Spaghetti for Breakfast

Chain Saws and Wood Chippers

2010-06-10T11:13:00.001-07:00

Nope, this is not a description of the latest construction project or earthquake recovery project in Haiti. This is what’s going on in my parents’ neighborhood in Arlington. As I flew home on Sunday, the flight was held up over Providence for about 45 minutes waiting for weather to clear in Boston. Then when I landed and called my dad, he explained that a tornado – what turned out to be a “macroburst” – had hit their neighborhood while I was in the air. There were more than ten huge trees down, some of which fell on cars and houses. Their house was OK, but there were two huge trees from neighbors’ yards now covering their backyard. Oh, and there was no electricity. So I woke up on June 6 and got ready to leave Haiti in the dark, and arrived home and ate dinner and started to unpack in the dark too. Who needs electricity anyway? I told some neighbors that I don’t know how to operate a chainsaw, but if anyone had a machete I’d be happy to help. I don’t think they really got it.

Since Sunday night I’ve been busy, but also just really enjoying some of the small things. I started an apartment search on Monday that seemed dismally depressing at first, but which turned around on Wednesday morning when the Craigslist gods smiled upon me and I beat a kagillion other people to the punch on the perfect Davis Square apartment. Lease signed, checks written Wednesday, and I can move in July 1. I’ve spent some time at PHA beginning to sort out exactly what my job will be next year, but mostly just hanging out with kids and adults, catching up, and wondering how it is that ninth grade boys can grow six inches in a year. Amazing. I’ve done a lot of walking around in this unseasonably chilly, but brilliantly sunny week. It’s such a pleasure to be able to just go where I want to go, and no one even notices me. Anonymity is not really possible for me in Haiti. I’m enjoying iced coffees and burritos from Ana’s Taqueria and stop lights and the T and the view of Copley Square through the giant glass windows as I came down the escalator at Copley Place.

I’m off to Chicago this afternoon to join some of my favorite people for the “Tour de Farms,” the annual fundraising ride for the National MS Association. We’ve done this ride a few times in honor of Michael John Myette’s father who has been battling MS for many years. Now we’re riding for Erika too, his wife and one of my very closest friends from Notre Dame, who was diagnosed with MS this fall. Yet another reminder that our own life plans amount to so little compared with God’s plan, and that there is no shortage people in anyone’s life in need love and support. Really, you don’t have to go to Haiti to find someone to help.

It will be a wonderful weekend, I’m sure, despite how terrifyingly out of shape I am. I rode 20 miles on Tuesday and it was a little rough. 150 over two days? Right … I’ll be fine. Which reminds me, if any of you want to make a contribution to our team, The Loose Sprockets, here’s my fundraising page: http://main.nationalmssociety.org/goto/BetsyBowman

After this weekend trip, I’ll enjoy a quiet summer, I hope … moving into a new apartment, getting settled in a new job, catching up with old friends, spending time with family and welcoming new nieces and nephews into the world. In August I hope to return to Haiti for a week to help the new group of volunteers get settled into their teaching roles. Then school starts in September and a whole new adventure begins. Maybe I’ll update this blog again with updates from Haiti in the future, but they certainly won’t be so frequent. Thanks to all the people I know and all the people I don’t know who have been reading this and even sharing it with more people. I hope you’ve enjoyed it – and that you continue to keep Haiti in your thoughts and prayers and ACTIONS in the years to come. It’s going to be a long road.

If you want to read another interesting blog – here’s the blog of the PHA students visiting Guatemala for the month of June. They arrived just before the volcano erupted and the torrential rains began. Now their trip has changed form a bunch of kids coming to see the world and learn Spanish to a bunch of kids helping to dig houses out of the mud. Sound familiar? www.juniorjourney.blogspot.com

All the best,
Betsy

Graduation

2010-06-10T10:41:00.000-07:00

It was beautiful. There's not much to say really that these pictures don't already express. There were a lot of joyful kids and families and the whole thing went off without a hitch. It was a wonderful way to spend my last day at Louverture Cleary School.

Snapshots of the last weeks

2010-06-10T10:33:00.000-07:00

Back in March I was a little bored … not anymore! May has been busy and hectic and at times stressful and irritating, but also fun and joyful. A few snapshots of LCS in May …

Construction: The maintenance guys have been busy. They’ve rebuilt the front wall surrounding the school that came down in the earthquake, and have almost completed three other damaged walls. It’s amazing to watch them work. They had to break the old foundation to pour a new one, and there are no jack hammers for that. They did it with sledgehammers and pick axes. Then they had to pour the concrete, and there are no cement mixers. They do it by hand – mixing the sand, gravel, cement and water, stirring it on the ground, then shoveling it into wheelbarrows to transport it to the site. And did I mention that in the middle of the day it’s been in the high nineties for the past few weeks? In all of these projects, students have been working too. This whole place was constructed by this community, so students have always been involved in construction projects here. They’re so proud when they see the wall that they helped to build.

Schedules … again: Apparently it is my calling in life to coordinate school schedules. This has often been part of my job at PHA, and post-earthquake it has been one of my major responsibilities at LCS. This past week required coordinating the final exam schedules for the oldest students whose school year is over, while maintaining the normal schedule for the rest of the kids. Now I’m working on the schedule for the extended school year through June – though I won’t be here to see it happen. The graduates will come back in June to work with their professors to prepare for the national exams that they must pass later in the summer. I was working on their schedule today and then one of the kids tonight just said, “wait … we have to be here at 8? They told us 9 …” I really am the last to know anything around here. Back to the drawing board.

Liz’s visit: When I decided to come to Haiti last year, Liz Murray, my long time PHA colleague and most recent roommate, proposed coming to visit. She and I both know that chances to visit Haiti are few and far between, and April vacation seemed like the perfect time. Then … plans had to change. It looked like she wouldn’t be able to come at all since flights were not easy to book, and were not cheap, but then she figured it out somehow and spent five days at LCS last week. Not surprisingly – to anyone who knows Liz – she was hanging out with the 11 year olds in about ten minutes and was doing crowd control for the kids waiting in line outside the “store” within her first four hours in Haiti. She came with all kinds of supplies and goodies for kids (and some for the grown-ups too … if you’re ever wondering, frozen Toll House chocolate chip cookie dough will survive a flight to Haiti!) Mostly it was just so wonderful to have someone who knows me so well in my normal life witness my Haiti life.

A fresh coat of paint: Classes ended Wednesday and the younger students went home, and then the graduates returned to campus to do all the prep to make the school look beautiful for their families to see it on Saturday. It’s amazing what motivated kids can accomplish in a few hours! With only a little supervision from adults, they painted every flat surface they could get a paintbrush on, and the school buildings, benches, and walls look beautiful. They’re also painting their class mural, on the new front wall whose plaster was barely dry this morning. Their mural includes the names of the 41 graduates and their class name “Odyssey” with an incredible image of a ship at sea. Again, talent combined with motivation and a deadline yields some incredible results. And what were the adults doing while he kids painted? We made 20 cakes and 24 lasagnas for the graduation lunch. The cooks are making the “real” food, but we decided to pitch in where we could!

Goodbyes: The kids here see volunteers come and go every year, and to be honest, I expected them to be a little guarded in their relationships with us as a result of these annual goodbyes. But they’re not guarded at all, and their farewells were so sweet and their thank you’s so sincere. I’m so happy that five of the ten volunteers will be returning next fall, and two will stay until the end of the extended school year in early July. I think it will be so good for these kids to have some consistency, and as the years go on, to still have people around who shared the earthquake experience with them. When they ask why I’m not staying, I tell them that I promised some other kids I’d come back after a year, and that answer seems to satisfy them. But I’m dropping some pretty strong hints that I intend to visit in the not so distant future … maybe with some of those other kids I know.

Tet anba – upside down: We love to do things a little backwards at LCS – turning conventional things on their head. On the last day of class, that meant the staff showing up at the morning meeting wearing kids’ uniforms. We each conspired with a student to borrow their uniforms, then marched out in a line to stand in front of the kids at their daily 8 am meeting. It was pretty hilarious. Some of the staff members literally WERE LCS students a year ago, so they looked pretty normal in their green plaid skirts, but some of us looked pretty fabulously ridiculous. This uniform just does not look good on most white people. It was a wonderful moment of levity in a busy week full of exams and grading.

So many generous gifts

2010-06-10T10:17:00.000-07:00

After the earthquake, the students at Montrose School (where I went to school from sixth through twelfth grade) raised about 2000 dollars for LCS through “coin wars” and a benefit concert. Though they understood why it was critical to just send money, they also wanted to give some kind of gift to the students directly. So they worked with their art teacher to create eight beautiful posters that represent LCS and Haiti and HOPE. They used some of my photos to get ideas and others just used their imaginations, and the results were amazing. Liz checked the huge tube of posters as her luggage, and on Thursday afternoon we spread them out on the basketball court for the kids to see. They loved them. They loved the representations of themselves and their school and appreciated the thoughtfulness of the artists so much. They also loved reading the artists’ biographies so much, through which they learned things like what lacrosse is and what after school program means and which year in school are sophomores. Almost immediately they suggested making a gift in return for their new faraway friends, and in just two afternoons, a little crew of four 16 year old boys created four drawings for the girls at Montrose as a way to say thank you. I don’t know … I just can’t help thinking that these are the kind of experiences that change kids’ whole view of the world and their own place in it.

Earlier in the spring, Prospect Hill Academy, the school where I have worked for the past 8 years, announced that they would contribute about $3000 of their “PHA fund for Haiti” to the Haitian Project and Louverture Cleary School. This money will be used to underwrite the programs within the school that support the neighborhood children who are too young for LCS. Presently, there are eleven children in full time day care / preschool, about 50 who come for lunch and play time each afternoon, and about 25 school aged children who do not attend school consistently are attending classes here taught by LCS students. I think this program is such a perfect match for PHA. It’s about kids helping kids, and about reaching out to the community outside of one’s own little world. I hope that one of these years some PHA kids will get to come here and see it for themselves!

And at least once a week I receive an e-mail from a friend or family member reporting that some other friend, or a local elementary school, or somebody’s church had a fundraiser and raised a hundred or three thousand dollars of the Haitian Project. It’s amazing to see how many people have actually followed through on their well intentioned promises to do something to help. If this many people actually stay engaged in Haiti’s progress in the critical months and years ahead, then I am truly hopeful that Haiti can rebuild itself into a better country. It’s going to be a long road though, and the work has only just begun.

Odyssey Class

2010-05-25T20:07:00.001-07:00

I wrote the article for the June edition of the THP newsletter about the graduation of the class of 2010, who named themselves “Odyssey.” The article will be published later in June (so is written in the past tense about an event that hasn’t happened yet … but you get the idea.) I think it came out well, and tells a good story about some special people. Here it is …

The LCS class of 2010 made a particularly appropriate choice this year in choosing their class name, Odyssey Class. Truly their years at LCS have been just that. They came to Santo 5 as eleven year olds in September of 2003, and after the chaotic failure of the government in February of their sixieme (7th grade) year, and a violent earthquake in January of their philo (senior) year, their graduation on June 6 was a particularly joyful celebration of the accomplishments and future of these 41 men and women. But these graduates don’t dwell on the two great tragedies that dominated their first and last years at Louverture Cleary. They focus instead on their many happy memories, their wonderful friends, teachers and mentors, and the mix of joy and sadness that they feel as this chapter of their lives comes to a close.

