.

Now we’re being told to pile back onto the bus. We’re going back to Port Au Prince.

Apparently the Haitians brought donkeys for the rice.