Cap-Haitien, Haiti: Part II

I've been busy here in the office but I'm back now to tell more about my crazy adventures in Haiti.

I'll start where I left off, Friday evening I believe...

After exploring the community in Trou-du-Nord, all of us piled back into the truck to head back to Cap-Haitien. The car rides were not fun. By some combination of road conditions and traffic conditions I felt as if I were inhaling 50% smoke, 50% dust in every breath.

Once back in our room, we all eagerly showered and changed clothes before pulling some furniture out onto the porch to enjoy the night. We had a dinner of peanut butter & jelly sandwiches, washed down with a Prestige, Haiti's beer, which I actually prefer to the DR's Presidente. We spent the evening just hanging out outside, talking about life, development, family, friendship, love, all of the things that sound cliché when written out but remain the most absorbing sources of late-night conversation among a group of people who have grown to trust each other. It is, as fellow intern David once said about a similar occasion, "raw life", and it is an incredible thing to feel.

Saturday was sight-seeing day! We woke up, piled in the car, and after another unpleasant ride over bad roads arrived at the Sans-Souci Palace, built by King Henri Christophe to rival Versailles. The palace was ruined in an earthquake, and still maintains a sort of exotic beauty as the remnants of walls and pillars mix with the surrounding natural environment.
From the palace, there was a stone road winding uphill for several miles before arriving at the Citadelle Laferriere, probably the most spectacular site in all of Haiti. The hike up there is long, and it is hot. Tourists like us are dogged at the heels by Haitians with horses, just waiting for us to give up and hire a horse to ride to the top. Not long after starting, members of our group began dropping off and hiring a horse, and soon David and I were the only ones left on foot. Fueled by little more than the obstinate determination not to give in to the horsemen who persisted to follow us most of the way to the top.

The Citadelle was pretty epic. See for yourself:



Saturday night, well... Nate has already written a good account of what transpired, so I'll borrow his words:

Saturday night, the whole hotel situation hits the fan. What happened is this: Some random employee had said that it’s $120/night between the 5 of us at the hotel. He wasn’t the boss there, just some kid who quoted a number, and said the sorts of facilities they had. As I listed above, the facilities were terrible. Being experienced travelers, we figured the price should have been closer to $50 per night. When we approached the employee who had been around all week about this (via Obed translating), he said, “Ok, fine – I’ll just charge you $350 instead of the $360.” Our response: ARE YOU JOKING?, that’s $3/night off. Ridiculous. After allowing Obed to translate this, the kid called his boss to tell him to come.

This is when it gets real interesting. The boss enters, and doesn’t act anything like a reasonable owner of a hotel at all. Instead of acting as he should have (weighing our complaints about the hotel to figure out a fair price for us to pay), he was extremely aggressive. He entered and immediately began accusing us of being unjust customers, stating angrily “Who do you think you are, coming into MY hotel and telling ME what to charge you?”, and otherwise changing the subject from the faults of his hotel to show why we deserved to pay the $120/night. David, one of the other fellows, did a good job of attempting to keep the conversation focused on the issue at hand – we cannot and would not pay that much, for the very understandable reasons we laid out. We were misled into believing this hotel was of higher quality than it really is. Perhaps someday it’d be that valuable, for now, it was on the same level (if not lower) than a Motel 6.

At some point in the night, several of us started to pick up that we may have started to bring ourselves (or Obed), into physical danger by agitating this man. He certainly was very wealthy, and we assumed he had friends in high places who he could call to deal with the issue of five pesky Americans. We were finally offered $260 for the three nights, and accepted it. Though this price was too high, it seemed to us that we needed to get away from this man.

We went to withdraw extra money from the main Roi Cristophe hotel to give to this man. At the Roi Cristophe, we learn an amazing fact: we had been part of an employee who was committing fraud. The man at the desk on Thursday who said that it was “full” was a friend of our not-so-friendly manager, and would send potentially wealthy people (i.e. anyone white) to the other hotel, which was no where near the same quality. In fact – the other hotel wasn’t even related! It was all a ploy to make us think we were somehow going to a legit place, which wasn’t legit at all.

In the end, the Roi Cristophe offered us rooms to stay the night at their hotel that night as a recompense for dealing with the fraud. We gladly accepted and quickly packed up from the other hotel and moved into a (MUCH) nicer and safer hotel for the last night.

Yep, that's pretty much how things went. The whole ride home all I could think about was the psychology of the owner we dealt with. In a society like Haiti, if you're an ambitious person, as this guy clearly was, it seems to me you probably look at your options in life and find that the honest routes to get ahead are basically closed to you, and so you start thinking OK, I guess I have to be dishonest. This is not to excuse in any way what he did. It was wrong. He took advantage of us, and that infuriates me. But I think it's difficult for us in the developed world to wrap our heads around how much greater the incentives for dishonesty are for people in places like Haiti. Now the specific guy we dealt with probably no longer needed to be dishonest to do okay for himself, but I imagine he had been involved in some decidedly illegal practices to get there, and he no longer cared about the morality of it. I can imagine him looking at people like me and my friends and thinking What are you complaining about? Do you know where I came from? You have no f***ing clue, you sheltered American children. Now shut up and pay.

Whether or not this was his actual thought process, I cannot say. But all-in-all it was an extremely eye-opening experience on many fronts.