Stecy Naika came to LCS as an eleven year old, leaving the home she had shared with her aunt since the age of three. To get Stecy to her primary school, and herself to work on time each morning, her aunt, Marie Kettly, had to wake Stecy at 4:30 am. When she heard about LCS from a friend at her church, Marie Kettly knew that her niece was intelligent enough to get in, and she loved the academic rigor and the discipline of the school. As she sat reminiscing last month, Marie Kettly explained in Kreyol that “Stecy was so timid as a little girl. Now she is confident and loves to talk with everyone.”

Truly, Stecy is one of the most gregarious of her classmates, and as her favorite class has always been English, she expresses herself with flair in her third language. She hopes to go on to University to study International Relations. Like all Louverture Cleary students, she has so much love for her country, and the hope that she and the rest of the Louverturians will be the leaders who will make a brighter future for Haiti. She explained that her happiest memories of LCS are of “the many people who think about a better world, and work for it, like Mr. Moynihan, Mr. Zamy, and Mr. Pierre.” She knows that it is their example and the discipline which they provided that have prepared her to “work hard and face the mean world.” She smiled as she added, “I’m not scared of anybody because I don’t have to worry about what the world thinks. I can be myself.”

In the days and weeks after the January 12th earthquake, these Philo students stepped up to leadership that would never be demanded of most students their age. As the staff and volunteers were occupied with preparing meals, and clearing debris, and coordinating with THP in then US, it was the philo students who facilitated the orderly distribution of meals on the soccer field, and the cleaning of dishes. They led the morning prayers, and organized both work projects and games for the younger students. Their leadership was essential in those days, and it is exactly this hard work and leadership that Haiti desperately needs at this critical moment in its history.

Stecy’s eyes filled with tears as she talked about her feelings on graduation day. She mused, “I am turning a page of my story and beginning a new chapter, and I am happy, but also sad to leave so many friends.” Her Aunt smiled as she echoed those same mixed emotions, explaining, “I am proud of Stecy and happy that my work as a parent is done.” She paused before adding, “but I know that my work is not really done.” As they smile for pictures and hug friends and teachers goodbye, Stecy and her Odyssey classmates know too, that their journey is only just beginning.

Poetry Out Loud

2010-05-25T15:07:00.000-07:00

Poetry Out Loud
At PHA, one of my favorite new traditions is the annual “Poetry Out Loud” competition. Poetry Out Loud is a national poetry recitation competition for high school students, and a PHA sophomore has been the Massachusetts state champion for two years in a row. The purpose of the competition is to encourage a love of poetry – of all different styles – in high school students. The idea is that the best way to demonstrate deep understanding of a poem, is to memorize and recite it, so that a student’s own unique interpretation of the poem will be communicated through her performance. It’s fun every year to watch the kids who don’t say much in class shine as they perform a published poem, and to discover new interpretations of poems that I thought I had understood before.

LCS kids love to perform, and they love to compete, so I thought that maybe some of them would rise to the challenge of memorizing and performing a poem in English. Sure enough, they did. I chose poems that I thought they could access – Shel Silverstein and Langston Hughes and a few other lesser known poems – and also invited them to write, memorize and perform an original poem in English. Sure enough, we had eleven participants who did an incredible job performing the poems. The winner was a seconde (10th grade) student named Caleb who wrote a hilarious poem about mosquitoes, and the second and third place finishers both performed the Shel Silversetein poem “Whatif …” The other kids cheered like crazy, and I think next year there will be even more participation. There are a few videos here – of Caleb the winner, Vanessa the runner up, and Olibirs, a philo student who wrote an absolutely hilarious poem – an ode to the incinerator.

At the same time as the poetry competition, the kids were putting on their annual language competition, known in French as la genie. Each class chooses a team of six to compete against the other classes in a competition full of questions in French, English and Spanish. There are translations, vocabulary, spelling and the hardest of all, idiomatic expressions. It was amazing to watch their facility with juggling three foreign languages at once, and also to witness the passion of the participants and their classmates. They cheered and roared when someone spelled a hard word correctly as if it were a world cup match. The winners got to choose a book from some extra books from the library, and all participants got “tickets” to redeem at the language store (where they can buy school supplies and other little goodies.)

As the school year winds down, it has been delightful to watch the kids enjoying some of these simple traditions and embracing new ones with such enthusiasm.

New website!

2010-05-08T16:39:00.001-07:00

Check out the new website for the Haitian Project! It's beautiful and full of so many great pictures, as well as all of the updates since the earthquake. You can sign up to receive weekly updates, and make donations online.
http://haitianproject.org/

Felisitasyon Klas 2010

2010-05-08T15:55:00.000-07:00

Graduation for the Louverture Cleary School class of 2010 will be on Saturday June 5, the scheduled graduation day since last August. I think these might be the only kids in Port au Prince graduating on time, and I’m really proud to have been a part of making this small miracle possible. They’ll still have to prepare for their national exams, which unfortunately will not take place until the end of August, as opposed to late June. But we’ll celebrate the accomplishments and futures of the class of 2010 with the community and their families on the regularly scheduled day. That really is a small miracle.

This week I had the privilege of taking the official class picture, and the individual cap and gown photos for each student. These will be printed in the US, and presented to the kids as a gift on their graduation day. The kids are struggling a bit with the fact that their philo (senior) year was without many of the fun traditions and celebrations that they have watched other classes enjoy for the past six years. They didn’t get to plan the all day party in April which usually marks the school’s birthday. They’re not going to have the traditional weekend retreat in May. Even the food at their graduation dinner is going to have to be a little different this year. All of these changes are necessities, based on the lost academic time, the unique financial requirements of the year, and the shifted focus of many staff members. So, given their quiet disappointment about all of this, it was really a pleasure to take them through a process that was so totally joyful. They were positively giddy as they posed for their class picture, and tried on the white gowns and red caps and did their hair and posed for their portraits. I’ve never taken formal portraits before in my life, and really, I’m not that good at it. But they didn’t care. It was all so much fun.

Incidentally … one of the other small miracles of this year is the fact that two days before coming back to Haiti I made a total impulse purchase and bought a really nice digital SLR camera. I had enjoyed taking pictures so much in Haiti, and I was getting frustrated with my little point and shoot, so on January 8, I bit the bullet and bought the fancy Cannon. However, as soon as I was back in Haiti, I had major guilt about it. How had I just dropped 600 dollars on a toy when people here don’t see that much money in a year? Well, two days later, as I found myself taking detailed pictures of cracked columns and fallen plaster and dangling concrete and sending them to engineers in the US who were working to determine the structural integrity of our buildings … I realized that my impulse to buy that camera wasn’t entirely my own. That camera has been essential in sharing the LCS story with our friends in United States, and I couldn’t have done it with my little point and shoot. Hooray for impulse buys! I’ll keep that in mind next time I’m coveting an expensive pair of shoes …

Soup Joumoun

2010-05-08T15:54:00.000-07:00

We weren’t in Haiti on January 1st to celebrate Haitian Independence Day, so we had plans to celebrate it with the Haitian and US American staff together on the first weekend after we returned in January. Well … other things happened … and we just never got around to it –until today!

Haiti celebrates its independence from France on January 1 each year, because after expelling the last French troops in November of 1803, Jean Jacques Dessalines, the revolutionary leader and first president, declared that independence would be proclaimed and celebrated on the first day of the new year. That day, in Cap Haitian, the city on the north coast with the citadel from which the last French ships had sailed the previous November, Dessalines proclaimed the Haitian Declaration of Independence. Somewhat ironically – or maybe tragically – the document was written in French, the language of Haiti’s colonial oppressors, since the descendants of Africans from so many different places did not share a common language of their own. It’s a shocking document, both for the striking resemblance it bears to the language and sentiments of the American Declaration of Independence written about thirty years before, as well as for the very un-Jeffersonian anger and violence which permeates it. Promises to “swear to the entire universe, to posterity, to ourselves, to renounce forever to France, and to die rather than to live under its domination,” are followed by the not so veiled threat to “pursue forever the traitors and the enemies of [our] independence.” Needless to say, after fifteen years of the most horrific violence, this declaration of independence was not sealed with handshakes and the flourish of a quill pen. It was sealed with blood and promises of retribution.

Along with the official pronouncement of independence, Dessalines led the people in a symbolic reclaiming of their rights as free people. That morning, he ate squash soup, the French delicacy long refused to the slaves, and invited the people gathered to do the same. Since then, the tradition in Haiti and in Haitian homes in the US is to greet the new year not with champagne toasts and wild parties, but with family and friends gathered around an early morning breakfast of squash soup. For years teaching in Cambridge, I have heard Haitian kids talk about their unique New Years tradition, and have occasionally enjoyed a Tupperware bowl full of squash soup leftovers on January 3 when school begins again, and I have always wanted to try making it myself.

This morning Benoit and I met in the kitchen at about 4:15. Unfortunately the electricity was out, as it often is at that time of the morning after the batteries have run out of juice and before the sun has come up to get the solar power going again. He chopped open the GIANT green squash, which looks like an orange pumpkin inside, and scooped out the guts. I got to work washing, peeling, and chopping sweet potatoes, regular potatoes, turnips, carrots, onions and garlic. As we worked, more helpers appeared, we drank two pots of coffee, and listened to Wyclef Jean. We boiled the squash, then pureed it – skin and all – in a blender. Benoit had prepared the meat before in the traditional way – by soaking it in citrus juices, then boiling it with garlic and scallions. We then boiled the pureed squash, and added the veggies, meat, macaroni, and lots of salt. (It wouldn’t be Haitian food without lots of salt!) By about 6:45 we were ready and a much larger than usual crowd gathered for an early Saturday morning breakfast. We had so much food that we were able to share it with some of the neighbors – men who were on campus to help with a building project, and some of the women who come to wash the clothes of those of us who are utterly incapable of doing so ourselves. We wished each other Bon Anè, and declared it the new year of 2010 ½ … and frankly, given all that’s happened here since January, it felt kind of good to turn the page of the calendar, even if it was to an imaginary new year.

Fahrenheit 451

2010-05-08T15:52:00.000-07:00

Nobody likes the idea of burning books. I know I certain;y don't, but sometimes you just have to.

Working for so long in schools, I have had lots of opportunities to be irritated by the “donations” that people make to the “less fortunate.” They pack their boxes full of the crap they don’t want anymore, drop it off at the door of a local charity, pat themselves on the back for their generosity and take a little tax write-off. Then, the school or charity has to figure out what to do with the donations. Don’t get me wrong, oftentimes people donate wonderful, useful things to schools. But too often they really just donate the crap that they don’t want and don’t know how to get rid of. So, I’ve had to face the question of what to do with unwanted, outdated, irrelevant books. My answer is always to resist the temptation to “save them because maybe some day someone will want them.” No, if we can’t use it right now, then I choose clean, organized storage spaces over the unlikely possibility that some mythical, future teacher will find a good use for the materials that all the actual teachers of the present think are useless. At PHA, this has meant that I have often led parades of boxes of books to the dumpster, or more recently to the curb where a non-profit recycling company picks them up. In Haiti, it’s not that simple.

On Thursday, a huge truck from Food for the Poor pulled up on Santo 5 and I watched as boxes and boxes of mysterious donations walked in the door of the school. Food for the Poor donates a lot of food to LCS, and this year they also provided us with 12 gently used, well refurbished computers for the kids’ computer lab. But in exchange for all the useful things they bring us, sometimes they bring us crap. I think I’ve written about the cases and cases of tiny leather cowboy boots, and the rejected cosmetics for white people that have appeared on our doorstep in the past. This time it was about a hundred boxes of English curriculum materials from some elementary school district in Ohio. There were a few boxes of reading anthologies, fifteen copies of three different books, which will be incredibly useful for the English teachers working with our youngest students. But beyond these ten boxes, there were 90 of teachers’ editions, answer booklets, catalogues, glossy professional development guides, and lots of other propaganda for the publishers of the “Storytown” reading program. The part when I really went through the roof was when I opened the box full of cardboard sleeves that looked like they contained some kind of DVD or CD-Rom … but no … oh wait … they were all empty. Thanks for that.

