How do YOU eat a Mango?

James showed up for dinner tonight with a bowl full of mangos. It’s the very end of mango season here, so we were pretty excited to enjoy one before they’re done for the winter. As I picked a mango out of the bowl, and headed to the shelf to grab a knife, I was met with a look of absolute disgust from Jimmy. He pointed to the knife and the mango and said, “no, no no. Put that back.” I asked him how I’m supposed to eat it without one and he smiled and responded, “with your teeth!” So I did. Um, it was messy, but delicious. There was mango juice all over my face and hands, and those stringy mango fibers all stuck in my teeth. Meanwhile across the table from me, Elissa refused to abandon her orderly American mango eating style. She neatly cut the flesh away from the peel and enjoyed bite sized chunks of mango, while keeping her face and hands relatively clean. Bellegarde shot her good natured glances of disdain as he gnawed on his own mango.

Bellegarde and I decided the mango eating situation is a pretty good metaphor for the difference between the Haitian and US American way of doing things. The American way is clean, efficient, and orderly, and yields satisfying results. The Haitian way is carefree and way more fun, but leaves a mess all over the place. Which way is better? Good question. Think about that one ….

Picture this …

Ten white people and one Haitian guy in a giant white Land Cruiser barreling through the crowded streets of Port au Prince on a Sunday, blasting old Cars songs with the windows down. And yes, we were singing along.

Then picture this …

Me wielding a pickax. I helped dig up and move a small tree from a part of a garden where it was growing into a footpath to another corner of the garden. One of the Haitian staff, one of the other volunteers and a kid from the neighborhood did most of the heavy digging, but then I decided that shoveling out the loosened dirt was getting dull, so I swung the pickax a few times. I kind of loved it … for about 20 minutes. Then I was done. And these guys do this all day sometimes. I’m working may way up to using a machete. Stay tuned for that adventure.

Petonville

This weekend brought not one, not two but THREE adventures outside the school walls. The trip to the Supermarket was on Saturday afternoon. Then Sunday morning we drove to the Scalabrini Seminary for Mass, this time in English. After Mass the Italian priest treated us to some homemade GELATO. Mmmmmmm. Later in the afternoon we headed out in the giant land cruiser (11 people in all) to drive to the home of one of the board members and benefactors to the school who lives in a nearby town called Petonville. This man runs two businesses that employ about 90 people and he has become one of the wealthiest men in Haiti. His home is up in the hills, and I knew we were entering a nice section of town because all the roads were paved, and the walls of all the houses were round, pretty stones, rather than concrete blocks. In addition to his financial support, his connections within the country are invaluable for getting things done at LCS. Anyway, his house is simply beautiful. We sat out on an open patio overlooking their small swimming pool and shady palm trees all around. His wife brought us iced tea, Tostitos and salsa, and chocolate cupcakes from the freezer! It was lovely to see a person who has built himself up in this country, and who works hard still on behalf of people who are struggling to do the same. And it was lovely to have a few little tastes of home!

After we left his house, we drove through the town of Petonville and stopped at the park in the center. It reminded me more of a small Central American city, with its pastel colored church and sketchy park in the center surrounded by people selling all kinds of food and crafts. We saw a young man painting an enormous canvas – at least six feet by six feet – of a tropical scene full of trees and birds and flowers. The colors were magnificent and the skill of this young artist was undeniable. We asked how much he was commissioned to paint it, and we were told 2000 US dollars. I think that may have been a bit of an exaggeration, but I certainly hope he is being very well paid!

We walked along the street looking at lots of other paintings – the kind I love full of bright colors and scenes of regular people doing regular people things. We weren’t in the market to buy today, though I know I will be at some point in the future! A boy about 12 years old started following us asking for money and the little juices that some of us were drinking. We did our best to just walk and not engage him, but he actually tried to grab the juice out of a few people’s hands. We piled into the car and started to drive away, and the boy hopped on the back and rode along with us. I’m not really sure why … maybe just to mess with us. Maybe for fun. Maybe for a ride. After a few minutes when we stopped to turn, he hopped off, probably hoping to avoid any trouble. The whole day made for one of those crazy contrasts: from the beautiful home of one of the elite, to the sad plight of a street kid. I’m sure it won’t be the last experience like that.

If I run out of sunblock –

They have my Neutrogena SPF 55 at the DeliMart supermarket! It’s 20 US dollars, but it’s good to know it’s there in case of an emergency. We went on our first shopping adventure on Saturday, to the big upscale grocery store in a nicer section of the city. Wow … it was nice. Air conditioning and all the imported goodies you could ever want (with imported prices to match them!) We went in search of snacks, mostly, since our three meals are taken care of here. But sometimes there’s not quite enough to really get one’s fill, or the 100% carb meals occasionally leave a person feeling hungry again 2 hours later. We came out with apples, grapes, crunchy peanut butter, cookies, Pringles, soda and a little bag of SKITTLES. The prices on some of the imported stuff were crazy. 5 US dollars for Oreos, 2 dollars for a can of Pringles, 20 dollars for my sunblock! The local stuff on the other hand was pretty reasonable. A package of about 30 cookies was a dollar. It was good to discover that really, all the stuff we could find ourselves “needing” here can be found relatively easily. Evidently Haiti is not planet Jupiter.

