A Week in Haiti
Ayiti This was published in the Cargo Literary Magazine Blog in 2018 and in Agricultural Landscapes: Seeing Rural through Design , published by Routledge in 2019. I went to Haiti in April of 2017 as a supernumerary on a nursing mission trip in conjunction with the Episcopal University Nursing School in Leogane. My interest was the usual curiosity of a seasoned traveler, but also, as a healthcare architect, I had prepared preliminary drawings for a surgery center in Canaan, a suburb of Port a Prince—I wanted to get a ground level view of healthcare delivery in Haiti. We are the Blan —a Kreyol term applied not only to whites but to foreigners regardless of skin color. We come on a mission trip with a nursing NGO and all but three of us are here for a week of nursing and college or continuing education credits. We bivouac in the coastal town of Leogane, not far from the epicenter of the magnitude 7 earthquake which struck in 2010, sequestered