Afrianer Women Love Chocolate Too

A Chinese proverb says may you live in interesting times. I've seen it on many of those fortune cookies they give you in restaurants, and I can't but smile every time. If you ask me, people should strive for the ordinary and the mundane and avoid the extremes that come with leading an extraordinary life. They'd live longer if they did. Who am I kidding? We all want an interesting life, in spite of the risks that are bound to come with it. Otherwise why would any of us bother waking up in the morning?

My name is Gustav Randolphe. That's right, with an E at the end. I was born in the City of Cap-Haitien, Republic of Haiti, in 1990. On January 12, 2010, my life and that of hundreds of thousands of my countrymen changed. I was attending the Universite Notre Dame D'Haiti ( Notre Dame University of Haiti, also known as U.N.D.H. ) at the time and like many provincial guys I was in awe of the Capital. I grew up in the small town of Quartier Morin outside of Cap-Haitien, and living in a Capital City of millions both thrilled and intimidated me. I came to P.A.P. to study and also to explore life away from my grandparents, Eugene and Maria Randolphe. They raised me on their farm after my parents, Richard and Nadege Randolphe died in a car crash.

When the Quake hit, I was hanging around the marketplace during my lunch break, looking for my favorite vendor of sweetmeats. Oscar was the old man's name and he had the tastiest food I'd ever put in my mouth. That's why I always came to his shop. I love hanging around the marketplace in between classes. If you truly want to see the soul of the Haitian people, come to the marketplace. It's where all the social classes intersect. From those I call "Moun ki gen anvi blan" ( white wannabes ) to the middle class and the heartbreakingly poor. In Haiti, even centuries after the Haitian Army overthrew the French regime, people of mixed ancestry are seen as higher in status than those of pure black ancestry. Whatever that means.

There are quite a few Arabs, Asians and Europeans living on the island of Haiti, mainly in big cities like Port-Au-Prince and Cap-Haitien. A sizeable minority of Hispanics, mainly from the Dominican Republic and the outlying islands also live among us. Even in our own country these people think they're better than us. I had the misfortune of falling for such a woman during my freshman year at the University. Rosario Gutierrez was her name. This five-foot-eight, curvaceous beauty with dark bronze skin and curly black hair was a mulatto, born of a Haitian mother and Hispanic father from the Dominican Republic. Like I said before, I grew up in a small town, far away from the big cities where the wealthy foreigners live, and I had seldom seen anyone who wasn't part of the majority of Haitians, purebred black one and all. To my eyes Rosario seemed exotic and beautiful, and I pursued her. I was new to the Capital and someone forgot to tell me the unwritten rules. It's considered okay for wealthy foreign men from the Hispanic, Arab and Asian communities to bed and even marry Haitian women but it's a rare foreign woman who will marry a Haitian man.

Even though her mother is black, thus making her biracial, Rosario Gutierrez considered herself high above me. I could never be with a Haitian man, she told me the day I got the nerve to walk up to her and try to get her number. Damn, it's like that? This happened a week before the Quake, by the way. I was learning all sorts of things about Haitian culture, foreign people and the world itself. Indeed, my time in the Capital, short though it was, taught me a lot. I had seen a few white male students at my University, along with some Arabs and Chinese, and the black women flocked to them.

In the Republic of Haiti, to be mixed is to be considered the epitome of beauty. Even if you're born in abject poverty, if you're mixed, a rich black person will seek to marry you. Mixed women are especially sought by Haitian men with money and education while on the island. Mixed women produce beautiful children, one of my classmates was fond of saying. Maybe that's why quite a few mixed women have won the Miss Haiti beauty contest in recent years. Can you imagine? A majority black country where black beauty isn't prized. Damn, maybe that's why the black person has difficulty advancing in this world. Too much self-hate. When I told my grandfather about my experience with Rosario, he told me not to fret. Things were better in the old days without foreigners on our soil, he told me. Whatever, I said, not feeling the least bit comforted by his words.

I was twenty years old, and still a virgin. Thankfully, my classmates at the University didn't know that so they didn't tease me relentlessly like my buddies at my old school, College Notre Dame Du Perpetuel Secours, used to. I attended an all-male private Roman Catholic school when I lived in Cap-Haitien, that might explain why to me women are like an exotic species. All-male institutions do wonders for a man's academic prowess but leave him several steps behind his peers from coed institutions when it comes to dealing with the opposite sex.

