As a child, Apricot Irving grew up in a sparsely populated desert near Idyllwild, California. When she was six years old her father took a job as an agriculture missionary in Haiti. Suddenly she was surrounded by people everywhere. She says, “You wake up in the morning and people want to shake your hand and ask you how you slept and how your family’s doing. It’s a very animated, interpersonal existence. I instinctively responded to that energy – there was so much to discover. There were lizards on the walls which would puff up their throats. There were incredible rainstorms and you’d see people holding giant banana leaves over their heads. The Kamyon bus horn’s bugle calls would erupt down the street as they thundered past.” Irving describes a critique that some Haitians have of the U.S. culture, “I’ve spoken with people in Haiti who explain, somewhat gently, that they’ve lived in the U.S. and they’ve chosen to come back to Haiti because what they saw in the U.S. was that we were busy all the time. They said, ‘You’re always in your vehicles, there are no people out on the street. You don’t have time. Never in my life would I want to live in such a place.’ I think that’s a valid critique.”
