It’s been a particularly busy couple of weeks down here at Rebuild Globally: Our new director of sales visited the workshop for the first time, we hosted an operations expert for a week who helped us analyze the workshop for ways to improve efficiency, and Rebuild’s board of directors flew in for several days to meet the artisans and explore Port-au-Prince. All of these things have kept me pretty busy and unable to think about my next post until earlier this week, but now that things are slowing down I’ve had a chance to rest and reflect on what I want to write about.

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When I found out I’d be spending the summer in Haiti, I knew that this was my chance to answer a question that had been burning deep inside me for over a year: What was life like as a foreigner working and living in a developing country? I felt very blessed to have the opportunity to personally explore that question after only my second year of college, and I intended to capitalize on it. My desire to work abroad after graduation was fanned into flame by my trip to India last summer for the Opus Prize, however I had no concept of what kinds of challenges and difficulties were associated with that kind of life. I felt like I was missing a vital piece of information for determining my future, and going to Haiti would provide me with a chance to better understand what I wanted to do post-graduation. Now, after almost two months of working, eating, sleeping, and soaking up life here, I’m starting to fill in the blanks.

To understand what it’s like to live as a foreigner in a developing context, you have to examine what it’s like to be an expatriate (“someone who lives outside of their native country”). From my experience working and speaking with many  expats in Port-au-Prince, there are four things that characterize their lives away from their homeland.

The 4 Characteristics of Life as an Expat:

1. Life as an expat is isolating

“Want to meet up at Starbucks at 3?”, said no one ever in Haiti. There isn’t a Starbucks in the entire country, nor is there a sports bar around the corner to kick back with buddies on a Friday night. You can’t go to a movie theater to decompress after a long week, or even go to the beach or hang out in the mountains without blocking out an entire day to travel there and back. This is one of the most consistent complaints I’ve heard from my fellow expats, and its one of the most prevalent aspects of life working in a country like Haiti.

A typical afternoon after work: listening to music and decompressing at home.

As a result of the lack of communal spaces for expats to hang out, many times people will simply commute between home and work, home and work before spending a Saturday with friends at a local bar or driving up into the mountains. Having access to internet helps fill your spare time each afternoon, but spending too much time on your computer can dig you deeper into a hole of isolation. As you make it through the week and Thursday and Friday role around, a combination of exhaustion and mild frustration mounts from the daily challenges of working in Haiti, and something as simple as a radiator overheating on your way home from work or not having running water at your apartment one day can become a major stressor when you don’t have much to help relieve the workweek tension.

Radiator spewing coolant on the way back home from work

2. The friendships you make with other expats galvanize quickly

Several weeks after I got here, I was at Pizza Amour with Annie and Sarah (the two expats currently working at Rebuild Globally) when I met a group of expats who worked a few blocks away from Rebuild at a woodworking company called Maxima. Among them was a guy named Kobus, a well built Dutchman who spoke with an accent and had a great sense of humor. Kobus had worked for Maxima for over a year and a half, and I quickly found out that he was known as one of the nicest, most hard working  guys around. Sitting next to Kobus was another expat named Kadisha, a recent arrival originally from the Congo but who had studied Architecture and Urban Design in Australia. When we first met, he told me that Portland, Oregon was the city he and his classmates had studied at length in their introductory urban design class, and he said he had spent hours pouring over maps of the place! After dinner was over, we said our goodbyes and I didn’t expect to meet either Kobus or Kadisha again.

My good friends Kadisha (center) and Kobus (right)

Luckily the expat community is tight knit here in Port-au-Prince, so several weeks later we met up at Rebuild’s Boutique Grand Opening (where the photo above was taken) and soon afterwards I found myself hiking through the mountains far above Port-au-Prince with Kadisha (an experience I detailed in my last blog post). Another one of my good expat friends, Nick, a singer/songwriter from Colorado, invited me to a cookout a few families were having across town last weekend. Nick is spending three months in Haiti working for Heartline Ministries as a driver, and our time in Haiti has overlapped for about a month now. We drove over to Heartline’s main campus with several other expats, gathered firewood, and roasted hotdogs and marshmallows before talking late into the night.

Roasting hotdogs at Heartline

From left to right: Rob, Nick, Glenda, Sarah, and Becky enjoying dinner at Heartline

All the expats here know the challenges of working and living in Haiti, so they go out of their way to support one another and be inclusive when they have get togethers and events going on. I’ve been invited over for dinners and offered rides to church by the founders of Heartline, a husband and wife duo named John and Beth Mchoul who have lived in Haiti for 26 years ( they’re quick to tell you they’re originally from “Bahston”!). Through their generosity I’ve been given the chance to meet dozens of people and to be included in the tight knit expat community here in Port-au-Prince.