Boulyon

I mentioned our Saturday lunch feast a few weeks ago, but I need to describe this in more detail. All three Saturday’s we’ve been here, James (one of the staff / LCS grads) coordinates the creation of an amazing stew. He shops in the morning and comes back with bags and bags of potatoes, carrots, plantains, malanga, and kabrit (goat meat.) The “faktory boulyon” opens at about 10 am (about an hour after the breakfast dishes are cleaned up.) James coordinates the show and runs back and forth from the industrial kitchen in the school cafeteria to the one in the administration building where we live. The real cooking is done on the big burners in the huge cauldrons in the school kitchen and we do all the prep in the smaller kitchen. 4 people peel, clean and chop about 20 potatoes, 20 plantains, a pile of malanga (another root vegetable that remains somewhat mysterious to me …) James butchers and seasons the meat. Then another team of 2 or 3 makes the juice. I think my favorite thing about Haiti might be this juice. I washed and squeezed (by hand) about 30 oranges … which, oddly, are green. Then there was mountain of a fruit called Grenadian. They’re little yellow fruits full of an orange flesh and tons of black seeds. The seeds make them not so practical to eat, but great for juice because you can strain them out. But the juice making process took me and 2 other people about an hour and a half. At the end – after all that time with my fingers in citrus and bleachy water – my fingers were freakishly pruney. But this juice – with all its freshness and the PILE of sugar they add to it – is heavenly. Back to the boulyon … the finishing touch are the little dumplings that get dropped into the boiling broth at the end. The boulyon emerges from the kitchen around 2 pm and somewhere between 20 and 30 people sit down for the best meal of the week. There’s always enough for seconds, though I’ve finally learned that if you eat this stuff too fast and think you want seconds, you usually discover about ten minutes later that you’re so full you can’t move. Someone mentioned today that all the ingredients for that meal – nothing imported or pre-packaged – cost around 20 US dollars. I love Saturdays.

PS – I just noticed that all of these blog posts are about food. Um … yeah. I offer no analysis of this fact. Make of it whatever you want to!

The Incinerator Homerun

We were playing kickball the other day, me, a few volunteers, a few kids from the school and three of the Moynihan kids and their mom. We played out on the soccer field which is this kind of wild, partially overgrown and partially dusty field with a few interesting features. You thought the Bowman wiffle ball house rules were weird, but these ground rules were nuts. The field is walled by ten foot walls with broken glass on top. On two and a half of the four sides, the other side of the wall is still within school property, but the other walls are shared with neighbors. So …. If you kick a ball over the back wall into the LCS playground, that’s a legit homerun. But, if you kick a ball that is technically still fair, but over the left or right hand wall into the neighbors’ yards, your team loses a point because really, you may never see that ball again. If you kick it onto the pile of cut grass and yard waste in the back of the field, the fielders have to climb the pile to go get the ball and you get to run the bases. If you kick it into the compost pit or the incinerator that may or may not be presently on fire burning trash …. That may be ruled a ground rule double. If the incinerator is not actually burning at the moment, then the fielder has to get the ball out of the trash pile. That’s not fun. Now in our game we had a few legit homeruns, one incinerator homerun and then, alas, someone kicked the ball into a neighbor’s yard. We all walked toward the 10 foot wall, not really ever expecting we’d see it again. It was kind of like that scene in the Sandlot when they just accept that they’ll never see their baseball again. When suddenly … without a word …. Some mystery person on the other side tossed it back to us! It was a Christmas miracle.

Teeth

One of the volunteers, Corey from Guam, is going to be a dentist. He just finished undergrad, but has known forever that he wants to take care of people’s oral health. All through college he did internships at dental clinics, and has a real passion for serving people in poor communities because he recognizes the close connection between oral health and overall health outcomes. After this year, he will most definitely go to dental school. It’s so funny being with someone who sees the world through the lens of teeth. After about a week he suddenly piped up with, “how is it that people here have such good teeth/” And as we thought about it, it seemed true. The kids all seem to have these stunningly bright white, straight toothed smiles. We conjectured that the lack of high fructose corn syrup in their diets must help, as well as all the water they drink. Another time, when we were at the Food for the Poor warehouse, Corey found 4 boxes of trial sized toothpaste packets. He was ecstatic! He’s already working on a community outreach plan to get toothbrushes and toothpaste into the hands of the families in the neighborhood around the school. Then today when we visited the Missionaries of Charity, the usually joyful Corey was really somber on the way home. I thought maybe he was just overwhelmed by the whole thing, but later on this evening he finally explained his sadness about the day. He told us that in the last half hour before leaving, after playing with the bigger kids and feeding them lunch and making them laugh for hours, he walked back into the room with the most sick babies. He found a little girl with a really swollen face and neck, and his dental training and a quick check of her lymph nodes told him for sure what it was. I can’t remember the name, but basically she has some kind of dental abscess that had become infected. Her little body was doing everything it could to fight this infection, but he explained that without a surgical procedure to drain the puss and antibiotics, she would spike a high fever, and suffer terrible pain, and probably die within a few weeks. Any child presenting with those symptoms in an American hospital would be treated within days, but this little girl might not ever get that treatment.

For me, ignorance was bliss today. Corey’s life experience and expertise revealed to him a terrible truth.