We sorted through the things we can legitimately use and then had to face that awkward questions about what we should do with the rest of it? I was a proponent of burning it, the way we burn all our trash around here. But the whole day as we sorted all the brightly colored spiral bound teachers’ editions on tables outside on the driveway, the kids were watching curiously as they passed by. They love books … any books … but especially books in English. I tried to show some that these weren’t books for reading – some were literally catalogues of additional curriculum materials. But as we started walking wheelbarrows full of materials back to the incinerator, the kids were begging us not to. So we stopped. What’s worse, giving poor kids useless stuff that will probably end up contributing to the momentous trash problem in this country, or the scandal of burning books in a school full of kids who are hungry to learn? We opted for the lesser evil behind door number 1.

So on Friday afternoon we set up tables by the front gate, and as kids were dismissed for the weekend, they took whatever they wanted. And they wanted all of it. Actually, despite our best efforts at order and discipline, they pretty much stampeded the tables to get what they could. Situations like this always make me – and pretty much everyone else who comes from cultures of wealth and privilege – really uncomfortable. When you’re so accustomed to not having anything, it doesn’t matter what the free thing being offered is – you’ll pretty much run over a kid half your size to get your hands on it because you know it’s not going to be there tomorrow.

By three o’clock the kids were gone and so were the unwanted books. We were left to burn the cardboard boxes and contemplate the weirdly complex ethical decisions that Haiti forces us to make. Sometimes the right answer is so obvious, and sometimes it’s a million shades of gray.

The Home Stretch

2010-04-25T18:41:00.002-07:00

The kids have been so worried about when school will end. When the government officially reopened schools in April, the word eventually came down that the national exams would be in August instead of June, and that schools should continue through the end of July. Well, for the kids here who never actually left even when we were having “unofficial” school, that news came as a pretty terrible blow, not only for the prospect of having to be in class instead of watching the World Cup matches in June, but also for sitting in the 100 degree blue tents in the hottest part of the summer. After much deliberation, the LCS administration decided that we will have graduation as scheduled at the beginning of June, but that the younger classes will all continue classes through the end of June, in order to give all of their teachers an opportunity to complete fair evaluations of their work over a reasonable period of time. While the volunteers will finish our classes in early June and then go home, the Haitian teachers will continue theirs until the end of the month, and the kids will stay at school without us. It’s absolutely the right decision, even though it’s not particularly popular with anyone. But isn’t that usually the case with most absolutely right decisions?

So now I’m looking at my last six weeks here trying to figure out what I need to be working on. Obviously I have all of my own classes and exams to finish, but I suddenly have this almost panicked sense of wanting to get so many other things done. I’m working with the volunteers on documenting our curriculum more formally and in a more uniform manner than it has ever been documented before, so that future volunteers are left with a somewhat more clear roadmap of what has been done, and what ought to be done in the future. I’m working on the schedule for the month of June, which will look a bit different without the ten American teachers. A few of us are working on an LCS recipe book to document how to make our favorite meals for 30. I’m so excited that five of the ten volunteers have chosen to stay for a second year next year, but unfortunately the five who like to cook are the ones leaving, so we’re trying to help them out as much as we can. Other than that, I’m trying to enjoy the kids and the mangoes and all the uniquely Haitian experiences that happen here every day – the wonderful, the absurd and even the incredibly irritating ones.

I will be returning to Boston on Sunday June 6th the day after LCS graduation. Unfortunately my flight will put me in about an hour or two late for the PHA graduation that Sunday afternoon, so I’ll miss the big day for that group of kids whom I’ve known since they were eleven. I’m so happy to be returning to Boston and PHA, a community that I love so much, in which I have essentially grown up as an educator over the past eight years. My year away from PHA has provided me with the space and perspective I needed to decide to pursue a more formal leadership role within the school. The school is undergoing an important transition right now, reuniting the middle school and high school on the same campus, so this was a great opportunity for me to make a career shift. Next year I’ll serve as an assistant principal with primary responsibility for the 11th and 12th grade students, as well as lots of work with teachers and parents. While it’s totally bizarre for me to imagine a life in school that’s not centered around my own classroom teaching, I’m excited for this new challenge. I think there are parts of this job that I’ll be really good at, and parts that will be really hard for me, and I so look forward to that experience. Being in Haiti this year has reminded me how much I love learning new things everyday, and having to think on my feet and adapt to whatever challenges the day throws my way. And I’m sure that some of the things I’ve learned here this year will help me to navigate the challenges ahead. At least those PHA kids won’t be able to get away with saying bad stuff in Kreyol around me!

2012

2010-04-25T18:41:00.001-07:00

I would like to thank the History Channel and Sony Pictures for perpetuating the absurd prophecy that the world will end in December in 2012. That’s going over real well right now in a country full of traumatized people who tend to lean toward apocalyptic conspiracy theories anyway, and who are now obviously particularly susceptible to such ideas. Thanks for that. I’m really enjoying having this conversation with a different kid every day.

Post Earthquake Haiku Therapy

2010-04-25T18:40:00.000-07:00

About two weeks after the earthquake, I decided to play one of my favorite games … the community Haiku. It works like this: I write the first two lines of a Haiku, and everyone else writes his or her own last line. This “post earthquake haiku therapy” has been on our wall ever since, and I still half smile and half cringe every time I read it.

The first two lines are:
Seven point zero
What the hell is going on?

The five syllable final lines are as follows … with a little explanation of each person’s earthquake experience:

Betsy: Get under the couch!
I’ve already explained that my somewhat appropriate and sort of insane instinct was to climb under the couch in our common room to wait for the shaking to stop

Mary: Should we not get out?
Mary was with me and Kristen upstairs, and while her inclination to get the hell out was probably better than mine to climb under the couch … we didn’t go anywhere.

Kristen: Please stop shaking now.
I’d say this one’s self explanatory

Elissa: Uh oh … coconuts!
She was outside walking among the mango and coconut trees and incredibly, her first thought was what would happen if one fell on her head. If you’ve never seen a coconut fall to the ground, it could kill you.

Peter: Incinerator?
He was outside dumping a wheelbarrow full of trash into the incinerator when the cinderblock walls starting moving. He thought the incinerator walls themselves were about to fall. Miraculously, only a few of the blocks actually did fall.

Samanthaa: Uh guys, get out now!
She was also near the incinerator with Peter and ran with the kids on the soccer field toward the center of the soccer field, away from the walls that were waving and crumbling.

Jon: Don’t push, pull instead.
Jon and Corey were making dinner in the kitchen and had a huge pot of water boiling on the stove. Amazingly, it didn’t completely fall off the stove. They ran for a doorway and Jon couldn’t figure out why he couldn’t get the door open …

Corey: Hold me Jon, I’m scared!
Corey the Guamanian is the only one of us who had any previous earthquake experience, so it was he who told Jon to get into a doorway.

Meg: I think we’re moving.
Meg was on the soccer field with the kids too.

John: hey guys, sorry I’m late!
John DiTillo wasn’t actually in Haiti on January 12th. He was a volunteer last year, and was safe at home in Hanibal, Missouri when the earthquake happened here. A month later, he had dropped everything at home and was back in Haiti. He’s picked up classes for volunteers who have since gotten involved in more time consuming outside of school projects. More importantly, he was a much needed shot of energy and enthusiasm at a time when we were getting pretty tired. Now he’s decided to stay on past June, and will return to LCS next fall as well. What a blessing.

About a month after the earthquake I started hearing an expression in Kreyol that sort of freaked me out a little at first, but which I have since come to understand and genuinely appreciate. One day in class I asked where a student was, and the response came, “anba dekonb” … under the rubble. I think she was really only in the bathroom or something. Subsequently, questions about “where’s your pen,” “has anyone seen my eraser,” and “where’s the truck” are all met with the same joking response … “under the rubble.” Now there’s even a Haitian DJ who mixed an upbeat tune that says, “put me under the rubble … pull me out from the rubble” and people around here sing it incessantly. It makes perfect sense to me now. Haitians are so accustomed to tragedy, but also love to laugh so much, that it’s only right that eventually there would be a collective national joke about the latest tragedy. We wrote a haiku, and they make morose jokes about being buried under the rubble. It’s the same thing really.

Una Playa Bonita … y Una Presidente Por Favor!

2010-04-07T07:42:00.000-07:00

On our first day at the resort near Santo Domingo, I kept laughing to myself thinking, “we are the ideal resort guests … because we will love EVERYTHING!” Did we throw a fit that our shower didn’t have any water for an hour or so? Nope. Were we annoyed that one of the restaurants was closed one night? Nope. We loved everything. The fancy lobby, the ocean view from our rooms (even though we had to crane our necks to the right a bit), the endless buffet, the waiters who came around and refilled our café con leche all morning, the free (I mean already paid for) cocktails … and the forks. Seriously, we were all just pretty excited to have total access to any kind of silverware we wanted at any moment of the day or night. At LCS our forks and spoons have the irritating habit of disappearing, so we end up eating spaghetti with spoons, and drinking soup with a quarter cup measuring cup. Needless to say, the endless supply of forks was pretty great. But mostly what we loved was the total relaxation of it. We didn’t have to do anything except enjoy the picturesque beach and the beautiful, friendly people. I’ve never done the “all inclusive” thing before, and I don’t think I would want to do it for a whole week, but for three days it was perfect.

After the resort we took the bus north to the Samana Peninsula, to a place called Playa Bonita. And yes, it was. There we stayed at a small hotel on a dirt road across the street from a very different, but equally beautiful beach. This one had rougher waves, but even softer sand. And there was no loud music, or people selling things, or free drinks … just the beach. We walked an hour into the little town nearby, bought sandwiches from an Italian grocery store, and rode on the backs of motorcycles back at night. We went on a horseback riding trip through mountain trails to a place called “cascada limon” where we jumped off a 30 foot ledge into the waterfall’s pool below. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve ridden a horse in my life, and I’m SURE I’ve never been on a galloping horse. It was terrifying / awesome … but mostly awesome.

Then we scored a reasonably cheap taxi ride back to Santo Domingo (avoiding a two and half hour bus ride all together) and arrived in the capital at about noon on Friday. We stayed at a little hotel run by a German man in the zona colonial, and for the next three days I just kept thinking about Europe. There are cafes with outdoor seating, and people just sit there smoking for hours. There are motorcycles everywhere. Little kids chase pigeons in plazas in front of 500 year old churches. Only it was better than Europe because seriously, Dominicans are way more beautiful than Europeans, and it was a whole lot cheaper. We spent the days walking a lot, enjoying the freedom of being in a city. I drank lots of coffee drinks in outdoor cafes, and struck up conversations with anyone wearing a Red Sox of Yankees cap, which was lots of people.