At my new school I tried to stand out in a bid to attract the ladies. I joined every club the school had, I think. I'm six-foot-two and weigh two hundred and fifty pounds. I'm dark-skinned and kinky-haired, and I suck at sports. I am a nerd through and true. People say I look like the burly black actor from the Underworld movie series. The one who turns into a werewolf. Yeah, the ladies from the Capital weren't feeling me. I was a scholarship student at U.N.D.H. and at all times I was surrounded by young men and women whose parents had money. The elite of the Haitian Capital studied at this school and as a farm boy, I stuck out like a sore thumb. Though gifted academically I wasn't what you'd call popular or sophisticated. I used to herd goats in the Haitian countryside. What did I know of big-city life? I felt lost and lonely at U.N.D.H.

Indeed, my world was already a bleak place before January 12, 2010. When the Quake hit, I was in the marketplace. That's when buildings started collapsing, and people were screaming. By luck or happenstance I was miraculously spared any harm. Never in my life had I seen such devastation, such pain and suffering. I was among the throngs of Haitians of all hues frantically searching through the rubble for our countrymen and women. I participated in relief and rescue efforts with my fellow Haitians long before the international community mobilized to help. Long before Wyclef Jean and Angelina Jolie and all the well-meaning people with money from America's celebrity world came, I was there. I personally rescued more than a dozen people. I fought beside my people in our darkest hour. And by God's grace, we got through it.

I made my way back to Quartier Morin four weeks after the Quake. The night I returned to my grandparents farm, a late-night phone call from an aunt I never heard of changed my life. My parents, Richard and Nadege Randolphe died in a car crash when I was young. I barely remember them. Little did I know that my father had a half-sister, Jeannette Dorvil, who lived in Canada. That lady tracked us down and contacted us. With the state of emergency in Haiti, many countries traditionally hostile to the Haitian immigrant began to relax. Canada allowed Haitians to send for their relatives on the island, especially the youngsters. The U.S. government stunned the world by granting Temporary Protected Status to all Haitians living illegally in America at the time of the Quake. Wow. Through the efforts of the aunt I never knew, I was allowed to come to Canada. On March 17, 2010, I set foot in the City of Ottawa, Ontario, for the first time.

At the Ottawa International Airport I was greeted by a short, plump black lady in her early forties and a tall, skinny white dude. My aunt Jeannette Dorvil and her husband, a Quebecer named Edouard Lalonde, whom she met at the University of Montreal during the 1990s. Welcome home, she said, giving me an awkward hug. I wanted to ask this lady why she waited so long to contact me and my family. I wanted to ask her where she'd been since my parents died. Instead I hugged her back and said thank you.

As for her husband, the skinny white dude gave me a strange look. It was the uneasy look that white men give black men every time they see us somewhere they didn't expect to find us. One thing would become clear to me in the coming days, just because you have a place to sleep and eat doesn't mean you have a home. In my aunt's white husband's eyes I read discomfort and mistrust. Clearly the dude hadn't signed up for this. Nevertheless, when he forced a smile and offered me his hand, I shook it.

Thus began my journey in Canada. I came to this country as a refugee claimant, sponsored by my aunt. I had to go through the process like everybody else. I got a work permit, a social insurance card and began looking for work. I found a job as a shelf stocker for a grocery store in Vanier, the east end of Ottawa. Surrounded by mostly French-speaking people, I could finally get my bearings. The day I got hired I went to the nearby Bank of Nova Scotia and opened up an account there. Now that I had a job, I felt more like a man and less like a burden. I am a Haitian and we're a proud, hard-working people.

My aunt's husband was not what I'd call helpful during my first days in Ottawa. Indeed, the dude would ignore me or stare at me awkwardly whenever we were alone in the house together. He worked for the City of Ottawa as an OC Transpo bus driver. As for my aunt, she's a nurse at Ottawa General Hospital. She's the breadwinner in their relationship. Whenever he's not at work, all Edouard did was drink and watch TV.