The Missionaries of Charity

Today we had the opportunity to visit an orphanage outside of Port au Prince that is run by Sisters of the Missionaries of Charity, Mother Theresa of Calcutta’s order of nuns. Their mission is to serve the “poorest of the poor” around the world, so sadly, Port au Prince is a natural place for them to set up shop. We were told that when we got there, we’d have no guide or orientation, but that we should just start walking around and doing. As we walked in the door, I was kind of nervous, and as we walked into the first room full of about 30 cribs with some really sick looking babies, I felt totally overwhelmed …. For about 1 minute until I felt two little arms wrap around my legs. Oh, I guess this is what they meant by just start doing stuff. I picked up the kid who looked not older then 2 and started walking around with him and looking at all the fake flowers hanging from the ceiling and posters of Mickey Mouse and pictures of Mother Theresa hanging on the walls. He was so smiley and repeated everything I said, in English or Kreyol. We started walking around saying hello to all the other babies who were in cribs unable to walk. Most were just sitting lethargically. Many were crying. A few had IV drips. What struck me more than the crying ones was how silent many of the others were. And in that whole room full of babies, I couldn’t get even one to smile … and I’m kind of good at making babies smile.

I walked into another room full of parents and families who were there visiting their children. Many of these kids aren’t actually orphans at all, but their families just can’t care for them right now for some reason. So many families came. Mothers sat on the floor and nursed their babies. Many more fathers than I expected came and held theirs. A few siblings came along too. These were really normal looking people – not crazy or convicts or drug dealers – just people who can’t care for their children and found in the Sisters’ orphanage a better alternative than leaving their child malnourished or uncared for. The children – all between about 8 months and 2 years – were all being fed a kind of rice cereal. So I found one who didn’t have any family with her, sat on the floor and fed her. Then her father arrived and I happily handed her to him so he could finish feeding her. Later after he fed her and rocked her and changed her diaper, I saw him just standing beside her as she stood in her crib, and he was just fanning her fact with a piece of paper. I found another little girl to feed and I was struck by the fact that her hair smelled like clean baby smell. I put my finger in her hand expecting the usually baby reflex or wrapping her fingers around mine, but she didn’t. She just ate what I put into her mouth, and occasionally looked up at me. I found another little boy who was standing in his crib crying and reaching out, so I picked him up. He immediately buried his head on my shoulder, and I just held him tight and bounced him until he fell asleep. I thought I could get away with putting him down, but as soon as I started to pull him away from me, he startled and held onto my shoulder. So I sat down and just kept rocking him. Later on I found the older kids – between about 3 and 6 eating lunch. They had such a big healthy lunch, and many of the tiniest asked for seconds! When I walked in I found the same little guy who had greeted me in the beginning, so I sat down with him to eat lunch. He was a little small to feed himself (I thought) so I started feeding him. Then I realized he must be so much older than his size suggested because he was MORE than capable of feeding himself, and directing me to exactly which parts of the meal he wanted to eat at which time. After lunch and a few games of Simon says with those bigger kids, it was time to go. Walking away from children who don’t get much stimulus and just saying “bye” was terrible.

For me that whole experience was strangely joyful. Some people found it overwhelming and frustrating to consider why so many kids were so desperate and how could the situation be different, and what will have to change to improve their chances. I guess I just didn’t care about any of that for those three hours because my only purpose was to do something for the children around me – hold them, feed them, change their diaper, play with them, rock them to sleep. I’ll worry about changing the world that put them there in the first place tomorrow.

My first joke!

This morning at breakfast I told my first successful joke in Kreyol! The head of the maintenance staff sat next to me and looked at me funny. Now, this is one of the funniest, jolliest people I’ve ever met, so I knew he was just messing with me. I asked in English, “what’s your problem?” and he responded in Kreyol “I’m looking at you, crazy.” To which I responded in busted Kreyol “oh, paske ou we nan glass.” (Oh, because you’re looking in a mirror.) It was a pretty poorly crafted sentence, but they all laughed and even the victim of my joke had to admit that I won. Small victories.

Prized possessions

Here’s a list of things that all of the volunteers have been really excited to receive, find, discover or somehow get in the past week and a half:
1. 5 gallon bucket
2. Dish towels
3. Roach killing spray
4. Coffee
5. Bleach – for washing dishes, washing fruit and veggies, and cleaning everything
6. A new STOVE that can fit more than one small pan at a time.
7. New silverware
8. Shelves in the kitchen
9. Citronella candles
10. Sponges for cleaning bathrooms
11. Rubber gloves for cleaning bathrooms

How priorities shift.

Waiting

Time is a whole different thing here. It’s almost a truism among people from the Caribbean in the US – and the US Americans who interact with them – that Caribbean time and American time are different things. I remember a priest at a mostly Jamaican parish in Roxbury once announcing that something was going to begin at a particular time, and he followed with “that’s American time, not Caribbean time!” What I’m struggling to figure out is whether or not the tendency for things to be late, and to have to wait forever for things and people, is a product of circumstances outside of people’s control, or if it’s just an excuse to be late all the time. Yesterday was an amazing demonstration of this frustrating dynamic, and a real challenge to my efficient, overscheduled American way of living.