Santo Domingo was lovely for the mix of uniquely Dominican things and the comforts of home. I went to Easter Mass at a tiny church with about 40 people in it, and instead of the Handel Alleluia and brass quintet (my usual Easter routine) there was a lady with a tambourine and about five nuns singing with her. A good reminder that, as much as I love the music, it’s not all about the music. Then for Easter dinner we did the only thing any self respecting Americans who have been in Haiti for 8 months would do … we went to McDonalds. I think a few of the boys almost cried with joy. I haven’t had a quarter pounder with cheese in years, but wow, that was tasty. Our last night, we planned to go watch the Red Sox and Yankees at a sports bar with a big screen TV, but instead stumbled upon a neighborhood dance party. We spent the evening with a few hundred people dancing Merengue and Bachata in the street while a live band and some old dudes (who could really sing) kept the crowd moving for hours. Instead of bar food we ate deep fried street food, but of course still enjoyed more than our share of the DR’s finest brew, Presidente. And much to my delight, there was a TV outside that was showing the Sox and Yankees, so all night long, I had lots of opportunities to trash talk in Spanish. How exactly do you say “Yankees suck!” in Spanish? Never quite nailed that one down. It was a perfect end to our ten day break.

The whole thing reminded me how much I love to travel. On this trip I spoke more Italian than I have in ten years (who knew there were so many Italians settling in the DR?) and I got to freak out lots of Haitians who did NOT expect the whitest person they’d ever seen to speak Spanish let alone Kreyol. I loved haggling with cab drivers, and negotiating very, VERY badly with an art dealer. Whatever. I don’t care if I overpaid. I love this painting and I feel pretty good about putting my money into the local economy. I love setting out for dinner with the plan to eat at a place recommended in a guide book only to find something way better on the way. It’s just all so fun. Can someone figure out how I can do that for a living?

Now we’re back to Haiti and LCS is up and running without missing a beat. Today, April 6, was the first official school day in Port au Prince since January 12th. The government encouraged the schools which are able to open, and there were kids in uniform all over town. We had 318 kids this morning, closer and closer to our pre-earthquake number. Today one of my absolute favorite kids was back to school for the first time. Rose Celine is about 17, and is one of the sweetest, smiley-est kids I’ve ever known. In the hours after the earthquake, hers was one of the terrified faces that drove home for me how serious this whole thing was. Gone was her smile – and the tears on her face and fear in her eyes is an image I’ll never forget. Then the next day she was gone, and I’ve wondered how she is for almost three months now. So I was so happy today to see her there in my first period Spanish class, looking a little overwhelmed but smiling nonetheless. Vacation was wonderful, but Rose Celine is back to school, so I better be here too!

The Rainpocalypse

2010-03-21T07:21:00.000-07:00

I know that people in the DC area lived through several feet of snow this winter, the so called snowpocalypse, and that my New England family and friends experienced 10 inches of rain last weekend and are still pumping out flooded basements. This morning, we had a rain phenomenon like nothing that has ever happened in my time here. It rained during school hours. Insert foreboding, dramatic music here.

The rainy season has begun again, which means that it rains almost every night at about 7 for a few hours, or for a while just before dawn. But it always stops by about 6 or 6:30 am, just as we’re all going outside to eat breakfast and get ready for class. This morning, it just kept raining, and literally, this was the first time in my six months here that we have had rain during school hours. If you think about most American schools, rain is no big deal. The buildings are enclosed, and once the kids get off the bus, or out of the car and run in from outside, they’ll be dry for the rest of the day. Not so much here. We have 2 classrooms that are literally outside under trees. We’re using five tents whose floors consist of a tarp over a dirt soccer field. Windows are wide open. There’s not very good drainage. We all have to walk outside to get from class to class. Oh, and we all wear sandals most days.

I of course had my first two classes of the day in one of the muddy tents. Unfortunately we HAD to open the window flaps or we would all have suffocated from the heat, but then the rain came inside. Lucky for me, I’ve been through many years of snowy days at school, so I knew enough to just let the kids spew whatever they needed to say about the rain for a while before delving into any even remotely academic work. It wasn’t pretty, but we survived. The pictures above are from the rainy morning assembly. You can’t actually tell how many kids are under that one umbrella unless you count the feet. I think there are 12 feet. The highlight of the morning however was when staff erupted into a spontaneous dance party in the rain as the kids sang the school song. That helped improve some people’s attitudes …

But in all our joking and laughing about the rain, and the inconvenience of having horrifically dirty feet all day from running around in the mud, I tried not to lose sight of the fact that there are still hundreds of thousands of people living outside in this country. Their tents generally aren’t as nice and waterproof as our classroom tents, and they don’t all have dry buildings to go into to dry off. It’s still going to be a long road for so many of them.

So what else is new?

2010-03-21T07:13:00.002-07:00

Louverture Cleary people are doing some really amazing things out there right now, while the rest of us are holding down the fort with the kids at school.

Patrick Moynihan and Corey (one of the precocious 22 year olds around here) have been working with Catholic Relief Services and a few other agencies to open an 80 bed rehab clinic for earthquake related surgical patients. In the first days after the earthquake, there were so many amputations and some pretty incredible surgeries that happened at so many different facilities, with so many different visiting medical teams. But then those patients all went home, or to tent cities, and now the calf muscle brilliantly grafted to some other part of the leg is atrophying, and the incision sites are getting infected. So, this rehab clinic will coordinate the post surgical medical care, as well as social welfare (including helping to secure housing.) It’s an amazing project that many LCS graduates will have important roles in – as doctors, translators, drivers, and social workers. Corey and Patrick have been running all over town for weeks to make this happen, and the first post surgery patient transfers happened this week. The clinic should serve more than 500 patients in the next six months.

People have donated so much money to our relief fund, and the work of helping our staff and neighbors rebuild is in full swing. LCS staff have fixed pieces of several houses,, making them inhabitable again, and are almost done with a completely new home construction for a neighbor whose mud house was totally destroyed. Meghan, another volunteer, is the finance manager for these relief funds, and has taken responsibility for keeping track of spending, and paying our team of laborers from the neighborhood every week. In the meantime, she’s learning how to build houses, which is also pretty cool since she’s planning to study architecture in the near future.

And since the earthquake, we’ve stepped up our work with some of the neighborhood children in desperate need of supervision and care during the day. In the fall, we had our afternoon lunch and play time for 40 – 50 kids, but we realized that this wasn’t nearly enough for some. A few weeks after the earthquake, we realized that a few kids were missing. Sadly, two parents in the neighborhood had decided that they simply couldn’t care for their children anymore and had given them away to an “orphanage.” Imagine the desperation that prompts a parent to do that … It took several days of asking questions and searching to find the children, and as we feared, they were in a totally unregulated and unsanitary situation. It seems that people were basically collecting children, then soliciting money from foreigners to help renovate their “orphanage.” One can only imagine what they planned on doing with the children they had collected. In this whole ordeal, I met the absolute shadiest human being I have ever met, a man who would not tell us where the kids were, and refused to let anyone – even their mother – go to see them. Scary. Anyway, after a few days Christina Moynihan and a few of the drivers and security guys managed to literally rescue 5 children from this so-called orphanage. Unfortunately, their parents were still unwilling / unable to fully care for them, so we basically started a full day childcare program at school. Now Kristen, the volunteer with the elementary ed background, and three of the Haitian staff are teaching and caring for about 10 of the youngest neighborhood kids most in need of care during the day. Then they go home and stay with their families at night. It’s been amazing to see the transformation in some of these kids. They were sick and scared and only wanted to be held a few weeks ago, now they’re running around throwing balls at mango trees with the older kids trying to score a juicy snack.

We’re still not “officially” having school, though we never really stopped having school either. With almost three hundred kids and most of the teachers back, this place is starting to feel more and more normal, which is of course, a good thing for everyone. But for me a weird consequence of all that routine, is that I’m getting kind of bored. I’m back to teaching Spanish, and still overseeing – though not continually retooling – the academic schedule, and supervising cleanup and study, and teaching some kids Italian, and playing with the little neighborhood kids … all the things I was doing last fall. I found myself getting bored this week, and to be honest, a little jealous of the people who are out there working on the more exciting things. I knew that the adrenaline of the earthquake and its immediate aftermath would die off sooner or later as the work became less heroic and more routine, and that then the real work would begin. Well, here we are. I just keep telling myself that it’s my role now, to just help keep things running smoothly here so that other people can get out there and rebuild Haiti.

EpiDor: The Fast Food Disco

2010-03-21T07:13:00.001-07:00

I need to describe our fast food restaurant experience last week. It was amazing – and not just for the joy of a cheeseburger, fries, a Coke and really tasty cookies ‘n cream ice cream. It was wonderful because it was a window into a small, little known segment of Haitian society – the middle class. My meal cost about 8 dollars, which is almost twice the minimum daily wage here, and certainly many people don’t earn anywhere near the minimum wage. So the people who live in our neighborhood, even the kids at LCS, are not the kind of people one is likely to find at a fast food restaurant. The only other experience I have “eating out” in Haiti is at fancy hotels where there are lots of foreigners, and lots of mostly very light skinned members of Haiti’s small, wealthy elite. I saw no evidence of this crowd at EpiDor either. Instead, it was full of people in their 20’s and 30’s, not too many families with kids, and not too many older people. There were of course some foreigners, but I think we were the only Americans. Many people were dressed as if they were going “out” – which in women generally means there was lots of visible cleavage, and in men means a well chosen, brightly colored polo shirt. Loud music was playing, creating a distinctly festive atmosphere. There wasn’t actually any dancing, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if dancing broke out there one day. People were laughing a lot, talking to each other, seemingly flirting, and of course, drinking lots of beer along with their burgers. I recognize that Haiti has bigger problems than a lack of causal dining and meeting places, but I actually think that places like this are so important to the future of this country. There needs to be a middle ground – nicer than the food vendors on the side of the road, but not as intimidating and expensive as the hotel restaurants. I can’t believe I’m advocating for more greasy fast food restaurants as a means of economic development, but I think that’s what I’m saying.

Another amazingly Haitian thing about EpiDor – it was total dezod. Chaos. There are two cashiers at one side of the store, and people basically mob them in a crowd not even remotely resembling a line. This scene makes cafes in Rome appear to have military discipline. Lots of elbows, lots of gentle shoving, lots of violations of personal space … but at the end of the day everyone gets their food and everyone’s smiling throughout. After you pay, you get your ticket and go to another counter where there is absolutely no rhyme or reason to who’s supposed to get which food for which people. You just hand it to someone and hope she’ll get your fries eventually. Having jostled with people on the side of the road hoping that the woman selling fried plantains would deign to get me some, I know why EpiDor is the way it is – because most people’s only food buying experience is from the vendors on the roadside, so all this madness is totally normal to them.

I will say that I’ve never worked so hard for a burger, fires and a cup of ice cream in my life. But they were totally worth it.

A Cold Monday and Hot Yoga

2010-03-14T11:49:00.000-07:00

This is a picture of our almost completed LCS logo ... we have 270 of 350 kids back at school, and the principal, Mr Hubert (at the front) orchestrated this awesome picture to demonstrate our progress so far.

Here’s a little assortment of news from the past week. No big stories, just life.

It was cold on Monday. . I realize that “cold” is a relative term, but it was seriously chilly. Maybe it was in the sixties, but when the breeze is blowing, and no buildings are really fully closed, and the showers aren’t heated … it feels downright cold. I slept with a blanket for the first time at LCS and wore my hood up on my hoodie sweatshirt in the morning. I saw a staff member wearing a down jacket (which he has because he once traveled to the US during the winter.) Not only was it cold, but it was overcast and sort of raw for two days. Now THAT is weird. Suddenly everyone had a cold and our solar powered buildings had some challenges those days. By Wednesday we were sweating our faces off again and remembering fondly, the Monday chill. It t was a strange little interlude.

