The Foreign Service Journal, June 2005

F O C U S O N F S F I C T I O N 32 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U N E 2 0 0 5 T HE G UARD he child named Bibou, second of three, woke him up, touching his shoulder once, then twice, then backing away to stand in the door- way. “Papa, Maman says there is smoke across the valley and filling the air.” Jean-Philippe rolled from his bed of woven canvas strips. He reached over to pull his olive jacket from the peg on the wall near the door of the guard post, and slipped it over his undershirt as he stepped into the clear morning air. From here, his place of work at the crest of a high ridge on the Haitian-Dominican bor- der, he surveyed what had also become his home over the last five years. His wife was busy scooping water from the two small tubs that sat on the far side of the guardhouse, near the covered area that served as a kitchen. To Jean-Philippe, the guardhouse was home. Cer- tainly, it was more than a man and his family needed in this part of the country, he often told his wife, and much pre- ferable to the life they had lived in Cap-Haitien after they had married. The post was built semi-advantageously, with a view of the narrow dirt road that rose from the valley where the small town of Desmoulins stood invisible below, appearing as if from nowherebetween the limestone bluffs and scrabble that dominated so much of the land. The air was decidedly more temperate at this altitude, though Jean-Philippe often found himself sweating easily after 10 minutes of patrolling the perimeter he was assigned. Behind the shack and about 10 meters along the ridge stood a single tree that had survived the for- aging for wood and at whose base they had buried their youngest child, Titide, less than a year before. As was his custom upon waking, Jean-Philippe walked to the eastern side of the wooden building, and leaned against the mud and sticks of the wall, bleached into a crumbling white cake by countless morning suns. He looked toward the sun and into theDominican Republic, down and across the sloping hills, all the more different than his beloved Haiti for its greenery and tree-lined ridge s . Jean-Philippe had inspect- ed the Dominican border only once before. He had traveled for three hours down the hill toward Quanaminthe, the point of crossing into the Dominican town of Dajabon, occasionally grabbing on to outcroppings of rock or man- gled roots to steady himself. To his surprise, he had found the border towns to be a hub T O NE MAN CHOOSES NOT TO STEP OVER A LINE IN THE DIRT . B Y R AKESH S URAMPUDI