Beth Mchoul receiving help from several young girls carrying food

3. Expats aren’t tourists, but they aren’t locals either

Visiting monuments, traveling around the country, and hanging out in the mountains or at the beach are all things expats do, just not all the time. That said, even though they live and work in country, that doesn’t mean they are fully integrated as locals. They live in a sort of limbo, suspended between their home country and their country of residence. The depth of the experience I’ve had here in Port-au-Prince as an expat (making friends, helping Rebuild to change and grow, and learning the local language) is contrasted with the breadth of experience many tourists get when they visit a foreign country for a short time. Tourists see a snapshot of the country, whereas expats get a higher resolution picture of a smaller area

One of my favorite parts of being an expat in Port-au-Prince is being able to get my bearings. The past several weeks I’ve walked to some of my meetings by foot, navigating through the busy streets of Port-au-Prince. That’s something I’m only comfortable doing because I am confident I know where I’m going and I can speak enough Kreole to ask for directions if I get lost. I’m usually the only white person walking, which can be uncomfortable at times but people are almost always friendly and smile when you ask them how they are doing in their mother tongue. There’s something to be said for experiencing life as its being lived by the people around you, and meeting people briefly on my walks has been a great way of doing that.

4. Every expat has several outlets

Sometimes all you need is a bit of time away from the stress and chaos of life in Haiti, and having outlets to help you cope is critical. For some people its kicking back a few beers every night, for others its doing yoga, for still others its listening to music, reading fiction novels or making art. Since I arrived seven weeks ago, my outlets have been  photography and watching comedy clips on YouTube.

Watching shows like “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” gives me a taste of what’s going on in the world, but it does so in such a way that I can laugh or shake my head at the absurdity of the world and forget momentarily about the stressors here in Haiti. Photography, on the other hand, has given me a chance to embrace the nature of reality here in Port-au-Prince and to try and capture its essence. I carry my camera with me just about everywhere I go, and so far I’ve taken over 3,000 photos. I try to challenge myself by experimenting with new methods of composition and trying to capture the contrast I see day in and day out in this city. Here are a few examples of the photos I’ve taken:

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The 4 Characteristics of Life as an Expat:

1. Life as an expat is isolating

2. The friendships you make with other expats galvanize quickly

3. Expats aren’t tourists, but they aren’t locals either

4. Every expat has several outlets

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These four characteristics of life as an expat are things I never would have been able to learn back in Spokane or in Portland. Sometimes I think back to my first week here and try to remember how overwhelmed I felt by everything here. I was hit with so many changes all at once that I was numb, in a partial state of shock. I remember climbing underneath my mosquito net into bed the first night and thinking to myself “What the heck have I done?!? I don’t know why I thought this was a good idea!” With time, however, my reason for being hear grew more and more apparent. It has only really been during the past several weeks that I’ve had enough security and stability to begin trying to address the questions I came to Haiti seeking to answer: What is it like as a foreigner working and living in a developing context? Do I want to work abroad long term after graduation? What circumstances am I able to put up with in order to live the kind of life I want? I still don’t have all the answers, but I’m excited to continue chipping away at the questions, stripping away the layers of uncertainty to uncover the life I want to lead.

– Aaron D.

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Thanks for visiting aarondanowski.com! Be sure to stay up to date on my travels by “Following” my blog by clicking on the button on the right hand side of your page!

If you would like to contact me directly, please do so via email: adanowski@zagmail.gonzaga.edu

The Open House for the new boutique on Friday

This was a tough week for me, both physically and mentally. On Wednesday I started coming down with a cold that sapped my energy and make my head feel ready to explode. At the same time, things at Rebuild got busier all week and everyone worked extra hours preparing for an open house event we hosted on Friday. The collision of these two things had me pondering some pretty big questions: 1. “What am I doing?” and 2. “Why am I even here?”

I knew the logical answers to these questions, I had practically memorized them: “I’m working with a social enterprise in Haiti that makes sandals out of tires and sells them to Kenneth Cole!”, and “I’m here because I wanted to experience what working with a social enterprise in a developing context feels like”. However, knowing these answers didn’t make the questions go away. In fact, every time they popped back up again it was more and more difficult to answer them. I knew WHY I was here, I was just less and less sure whether it was a good enough answer.

Kenneth Cole Rebuild Sandals

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from being here in Haiti, its that no matter how inspirational or awesome your target is, you will inevitably have moments when you’re ready to quit or stop pursuing it (see my post last week about the Inspiration Curve for more on this). The challenges you face will seem too steep, and your energy reserves will run completely dry. These are the pivotal moments on the Inspiration Curve that define your life. They force you to reconcile your beliefs with your actions, your values with your lifestyle, and your goals with your level of commitment. When those moments come, you have a difficult choice to make: Should I quit and move on to a new pursuit, or should I persevere and continue to fight for my target?