When we got to food for the poor, we were dropped off and told that we’d be picked up at noon. We were given a cell phone number in case there was a problem, and left to sort through the ginormous box of books. We worked hard for about three hours in the hot dusty warehouse and started to pack up and get our boxes organized at about 11:30 so we’d be ready to go at 12. The three of us had also left before breakfast, so we hadn’t eaten all day. We sat on our boxes of books in the warehouse and waited. 12:30 rolled around and as our stomachs growled and we commented on our lightheadedness, I couldn’t help but laugh at the awesome irony of three rich Americans starving inside the Food for the Poor warehouse in Port au Prince. You just can’t make this stuff up. We tried to remind ourselves that the hunger we were feeling was what many people in this country live with daily, not just for a few hours on a Wednesday morning. But damn, we were hungry, and the minutes were dragging. At 12:30 I decided to go ask someone if we could use a phone to make sure that our ride was on its way, and when I talked to Patrick, he said they were on their way and that since we had by that point missed lunch, we could come eat at his house when we got back. Finally just after 1, our ride arrived, and he apologized for being late, but explained that a meeting had just taken forever,

Before we could leave, the staff from the Food for the Poor needed to make us a receipt so they could keep track of their inventory. As we sat on the bumper of the truck and waited, this process took an additional hour and 15 minutes. At one point we thought we were ready to go, but then the man realized we had all that toothpaste, and it wasn’t on the original list, so they had to go back and redo it. I decided at that moment not to inform him that we also had a box of much needed dish towels. I think that in so doing, I might have committed my first crime in Haiti – stealing dish towels from food for the poor … but seriously, the rags we use are foul, so I didn’t care. ANYWAY … we finally loaded the boxes at about 2:15 and 6 of us piled into the five person car.

We got back on the road, and I though we were on our way home, but we had to stop and pick up someone else who had gone to the hardware store (and who had probably been waiting there for hours.) So person number 7 piled in. So I thought we were home free … but then we got a phone call asking us to wait for a different car full of 4 other people because we needed to swap drivers. Seriously, I have no idea why, and no one was able to explain it. But we waited on the hot dusty side of the road for another 20 minutes until they arrived. When we made the passenger swap and headed off, we got stuck in the most ridiculous gridlock traffic that I have ever experienced. For about 20 more minutes. Finally, just after 3, we arrived back at LCS, hungry, dusty and tired, but happy with our haul from Food for the Poor.

As we got out of the car, some of the other volunteers informed us that there was a staff meeting starting right away. I made an executive decision that we were going to be late, and it was OK, because we were all dizzy from hunger. So we found some bananas and peanut butter and bread, shoved that in our faces, and headed to the meeting.

The content of the meeting is the subject of a whole separate message, but what matters, is that it took 3 hours. I have never sat through a three hour meeting, in which one person is doing most of the talking. And it was in Kreyol. And I was sharing a hard wooden student bench with two other people. I understand enough Kreyol to get the gist of the discussion and to appreciate the fact that it was important, but as it dragged on and on I felt closer and closer to jumping out a window. Finally, just after 6, it was over. Dinner usually starts at 6, but since everyone who was supposed to make the dinner was in the meeting, that didn’t happen. I suggested that we scrap the dinner plan that would have taken at least an hour, and just use the ingredients to make cheese and veggie sandwiches instead. We did, and it was delicious. And we all survived.

But wow, that was a frustrating day of waiting. Was it all necessary? Maybe. Are there circumstances beyond people’s control, and are there things that go on that I have no idea about? Absolutely. Did it really take three hours to make sure that everyone understood the content of the meeting? Possibly. But in this country, I’m going to have to seriously let go of my need to be in charge of things, or I will go nuts.

Food for the Poor

On Wednesday, Corey, Meg and I went to an organization in Port au Prince called Food for the Poor. Any trip outside of the school is kind of exciting – just for the opportunity to see new things, and the – um – adventure of driving in the crazy traffic. The highlight of the drive was when the driver took a left hand turn and actually went between two tap taps coming in the opposite direction. OK. Deep breath. The tap taps all go really slowly (since there are people hanging out the back) so whenever anyone’s behind one, they cross into the oncoming traffic to pass it. So we did that for a while, then turned off the main road onto some outrageously bumpy, busted roads. I thought the roads in rural Honduras were an adventure … this is unbelievable. Corey and I both put on our seatbelts in the backseat when we got in the car, but after a few too many murderous bounces, as the seatbelts got tighter and tighter and came closer and closer to strangling us, we took them off.

We got to Food for the Poor – which is an absolutely huge warehouse and went into the office to talk to one of the managers. The office was air conditioned! Amazing ….. Our purpose for going there was to sort through a huge donation of books in English that they had received and take what we thought would be good for the kids at LCS. Now, when I say huge box of books, I’m not kidding. There were probably 2000 books in this thing, and at one point I was sitting in the box, only taking up about a quarter of it. Here’s what I inferred about the school that donated the books: It was a California middle school or K-8 school. The books came from either a library, or a combined ELA / social studies classroom with lots of Spanish speakers. In California in those grades, they study California history, early American history, and ancient civilizations. We found lots of great books – in English and Spanish – that will be wonderful for the library here. But we also found so much absolutely ridiculous stuff in that huge box, as well as in the boxes all around it, that it really made me question what goes through people’s minds when they think, “I know, let’s make a big donation of stuff to poor people in Haiti!”

