On September 9, at the Dallas, TX mid-term Republican convention, our president pledged to send every American adult a check for $5,000 if voting retains MAGA control of both houses of Congress. (I did the math: $5,000 per U.S. adult comes to $1,384,000,000.) Memories of a challenging yet rich experience working in Haiti in the 80s from years ago came flooding back. There are similarities, both comical and appalling, between the U.S. and that island dictatorship.
In 1985, my wife Katherine took a job with a college that sends students to a developing country for a Study Service Trimester. As her spouse, I was hired as support. We would lead 24 American students in Haiti. We found host families, scheduled experts to teach Haitian language, history, politics, and culture (art, music, religion, sport), for the first half of the trimester, and then we placed students in service placements (clinics, schools, re-forestation projects) for the second half. The program aimed to broaden students’ perception of our own country’s role and its obligations to the world. We were eager for a foreign adventure; we arrived in July, 1985.