There is a right time to quit and a right time to persevere. The trick is figuring out which one is right for your current situation. There is a stigma our society associates with “quitting”, as if giving up is always a failure on the part of the individual. However, knowing when to quit is incredibly valuable, because my definition it also helps you recognize when to persevere.

“Should I quit and move on to a new pursuit, or should I persevere and continue to fight for my target?”

There are three guiding principles I’ve come across that help answer the question of whether to persevere or quit. I’ve learned these principles from people who have found their “right” target, who live full, authentic lives by overcoming the daily obstacles in their way. Its important to note that these people are not perfect, nor do they all engage in similar pursuits or share common roots. But they do have one thing in common: they know what they are living for. Each of them has a purpose, a meaning that fuels their life and that gives them the strength to persevere through the almost daily challenges they face. Their clarity of purpose provides a compass for them to knto navigate when to quit and when to persevere. So, from atop the shoulders of these giants, here are the three guiding principles to know when to persevere and when to quit:

Principle #1. Find your Purpose and Follow your Heart by Answering the Question “What do I desire?”

Steve Jobs nails it on the head when he says “Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” Following your heart, or as Alan Watts puts it, what you “desire”, requires a high level of commitment and self-confidence. In order to find your purpose, you need to be able to articulate not only what you desire your life to be about, but also why its important to you. Your answer depends heavily upon your values, your beliefs, your present needs and your future plans, all of which are growing and changing as you add new experiences and people to your life. Answering this question does not happen overnight; it can take years, even decades, and the answer can change drastically over the course of your life. But ultimately, it’s the most important question you can ask yourself in order to find your “right” target. “You’ve got to find what you love”, Jobs says, “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And just like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years role on.”

The importance of following your heart and discovering  what you desire is illustrated in the story of Scott Harrison. When you listen to Scott speak, its easy to get swept up in his stories. His sterling silver gray hair belies his age (he’s thirty nine), but the passion in his eyes and his expressive, lively mannerisms make him seem more like an idealistic twenty five year old. The son of an electrical engineer and a journalist, Scott grew up as an only child and moved from Philadelphia to New Jersey when he was 4. At the age of 18, he moved to New York city as part of a rock band and started playing gigs in local clubs. He grew his hair out long and enjoyed the nightlife New York had to offer. Over the course of time, he began to realize that the club promoters booking his band were making a heck of a living, and after six months when his band broke up, Scott decided to jump into the night life business. He quickly began partnering with a local promoter to book shows for the likes of Stevie Wonder, Prince, and Whitney Houston. “If you wanted to rebel, here was a way to rebel in style”, Scott said in an interview several years ago with Kevin Rose. “You’d work a couple nights a week, get beautiful people to come to your club, you’d walk in and get 50 drink tickets, and all your friends would drink for free… oh and by the way you got paid!” After several years in the business, Scott was one of the most successful night club promoters in the New York, getting paid thousands of dollars a month to drink Budweiser and Bacardi, and jetting off to Paris on the weekends to attend fashion shows for the heck of it.

Scott Harrison (INC.com)

On December 31, 2003, ten years after entering the promoter business, Scott was sitting on a beach in Uruguay watching the sunset next to his supermodel girlfriend while servants waited on them and the rest of their group (they had all arrived in private planes that afternoon to celebrate New Years). It was on that trip that Scott realized something. In his own words, “I was the worst person I knew… I was the most selfish, sycophantic, arrogant, no good… I really saw what I had become. I was emotionally bankrupt, spiritually bankrupt, and morally bankrupt. Every single thing I had held as a value I’d walked away from in this sort of slow burn over the ten years”. After he returned from Uruguay, Scott began to think hard about what he desired in his life, and after reconnecting with his faith, he ended up spending the next two years paying to be a photographer on a Mercy Ship, a floating hospital that travels to underdeveloped countries around the world to provide top quality medical care to those in need. The experience was transformational, and one of the many realizations he had over the course of his time in Africa was that one of the biggest underlying issues Mercy Ships wasn’t addressing was the lack of access to clean water. After moving back to New York in 2006, Scott founded the nonprofit charity:water, an organization dedicated to bringing clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations. Since its inception, it has raised tens of millions of dollars to build thousands of wells around the world, and it has emerged as one of the most innovative, transparent nonprofits in the world.

Scott Harrison’s transformation is an extreme example, but it illustrates the possibilities that open to us when we stop to consider what we desire in life, and how we can use our gifts to make the world a better place. If you’re interested in hearing more of Scott’s story in his own words, I would highly recommend watching his 51 minute interview with Kevin Rose, and you can also check out charity:water’s website for more details on the work they do.

Scott Harrison, founder of charity:water

Footnote: If You Don’t Know Where to Start, Answer the Question “What DON’T I Desire?”