We have 270 kids back at school. Each week we (or actually I) have rearranged the schedule to accommodate the increased number of kids. The big shift happened this week when we divided three more classes into two sections instead of keeping them all together in one. The challenge there … room space. We got 7 tents from the Italian military that we set up on the soccer field to use as classrooms, replacing the 6 classrooms in our damaged Jean Jacques Dessalines classroom building. The tents are excellent … except for one thing. They’re blue. Blue does not exactly reflect heat … and since they’re sitting in the blazing sun of the soccer field, but by about 11 am they’re pretty darn unbearable. The kids whine incessantly like teenagers do … and then we do it all again the next day. It’s kind of a hilarious scene actually. There are these seven huge blue tents in two rows on the soccer field. They’re about four feet apart, so everyone can hear everything going on inside the neighboring tents. We moved the kids’ classroom benches and built blackboards to move in. Then we named them after the continents – Europe, Africa, Asia, Americas and Antarctica. But really, they all feel like Africa.

Then yesterday I discovered an excellent use for the tents in the blistering heat of the afternoon. Hot yoga. With all the plastic window flaps closed and the two doors zipped shut, it must be almost a hundred degrees in there. Perfect for some downward facing dogs. I’ve done hot yoga before in some sultry conditions, but this is something else entirely. Too bad my shower afterward was also hot since the water in the black tanks on the roof had also been sitting in the sun all afternoon.

We opened the “language of the day” store again this week. Every day the kids are challenged to speak the language of the day – English on Monday and Wednesday, Spanish on Tuesday and Thursday, and French on Friday. If they are heard practicing the language of the day by staff or the oldest students, they can receive tickets redeemable for prizes in our little weekly store. After Christmas we came back with lots of new additions to the store. We always have the school essentials like pens and pretty pencils and erasers and white out and calculators. But we now have a bunch of matchbox cars, and bracelets, and bubbles and hair accessories and legos. The kids loved it. One little girl, Willine, spent about fifteen minutes trying to decide how to spend her six tickets. She kept picking things up saying, “oh, this is so beautiful …” then moving on to the next thing. She settled on a hairbrush and a very pretty pink pencil with silver hearts on it. She was a very happy customer. Another little boy came and said that he didn’t have any tickets because he used to have ten, but they were in his house and now his house is “craze” (broken.) Bummer. I taught him my favorite expression to describe earthquake induced losses (like my pillow, a set of sheets, and a jar of cilantro). The earthquake ate it. Then I told him he’ll just have to start practicing again next week to earn lots more. Life is tough around here.

There’s a new fast food place near our neighborhood! It’s actually a little mini version of a chain called EpiDor that is part bakery and part fast food joint. They have burgers and pizza and ice cream and beer and crepes and French fries … The other ones in town are bigger, but a hassle to get to with all the traffic these days, so we’re pretty excited to go to this one that’s only a ten minute drive away tonight. I’ve never been so excited for a cheeseburger in my life.

Sunday is Pi day – 3/14. Peter decided to have a pi day math competition for the kids. Unfortunately, this is a culturally and linguistically complex little pun. First, he had to explain to them that we pronounce PI as PIE and not PEE (as they do in French.) Then he had to explain that we write the dates with the month before the date, so the date actually reads 3/14 (as opposed to 14/3 like most of the rest of the world does it. Then he had to explain what PIE is. After all that, he announced that there were some grade level appropriate geometry problems posted, and that the person who submitted the first correct answer in each class would win a piece of pie (to eat, not to throw in anyone’s face you PHA people …..) Today he spent the morning climbing trees, and about 3.14 hours later, he and Mary had produced about 3.14 mango pies – one of which we will consume at 3:14 pm. The others of which will await the kids with the correct solutions to his math problems. I love linguistically layered math puns.

And that’s about it. Two more weeks until we head out to the DR for a week of beach and cocktails with umbrellas in them. Can’t wait.

Iron Chef Haiti: Battle Mango

2010-03-07T17:31:00.002-08:00

I really love cooking here. I love the challenge of limited ingredients, and cooking for 20 to 30 people, and occasionally losing power or water in the kitchen. I think what I enjoy most is that when we pull off a meal that’s a little different, and particularly delicious, people appreciate it so much. There’s the added challenge of cooking for the Haitian palate and the US American palate at the same time, but I find it sort of an amusing challenge. And for the record, all you need to do to please the Haitians is make it really salty, and all you need to do to please the Americans is include as many vegetables as possible.

We decided this weekend to have a cook off between some of the Americans who most enjoy cooking - and trash talking about our culinary skills. Tonight was my turn with my teammates Peter, the master baker and rice maker and Mary the skilled sous chef. The rules of the competition were that we could only use the ingredients that we readily have available or already in our cabinets. No special trips to the supermarket or unusual expenditures. So, we decided to center our meal around the most abundant – and free – ingredient in Haiti in March: mangoes. In terms of the rest of the ingredients, we always have rice, which we get for free from Food for the Poor. The Columbian Red Cross dropped off massive quantities of lentils and red beans a few weeks ago, and we’ve been working hard to get through those. We can always get potatoes, onions, carrots and tomatoes, and we can usually get milk and butter too, so we used those basics for our mango inspired menu.

We made white rice in the normal Haitian style, except that we added a huge quantity of curry to the water to flavor the rice, and turn it a little yellow. Then we boiled and mashed lentils with garlic and more curry. We sautéed potatoes, onions and carrots in lots of garlic, salt, curry and cumin. Then to top off the rice and lentils, we made a mango chutney with mangoes, tomatoes, spicy peppers, scallions, garlic, cumin and a little vinegar. Oh my goodness it was beautiful. To drink we made mango smoothies with nothing but mangoes, milk and ice. On the side we made Indian chapote bread. For dessert we had mango cake and coffee with a little chocolate (also from the Columbians …) We fed 20 people, and probably spent about 25 cents per person. Oh yes, I forget to mention that all 30 mangoes that were used in the creation of this beautiful meal came from trees on the school campus which Peter Ulrickson climbed himself.

We started cooking at about 2:30, served the meal at about 6:15, and sat around enjoying the it until about 7:30. We called the meal “Indies: East and West” and I made a playlist of music from the movie Slumdog Millionaire, along with some of Wyclef Jean’s greatest hits. Instead of eating buffet style, we set the table and served everyone plates. There were candles and napkins and place mats. It’s just so nice to take the time once in a while to remind ourselves that there can be so much pleasure in small things. That really, just taking the time to prepare a meal, and eat it slowly makes us all feel a little more human.

And there’s not a CHANCE that tomorrow night’s team is going to make anything more amazing than what we made tonight. We’re totally gonna win.

A Tale of Two Cities

2010-03-07T17:31:00.001-08:00

My journey to Notre Dame took two days, during which I passed through three countries, two states and a US territory. When my flight from San Juan was preparing to land in Chicago, I was all irritated because it was landing almost an hour late. Then the pilot came on and said we were preparing for an early arrival. I looked at my watch, perplexed. Then I figured out that San Juan is in a time zone EAST of Eastern time, so I needed to set my watch back two hours for Chicago time. I reached in my pocket as I prepared to get off the plane to dig for money to buy a long awaited Starbucks latte, and had to dig through the Haitian Gourdes and Dominican Pesos before I found any good ol’ greenbacks. On the way back to Haiti I was amazed to discover that the journey from Chicago to Santo Domingo took about seven hours, while the bus ride the next day to Port au Prince took nine. Anyway, it was a complicated journey but so good to be at Notre Dame with many people that I love to share in a beautiful farewell to such a special person. And three days in the United States reminded me once again how much I love hot showers, and what a gift it is that we can drink the tap water.

This journey also included my first ever visit to the other side of this little island, and … I had some serious culture shock when I got there. Before I describe Santo Domingo, I need to note that Haiti and the Dominican Republic have shared so much history, but also have an extremely tumultuous relationship. I’m not much of an expert on Dominican history, though I plan to educate myself a bit more in the next few months. Here’s what I know … before Columbus arrived on this island, the native Taino people who lived here called it Ayiti, which means something about rocky ground. They lived in grass huts, in small family based communities. They fished gathered what they could from the land, and were generally peaceful among themselves. Columbus arrived and forced them to mine for gold. In less than 200 years after the arrival of the Spanish, the Taino people were all but extinct, the victims of violence and smallpox. The next three hundred years brought sugar plantations and slavery and battles between the Spanish and French over this little island which would make both European empires incredibly rich. At some point in the 1600’s, the Spanish ceded the western half of the island to the French, as part of some treaty that I can’t remotely remember the specifics of. And so, the western half of the island, Saint Domingue developed its unique culture based on French culture, slave culture, and the distant memories of Taino culture. The Eastern half of the island meanwhile developed more or less as the other Spanish colonies did. Slavery was less prominent. The Church was more powerful. And there was more mixing among the different ethnic groups on the island, creating a still diverse, but less binary racial climate. In 1804 when the former slaves successfully expelled the French for the last time, they then expanded beyond the old boarder and took over the Spanish side of the island. Though they abolished slavery, the Haitian leaders treated the Dominicans brutally, and about 40 years later, the Dominicans fought for and won their independence from Haiti. The next hundred years brought dictators, military juntas, and dubious foreign involvement to both countries. In the 1950’s, the Dominican Republic languished under the brutal rule of Rafael Trujillo while Haiti suffered under Francois Duvalier. Ironically, these two sadistic dictators hated each other, and did their best to brutalize each other’s people. And here’s where the similarities end. After the DR forced out Trujillo, something changed. While Haiti plodded along under the dictatorship of Duvalier and his hapless son until 1985, the DR was developing. While Haiti stumbled through coup after coup and unimaginable political chaos from the early 1990’s until 2006, Santo Domingo was becoming a mini Miami. I don’t know anything about the last fifty years of Dominican history, but wow … something different happened on this side of the island.

Santo Domingo is really like a little Miami. After about three hours there, I decided that I could absolutely, comfortably live there. There are six lane divided highways. There’s organized public transportation. The city is well lit at night. There are tall buildings and fast food restaurants and ice cream places and fancy hotels and dance clubs on the strip in front of the main beach front. There are families walking around with little kids at night. There’s a big plaza by the water with karaoke bars and outside seating and little kids riding bikes and couples strolling and bachata music blasting from passing cars and nearby bars. The night I got there happened to be Dominican Independence Day, and they were shooting off fireworks all along the beach in a relatively well organized (though definitely not OSHA approved) fashion. I ate the best pizza I’ve had in so long. And here’s something strange … there were a lot of overweight young people, something you just don’t see much of in Haiti. It was like being on another planet. On the one hand it made me so sad to think of people who share so much history, so close by living in such drastically different circumstances. On the other hand, it made me sort of hopeful. They’ve built this recently, after a tumultuous history. There must then be hope for Haiti. I don’t know what the development lessons are … but I hope someone does and I hope they’re in Port au Prince right now helping to plan for the rebuilding of Haiti.

Memory Eternal, Gail!

2010-02-26T15:44:00.000-08:00

On Saturday I’ll be leaving Haiti for a few days to attend the funeral of Dr. Gail Walton, one of my most important teachers and mentors from Notre Dame. Gail was the director of Music at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at Notre Dame, and the director of the Liturgical Choir, the group that I sang with all four years of college. She was suffering from leukemia and died on Wednesday from complications after a bone marrow transplant. I’ve written many pages of memories and reflections on how important she was for me and so many others in our journeys into adulthood, but I’ll keep it short here.

