Market day at the DR border

            On Friday, I was invited to go with the boss and one of the country directors to the Dominican Republic. The foundation needed a truck battery, a lawn mower and some other equipment which is hard to find and/or very expensive in Haiti. With the border only about an hour and a half away, it can be a lot easier to make a day trip out of the country when you need this kind of stuff.

            We left at 6 am and drove east through some nondescript towns. In one, the streets were lined with tall sacks of charcoal, Haiti’s leading source of energy and deforestation (and possibly employment). We passed Caracol, a new industrial park funded by aid dollars and a pet Clinton project which has largely failed to prosper, and the University Roi Henri Christophe, a gift from the Dominican Republic that looks very out of place in the middle of an empty field. Finally we made it to Ouanaminthe, the border town that faces its Dominican twin, Dajabón, across the river. We arrived a little bit before 8, along with seemingly the rest of northeastern Haiti.

            Mondays and Fridays are market days, where anyone is allowed to cross into Dajabón on foot without a passport. Thousands of Haitians cross over to the market on the Dominican side with wheelbarrows, motos outfitted with trailers, or giant head loads full of Haitian goods to sell. At the end of the day, they return with the same wheelbarrows and bundles full of Dominican goods, which they sell in Haiti before the next market day. Rinse, repeat.

            If you’re on foot, getting across is as simple as strolling over the bridge with the rest of the crowd. If you’re in a truck it’s a different story.  Your vehicle needs special permission and insurance to enter, your passengers all need to have their passports stamped on both the Haitian and Dominican sides, your goods will draw the attention of customs, and bits of money will fly out of your wallet every step of the way. In hindsight, market day was probably not the best day for us to try to run this errand.

            The boss and the director knew the steps we had to go through, but none of the places we needed to go were clearly marked. Rolling down the windows and asking the walkers was a recipe for conflicting instructions, until an "expediter" sensed our confusion in the crowd (or just saw a pickup truck with a couple of white people in the front). Sporting a bold “I Love America” t-shirt, this guy cleared a pathway for our truck to creep through, found us a parking spot, escorted us through the various offices we needed to present ourselves at, and translated with the Dominican border guards for us once we got across the bridge. His whole job is a racket that could be eliminated with some clear signage, but we were happy to kick a little his way just to feel like we had someone with us who knew what was going on. The whole process us took us probably 2 hours, and probably would have taken even longer if we were on our own.

            Once we were properly in the DR, we had about another 2-hour drive to our destination in Santiago. Short as it was by road trip standards, it was enough to get a very good sense of the difference between Haiti and the DR. Haiti does not feel so different from Africa; the DR feels like Puerto Rico, or even parts of the American Southwest (with the addition of a lot of bored-looking soldiers at military checkpoints). The ethnic differences between the Haitians and Dominicans are very clear, as are the 65 ranks on the Human Development Index which separate them (the DR, at #96, is ranked higher than China and the world average. Haiti, at #161, is tied with Uganda). The DR has rice fields and plantain orchards just like Haiti, but they are larger, more mechanized, and removed from residential areas.  There’s no need for 4-wheel drive on city streets, and even remote towns have electricity. Santiago has Subway, Burger King, and TGIFridays. It was hard to believe we were on the same island.

            We went to an everything store to rival any Target and a hardware store to rival any Lowes, struggling through our errands with the dozen words of Spanish we had between the three of us and pulling many U-turns on the busy boulevards named after military heroes and historical dates. Still, the shopping took much less time than the driving, and we were on our way back to Haiti after just a couple of hours.

            The return journey was a race against the clock, since we were told the border closes at 5. We sped back to Dajabón, happy that the soldiers at the military check points were too hot and uninterested to bother stopping us. We wasted valuable minutes getting lost in Dajabón, agonizingly close to the border. We made it to Dominican immigration with only 20 minutes to spare. One of the immigration officials chose this moment to take an agonizingly long cigarette break while our passports sat in a heap at an unmanned counter. Once she returned and painstakingly hand-wrote recipts for everyone in line, we hopped back in the truck and inched our way though the returning crowed as quickly as possible. If Haitian immigration was closed by the time we got there, and Dominican immigration was closed by the time we turned back, we’d be stuck sleeping in the truck in the no-man’s-parking-lot between the two.

            But no! Haitian immigration was still manned when we got there, and a few minutes later we were triumphantly on our way back to Milot. (A later look at my Haiti guidebook said the border closes at 6, not 5, but I’ll keep that to myself so as not to rob the others of the sense of epic accomplishment in getting across in 20 minutes.)

            We passed by a few customs checkpoints on the way back through Haiti, which had lines of large trucks waiting to get through. The trucks were piled precariously high with sacks of food, goods, and the people who had just purchased them, with their wheelbarrows tied to the outsides like a weird metal wreath. I'm so bummed I didn't get a picture, because those trucks were feats of engineering. Those vehicles would be stopped and made to pay taxes and “taxes” if they were carrying anything good. Our one lawnmower didn’t pique anyone’s attention, and we had an uneventful twilight drive back home.

            As far as road trips go, this one would only be interesting to people like me, killing a work day in a new environment, or people watchers fascinated by the chaos at the border. I was therefore surprised to find myself traveling the same route, between Milot and Santiago, when I read The Farming of Bones over the weekend. The book is a novel by Edwidge Danticat, which follows the story of a woman from Cap Haitien working as servant in a Dominican house in the 1930s. An early scene takes place at a Dajabón market day. I was surprised to know they were happening so long ago, since I had assumed they were the product of some free trade policy from the 80s or 90s.

            Things got more disturbing the more I read and learned about the relationship between Haiti and the DR. Many Haitians had fled across the border during the American occupation of Haiti (1914-1934), exacerbating long-standing tensions between the neighboring countries. In 1937, the Dominican dictator Trujillo ordered the massacre of all Haitians in the border region.  In an echo of the Biblical "Shibboleth" story, Haitians and dark-skinned Dominicans were captured and made to say the word "perejil" in Spanish ("parsley"). Creole speakers can't roll the "r" or pronounce the "j" correctly. Anyone with an accented pronunciation was slaughtered. 20,000 people were killed in what many call a forgotten genocide. The towns I had passed through featured as the settings for mass killings, and bodies were dumped in the river between Ouanaminthe and Dajabón. It’s still called the Massacre River today.

            Haiti, especially the north, is saturated with history. Already I've wondered many times whether the people who populated these places now know what happened there in the past. I've heard opposing things--that Haitians are deeply knowledgeable and proud of their history, and that they are largely uninformed and preoccupied with the present. In this case, I wonder how many of the hectic market day traders remember the ghosts under the bridge as they cross over it.