Out and About: Cold Coke and Sugar Cane

Very exciting news … we officially have permission to leave the front gates of school and walk about twenty steps down the street to a little shop that sells cold Cokes and cookies and stuff like that. It sounds absurd, but this is a good sign that things are really quite calm here these days, because there have been years here that weren’t so calm when volunteers have never been allowed out – even twenty steps away – unescourted. I enjoyed my first cold Coke in a glass bottle immensely the other day.

I also went for a walk with Christina into the neighborhood, which people simply call “the zone.” Christina has lived here with her family off and on for about 12 years. Her kids have run around and played with all the neighborhood kids, and so everyone knows her, and she knows everyone. We walked to the market, stopping along the way to say hello to everyone who was just hanging out. That’s one of the strangest things to get used to about life here – the people just sitting around. So few people have jobs (in the way we think of a job – a place you get up in the morning and go to every day.) So as you walk around the neighborhood, there are just people sitting on the side of the road, in front of their houses etc. We met an elderly lady who is the smallest adult human I’ve ever seen. Just a tiny, frail woman, but totally with it. She sat inside her little house, with all of the women and children in her family sitting around outside. We stopped to bounce some babies and talk to the ladies. Christina asked one lady if her husband had work, and she said no. She followed up by asking her what he does all day. Her response is indicative of many people’s lives here, “Li chita, li mache.” (He sits, he walks …)

Our last stop was the vegetable market to buy some food for our dinner. We found wonderfully huge avocados as well as some eggplant (which made it into our lasagna this week … very tasty!) Then I spotted a man with long stalks of something purplish and I asked what he was selling. Sugar Cane! I have to pause here for a little history lesson.

In my ninth grade world history classes at PHA, I teach a huge unit on revolutions – the American, French, Haitian, and Latin American revolutions. Critical to the story of the Haitian Revolution, of course, is sugar cane. The French followed the Spanish to Hispaniola first in search of gold, but once they had exhausted all of those resources, (and most of the native people were dead) they looked for new ways to make money. The obvious answer was sugar. The French built a brutal and wildly successful plantation system based on West African slave labor working to produce one of the island’s natural products. The life expectancy for a slave imported to Saint Domingue (as the French colony was then known) was less than one year since the labor and living conditions were so horrific. Meanwhile, this tiny half of an island became the jewel of the French empire and the envy of the other European powers … until 1791 when the slave population of the island organized the first and only successful slave revolution in history and became the western hemisphere’s second independent nation.

Unfortunately the rest of the story doesn’t end happily ever after, but that’s for another day. I tell this part of the story now because I had never even seen, let alone tasted, sugar cane before. In my lessons on the Haitian Revolution at PHA, I have always relied on the kids from the Caribbean to describe the look and taste of sugar cane. First of all, it’s much thicker than I thought it would be. It’s probably about an inch and a half in diameter. It has a purplish skin on it, that requires a machete to peel and it’s the color of the flesh of an apple inside. I asked the man for one, and he spent about five minutes peeling the skin off, then chopping it into about five pieces about five inches long each. I thanked him, paid him about 25 cents and went on my way. To eat sugar cane, you bite off a piece, and chew it, suck out all the juice, then spit it out. It has the texture of an apple, but it’s so fibrous it would be gross to swallow. But the juice is … pure sugary deliciousness. As I stood on the street and walked along chewing on the sugar cane, I kept thinking about this country’s sad, proud, complicated history … and it all began with sugar cane.