I joined the Liturgical Choir in the first weeks of my first year at Notre Dame, and in the following four years I discovered a passion, learned a whole set of new skills, developed some reasonably well informed opinions about sacred music, grew into a more adult understanding of my Faith, formed some of the most important friendships of my life, worked really hard, and had so, so much fun. Gail was an incredibly accomplished musician who somehow tolerated – or rather seemed to enjoy – leading a choir of 60 eager but not all well trained undergraduate singers. I don’t know how she got us to sing the complex music we sang as well as we sang it … except that she was just an incredible teacher. I couldn’t read music and didn’t know a fermata from a subito piano when I started singing with Gail, but fifteen years later I’m still singing some of that same music with my choir in Cambridge, and even have a lot of it memorized from when I learned it with Gail. She taught us to appreciate the liturgical significance of the music we were singing and to approach our music ministry with so much care and respect. She knew that while the Sunday morning Masses at the Basilica might become routine for us, that each Mass brought first time visitors and prospective students and returning alumni and people who were suffering or searching, and that it would be our music that would help them to pray more deeply. We knew we were ministers, not performers, and because of this she demanded excellence.

Beyond music, over the years Gail shepherded hundreds of undergraduates through that often tumultuous transition through college into adulthood. She was sometimes one of us – laughing along with our jokes, and standing with us flipping burgers at pre-game concession stands. But she was just as often the adult voice of reason helping us with the difficult decisions, challenging us to be better than we thought we could be, cheering along with all of our success, and helping us pick up the pieces when we screwed it all up. I will always treasure the memories of making beautiful music with Gail, and I will always be grateful for her guidance and friendship in these past fifteen years. I have no doubt that Gail Walton’s kindness and passion and hard work set an example for me that helped me become who I am today.

In the years after college I stayed in close contact with Gail. I would see her every time I was on campus, and at so many weddings of choir friends all over the country. She always responded to e-mails, even the ones that were just to say hi. I saw Gail back in June at Notre Dame at my 10th reunion, and told her that I would be spending the next school year in Haiti as a volunteer teacher. While many people struggled to make sense of that decision at this point in my life, Gail just smiled and said how proud she was – followed immediately by all the motherly questions about safety and security. Throughout the next few months, every time I sent an e-mail update from Haiti she always responded with a quick line or two of encouragement and support. After the January 12 earthquake one of the first e-mails I received was from Gail, offering her thoughts and prayers, even as she herself was suffering so much.

When I got the news that Gail was in her last days, I really struggled with the decision of whether or not I would make the complicated trip from here to South Bend to be with her family and the legions of choir people at her funeral. I knew that I wanted to be there more than anything, but I felt sort of guilty even thinking about spending so much money and time away from my work here. I know that funerals are for the consolation of the living rather than any benefit for the dead, so it just seemed sort of selfish for me to consider going. So I decided I wouldn’t go. Instead, I told myself that I would stand in solidarity with some of my colleagues here and the thousands and thousands of Haitian people who didn’t have the privilege of attending funerals when buildings collapsed on their loved ones last month. I decided that like them, I would just have to find a different way to say goodbye.

And I stuck with that decision for approximately four hours … during which time I realized exactly how much I need to be there. I’ll make the journey through Santo Domingo (since commercial flights are not flying regularly out of Port au Prince yet) and I’ll arrive in Chicago with my one hoodie sweatshirt and 1 pair of close toed shoes and hope there’s not a blizzard going on. I still don’t feel quite right about taking such obvious advantage of the privileges of wealth and my American passport, but I know it’s what I need to do. It makes me smile to think about the music that we’ll sing, and the choir reunion the likes of which will never happen again. It will be beautiful – and for once Gail won’t have to be in charge of every note and every cue and every cutoff. This time, she’ll just sit back and enjoy it all. As the Orthodox Christians say - Memory Eternal, Gail!

School - A Shaky Start

2010-02-24T11:41:00.001-08:00

After the earthquake, the government announced that schools would be officially closed for a month. Certainly many schools were incapable of opening due to severe physical damage. Many schools lost students and teachers – some who were killed, and others who left the city for the relative safety and calm of the provinces. The government ministry responsible for education was also decimated – its physical building collapsed and many of the people inside it buried in the rubble. And of course, there was the psychological trauma that everyone was dealing with. So a mandatory closure of all schools in the region for a period of time seemed reasonable to give everyone time to pull themselves together and reorganize.

At LCS we didn’t have any classes at all for a week after the earthquake. But once engineers had pronounced most of our buildings safe, we moved forward with a “para-curricular” school program. I put my well tested scheduling skills to work and devised a shortened school schedule utilizing only the buildings we had available, with only the residential staff as teacher (not the visiting professors who normally come work for a few hours each day). The kids didn’t wear their uniforms, and we didn’t have grades or move on with the standard curriculum. Instead we used that time to get back into some kind of routine, since everything we know about kids after disasters says that the return to normalcy is the best medicine. The student population changed each week – sometimes even day to day – but we carried on as best we could with whomever was here each day.

A month came and went, and we heard little from the government about the future of schools, so we decided to “officially” open school this past Monday after the traditional holiday week of Carnaval. Sure enough, the Friday before, the government announced that schools were not ready to reopen, and that no school – public or private – should do so until more schools were able to begin again. The primary arguments against allowing some schools to reopen were based on solidarity, and equity. There is a perception that if some kids go to school again while others are unable, that it will unfairly position them for success on the state exams. The solidarity argument is simply that everyone’s in this together and needs to stay in it together. Honestly, despite the fact that I almost always support arguments based on solidarity and equity, I think this argument is absurd. By that logic, no one should begin rebuilding their house until everyone can. No one should reopen their store until everyone can. No one should stop living outside until everyone does. So we should all just sit on the rubble and wait … and wait … and wait in solidarity for the magical cure for all our problems that’s never going to come. The solutions will come when individuals – on their own or with the assistance of the government and all the international aid organizations – take those first steps toward normalcy. I’ve seen more and more people out rebuilding their walls. I’ve seen teams of people in the streets of Port au Prince wearing USAID T-shirts cleaning up trash. More and more stores, restaurants and even a few nightclubs downtown are reopening. With each of these small actions – individual and collective – people begin to see a way out. Why can’t it be the same for the schools? Young people in school uniforms are a great source of pride for people of all social classes in Haiti, since public and private schools at all levels require uniforms. They have always been a sign of hope for a better future – not just for the students themselves but for their families and for the whole country. Wouldn’t the sight of kids in uniforms bring much needed hope at a time like this?

So, we opened school anyway. We backed off on wearing uniforms so as not to attract too much attention, but our professors were willing to come back and we announced to the kids that grades were back, and that the 2nd quarter (which should have ended after the third week in January) would end after the first week in March. On Sunday afternoon at 4 pm, we had the usual gathering of all of the kids at the end of the weekend, and we had 237 students, the most we’ve had since the earthquake. There was a very normal excitement and noise level all afternoon, as there is every Sunday afternoon. The kids crowded into dorm rooms (since some of their usual rooms are in buildings that are not usable yet), and even dug out their notebooks during the evening study hours to begin preparing for classes once again. It all felt so wonderfully routine.

Then at 4:30 in the morning we were all shaken awake by the largest aftershock we’ve felt in a few weeks. ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME? There were nervous screams – distinct from the screams of actual terror from the first earthquake – as kids and adults ran outside in their pajamas and assembled on the basketball court. There was no damage, and everyone was OK. Mr. Pierre the principal even joked about being careful to check for “pu pu” on the ground on the way back, in case anyone had – um – had a fear induced accident. The kids all laughed, and though we got an earlier than usual start, we went about the morning as normally as possible, despite some of that old anxiety lingering in the back of everyone’s mind.

The school day went as well as could be expected. I had to laugh to myself as I repeated a mantra in my head that has helped me maintain sanity for many years of working in a forward thinking school …”change is hard … people fear change … change is like death ….” Teachers were confused with the new schedule, and couldn’t understand why we hadn’t just gone back to the old pre-earthquake schedule. Some kids didn’t think we should be starting again at all. And of course, despite my best estimations, the schedule I devised had to be almost completely reworked for the following day. A few of the classes have more than 40 kids in them, so instead of keeping each class in one section, we had to split them into two. While this isn’t terribly complex in terms of the schedule itself, I’m not so sure where we’re going to put these new classes, since six of our classrooms are in a building that needs some serious work before it will be structurally sound enough to hold classes again. We’re working on getting classroom sized tents … or maybe for a while they’ll just have to sit under a tree somewhere. Actually, now that I think of it that might not be so bad … there are thousands of mangoes about ready to fall from those trees!

Now it’s Wednesday, and after significant aftershocks on two subsequent nights, many kids – typically at the urging of their parents – have decided to go home. We have about 160 lefft, but that’s down by almost 80 from Monday morning. It’s incredibly frustrating. I don’t mean to be melodramatic here, but sometimes it honestly feels like we’re fighting some cosmic battle between order and chaos. We’re scratching and clawing and fighting to maintain order here, and the chaos outside just keeps coming. Not chaos in the social or political sense, but in a deeper, almost spiritual sense. Despite all the rational explanations about aftershocks, people continue to insist that these two in a row must mean that another “big one” is coming. The radio spouts inflammatory rhetoric about not going back into any buildings (regardless of their structural integrity) for another month. The government insists on keeping schools closed. These kids are so smart, and after a few weeks and so many explanations and conversations about it all, they were on board. They were laughing and playing basketball again and sleeping inside and getting their friends to come back to school. Now the fear is back and the same old questions are back and lots of kids are going home where they’ll sleep outside in tents instead of inside our perfectly safe buildings. Some days it definitely feels like the chaos is winning.

Helping - why is this so complicated?

2010-02-20T06:49:00.000-08:00

Shouldn’t it be simple to help people in desperate need? There has been such an outpouring of support from around the world, billions of dollars and tons and tons of donations without thousands of aid workers and volunteers on the ground. It’s amazing to watch first hand, how incredibly complicated this is. It can be done well, and it cone be done so badly – even with the best of intentions.

First, how do you distribute food? How do you know who really needs it most, and how do you ensure that they get it? I know the TV has been full of images of riots over food thrown from the back of a truck, and police shooting people suspected of stealing that food, and I’ve seen glimpses in person of what that looks like. Even in our little neighborhood this morning a truck pulled up with some bottled water and bags of rice and our normally subdued and peaceful neighbors went a little crazy, yelling and pushing each other to get to the truck first. It’s strange because most of them are not actually worse of now than they were before the earthquake, so honestly that same thing probably would have happened two months ago if a truck full of free stuff had pulled up. But certainly in the tent cities there is a much more acute need, and sense of desperation, so when the food comes to the those places the reaction is even more intense.

I’ve seen food distributed really well too. The US military lines people up on a huge field, then releases them a few at a time to walk across another field to the place where the bags of rice are being handed out. Then tap taps wait on the other side to drive the people and their huge bags of rice home. Of course there are guys standing guard over the line with automatic weapons, so that helps maintain order, but the whole thing looks calm and dignified. The Missionaries of Charity are my favorites though. They have been here so long, that they know who really needs the food. They go out into the neighborhood and the tent cities and hand out tickets with a date and time stamped on them. People with the tickets then come to their door, and they only allow the ones with the [roper ticket into the compound. Then they each receive a bag with all the staples – rice, beans, cornmeal, soap, crackers, oil, and bulgur wheat. I’ve helped in the packaging and distribution of that food, and it’s a totally peaceful, dignified process. People smile and say thank you. Most of the people who come are women, the ones likely to be caring for their family, whereas most of the food riots you see on TV are battles among young men. Butt even the sisters say it’s hard when they go out into the tent cities and bring prepared food directly to the people there. They don’t know everyone, and the desperation is so acute, that they often need help controlling the crowds. But this is their mission, to serve the poorest of the poor, and they are doing it with as much love and tenacity now as they ever have before.

