Wild Life

24 January 2009

Voodoo power

Another houngan owns the hotel Oloffson, where we are staying in Port-au-Prince (pronounced in Creole ‘PawohPwanz’). Richard Morse, the witchdoctor proprietor, advises me at supper to relate my dreams to him at breakfast for interpretation. ‘They’re all nightmares,’ I say. ‘I know what they mean already.’

Graham Greene stayed at the Oloffson and it inspired his rather slapdash novel The Comedians. It’s a gothic gingerbread house that is haunted by foreign correspondents who drank themselves to death on rum punch. ‘You expected a witch to open the door to you,’ Greene wrote, ‘or a maniac butler, with a bat dangling from a chandelier behind him.’ Morse has named his rooms after famous guests who visited before Haiti got flushed away. I wanted the Greene or the Mick Jagger suite. Instead I was put in the Jean-Claude van Damme room. There really is no hope. As Alex often says, ‘I’m crispy ducked, mate.’

Haitian ground-level is so despairing you find yourself always grabbing another MOVCON UN chopper flight to any other place on the schedule. At altitude you breathe easy. But the second the rotor blades cease turning you are back in a dormitory state breeding tomorrow’s Manhattan taxi drivers. So switch your cell phones off and enjoy the ride. This is Haiti, dig it: the permanent emergency.