My aunt's marriage to this guy was rocky, and my living with them didn't help matters. Every black woman in an interracial relationship considers the white man to be a knight in shining armor. I'll never understand that one until the day I die, especially after seeing how Edouard treats my aunt when she displeases him. He calls her names, and more than once he's smacked her around. One day I had enough of his bullshit and told him that if he lay a hand on her one more time I'd kick his French ass. You should have seen the look on his face. Dude wasn't happy, but he knew better than to step to me. Get out of my house, he said, red-faced and angry. Gladly, I retorted.

That night I went to stay with my buddy Ibrahim, a Somali dude I met at work. He's a security guard at the grocery store and also studies at Carleton University. He let me stay at his spot, and later asked me to be his roommate. I moved in, we signed a one-year lease, and life continued. I began to explore life in Ottawa, now that I was a free man, no longer bound by the dictums of my aunt and her sleazy husband. Canada is a fascinating place, but it's not as friendly as people think. There's a lot of racism in the great white north, especially in Ottawa. The arrival of immigrants from Somalia, Haiti, Jamaica, Lebanon, Syria, South Africa, Palestine, Brazil, China, Japan, Colombia and other places wasn't well-received by all residents of the capital. Indeed, many of them saw us immigrants as invaders. By the way, a white guy from Australia who moves to Canada isn't considered an immigrant. Immigrant is code for non-white in Canada.

It became clear to me that the only way I could advance as a black man in this society is through education. I also quickly noticed a difference between foreign-born newcomers like myself and non-whites born and raised in Canada. A lot of Haitians born in Canada lack the drive and ambition that many of us foreign-born individuals possess. Take my buddy Ricardo for example. He's half black and half white, born to a Haitian mother and Italian father. The dude could have gone to any University and made something of himself. He was born in Ottawa with all the benefits and privileges of citizenship. Instead he became a hustler, dealing drugs and wasting his life. He was in and out of prison. What a waste of life if you ask me.

A lot of black guys think they're getting back at western society by being thuggish. The one thing a white man fears is a black man who's smart and going places. Why else do you think so many white guys on the Republican side hate U.S. President Barack Obama? He's their worst nightmare come to life! Not only is he the son of a black father and white mother ( white guys hate seeing black men with white women, even though those same white guys date women of color ) but he also got an Ivy League education and took over the U.S. Presidency and the White House, the ultimate white man's club. Add to that the fact that whites are becoming minorities in various parts of the U.S. as the Hispanic, Asian, Caribbean and African-American populations boom and you've got a recipe for white panic.

Now, this means good news for people of color around the world but we've got to be ready to seize these opportunities as demographics change. The black man in North America needs to pull his pants up, stay out of trouble, go to school, and then go challenge the white guys on their turf...as an educated black man with ambition and no fear. Instead of aspiring to become rappers and NBA players, brothers need to become lawyers and MBA holders. That's why I decided to go back to school. I learned English in a matter of months from interacting with everyday people and watching TV. I felt confident enough to take on the world of Canadian academia. The language barrier wouldn't hold me back. I vowed that nothing would.

I registered through the Ontario Universities Application Center, and once I was in the OUAC I began looking at Canadian colleges and Universities. There are a few of them in Ottawa. As a French speaker I gravitated toward the Francophone institutions of higher education like La Cite Collegiale and the University of Ottawa. Algonquin College I bypassed, but Carleton University fascinated me. That's why I applied to it. I got in, but not before applying for a study permit, and going through the painful task of having the quake-battered U.N.D.H. translate my old academic records from French to English and mail the transcripts to Carleton University. Thus I enrolled at Canada's Capital University as an international student. I opted to study Criminology, since I initially planned to study Law at U.N.D.H.

I enrolled at Carleton University, and come September 2010 I experienced a whole new world. When I first applied to the school, I thought it would be lily-white since we were in Canada after all. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined the sheer size and diversity of the student population. Among the throngs of students I saw Africans, Arabs, Asians, Hispanics and others I could only guess at. I thought I'd be in the minority, a single black spot in a vast whiteness. All of a sudden I realized I wasn't as alone as I thought.