At LCS we decided early on that we would not become a large scale food distribution site, but rather would follow more in the example of the Missionaries of Charity and St. Vincent de Paul and bring assistance directly to the people in need. In the days after the earthquake that meant setting up a huge pot of rice and beans on the street and serving it directly to our neighbors who came by and ate it, then handed their spoon and bowl to someone else who hadn’t received any yet. That worked pretty well for a week, but it was never a long term solution. Now we’re back to feeding the neighborhood children at the school, as we always have. But since we’re a well established organization, many individuals and some of the larger aid organizations are beginning to turn to us to help figure out how to get help to the people who need it. The Red Cross of Colombia just made a huge drop off of food and supplies to LCS this week. We spent Thursday sorting the food into study shopping bags with brightly colored cartoon characters on them. Then on Friday we handed one bag to each student on his or her way out the door, and personally delivered them to families in the neighborhood, and some of the hardest hit families even beyond our immediate neighbors. There was no drama, or pushing, or yelling, or fear. Everyone got one. Now I think one of my first Spanish classes next week will need to be focused on reading the labels ad directions on some of this food that the families are a little less familiar with …

And how do you prioritize what to do first? Of course our first priority is caring for our own students and neighbors. We’ve also worked downtown excavatig the Cathedral, but then our focus shifted to one of the few functioning hospitals. While we were able to provide some actual medical help in the form of LCS graduates who are medical students, and current students to work as translators, one of our main roles at the hospital became … surprise, surprise … managing the trash. I’ve noted in the past my newfound appreciate for waste management, but this is a whole new thing. What do you do with the medical waste when the incinerator that usually burns the trash collapsed in the earthquake, and the national trash company that usually picks up the trash is a little overextended right now? We burn the trash ourselves. I’ve never personally participated in this oh so glamorous activity, but the stories of rats the size of cats are enough to give me a pretty good sense of what that’s like.

Where do you start on the physical reconstruction? The “monuments” to the earthquake are everywhere, and I worry that the longer the piles of rubble and broken buildings sit there, the more normal they will become. And once people stop noticing them, then the urgency to remove them will disappear. This is the same lack of urgency that lets people walk past piles of trash in the street here without blinking, and if the rubble problem becomes like the trash problem, then this country will not move forward. So, in our own neighborhood we’ve worked hard to clean up our own rubble, and encourage neighbors to do the same. We’ve even started paying a team of unemployed young men from the neighborhood to do some of that work. They cleaned up a large, destroyed house on a prominent corner, and are now helping to build a foundation, and eventually a house, for another neighbor who lost everything. Even the little kids in the school were helping this week, carrying cement blocks in wheelbarrows, and even on their heads, from our own pile of rubble to the site of the new house where they were being used in the foundation. After this house is constructed, we’ll move on to another one.

I’m hearing all the weird stories about utterly useless things that have been donated and shipped halfway around the world. And I’ve felt the frustration as I sit in gridlocked traffic in a line of cars bearing the logos of prominent NGO’s … each with one person inside. But I honestly don’t know enough about international aid organizations and disaster relief to offer any real criticism or analysis of what’s gone on here, and how it all could have been managed better. I just think that for myself,if I’m ever looking to make a contribution to assist people after a disaster, I think I’ll give it to the Missionaries of Charity. They know who needs the help most, and they know how to distribute it.

A different planet called Belo

2010-02-20T06:45:00.001-08:00

I know that I’ve mentioned a place called Belo in past blog posts, but I don’t think I’ve ever really described it or posted pictures of it. Given the image of Haiti that most people – including myself – have always had, especially post-earthquake, I just want everyone to know about Belo. This place is inching higher and higher on my list of favorite places on Earth every time I visit. When I tell Haitians about visiting a little place called Belo, they have no idea what I’m talking about. To give people a clue, you have to mention the bigger tiny town nearby, about thirty minutes farther down the mountain. Even if they know that town, most have never been there or anywhere like it. When I show the kids at school pictures of Belo, many can’t even believe it’s Haiti, since they themselves have never been to such a remote, mountainous place.

Belo is barely even a town – it’s more of a truck stop at the end of a rutted, windy dirt road on the top of a mountain south of Port au Prince. A few trucks come and go each day, to drive workers the two and a half hours down to the city, and transport goods back up to the people who live in tiny houses scattered throughout the mountainside. There are a few large landowners up there as well – our friend Patrick Brun is one of them – and they have worked hard in the past nine years to replant trees in the largely deforested region. Amazingly, in such a short time, trees are thriving, and the soil is improving with it. The primary mode of transportation around Belo is walking – or sometimes riding horseback – and the primary mode of transporting goods is by carrying them on one’s head. It’s cold in Belo, in the low sixties at night, and often misty by day as the clouds swirl around among the mountaintops. There are no mosquitoes in Belo and the stars at night are brighter and night sky has more depth than any I have ever seen. People in Belo are incredibly friendly in that way that small town people around the world always seem to be, especially when compared with their more jaded and suspicious countrymen who live in the crowded cities. They wave and smile and don’t ask for money, and they absolutely do not speak one word of English. Every time we come, they always seem somewhat amused and intrigued by the carload of blan arriving from the city. However, the best thing of all about Belo these days, is that the violent fingerprints of the earthquake are nowhere to be found.

Of course the people in Belo felt the earthquake. It’s actually much closer to the epicenter in terms of miles, but the elevation (more than 6,000 ft) seems to have cushioned them from most of the shaking and destruction. One man explained to me that some small houses were destroyed, but that everyone from the area who actually died during the quake was killed in the city, not in Belo. Mr. Brun’s house is simple and well constructed, and the only damage his house sustained was some broken glasses that fell from a shelf and a large granite table on the back patio that tipped over. When we made the turn off the paved road onto the dirt road about 45 minutes from Belo, we saw fewer and fewer piles of rubble and collapsed houses, those sad remnants we have termed “monuments” to the earthquake. There are no tent cities or UN trucks, or traffic, and the thin mountain air refreshes the body and spirit in equal parts.

What is there to do in Belo? Nothing really, and that’s why it’s wonderful. We’ve gone there a few times, always a collection of volunteers, staff and Moynihans, but this time we went alone, just the volunteers. This week was supposed to be a vacation week in the country in celebration of Carnaval, and we had plans to spend it in the DR sipping cocktails with umbrellas in them on a beach somewhere. But Carnaval didn’t happen, and traveling is still complicated, and it just didn’t feel right to party it up in the DR while people here are still digging out. So instead we opted for two nights at the Bruns’ house in the mountains of Belo. We played Chinese checkers sitting in the sun on the patio, read a lot, went on long walks in the hills, and spent tons of time cooking and eating. It was nice to sleep a little later, lounge around in our PJ’s, curl up under blankets on the couch and watch the clouds roll in and out. We grilled chicken and potatoes that Bernard, the caretaker of the house, literally dug out of the ground for us. In the morning he brought us some freshly laid eggs, and we enjoyed the tastiest omelet I’ve ever eaten. At night we built a huge fire in the outside fireplace and made s’mores while sipping Barbancourt rum and Cokes.

On one of our walks we journeyed to a nearby hotel that we had heard has a restaurant, but when we got there we were informed that it was closed for the season until March. But since one of the gates was close with only a coat hanger … we decided to do a little exploring anyway. It was the strangest place! It was sort of a cross between the hotel from The Shining and the family summer camp from Dirty Dancing. There were little cabins, and well maintained gardens, and a big outdoor pavilion with a creepy Phantom of the Opera chandelier. There was a restaurant with a patio for outdoor seating, a soccer field, some horses, and the ugliest, mangiest dog I’ve ever seen in my life. Men were working on the grounds, and smiled and waved as we walked around, but other than that it was totally deserted. Eerie. I imagine that people must come there, and one of the caretakers explained to me that in the summer there are lots of big parties and weddings there. I think it must be really beautiful, and it gave me a glimpse into the tourist industry that this country could have … if visitors didn’t have to pass through the trash piles of Port au Prince in order to get here. Maybe if Haiti rebuilds right and foreigners invest, then tourists will come. I hope so. I’d love to come back to Belo with friends some day.

Pictures

2010-02-05T19:19:00.001-08:00

It has been hard at times to take pictures. There are so many things that were just too personal, or too sad, or too ...just plain wrong ... to photograph. But I also know that people care and really want to see. You'll note in these pictures lots of hard working volunteers and staff, lots of smiling children, and lots of broken buildings. It's a little overwhelming to drive around downtown right now, since the buildings are all so close together, and they're in general larger, the destruction is that much more daunting. But every time I go out I see more and more pieces of heavy equipment, and more and more people clearing rubble and rebuilding walls. There's a well loved Kreyol expression that I've been quoting daily around here ... "piti a piti n'a rive." Little by little we'll get there.

Please enjoy the pictures, but please do NOT copy and paste and share them. These are real people's lives and homes, and I would feel terrible to know that their loss was someone else's entertainment.

Nou pare pou rebati Ayiti!

Notre Dame – not that one, the other one …

2010-02-05T19:18:00.001-08:00

I spent the day today literally climbing around the rubble of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in downtown Port au Prince. I never had the opportunity to go inside the cathedral before it collapsed on itself on January 12, but I had driven by it several times. It was enormous and pink. There aren’t many enormous buildings in Haiti, to be honest, so this one was really special. It was a building as grand and glorious as those in any fine city, and it was a place that Haitian people were proud of. Climbing around inside today I think I got a vision of what Germany looked like in 1944. It was just really sad – to see a place that must have been so lovely, now so utterly humbled. It has no roof at all anymore, and the top sections of all of the walls have fallen in. I crawled around on the rubble on top of the main altar area, but could see no signs of an altar beneath. To make things even a little more pathetic, everything of value has been taken from the church already. The tabernacle, all the robes and sacred objects, even some of the wooden drawers and cabinets in the sacristy have been taken away. We were there today because there is no one left in the Church in Port au Prince really to do this work. The Archbishop is dead, the staff is dead, and the buildings are destroyed. So a little band of LCS people and neighborhood guys is working on the excavations. I went today mostly to photograph the whole affair. The highlight of the day was when Angelo, one of the neighborhood guys, found a document in a cardboard tube. It was the original decree from Pope John Paul II installing Serge Miot as the Archbishop of Port au Prince. Certainly saving old Church documents and artifacts isn’t as important as saving lives at the hospital down the street, but it’s not insignificant either. So much has been lost here. To preserve even little bits of culture and history for the future is another small step toward rebuilding this country.

MRE’s – part 2

2010-02-05T19:05:00.000-08:00

MRE has another meaning in Haiti, stemming from the tumultuous period of political upheaval in the 1990’s. I know that I’m not an expert in Haitian history, especially not in this incredibly complex and still hotly debated period, but here’s my basic understanding based on lots of reading and conversations with people who lived through it. In those years, the divide in the country was quite clearly along economic lines – the people vs. the military and the so called MRE’s – “morally repugnant elite.” Surely throughout Haiti’s history those with wealth have in general done little to demonstrate any real care for the suffering of the masses. They ran their businesses, which provided jobs for some, but graft and corruption in the business community seem to have been as ubiquitous as in the military and the parade of failed Haitian governments of the same period. No one trusted anyone. People with wealth and power used their influence to brutally repress the democratic movements of Aristide, and as the years went on, Aristide’s gangs responded with gruesome violence. A favorite tactic of the day was “necklacing,” in which an MRE or other undesirable would have a tire placed around his neck, be doused with gasoline and lit on fire.

