Oregon Humanities

Lessons from Manno

When my family moved back to Haiti, I was fourteen, the reluctant daughter of a missionary. When I was six, Haiti had felt like paradise: mangoes fell ripe from trees, kamion drivers blared past our house with carnival-music horns, houses were the color of bubble-gum ice cream. But after living in the states and acquiring the knowing condescension of a teenager, I did not want to be dragged back to Haiti. This time, to make matters worse, we wouldn’t live on the missionary compound, surrounded by friends. Instead, we lived in a small village because my father wanted us to have Haitian friends; to make sure it happened, he hired a Kreyol language teacher, a young man named Manno, who was a few years older than I was.

At first I was smitten by Manno’s dark brown eyes, long lashes, the confident thrust of his shoulders. The infatuation lasted about a week, and then I started complaining that learning Kreyol was ruining my French accent. I was too tired after a day of high school correspondence courses to memorize a list of verbs: rélé, to call or be named; kouri, to run; degagé, to make do with what you have.

A few months later, we gave up on the experiment and moved back onto the compound. Nothing was working out as Dad planned. His reforestation projects had been thwarted by drought. Most of the tree seedlings he had planted died, along with the vegetable gardens. Dad might have felt defeated, but my sisters and I were euphoric. There would be no more awkward afternoons with our Haitian neighbors, with Dad telling jokes that didn’t translate while my sisters and I kicked each other under the table. We disappeared effortlessly into the quasi-American hum of the compound: teen nights on Wednesdays, movies in the lounge, sleepovers.

I only remember Manno coming over to visit us at the compound once: I was sitting at the picnic table in the middle of the compound, surrounded by girlfriends. We were fixing each others’ hair and giggling about some visiting American boys on a tour group. Manno drove up on his new motorcycle. I tried not to make eye contact but everyone looked at me and grinned. He’d come to ask if I wanted to go for a ride.

At the time, Manno represented everything that I despised about Haiti: his swaggering masculinity, his pompously long pinkie fingernail, which I’d heard explained suggested that he thought himself too good to work in the fields. I didn’t understand, at the time, that I scorned Manno because I saw myself in him.

I don’t remember what I said to Manno that day in front of my friends. I would like to think that I was not unkind. But Manno understood that I had rejected him and I suspected, even then, that he would not forget it.

A few months ago, I went back to Haiti to collect stories for the radio show This American Life. It had been twenty years since I had seen Manno and in that time, he had become a doctor, the medical director of a small, Haitian-run clinic. Manno’s clinic is less than one hundred yards from the house where he once tried to teach me Kreyol. His long pinkie fingernail is gone, but his impatience and confidence serve him well as a medical director.

Ever since the earthquake, he has been driving down to Port-au-Prince to do relief work. When I met him again, with a microphone in my hand, I was relieved to realize that we had both changed. This time, I saw him as a man with stories that I wanted to understand.

About Apricot Irving

Apricot Anderson Irving is a writer and radio producer. Her story about Manno’s medical clinic is featured on This American Life. Her most recent essay for Oregon Humanities magazine was “Neverland” in the Fall/Winter 2009 Away issue. She lives in Portland with her family.

24 May 2010 | Posted by Apricot Irving in Inside O. Hm.
Permalink | Comments? (0 so far)