This past summer, I went on a week-long cruise in the Caribbean with my family. One of the places where the ship stopped was Labadee, a private beach in Haiti used exclusively by the cruise line Royal Caribbean International. My vacation was, of course, before the January earthquake.

Reflecting back on all the time that I spent sleeping and eating to my heart’s content, I must say I had a pretty great vacation, especially now that I’m here in Binghamton. I miss Labadee’s turquoise “blue-as-laundry-water” ocean, its soft and fine sand and even the blistering sun and the omnipresent smell of suntan lotion. I remember spending my entire time on the peninsula while napping under the shade of an umbrella among the many rows of beach recliners.

But I also remember noticing something else that startled me: the many-armed guards — a stark reminder that we were vacationing in one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere. Labadee, a peninsula of Haiti, is sectioned off by a heavily guarded fence and only allowed to security personnel, meaning cruise passengers have no idea what lies beyond it. The big fence, for the Haitians, is protected by a smaller fence, for the tourists.

Being the ignorant person that I am, I knew neither where Haiti was nor anything else about it until I went there. A waiter assigned to my dinner table said, “Haiti doesn’t even have any trees. The country is treeless … Many Haitians don’t even know what a tree looks like. Haiti’s poverty has contributed to the state’s excessive deforestation [wood is Haiti’s primary natural resource].” “Come on,” I remember thinking to myself. “There has to be at least ONE tree.”

His statement was definitely a bit of an exaggeration — I mean everyone knows what a tree looks like — but it only made me realize how little most Americans, who have never experienced life in a failing country, understand poverty. It’s one thing to read about it in the newspapers and to talk about it in your political science class, but quite another to be exposed to it firsthand.

And to be honest, I’ll admit that I definitely don’t understand it.

It is astonishing how separated, physically and emotionally, we can be from the troubles that the people in our neighboring countries have to deal with. Labadee’s fence is a perfect example of this disparity. On one side, tourists are enjoying their vacation in paradise, while on the other, people are struggling just to survive. If the tourists don’t see the poverty, they don’t think about it. And if they do, they are quickly distracted by more personal priorities, like choosing whether to go parasailing or scuba diving. It’s easy to want to help and to give money, but it’s also easy to forget.

Immediately after the earthquake, a journalist questioned whether it was ethical for Royal Caribbean to continue docking its ships at Labadee. According to a Jan. 15 article in The New York Times, the company defended itself by saying that it was contributing to the rescue efforts by helping to transport important cargo and to stabilize the economy with revenue made from tourism.

But it’s important to realize that all the real profit from Labadee is being made by Royal Caribbean itself and the corrupt government officials whom the American company is greasing. At the same time, Royal Caribbean does employ many locals, and the last thing the country needs now is a few more unemployed citizens. The line between us as tourists, whether we are exploiting or helping Haiti, is very blurred.

A month and a half has passed since then and, already, the earthquake and all of the destruction it left in its wake has become old news. Most of the world has shifted its attention to other things. Every time I see Anderson Cooper — and his much-talked-about tight T-shirt — on CNN, urging the American public to take action, I do what most people do: turn to the next channel.

I remember a photo of a very young boy standing on a mountain of rubble looking for his buried relatives. It occurred to me that, beneath the pile of debris, there may be the bodies of the small boy’s parents. Their deaths are not merely the result of an earthquake or a poorly constructed building; they show our broken humanity, our guilt, our inaction and our indifference.

But then, I closed my computer and looked out my window to see it snowing, and I thought, “If only I could be somewhere warm.” Turning a blind eye is one of the most inhumane things a person can do, but it is also one of the most human.