Free The Best American Travel Writing 2011 by Sloane Crosley Page B

loups-garous: both were killed on sight.
    We were in the hills of Carrefour Feuilles, a neighborhood above Port-au-Prince. Before the quake small cinder-block houses had been stacked steeply one upon the next, climbing the bowls of the mountain, the inhabitants maneuvering through tiny alleyways. When the quake came, one house took down the next, leaving the entire hillside a smear of concrete and rubble and fallen satellite dishes.
    "But why do loups-garous want to suck children's blood?" I asked.
    The question provoked discussion. One man proposed it was a vice, like a taste for whiskey or smoking. Another man just shrugged. But a third man said, "
Le loup-garou—c'est le mal absolu.
" The loup-garou is absolute evil. I suppose, thinking it over now, that it was easier to stay awake at night watching for werewolves than it was to stay on guard for lethal aftershocks.
    Â 
    The earthquake was still recent enough that every passing truck gave me the shivers. Very early one morning, my phone rang, but when I answered it, the caller abruptly hung up. This pattern irritatingly repeated itself perhaps five or six times. This was Venance Lafrance's way of saying he was not dead.
    I had met Venance three years earlier, shortly after my wife and I moved to Haiti. She had found a job in the justice section of the United Nations peacekeeping mission here, working with judges, prosecutors, and lawyers to reform the Haitian legal system. I had just published my first novel, and I figured that I could avoid writing a second one as easily in Haiti as anyplace else; in this I would eventually be proven completely correct. Cristina was initially assigned to the town of Jeremie, only about 125 miles from Port-au-Prince but remote, like an island off the coast of Haiti, fift een hours of bad road between us and the capital. There were more coffin makers in Jérémie than restaurants, more donkeys than cars, and the paved roads petered out at the edge of town. We rented an old gingerbread house flanked by a quartet of sturdy mango trees. In the mornings merchants came down from the hills past our front gate with baskets of fruit balanced on their heads, and at night in bed under the mosquito net when the moon was silver and big, we heard voodoo drums and strange, spooky singing. I don't know if I've ever liked a place more in my life.
    Everywhere I went in Jeremie, people asked me for money. Out front of the Internet cafe, a woman who was almost obese looked up from her breakfast and told me she was hungry. At the market, on the beach, in the streets, people would throw up their palms and say, "
Blan, ba'm cinq gourdes
"—White, give me five gourdes. I've been in other places as poor as Jérémie—the slums of Calcutta, the highlands of northern Thailand—but I've never seen more persistent and aggressive begging. There is a Creole proverb: "
Degagé pa peché
"—Getting by isn't a sin. Asking someone who had money for money was just another way of getting by.
    Venance Lafrance asked me for money just a few days after I got to Jérémie. I was walking to the beach—think goats, chickens, cows, pigs, and wild turkeys; mud huts; a strip of white dirt road snaking along high cliffs diving down to a postcard sea—when a young man with a bag of sweet potatoes on his head accosted me and told me in broken French after some conversational preliminaries that he wanted to be an artist. He was seventeen at the time but looked about twelve. He looked a little like a space alien, with very big eyes, a wide, tall forehead, and high, prominent cheekbones tapering down to a narrow, angular chin. He was wearing a T-shirt that read LIFE IS SHORT. EAT DESSERT FIRST. He was very skinny. I don't remember how he began the conversation, but the upshot was this: he was a student; he had no money; his mother had no money; his little brothers were hungry; and he wanted to be an artist. He had a terrific smile—chiefly