Piti had failed to procure the necessary documents for his family to cross into the Dominican Republic, and Eseline, having never before ridden in a car, was violently carsick for most of the trip. Returning to the Dominican Republic was not as smooth. Eseline's father, unimpressed with Piti and the fact that the couple had had relations before the marriage, was won over by the appearance of Alvarez and her husband. Improbably, Alvarez and her party reached the tiny town of Moustique, where Piti married Eseline (who had given birth to the couple's daughter, Ludy, four months before) in a sweet, joyful ceremony. The poverty of Haiti was startlingly clear, yet the families they encountered, rich in faith, were eager to share the little they had. Despite all this, Alvarez, who includes several wonderful snapshots of the trip, found the landscape suffused with a sort of buoyancy, present in groups of laughing women selling mangoes on the road and an impromptu auto parts 'shop' constructed from four poles and a blue tarp. Once inside Haiti, Alvarez grew progressively uneasy with their vague directions and a route that included washed-out dirt roads that seemed to lead nowhere, dried riverbeds that threatened to flood, and a coating of fine white dust on everything. It didn't take long for her to realize that crossing the border into Haiti involved a great deal of head-shaking, inspecting of documents, the phrase, 'Is there any way we can resolve this now?' and, finally, the exchange of U.S.

Despite being raised in the Dominican Republic, Alvarez had taken only one brief trip to Haiti a quarter-century before. 'One of those bighearted promises,' she writes, 'that you never think you'll be called on to deliver someday.' But in August 2009, Piti did indeed call on Alvarez, his madrina (godmother), to come to his wedding in a remote part of northern Haiti the following week.Īlvarez and her husband dropped everything and left their home in Vermont for Alta Gracia, where they gathered supplies and a few extra travelers and set out. One evening, in an attempt to assuage his homesickness, Alvarez assured Piti that when he married, she'd be at his wedding. Every time I spotted, I felt the pressure of that mother's prayer in my own eyes.' Soon Piti was working at Alta Gracia and had become part of Alvarez's extended family. 'Somewhere in Haiti, a mother had sent her young son to the wealthier neighbor country to help the impoverished family. 'What I felt toward the boy was unaccountably maternal,' Alvarez writes. Some years later, they met Piti, a Haitian teenager working on a neighboring farm.

In 1997, while on a writing assignment in her native Dominican Republic, Alvarez and her husband, Bill Eichner, became the owners of 60 acres of deforested land that would ultimately become Alta Gracia, a 260-acre organic coffee farm/literary arts center. 'Who knows why we fall in love with people who are nothing to us?' Julia Alvarez writes at the beginning of A Wedding in Haiti, a beautifully written and moving account that weaves an unusual road trip and family portrait into an unexpected journey of discovery.

Julia alvarez