By Shannon Ewing
VOICES Radio Hour, brought to you by VOICES in partnership with KDNK, The Sopris Sun, and the Connection is the Medicine Foundation. Each episode we share stories from members of our community. We hope this serves to preserve our oral history of who we are, where we come from, and who we aspire to be, through the tradition of storytelling.
This episode of VOICES Radio Hour is called “Simple Gifts,” and it’s about the treasures in life that reveal themselves to us when we take the time to look for them, a gift from the universe that lit up your world in the least expected ways. The episode aired on KDNK at 6pm on Sunday, March 22, but you can still watch or listen online anytime at voicesrfv.org/voices-radio-hour The storytellers for this episode are Caitlin Causey, Shannon Ewing and Raleigh Burleigh, moderated by Mitzi Rapkin.
I am pressed between two Haitian truck drivers in the cab of a semi, stuck in sweltering, smoggy Port-au-Prince traffic, and I can’t figure out why neither of them will look at me. We have spent what feels like an eternity creeping through the congested city streets, unmoving, in uneasy silence.
The three of us work for an organization called Doctors Without Borders — they transport supplies to different hospitals and I’m an HR volunteer. The organization has strict security rules, so it’s bizarre for all three of us that I am sandwiched between them.
They’re young, in their mid 20s, with close-cropped hair and the standard Port-au-Prince outfit of second-hand t-shirts and worn out jeans. They’re both carefully looking out the windshield and not in my direction.
The windows are down. We’re trying to cool off from the afternoon heat, but all that pours in are diesel fumes and smoke from corner cooks — women crouched over charcoal cook stoves selling styrofoam containers of jerk chicken and rice and beans because most of the restaurants are closed. Colorful tap tap buses grind by, music and horns blaring.
Sweating and awkwardly smashed up against each other as I fill the jump seat, I try to make conversation — me in my stumbling French and they with their thick Creole accents — this is uncomfortable in so many ways.
It is three months after a 7.0 earthquake killed 300,000 people almost overnight, and the capital city is teeming with aid workers. Most are focused on providing healthcare and only one organization on housing, which means the NGOs have rented the standing houses while locals are living in tent cities under bedsheets propped up with sticks. It will be monsoon season soon.
I have spoken to many local friends and colleagues about the devastation of the earthquake, and, now — here with these two manual laborers — I’m curious: what do they think of this outpouring of aid? Do they resent us?
At first they are polite. They talk about how it was good to get some assistance, how great the need was in the beginning. But then the driver glances at me and says, “And, look, it’s quite good for you.”
I don’t know what he means.
He says, “Look at how many jobs it has created for you all.” I reply that I can’t speak for any other organization than the one they work with, but that everyone who has come in to help is a volunteer. We are not getting paid.
The passenger’s brows furrow and he asks, “If you’re not getting paid, then why are you here?”
I flash back to the whirlwind week before I left. I was given seven days’ notice to get on a plane with a one-way ticket. I’m telling people I’m leaving and friends tell me that they, too, would come help, but they’ve got a mortgage to pay, student loans. The woman who worked the hotel front desk said she would come in a heartbeat, but she has a cat.
I didn’t have a mortgage. I didn’t have a cat. So I got on the plane.
So when he asks, “Why are you here?” I say, “Because you are my neighbors and you needed help. I came with my two hands.”
Nobody says anything for a long time.
The truck hasn’t moved. The engine still idles. The fumes and the music and the horns are still pouring through the windows. Outside the truck hasn’t changed.
Inside, something has shifted.
These two men, who have just spent the last hour avoiding eye contact, now actually look at me. We’re still hot, still smashed leg to leg. But what used to feel like being trapped now feels like a different kind of closeness.
They had assumed that we were profiting off of the worst thing that had ever happened to their country. And — with the food being flown in, the housing, the international budgets being spent — of course they did.
But in this cab, in this moment, these three people finally see each other.
I came back and started an organization called Global Neighbors because, in the cab of that truck, that’s what those men taught me we are.
Shannon Ewing spent 15 years in the field implementing international development and humanitarian aid projects before becoming a blockchain technology specialist and helping to produce the world’s largest Ethereum event. She currently organizes contemporary idea salons to reengage society in discussions about the world we want to build.