Chapter 7

Chapter seven begins with the introduction of Ophelia Dahl. She was only 18 and was working in an eye care facility in Mirebalasis, Haiti when Paul first arrived. She first met Paul coming out of the Eye Care house, Paul was standing on the balcony. They sat down together and after a while she was telling a complete stranger some of her deepest feelings. Paul was being very helpful. While being quiet and listening, he also was giving her good advice on how to deal with her problems.

They then went of a trip with the team in the Land Rover. On that trip he began to master the creole language with incredible speed. On the way back, the passed an accident on the side of the road. An overloaded truck, full of people and mangoes headed to the market, couldn't master a turn. people all around were in shock, there was a lady laying dead on the fruit with only a cardboard to cover her body. Paul wrote a poem dedicated to this incident. "We start, eyes drawn reluctantly back Over baskets, to the dead mango lady Stretched stiff on her bier of tropical fruit. She is almost covered by a cardboard strip, Like the flag of her corrugated country, A flimsy strip too thin to hide the wounds."

Paul later explains, that while this accident really was an accident, there was really no accident about it.“Accidents happen. Sure. But not every bad thing that happens is an accident. There was nothing accident about the wretchedness of the road . . . or the over-loaded truck . . . of the desperation of a peasant woman who had to get to market to make a sale, because otherwise her family would go hungry.” He soon realized that he didn't come here to study anthropology, he came here to do ethnology. Ethnology is the study of a culture not through books and artifacts, but from the people. After Ophelia heard of Paul's decisions, she realized that things would never be the same. She left back home, but promised to write Paul whenever she could.