Here are some of the things we found that seem pretty ridiculous to donate Haiti:
1. Hundreds of books in English about American history
2. \A book called “punch out masks of the Pharaohs” …. But all the masks were already punched out
3. A used spelling workbook
4. A box full of “nude” (for white people) Leggs pantyhose
5. A box of Halloween themed gummy candy
6. A box of little sample sized Garnier Anti Wrinkle Cream
7. I’m not kidding here …. A box of prepackaged olives and olive picks for martinis
8. A box of flavored straws that make milk taste like cookies and cream

There was also so much wonderful stuff there – and the staff were moving boxes and boxes out to waiting charitable organizations constantly. We got boxes and boxes of toothpaste for the school and the neighborhood. There was cleaning solution and bottled water, and medical supplies and sacks and sacks of rice. But the whole time I kept thinking of the people who had donated some of the ridiculous stuff. They had paid so much money, I’m sure, to ship those boxes here, but how much thought went into what the people here really need? The school in California was probably so proud of making such a big donation to kids in need, but so much of that material will be useless here. So I guess the moral of the story is: if it’s crappy, throw it away, don’t give it to a charity.

Remember that Windex commercial with the birds ….?

I’ve mentioned that we’re renovating the kitchen and dining area. There’s a sliding glass door on the way into the dining room from the hallway, but from what I can tell it hasn’t been closed in years. But since we cleaned the glass doors that go outside, and put a screen in so we can get a breeze and keep out mosquitos, we decided to start CLOSING the glass doors that go to the hallway. OK, remember that commercial where the birds fly into the glass because it’s so clean? Last night, as I walked into the dining room for dinner …. Wait for it …. I totally slammed into the glass door. Of course I made a comedy routine out of it and everyone had a good laugh at my expense. Well, over the next 24 hours about 7 other people did the same thing. At breakfast this morning FOUR people did it … and the whole room of about 25 people absolutely erupted every time. I’m still laughing about it. We kind of wanted to just leave it and let the comedy routine continue, but decided instead to do the safe and responsible thing and put a sign on the door so people would see it. I’m thinking we should take the sign down every Tuesday and have a few good laughs at each other as people crash into it.

Kreyol

This really is the coolest language. It’s SO practical and simple – no such absurdities as gendered nouns and conjugated verbs. And really, the verb “to be” is always so complicated in other languages – but in Kreyol it practically doesn’t exist! And since Kreyol was so long only a spoken language, once people decided to start writing it down, they eliminated all the absurd spelling of the French from which most of the words are derived. It is one hundred percent phonetic – no silent letters or letters that change sounds in 14 different ways. The only complicated thing about it in terms of pronunciation is the nasal sound that just doesn’t exist in English. Still working on mastering that …

I love learning languages and I love even more trying to use them with the people who speak them. Almost everyone here speaks English so well, certainly better than I can speak Kreyol yet, but it’s so fun for me to practice all day long, and I think they are genuinely amused by my efforts … or at least they pretend to be! Right now we’re all taking Kreyol classes with some of the “junior staff,” who are kids who graduated from LCS within the past few years and work here now, usually while pursuing some kind of university study at the same time. I managed to get my own private lessons with Barbara because I was the only one who really had any background in Kreyol before coming here. Her French is beautiful and she can read and write English well, but she struggles to pronounce English. So our classes together are so good – she helps me sort out the Kreyol and explains the subtle differences between words, and I help her figure out how to pronounce English.

A few summers ago when I was in Guatemala, some of you followed my quest to be able to say the most complicated sentence imaginable in Spanish – “if I had known you were coming I would have baked you a cake.” I eventually figured it out – “si hubiera sabido que tu venias, te habria hecho un pastel,” and I always have that sentence in the back of my mind in Spanish when trying to construct similarly complex sentences. I think that today I conquered a similarly complex sentence from my little “Creole Made Easy” book. (note …. Clearly this language is easier if I’m able to figure out a sentence like that after about a month of working on the language whereas in Spanish it took me about ten years.) The sentence: ‘If we hadn’t arrived on time, he might have untied the boat.” Nan Kreyol: “si nou pa te rive a le, li te ka demare bato a.’ OK, it did take me like five minutes to figure out how to write it … but I got it eventually. Hmmmmm …. Can I figure out the Spanish sentence in kreyol? “Si mwen te konnen ki ou vini, mwen te ka fe yon ti gato.” Really, I can only do that because there’s no subjunctive or past conditional or anything in Kreyol. So fun.

Now if I could only understand ANYTHING that Kreyol speakers are saying when they talk to each other …. That would be awesome.

Ti Moun Yo

This morning the new sizyem class arrived for their three day orientation. Sizyem is about 7th grade, and there are almost 60 of them. Last week the school administrators were interviewing the kids and parents of the kids who qualified for the school based on their test scores in order to choose the new class. This is a huge decision that no one took lightly. They know that inviting a child into this community will change the course of his or her life, and they also know that they need to choose the right child who will fit into this community and contribute positively to it. My favorite story from the interviews was of a little boy who was asked to describe his parents’ work. He was a little shy and embarrassed because though his parents work – his mom sells things on a street corner, and his dad pushes wheelbarrows – he seemed to be afraid that this work wasn’t good enough to talk about. The interviewer asked him what he does around the house to help, and he became animated as he described all the things he does to help with cleaning and caring for younger siblings, and when asked if he likes all that work, he replied with a shrug and explained “ki moun pa travay pa manje.” If you don’t work, you don’t eat. That is the kind of kid who will fit in at this school.