Scott figured out what he desired by first recognizing what he DIDN’T desire. He knew he was not living the kind of life he wanted, and he decided to quit his former life in order to take action and start searching for his purpose. A good way of gauging whether or not you should quit is to think about how you DON’T want to live your life. When you find yourself slipping into those things, take active steps to change things up. You don’t need to know exactly where you’re going in order to change directions.

Principle #2. Live your Passion, and Make Every Moment Count. You Can Persevere Through Just About Anything With a Good Reason WHY You’re Alive

As you discover your purpose, you need to trust in your ability to live it out and make everyday count. In other words, once you know the WHY, don’t be afraid to figure out the HOW. Randy Pausch and Steve Jobs both make it clear that you have too little time on this earth not to follow your heart and make the world a better place. “It is going to get hard and you are going to want to quit sometimes, but it will be colored by who you are, and more who you want to be” Will Smith says. Whether that means overcoming adversity to ensure your kids have more opportunities than you did, investing your time teaching and shaping the world’s future leaders, advancing public policy to empower the marginalized in society, working to promote human rights, ending food insecurity, or increasing access to healthcare and education, you can’t be afraid to follow through on your passion. As Will Smith says at the end of the video, “The first step, before anybody else in the world believes in you, is you have to believe in you… Why would you be realistic? What’s the point of being realistic?”

There are many good examples of people living their passion, believing in themselves and taking Will Smith’s advice and being unrealistic. Take Gollapalli Israel for instance, a Dalit in Chennai working to promote upward mobility for thousands of outcasts in Indian society amidst the climate of a rigid social caste system.

Or Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, a movement that is seeking to reform the public school system in America, opening new worlds of possibility for kids all across the country and creating a dedicated network of education reformers in all levels of the education system.

Or Fr. Rick Frechette, the Passionist priest working to provide high quality pediatric care, employment, and security to thousands of at-risk Haitians here in Port-au-Prince, despite the lack of infrastructure and stable political climate.

None of these people managed to reach where they are today without facing major challenges and obstacles, and I guarantee you all of them thought about giving up, but their passion and clarity of purpose helped inspire them to continue to pursue what they desire in life and continue to dream.

Principle #3. Quit and Move On When Your HOW Isn’t Getting You Closer To Your Purpose

Chances are you probably won’t find the best way to live your purpose on the first try, but each time you realize you aren’t moving in the right direction to live the life you desire, you need to be able to quit in order to find the path that resonates with your ever evolving values, beliefs, needs, and goals. William Whewell, an English scientist, is quoted as saying that “Every failure is a step to success. Every detection of what is false directs us towards what is true: every trial exhausts some tempting form of error. ” This is the case with finding your “right” target.

Now, an important thing to note is that does not mean quitting whenever things get difficult. As we have already seen, things will inevitably get difficult, and if you quit each time you encounter a challenge, you won’t make any progress towards any target for your life. It means you ought to quit when you realize your target for your life is not in line with how you want to live your life. I don’t think the concept of “strategic quitting” is stressed enough in society today, especially in the formative years of high school and college when students are trying to figure out what they want to do with their lives. I have several friends who went to colleges in the Midwest and the East Coast thinking they wanted to be doctors, and when they arrive they realize that they were competing with their classmates to see who could make it through all the weed-out classes and “survive”. If someone drops out of the pre-med track, there is a tendency to characterize them  as being less intelligent or less able to handle the challenge of being a doctor. The same is true with students who switch out of engineering into business, or from a “hard” major to a “soft” major. The switch is (consciously or subconsciously) considered a failure.

However, most of the time “quitting” one major for another is simply an opportunity to more fully discover yourself, not a personal failure. It’s a successful step towards living the life you want to live, granting you more flexibility to find your passion and pursue your purpose. I switched from engineering to business before the start of my freshman year, and given all that has happened in the past two years, I think it worked out pretty well.

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The Three Guiding Principles for When to Persevere and When to Quit:

Principle #1. Find your Purpose and Follow Your Heart by Answering the Question “What do I desire?”

Principle #2. Live your Passion, and Make Every Moment Count. You Can Persevere Through Just About Anything With a Good Reason WHY You’re Alive

Principle #3. Quit and Move On When Your HOW Isn’t Getting You Closer To Your Purpose

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Now that the week is over, my batteries are recharging, and with these three principles in mind, I came back to the two questions I had been pondering: 1. “What am I doing?” and 2. “Why am I even here?”

I’m doing what I need to do in order to pursue my purpose and live my passion, and I’m here because I have faith I’m on the right path, making each moment count and allowing my desire for my life to evolve and grow with each step I take.

Those feel like good answers to me, and I hope you can say the same as you face the challenges that await you on your path.

– Aaron D.

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Thanks for visiting aarondanowski.com! Be sure to stay up to date on my travels by “Following” my blog by clicking on the button on the right hand side of your page!

If you would like to contact me directly, please do so via my email: adanowski@zagmail.gonzaga.edu