I joined the African Student Union, one of the coolest student groups on campus. Imagine my surprise when I found out the vice president was a six-foot-tall, athletically built blonde-haired white chick. Tess Van Dijke, a young white woman from the City of Durban, South Africa. When I went to the first meeting of the ASU, and the group leaders introduced themselves to us new recruits, I thought they were joking. The president of the club is a tall Jamaican guy named Evan Rhodes, and his VP is a white woman. Damn, I wasn't expecting that. I was born in Africa and damn proud of it, Tess told me, looking me in the eye when I asked her a few questions to assuage my curiosity after the meeting.

Welcome to Carleton, Tess Van Dijke told me, giving me a simple hug before going on her way. I watched her go, scratching my head and trying really hard not to notice the way her cute, surprisingly big ass sashayed from side to side as she made her way through the university center. White women got booty and it seems I'm the last to know, damn. As it turns out, Tess and I had more in common than I would have thought. Earlier I told you Australians and other people of European extraction aren't treated like immigrants while in Canada. I must amend that thought.

Why is that, you may ask? You see, through my later interactions with a certain South African beauty I learned that cultural divides can be quite a barrier to overcome. When Tess told me that as a white woman from the Republic of South Africa she felt out of place in Ontario, I was shocked. Not a hockey fan, she said, laughing. Shrugging her shapely, strong shoulders, she told me at great length how much she hated the cold weather and anything to do with winter sports. Real athletes play rugby and football, she said with a smirk. We exchanged dap. I had to laugh at that one. Where I'm from, soccer is the number one sport. Most Haitians living on the island have never even heard of hockey.

In spite of myself I became fascinated by Tess, and we became friends, of a sort. I wanted to make the most of my academic experience at Carleton University because I feared being sent back to Haiti by the Canadian government. The initial goodwill towards us poor downtrodden Haitians had vanished once news of the Quake stopped dominating the airways and the world's attention became focused elsewhere. Incidents of terrorism like the rise of the Somali terrorist group Al-Shabaab and the Underwear Bomber caused Canadians and westerners in general to be very distrustful of non-whites.

It's even harder if you're Muslim, Ibrahim was fond of telling me. My Somali roommate shared with me some of his horror stories. It's not easy boarding an airplane or traveling around the world if you're a guy with an Arabic-sounding name in the post-911 world. Ibrahim told me how he'd gotten a cavity search at the Ottawa International Airport. Dude if anyone ever did that to me I'd kick some ass, I told him. Ibrahim shook his head. Don't give them an excuse to kill you my brother, he said, sighing. Yeah, I could commiserate with Ibrahim.

We're from radically different backgrounds. He's a Somali-born Canadian citizen and I'm a Haitian-born refugee claimant. I'm a proud Catholic and he's a Sunni Muslim. Yet we got along just fine and even hung out sometimes. He showed me around Ottawa and even introduced me to his people. His tall, shapely cousin Yasmina and his aunt Fatouma sometimes visit us. Yasmina has taken a liking to me and even added me on Facebook. The gal is cute and has one hell of a booty. If it weren't taboo for Muslim women to date Christian men I think Yasmina and I might have gone out. Ibrahim didn't seem to care that we were real friendly. The gal is cute but I'm not changing my religion.

I focused on my studies, and continued working at the grocery store, eventually getting promoted to night crew chief. I got a two-dollar raise, how cool is that? Now I'm making thirteen dollars and seventy five cents an hour. I was very much involved with the ASU and Tess and I began spending more and more time together. Due to my dedication to the club, she made me the operations officer. Meaning that I'm the go-to guy when it comes to planning events, trips and things of that nature. Getting promoted to Operations Officer meant spending more time with Tess, since no one is more dedicated to the group's activities than her. Spending more time with a gorgeous, intelligent woman who's actually friendly? I didn't mind at all.

Tess and I began hanging out together off-campus, going to the movies together and I must say I thoroughly enjoyed myself on these outings. Having been in Ottawa a year longer than I have, Tess knew her way around. I'll show you the cool spots, she promised me. We went to a big park on Kanata Lakes and played paintball there. She shot me in the face and I retaliated by shooting her in the butt, which unfortunately left a bruise on her posterior. Pissed off, Tess chased me and tackled me and for several moments we wrestled on the snow. Somehow she ended up on top of me. For the record, I didn't let her win. I got you, Tess crowed victoriously, smearing my face with snow. I give up, I said, spitting out a tiny snowball.