“So when are you going to visit?” Henri would always write in the annual emails we’d exchange around the holidays. “There’s a truckload of Haitian hospitality just waiting for you.” “Soon,” I would reply. I could just imagine him reading my response from the modest Port-Au-Prince apartment Henri shared with his wife and five-year-old son and rolling his eyes. It’s not that I didn’t want to visit my friend in Haiti, it’s just that it never seemed…convenient. But after yesterday’s devastating earthquake, I wish I had.
Henri would try to entice me to come with descriptions of how beautiful his country was. He promised to take me to his favorite place—Île à Vache (Cow Island), a small island off Haiti’s south-west peninsula which was a popular tourist attraction that many considered to possess the most amazing scenery in all of the Caribbean. He told me of this one section of a mangrove forest that none of the tourists knew about, but was the most beautiful spot in the world. “When God needs a vacation,” he would write me, “this is where he goes.”
