BVL in the World

There was the pair of dogs fighting somewhere in the darkness of the jungle behind the compound, but that’s not why I couldn’t sleep. My watch said 2:00 a.m., which made it 3:00 a.m. where I was in Saint-Louis-du-Nord, a village on Haiti’s northern coast; a two-hour drive west of Port-de-Paix where we had to catch a plane scheduled for departure back to Miami via Port-au-Prince later that morning.

And though it wasn’t the dogs keeping me up, their growls and moans affixed my imagination, playing in my mind like an old Italian horror flick. I’d already rolled up my sleeping bag and packed my gear and I had no idea how the rest of my six-member team was asleep, snoring. We had spent the entire day fixing potholes on the coastal road and the work was difficult.

We slept under a tin roof atop a three-story mission. The ocean shore was across the road and through a thin screen of Grugru palms, and the sounds of the tide had lulled me to sleep for the past two weeks. But it was our last night and I was restless—as were du-Nord’s dogs, apparently.

I laid down on the concrete rooftop deck and looked up at the stars. There is almost no light-pollution there and most nights you can make out the Milky Way. I realized that my entire time there, I hadn’t looked above the tree line.

“Your sky looks like this?” A voice said. It was Maxime, his pidgin accent. He was a regular at the mission and had joined us in our work, largely to share in our meals. Food was scarce, otherwise. Like many Haitians, his teeth were bright from chewing sugar cane. There on the deck in the starlight he had a Cheshire smile. Others called him yon olye etranj, rather strange, and I was not surprised to see him at that hour.

“I have never seen a sky like this,” I said.

“It is dark in Chicago?” He asked.

“Yes, but a different kind of dark,” I said.

He laughed. “There are many kinds of dark,” he said.

We paused. I noticed that the dogs had gone silent. A rooster crowed somewhere in the village. “What do you think the dogs were fighting about?”

“There are many kinds of dark,” he said again, only he was not laughing.

We were there under the stars in silence for I don’t know how long before the others on the team began to stir. It was not until sunlight breached the horizon that I noticed Maxime had gone.

Later, on the road at the edge of the village on the way to the airport, I saw a pair of dogs playing tug-of-war with a piece of flotsam.