It is fifteen minutes past eleven when I walk through the doors of True Food’s Bethesda location. It’s drizzling outside, but the gray weather does not find me in the wishful state it usually does. I woke up with a now-unfamiliar sensation: the need for coffee.
I am not a fanatic of the drink; I haven’t been for the past few years. But this morning, my nostrils frizzle nonetheless when the barista presents me the cup. It smells like home, the aroma of the Haitian ground. However, I am left disappointed when I take a sip. This is not from home. It is not nearly as rich and strong as what my grandmother used to serve us at breakfast, in an animated Port-au-Prince that is no longer. I keep drinking, nonetheless.
This is how I choose to settle with Mother Nature as this decade ends. She and my people did not have the best start to this closing decade. Indeed, in 2010, twelve days into a new year that seemed like it was going to be perfectly normal, the Earth mercilessly shook our half of the island to its core.
The inability of the government to provide an exact number of casualties did not make it any easier to process. Even today, one cannot help but wonder about every acquaintance they haven’t seen or heard from in a while. “Did we really lose him too?” “Was she possibly among 200,000 that never came home?”
My schedule would not cooperate with my initial plan to go on a hike today. I wanted to meet Mother Nature, sit with her in silence and in her company ten years on, to sip this coffee — the closest coffee to home’s that I could find. I wanted to walk. For our brothers and sisters that we lost, suddenly vanished without the occasion to say goodbye. For the ones who are still here but left with disabilities they had to learn to live with since then. To walk for the ones who lost their home to the earthquake and had to leave on a quest for safer ones; for those who will never be able to think of Haiti without reexperiencing the trauma they survived; and finally, for those who are still terrified to be sent back to a country where no one is expecting them, who, like me, are in a city where few can relate, longing for home.
Unlike many, I am fortunate enough to have not suffered a family separation. Yet I still find it quite challenging to get by in a country I can never fully call my own. I can only imagine what it is for those of us who really are on their own. There’s intense pressure to overcome the language barrier in a timely fashion. The social isolation, loss of fluency in our mother tongue, and exposure (more often than not) to people’s blatant xenophobia are constant reminders we are only guests.
Will I ever be able to resume my life back home? Or am I truly an “apatride,” caught between two cultures and unable to identify fully with either one?
This feeling that has been following me around for the past few days comes from a place of need and insecurity. Among other things, I feel the need to enter this new decade free of all the anger, grudges and resentment that we have been holding on to these past few years against failed governments, corrupt politicians and fraudulent nongovernmental organizations.
Second, I need to know for sure what’s next. Indeed, although those of us under the Temporary Protected Status can finally breathe due to USCIS extending the validity of TPS-related documentations to Jan. 4, 2021, we still live with the burden of an uncertain fate when it comes to staying in the United States with our loved ones. And finally, the need to be better, to be more present and supportive of our own in the here and now, to be kind and caring for those of us who need it the most.
Therefore, to whatever’s yet to come, for lack of a better offering, with the earthy aroma of our hope and fear, here’s coffee. Please, be good to us. And may this new decade be a better one.
Schleika Castan is an international relations student with a minor in history.