After the list was narrowed down, the lucky 58, appeared at school this morning with their parents. We weren’t responsible for any of their activities at all, which was kind nice to watch other people interact with them, and to just enjoy their cuteness from afar. I loved that the first thing they did this morning was clean. I looked out from my own work cleaning some glass doors, and there was a little army of 11 year olds sweeping the campus. They met some of their teachers and I heard lots of singing at various points in the day. Then tonight they appeared out on the basketball court for one of the greatest camp-style-sing-a-longs I’ve ever heard. I understood none of it, but there was clapping, singing, call and response, dancing, stomping, and tons of laughing. I loved watching one of the junior staff – herself just two years out of high school – leading the fun, and then about died laughing as James, an almost 7 foot tall member of the security staff, led the 11 year olds in a ridiculous dance. My only concern is that all of these little boys look so similar: they’re all skinny, and have really short hair, and huge, gorgeous eyes, and beautiful smiles! I can’t wait to meet more kids.

The Epic Lunch

Sundays are slow in Haiti. Patrick, the American who operates this place on a tight schedule with high expectations for timeliness and following rules, says that on Sunday he lets Haiti be Haiti. That means there’s tons of time for relaxing, and doing laundry, and talking, and reading, and church and … cooking. At about 10:30 Patrick came over and invited Corey and me, the first 2 volunteers he saw, to come over to his family’s house across the street for dinner. I though 10:30 seemed a bit early, but was eager for something new to do. A former LCS student and his mother and sister were visiting, and they had brought all the makings for a feast. At 11 when I came over they were starting to slice meat. Now, I have to note that they were essentially filleting the meat – in their hands … moving the knife through the meat and toward their hands. I’ve watched my mom slice carrots toward her thumb enough times to know that such things are possible without amputating a finger, but this was terrifying. Over the next 4 and a half hours I watched the meticulous preparation of about seven different dishes. There was no food processor or blender or garlic press or pre-packaged, trimmed meat, or bottled salad dressing, or minute rice or microwave. They worked on a countertop that was about 2 square feet, and cooked on a tiny stove top. And they never sat down. Meanwhile, the kids and I played a few epic games of UNO, the adults talked about life in Haiti and the US, and another family stopped by in their most perfect Sunday best on their way home from Church. When it was finally time to eat, 12 people sat down for a feast that was described to me as the food that many Haitian families would eat on Christmas and Easter put together. I apologize to all my Haitian people reading this who probably want the actual names of things – but I’m still struggling to pick up names of unfamiliar foods on Kreyol. There was a brown rice fried with some kind of pork and peas. There was beef that was seasoned with lime and boiled then fried. That part I didn’t really understand. I tried a bite after it was boiled and it was delicious. After frying it … kind of leathery. But I digress. There was a lettuce salad and carrots and beets with a citrus vinaigrette. There was a spicy cole slaw. There was fresh squeezed juice from a tropical fruit called a grenadian. There were fried plantains. There was some kind of root – taro maybe? – that was ground into a consistency resembling hummus, then deep fried. Are we noticing a theme here …. Fried. A lot of oil, and a lot of frying. Anyway, it was an absolutely beautiful meal for its deliciousness, but even more for the love and care with which it was prepared. Let’s just say I was not hungry for the community dinner at 6.

Moun Yo

Moun means “person,” so moun yo means “people” and ti moun means “little people – kids.” The people here are beautiful in every sense of the word. I know how trite it sounds to say that people who have very little are the most joyful, but here it is true. The people within the school community are friendly and quick to smile and laugh. They relish conversation – after dinner, sitting around playing cards, during a break in the work day. People talk to each other for hours. The other night we started talking Haitian politics and 2 Haitians and three Americans talked for about 2 hours. And in case you’re wondering, there’s still no consensus on what actually happened to Aristide in February 2004. Seems that no one really knows ….!

The language skills of the people in this community are absolutely humbling. They grow up speaking Kreyol, then learn French in school. When they come to Louverture Cleary, they learn English and Spanish too. I guess I was expecting the level of English that would reflect the level of Spanish that most American high school kids learn in 4 – 7 years. Wow, I was wrong. Many of the staff of LCS graduates, and most of them speak English with ease and sophistication. They grew up here with American teachers every year, and they love American music and movies, but their fluency blows me away. Then I discovered that many – though not quite as many – are as conversant in Spanish. My language loving brain is having so much fun here bouncing around among 4 languages over dinner!

The other 8 American volunteers are wonderful. They’re all 22 and either 2 months or a year out of college. But they’re smart, enthusiastic, creative and eager to do excellent work. I think there are a few natural teachers among the group and I’m looking forward to watching them in action once school starts!

The other group of people here aside from the Haitian staff and the American volunteers is the Moynihan family. Patrick Moynihan is the President of the Haitian Project and over the last 12 years has been involved in some capacity or another within the school. He had his wife Christina, and their four kids ranging in age from 16 to 9, have just moved back to Haiti after 2 years of living in the states. The kids are so helpful to us because they know the things that are hard for Americans about living here, but they have already mastered them. On my first night here, Mariana the nine year old helped me hang my mosquito net. This afternoon Michaela the 14 year old helped us wash our clothes and shared her expertise with us. Robby the 16 year old knows where things are and how things work and is quick to help us find things or retie our first pathetic attempt at hanging a clothesline. Timmy the 12 year old is about the most social being I’ve ever seen and he just hangs around and offers commentary on whatever we’re doing – sharing his wisdom about life in Haiti and offering warnings or encouragement as the situation calls for. It’s really humbling to know that they have given up their life as a typical American family to be here and be a part of this community – not just for a year, but for the foreseeable future. The older kids obviously were frustrated to leave their nice American high school and teenaged social lives, but they know that this is their family’s work, and that they’re all better people for it. I keep telling the older kids whenever I come up with new angles or topics for their college application essays: “why my family’s not normal,” or “my life as the only white girl at a boarding school in Haiti,” or “50 uses for a five gallon bucket.” Their lives are way more interesting than most American teenagers!
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Spaghetti for Breakfast

