...it's best to get your starter tarantula out of the way on the first night. That way your host mother can show you how to kill him. Required are a firm broom and a swift hand.

These aren't your pet store variety tarantulas who have had everything handed to them and have never so much as gotten into a bar fight. These are monsters. Chain-smoking, Jack Daniels-
swigging brutes that eat American punks like you for breakfast. You begin to announce, before entering dark rooms and dim fields, “If there are any tarantulas here you'd better run – ‘cause otherwise you're DEAD!” But your swagger fools no one and you inevitably... ritually... end up taking one hop and a flying leap onto your bed in a tangle of mosquito netting and hot wax from your smoldering candle.

Despite these nightly show-downs, your days pass in a stream of brilliant possibility. Tarantulas and stinging ants aside, you are transfixed by this new world, full of everything to learn and nothing that is yet old. You compose brief yet heartfelt eulogies for privacy, plumbing, and pre-dead meat, then you set them aside and put your hand to the plow. To the machete. To the washbasin. You scrub clothes until your knuckles break open and crimson swirls settle on the white tee you bought at the GAP a million and a half lifetimes ago.

Your color changes under the strong hand of the sun. Many remarks are made about this. Many remarks are made about everyone's color, you realize, including remarks intended both to cut deeply and to toughen. The darkest children are told that they are ugly. Lighter children are hit and then berated for crying. For the most part these actions are a means to an end. It's a tough world out there; each person must be readied to endure it.

You make the 20-minute trek to Marjorie's school with her each morning and visit for an hour or so before you are due to meet with Guichny. In this time you see kindergarteners stricken into submission. Stricken in the face for sleeping then forced to stand for hours. Stricken on the hands with a stick for mumbling. Stricken across the back for an incorrectly-formed "e" at the chalkboard. "Madame E" she is referred to, the curve of her headscarf carefully traced into a letter—a personification surely created to make writing accessible and non-threatening, but here turned into a source of fear.

You leave to meet Guichny. On weekdays you go over his Advanced English Grammar homework and help him with his pronunciation. You wonder how your teaching skills stack up against those of the professors to whom he is accustomed. Surely you are gentler and more sensitive. But is any value placed on gentleness in this setting?

You don't pick Marjorie up at noon. Not today. You walk home slowly, the heat shimmering off the dusty path and drawing the last drops of moisture from the sugar cane fields. Your mouth feels as if you have gargled with chalk.

Datiny, 18, is standing at the edge of the field when you arrive home. A cousin of the family, his was one of the first names you learned because he bathes in your yard and walks home in a towel. He surveys your flushed face and promptly climbs a tree—his tree—to retrieve coconuts for you to drink. You both sip slowly as he toes the splintered shell that litters the ground. “Are you happy, Linds? Are you happy?” “Yes, Datou, I am happy.” “You are happy because the field is beautiful.” “It is quite beautiful.”

Datiny, like the majority of Haitians, is simultaneously tough and gentle. He is also a bit mischievous, so you calculate that he has experienced his share of beatings. But somehow he has emerged a well-adjusted guy, compassionate and unafraid. How can this seeming contradiction be reconciled?

Your mind passes over your own elementary days. Though physical aggression was rarely a classroom management technique, there were other ways of keeping students in a permanent one-down position. "Heads down on the desks!" was one of the most dreaded cards a teacher could play. A child naturally feels vulnerable, but when she is robbed of her sight and freedom of motion, she feels completely debilitated. Your teacher would pace the room, surveying the rows of down-turned faces covered by small hands. One day she stopped behind you and bent to whisper in your ear. “You are the last to memorize your multiplication tables. The last out of the entire class. This requires a phone call to your parents. Then you'll learn.”

This is the natural order of things in a fallen world. Strong, weak. Big, small. Right, wrong. An American child will find no sympathy from her parents over her situation. The thought that this is a ridiculous and unbalanced way for a child to be treated surely never crosses their minds, just as no Haitian parent would approve of a teacher who does not use corporal punishment. [They would, however, be horrified by the American one-person-to-the-bathroom-at-a-time rule. A Haitian child will never hear “You can hold it until Isai returns; you're a big boy now.” This is considered disgusting and cruel.] Each society has its own ways of exerting power over the weak, and each thinks its own ways innocuous.

There is an apropos fable published in "The Best American Non-Required Reading" (2003).

The moral of this story, of course, is that it's easier to recognize madness in other people than to see it in yourself.

It may be easier for you to recognize wrong in Haiti because you are an outsider. Likewise, a Haitian traveling to the States could quickly identify what are, to him, completely obvious injustices. You welcome this opportunity to see your own shortcomings through a fresh pair of eyes. You spear a mango and lift it into the air. “Datiny, let me tell you about America.”