After a week on the streets of Port-au-Prince at the time of my first visit here, two years ago, I was indeed in shock.  It didn’t wear off until I had been back home for quite a long time, and thus somewhat confused the issue.  It has taken several subsequent visits (although the term becomes less and less appropriate, for in some sense Haiti is indeed now for me a second home) for the full dynamic to become clear. 

In fact, when I leave the peaceful and familiar surroundings of a mountain retreat at home, and within a few hours find myself deposited in the bustle and chaos of Port-au-Prince, with a language adaptation into the bargain… it takes only a very short time to recover from the jolt.  But the return trip is quite another matter. 

Once only (and I have more or less vowed to myself not to repeat the experience) did I return straight from Haiti to Nashville, and thence home.  The shock was overpowering.  Now, I do my best to plan a night/day of “decompression” in Miami (despite the superb connection available… leave Port-au-Prince mid-afternoon, and arrive in Nashville in the late evening). 
At first glance, this phenomenon may appear very strange.  One would suppose that everything should be done to hasten the return to the familiar, the far more pleasant, far less stressful environment of home.  I can find only one explanation:  The chaos, the impossibility, the dreadful poverty, the overpowering instability of life in Haiti throws a very harsh and discomfiting light upon our comfortable way of life.  It makes laughable many of our preoccupations, reveals the triviality of many of our concerns, and dramatically illustrates just how much we take for granted in our lives.  In Haiti, pick up a telephone:  it will probably be dead, even in a well-tended store.  Get a dial tone, dial a number: the chances are not very good that the connection will succeed, or be answered if it does.  Walk into a house, flip a light switch:  maybe there will be light, more likely not.  Pass through the streets at night, and they are lined by vendors’ booths… lit by candles here and there.  Arrive home dusty and ready for shower?  Maybe… if there has been power long enough and of voltage sufficient to make the pump work for a little while; otherwise, perhaps one had enough foresight to store some water in buckets… or out to the well to draw some more, if one is so fortunate as to have a well nearby.  Will the government stand or fall?  Who knows.  (Even as I write in Jacmel, the newly-elected government takes office today in Port-au-Prince, 50 miles and light-years away… perhaps I shall return to a peaceful city, perhaps to a city in turmoil, even in flames, as so many times in the past.)  If it stands, will it be able to do anything about the chaos, the trash, the garbage, the corruption, the indolence and despair?  Everything is uncertainty.
Only one thing is firm — and, despite appearances, it is exactly so back on the “firm” ground of home:  the Cross of Christ Jesus, the Faith once for all delivered to the saints.  Therein only is hope, and therein only the answer to any culture shock, in no matter what direction — for we are citizens neither of this country nor that, not even of this earth, but only, in truth, of the Kingdom of God.  All else is transitory, illusory and, if taken for more than it is, can lead us only to despair and emptiness.