The food here is almost 100% imported – which kind of blows my mind. Haiti is about 70% deforested so there is little production of food staples like rice and grain here. To make up for it, rice is imported from the US, people eat wonder bread style white bread, and lots and lots of pasta. We typically eat spaghetti or oatmeal or sometimes cereal for breakfast. The spaghetti usually has but up hot dogs in it, which pretty much still cracks me up. Breakfast of champions. For lunch, the main meal of the day, we eat the meal prepared by the school cooks for the kids (even though there are only small groups of kids here right now, not the full 350.) That meal has been a big pile of rice, topped with some vegetables and occasionally meat, and drizzled with some kind of vegetable, meat or bean based sauce. It’s pretty delicious – but so greasy. I think they use vegetable oil not just for sautéing veggies, but actually as a cooking liquid. For dinner we don’t eat nearly as much as I’m accustomed to. Last night we had French toast with peanut butter and syrup – seriously, try it. So tasty. One night we had lasagna. Another night we had hot tuna sandwiches. There’s no salad or side dishes or dessert at all – just the food and some juice. It is absolutely enough food to eat and feel full, but I realize how much more I am accustomed to eating in a day. No surprise, there are no obese people here!

NEWS FLASH: After I wrote this, I went downstairs for Saturday lunch and had the most delicious food we’ve had yet. About three people worked for three hours to prepare a huge bouillon, a stew with potatoes, yucca, carrots, plantains, and homemade dumplings. AND MEAT! It was absurdly delicious. On top of that, we had freshly made juice a local fruit, and brownies. It was heavenly.

Gray water and green roofs

My biggest concern coming here was what it would be like to live here – with the heat, the mosquitos, the sun, the shared living space and the relatively confined life within the walls of the school. So far, I have been pleasantly surprised that none of the above is nearly as challenging as I imagined it would be. To be sure, it’s hot here during the day. I try to avoid the noon sun as much as possible, because it is powerful. But to my surprise, it’s not really humid at all here, and there is often a beautifully refreshing breeze. It has rained on many afternoons, and the evenings have mostly been cooler, breezy and lovely. The other night was so cool – just above 80 – that I seriously considered wearing a long sleeved shirt to bed1

The mosquitos are no joke. I never seem to see them (what a surprise …) but they have been enjoying an all you can eat buffet around my legs. I hate bug spray, but I think it’s just going to have to become more a part of my daily routine.

The living space is definitely crowded, but luckily the people with whom I’m sharing it are so delightful that it’s really not so bad. There are 9 American volunteers living in the upstairs living space, along with 6 - 9 (depending on he day) of the Haitian staff who live here. We share 2 bathrooms, one small common room, and a wide open, breezy hallway. Downstairs in the main administration building is our eating and cooking space. We’ve spent the better part of the last week working on renovating that space. I’ve watched with a certain degree of awe as some of the guys have rebuilt a few concrete walls that were crumbling. We’ve scoured and repainted three huge rooms, and yesterday managed to open a wrought iron gate that had been blocking a sliding glass door which, according to one of the staff, “hadn’t been opened since Christopher Columbus came.” Fun with sledgehammers!

I know it’s all the rage in the states to try to figure out how to engineer and build “green” buildings, and in many ways, I’m living in the developing world version of one. The school is completely solar powered, which is a huge benefit considering the limited infrastructure in this country. Tricia, where does Haiti fall on the CGLA rankings?? Similarly, we don’t waste anything here. Anything. When you shower, there’s a big bucket underneath the shower head to catch the so called “gray water.” That water is then used to flush toilets (since there’s not enough water pressure to do it, it’s necessary to pour water from a bucket down the toilet to flush it.) And naturally, since water is such a precious resource, people here absolutely follow the “if it’s yellow let it mellow …” rule. Any leftover food is composted. Glass jars are reused. There is a rooftop garden whose purpose is not so much to reduce cooling costs – since air conditioning is non-existent – but actually will produce food. I’ve never been so aware of my carbon footprint as I am here!

On the other hand, there’s no EPA in Haiti. Trash is burned – all of it. That includes plastics that certainly should not be burned, but there’s not really anything else to do with it. When we wash clothes or dishes with bleach, the dirty water (if it’s not used to flush a toilet!) is just tossed outside. I can’t imagine that’s good for any living creature … Outside of the school the trash problem is overwhelming. There’s just trash everywhere, because there’s nowhere to put it and no infrastructure to deal with it.

The school grounds are really quite beautiful. The buildings are all white and yellow, and there are tons of trees and gardens surrounded by low concrete walls to sit on. There are 2 basketball courts – which are constantly in use – and a soccer field. There are lots of little tables and benches all around where people just sit around and talk or play cards or play dominoes for hours. There’s a beautiful little playground in the back with swings and 2 big plastic slides and a jungle gym. Yesterday we invited all of the little kids from the neighborhood around the school to come in for an hour to play. There were about 30 kids running around that playground laughing their heads off. The hour flew by! There’s also a library here that PHA teachers would envy! What I can tell so far is that there is a real culture of reading and books here, and I’m eager to see that in action once the students all arrive.

