The border that splits the island of Hispaniola into Haiti and the Dominican Republic (DR) can hardly be described as any type of physical barricade. In fact, with only four official crossings along the 394-kilometer border, “porous” is the word we found most commonly used to describe the geographical delineation of Haiti and the DR. Yet the word porous can be used to describe much more than just the physical border. It can also be used to describe peoples’ conceptions of the region, as locals living along the border frequently cross back and forth with little fanfare.
Perhaps where this is most perceptible is through the intermingling of languages in the area. It’s not uncommon to find a French speaker, a Spanish speaker, and a Haitian Creole speaker living in the same area, let alone to find someone who speaks all three languages. Such is the reality in a region where identity goes beyond association with one country or another. For Haitians and Dominicans, this simplifies their story a little too much. For them, the border is much more mental than it is physical.
When we set out to uncover some of these more nuanced views of people living along the Haiti-DR border, I did not foresee having the complications that we did. I thought we might encounter unwilling interviewees, or irritated government officials, or NGOs frustrated at our inability to do anything but write a report. But I did not anticipate that one of our most difficult hurdles to overcome would be with our translator for the day at the Jimani/Malpasse border crossing.
When at first it seemed like an ambitious request to get a translator that could speak French, Spanish, and Haitian Creole well enough to translate them back into English, it soon became clear that these languages were so commonly spoken in the region that any good translator would be able to do this. Enter our translator: let’s call him “Mr. Fay” to protect his identity.
Initially, Mr. Fay seemed like a perfectly competent translator. When I first met him, he was recounting his translation for a group of students from an American university the week before. This seemed like a good sign, and I was hardly skeptical of Mr. Fay’s skills at that point. After all, your translator is supposed to be the person you can trust the most, right? If they were to have any credibility in that profession they would have to translate in an unbiased way, right? Turns out not really.
Perhaps it was a bad sign that our bus driver had recommended the translator. However, a reliable source had suggested the transportation company, so this didn’t seem like cause for concern. Nor would it until we had crossed the border into Haiti and our group was caught negotiating the terms of our transportation for the rest of the day in a back room that Haitian immigration officials had kindly lent us. Of course we would end up there, with Mr. Fay telling us our bus driver didn’t have insurance to drive further into Haiti so our journey would have to end at the immigration office. Unless, of course, we could give him an added incentive to do so. We eventually realized it would be more beneficial to negotiate directly with the bus driver, who didn’t have such a strong desire to pinch us for every penny we had. The bus driver spoke Spanish, and we had able-enough Spanish speakers to convince the driver to take us to meet the NGOs we needed to in Fond Parisien, Haiti – without paying any extra money.
So our question for the day quickly changed from “how do we get the most information?” to “how do we get past our translator to get the correct information?” This proved easier than one might expect, as we had decent French speakers that could generally understand what the NGOs were trying to tell us. Though we couldn’t avoid how Mr. Fay would translate our questions, and we often found him adding his own personal flair to the NGOs’ answers.
And there were some funny moments too. Like the time we asked Mr. Fay what “share” was in Creole while he was handing back our passports and reading off our names. We ended up yelling “Gupta! Gupta!” to two Haitian boys that we handed food to. “Gupta” does not in fact mean “share” in Creole, rather it’s the last name of one of the students in our group.
We ended the day exhausted by all we had learned and faced with how much can go wrong for foreigners in a situation like this. While we had confronted some barriers of our own, I was only beginning to understand how complicated it was to live in a region where crossing the border was a function of peoples’ daily lives and how much harder this has become for so many Haitian migrants and Dominicans of Haitian descent.