So far, I don’t have any sunburns, I haven’t melted from the heat, I’m enjoying my cold showers and not feeling imprisoned at all. Let’s hope it stays that way!

First Days

Leaving Miami on the way here was sort of surreal – knowing that it was the last air conditioning and CNN and the last Starbucks iced coffee I’d enjoy for a long while. The flight itself was uneventful, but interesting. There were several white people other than us, but mostly it was very well dressed Haitian people – some who seemed to Americans visiting, and others who seemed to be Haitians going home. All of the flight announcements were in English, French and Kreyol. As we started to descend, we flew over what I think was Cuba, then over that picturesque Caribbean blue water. We approached land, which I knew was the western coast of Haiti, and flew over the capital of Port au Prince. From the air, it seemed much like any sprawling city – just without any particularly tall buildings. Out the other side of the plane the water quickly gave way to mountains, and I could see how deforested they were. The soil was more brown than green, and seemed parched and rugged. We landed and climbed down the stairs onto the tarmac and were met with an incredibly hot wind and a band playing Haitian music just inside the terminal door. Customs was orderly and official, and the baggage claim area was simple – only 2 carousels – but people waited patiently for their suitcases to emerge. Then we stepped outside. The staff who had met us in Miami explained that once we got our luggage we would all go outside together. They warned us to stick together, not to let anyone help with our bags. There was a barrier behind which about a hundred people were standing, waiting for people on the flight. We wheeled our luggage carts to the corner of the fenced in section, where we handed our 50 pound suitcases over the wall to the school staff waiting on the other side. Once all of our luggage was safely in the hands of the school staff, we walked around the barrier, through the crowd, to the three waiting cars. Much of our luggage was thrown in the back of a pickup truck, and the rest was tied on the roofs of the 2 other vehicles. About 20 of us crowded into those three cars for the ride to the school.

The road was paved, but rugged and it was lined with people the whole 20 minute drive. There were stands selling food and gifts, and people just sitting on the roadside. At intersections, little kids came to the windows asking for money or food or to wash our windows. It was hard to look at them, but even harder not to. I had read about “rap taps,” brightly painted, covered pickup trucks that serve as Haiti’s public transportation system, and couldn’t help but smile when I started seeing them all over the road. I don’t really think there are any traffic rules here … it was definitely every man for himself!

Our first days in the school have been spent getting used to living here – learning how to flush toilets, and where to find water, and which water to drink, and how to do laundry. We’ve also been working each morning from about 7 to 11:30 on some cleaning and renovation projects. In the afternoon we’ve been meeting with people on the academic side of the school to begin to prepare for teaching here. Evenings have been spent playing basketball, watching movies, reading, talking and sleeping like a rock.

A person’s most prized possessions here are a little different than back home. Duct tape, for example, is an essential for everything from patching mosquito nets, to repairing a crack in a bucket to simply hanging things on walls. /Our first morning here we were presented with two five gallon buckets with our name on them – one written in green and the other in red. Our hosts explained that the red bucket was for personal use – laundry and for taking showers when the water pump wasn’t working well enough to get anything from the shower. The green bucket was for cleaning projects – to fill with bleach for cleaning bathrooms, or paint thinner for cleaning paintbrushes. These 2 buckets have become prized possessions. When they get dirty, we take the time to clean them carefully, and when not in use we store them in our rooms. And of course a 5 gallon bucket also makes a pretty excellent chair or stool!

Today is Saturday, and it was delightful to sleep in … until about 6:30 when the barking dogs and bright sunlight made sleep impossible. But we didn’t have any work to do this morning, so I spent it reading, and doing yoga outside on the back basketball court. That was really nice … though dodging the ants in my downward facing dog was a bit challenging. Then we got our first laundry lesson where we learned the basics of how to wash clothes by hand. Wow, it’s hard. Without hot water, friction is the key to actually getting the clothes clean. After my first attempt, my knuckles are all a bit raw and I’m not actually convinced that any of my clothes are clean. We’ll see when I pull them off the line later!

Saturday afternoon we piled into 2 cars – about 20 of us – and drove 20 minutes (3 miles) to a seminary nearby for Sunday Mass. It was good to get out in a car again and see the area around the school. After turning off the one paved road, the roads became incredibly bumpy and dusty. People walked along the side leading animals, carrying buckets of water on their head, and a lot of people just seemed to be sitting around. A motorcycle behind us had 4 people on it, and a young girl started chasing after our car as we passed her, I think just for fun. We turned into the grounds of the seminary and it was lush and green with the most beautiful soccer field and fruit trees all around. It’s a Scalabrini Brothers seminary, and also the meeting place for the national council of Bishops. We attended Mass in a partially open air chapel with an Italian priest who generally started sentences in French and ended them in Kreyol. There was a group of kids from a nearby school – the girls neatly dressed in blue dresses and yellow ties, and the boys in blue pants, yellow shirts and yellow ties. The priest addressed his passionate, enthusiastic words mostly to those children. He spoke of the transformation of the resurrection, and the transformation needed in this country. He urged these children to be active, rather than passive, to be optimists rather than pessimists, and to be the people who rebuild their country. Even the Americans in the crowd who didn’t understand his words, knew that he was saying something important. After Mass we walked around the beautiful grounds and the seminarians prepared dinner for us – papaya, tuna salad, pizza and beer. Most delicious beer ever.