One thing that’s been particularly unique, I think, about my experience in Haiti is that I have had the opportunity to get to know people from so many different parts of Haitian society. Obviously most of the children that we serve in the school come from the poorer neighborhoods and slums, and since most of the staff are graduates of the school, so do they. But many graduates have managed to move up quite a bit in society. Many have laptops and a few have cars, and some can talk about traveling to the DR or even to the United States for vacations. But another of the most important groups in the LCS community is formed by some of the wealthiest people in this country. The project has worked hard in the last few years especially to engage the Haitian business community in supporting LCS, but also in supporting charitable endeavors all over the country. The notion of social entrepreneurship is new here, and many small grocery stores and even the giant cell phone company Voila are getting on board. One of he local store owners donated many essential grocery items to the school each month. Sadly, that man and many of his family members were killed when their store collapsed on them. Voila has made sizeable contributions to the school’s “office of external affairs” which supports graduates in finding university scholarships and job opportunities. Four days after the earthquake, Voila handed us 10 new cell phones with lots of minutes on them. Maybe the “haves” in this country are starting to get it finally, that their fate is inextricably linked with that of everyone else. Many have great hope that the shared experience of the earthquake will further that sense of solidarity.

One of my absolute favorite people in Haiti is a man named Patrick Brun. Truly, each day this guy is inching higher and higher on the list of the people that I admire and respect most in the world. Patrick was born into privilege in this country of so much poverty. His father’s business was in construction and hardware sales, and as a child he enjoyed an education at the fancy Catholic school, vacations in Europe and a life of relative comfort. In the 90’s he came in contact with Louverture Cleary School and the infinitely persuasive Patrick Moynihan. First he started selling building materials at cost, then consulting on construction projects. Before long he had drunk the proverbial LCS Kool Aid and had what he describes ad a true conversion. Now he’s up to his eyeballs in this place, and the chair of the Board (one of only 2 Haitians on the board.) On a personal level, Patrick Brun and his family have been a great gift to me and the rest of the US volunteers. They’ve had us over to their lovely home in Petonville and fed us chips and salsa and chocolate cupcakes. We’ve spent a few wonderful days of R and R at their small home in the mountains, where there are no mosquitoes, no tap taps, no TV’s, and no noise except for the mooing of cows. Patrick’s visits to the school are frequent, and he always takes the time to talk and to listen.

On the night of the earthquake, when we were missing our two senior most leaders, all I wanted all night was for Patrick Brun to walk through the door of that soccer field because I knew that his presence would calm people down, and that he’d help us to make good decisions. Sure enough, at about 8 pm, there he was, and it was like the weight of the world lifted off my shoulders. He brought us the first real news of what was going on outside. He had been downtown when the earthquake hit, and before returning home, he knew he had to come check on us at the school. Along the way, he picked up strangers along the road who needed to get to hospitals. We stood and talked for about 20 minutes about what to do with the diesel drums and whether or not it was safe to go into the dorms to get the kids blankets and mattresses to sleep on, and what should be our top priorities in the morning, and what were the signs of shock that we needed to be looking for in kids. Then he said goodbye – since there were people sitting in his car on the driveway who needed to get to hospitals – but he promised to come back the next day.

Since then, Patrick Brun has basically abandoned his family business and left it to his brothers. His work has become logistical support for the International Red Cross and Catholic Relief Services. He and a team of LCS students, staff and volunteers cleaned out one of his warehouses to be used for Red Cross building materials and medical supplies. He’s been on site each day this past week while another team of LCS affiliated people has worked to excavate the Cathedral and the Archbishop’s residence. The Church of Port au Prince is destroyed – church buildings are piles of rubble, hundreds of priests and seminarians (as well as the Archbishop and his staff) are dead, and all of the cultural and personal history that the Church preserves is buried under tons and tons of concrete. Since there’s no one left to organize the excavation and recovery of baptismal records and marriage licenses and cultural artifacts from the Cathedral and archdiocesan buildings, Patrick Moynihan and Patrick Brun are simply doing it themselves.

On Tuesday night I had dinner with a group of American surgeons and nurses who are staying at the residence of the Papal Nuncio while they serve in one of the city’s few functioning hospitals. The house is lovely, situated on the side of a hill overlooking the city. It was surreal to be in such a beautiful place, looking down on the city below without really being able to see much of the destruction, but knowing it was there (having just spent 2 and a half hours in gridlocked traffic to get up the hill.) Patrick Brun came over to me and I asked him how he was doing and for the first time since I’ve known him, he looked a little beat up, and admitted to me that he was really tired. Then he explained that he had read a Miami Herald article about how the wealthy of Haiti – the so called MRE’s – were basically unaffected by the earthquake. The article went on to explain that most had left the country and were doing little to assist in the recovery efforts. I looked at this man who had spent the last three weeks doing nothing but assist in the recovery efforts and said, “I’m really sorry Patrick. That must make you kind of furious.” He launched off on a little tirade about journalists being too lazy to leave their desks and find out the real story, and the danger of falling back on that old, divisive narrative at a time like this. After listing some of the other things people like himself were doing to help the country, he said, “this thing shows us that everyone in this country can die together, so we have to be able to live together. History started over on January 12, 2010.”

Someone suggested that he write a response to the article in the Miami Herald. For a moment he seemed to consider it, but then backed off. He explained that he could, but that it would be taken the wrong way by some and would just rekindle those old feelings of animosity, and this country can’t handle that at a time like this. So, Patrick Brun won’t defend himself, out of respect for the needs of his country. But I couldn’t let this one go. I wish American journalists would stop writing about heroic relief workers and start writing about heroic Haitian people like Patrick Brun.

MRE’s

2010-02-05T19:04:00.000-08:00

The 82nd Airborne Division is housed down the street from us here in Santo, and one afternoon Patrick Moynihan saw them walking down the street, so he invited them over. They walked in the front gates in 2 lines, each young man wearing dark glasses, his hand on an enormous automatic weapon. It was surreal – but also so funny. As I looked at each 18 year old face – and I’m fairly sure none of them is older than 24 – I was honestly happy to see them, but also happy for them that they had the opportunity to spend time at LCS, and would get to meet such smart, fun, interesting kids here. Of course it was the middle of netwayaj (cleanup hour) when they arrived, so the kids were more than happy to drop their brooms and wheelbarrows full of cinderblocks that they were in the midst of moving from the collapsed front wall. Instead they all gathered around the basketball court and watched members of the 82nd airborne take on 5 of LCS’s best ballers. The kids wore flip flops or played barefoot, and they basically ran circles around their peers in the US Army who wore fatigues and T-shirts with heavy boots. The Americans were actually much better shooters, but the full court defense and quick passes of the Haitians won the day. The final score was something like 40 to 15. Let’s hope the Americans have more success in their efforts to help rebuild this country than they did on the court.

Since that day, this one platoon from the 82nd has come back several more times. They told us they’ve kept the school a secret from the other platoons, calling it their “oasis.” Today they came for lunch and to enjoy real showers for the first time in three weeks. Obviously it would be absurd for the US military to eat the food that we eat from Catholic Relief Services and Food for the Poor, so they brought their MRE’s and exchanged them with the neighborhood children’s plates of rice and beans. You can be sure that both sides were absolutely happy with this arrangement. The LCS kids love MRE’s. A few of the older kids who have been working as translators in hospitals around the city have come back to school singing the praises of the MRE’s they get for lunch sometimes. After today’s exchange, I think the rest of the kids are now fully jealous of the United States Military’s superior cuisine.

Fear

2010-01-30T04:51:00.000-08:00

A few seconds after the earthquake began, I knew what it was. Though I had never lived through one before, and I had no frame of reference for whether what I was experiencing was big or small, I understood that what was happening was a natural phenomenon. Then about five minutes later, as I ran around the campus to gather all the kids, I again had an awareness of what was happening when the first aftershock rattled us all once more. But in the next few hours and days, I came to understand that many people here didn’t know what an earthquake was and truly believed the world was ending in those first scary moments on Tuesday afternoon. Then with each aftershock in the following days, their fears were revived, as vividly as the first time. We’ve spent lots of time in the past few weeks explaining tectonic plates and fault lines and aftershocks to kids and adults alike to try to alleviate their fears that another “big one” will likely strike again soon. But fear so deep is not so easy to just explain away, even with well formed logic and sound science. Despite the testimony of expert engineers and many discussions about load bearing supports and the different types of cracks in a wall, many people are still not comfortable going inside. For me it took only one night of sleeping on the soccer field outside to decide that it was time to sleep inside a structurally sound building, because I inherently trust the experts who told me it was safe to do so. That trust doesn’t come so easily for many here. Considering these deeply held fears, I have been amazed by the courage of the junior staff member who walked into a classroom to teach her French class only a week after she ran for her life out of a crumbling university building. I have so much respect for the children who have swallowed their fears and gone to sleep inside again, even as the radio and many in their family are telling them it’s crazy to do so. This might be the most important work that we do here – more important even than making spaghetti for 400 people in those first days after the earthquake. We are helping the LCS community to return to its normal and productive life by supporting people as they face their fears and take those first courageous steps back inside.

Deyo

2010-01-28T05:49:00.000-08:00

Today (Tuesday) I finally got a chance to go out, beyond the street our school is on, for only the second time since the earthquake. It was the sort of journey that I’ve become quite accustomed to in Haiti – driving all over town to drop people off, pick people up, run errands to buy things and talk to people and just get things done. Such journeys can take hours because of traffic – even before the earthquake – and often don’t include such luxuries as eating or bathroom stops. Tedious as these trips can sometimes be, today I was eager for the chance to get out, to see a little more closely what’s going on outside, and to take a break from school. These drives usually happen in the big white land cruiser, with a driver, 2 security guys, and the necessary passengers. This time there were 7 of us at first, then 4, then 10. It’s like a roving clown car all over town.

Our first mission was to drive 2 of the American staff (who came after the earthquake to help) to the Inter-American Development Bank to catch the convoy to the airport and their charter flight to Santo Domingo, where they will then catch a commercial flight home. American airlines is still not flying commercially in and out of Haiti, so Americans pretty much hitch rides home on charter and military flights. The drive there was slower than most drives through the city, but not outrageous by Haitian standards. Along the way I had the chance to see more of the widespread destruction from the earthquake. Certainly there are more buildings standing than fallen down, but the ones that have fallen leave such a bewildering impression. Some buildings look like tiered layer cakes where the top layer just slid right off and down the side. Others look like some giant Bigfoot creature simply squashed them with one step, while others are such confusing piles of concrete and rebar that I can’t fathom which laws of physics guided their collapse into their present states of disarray. There are a few huge buildings whose upper floors hang perilously over the street below, and gas station roofs rest peacefully on top of oil tankers beneath them. But amid all the chaos, there are buildings and homes that look totally unharmed. There are people out in the street selling food and clothes and those beautifully vibrant Haitian paintings of market scenes and country houses. It’s hard to fathom why one building fell and its nearly identical next door neighbor did not. I think in the months to come we will learn more and more about dishonest builders mixing cement with clay, and greedy contractors who cut corners in design and construction to save a dollar, and in the end cost thousands of lives. Time will tell, but for now the scenes of destruction really do defy logic to the untrained eye.

After some remarkably skilled driving and navigating around blocked roads and traffic jams, our driver Ganiel delivered us to the IADB where we met the other passengers on their way to Santo Domingo. There were two Nicaraguan architects who had earlier come out to the school to offer an additional expert opinion on the structural integrity of our buildings. I learned that one of them had graduated from Notre Dame in 1958. He told a story about wearing his Notre Dame hat earlier in the week and having a security guard at one of the destroyed hotels who had just turned around several cars up ahead simply wave him and his car through. Go Irish! He showed us some of his pictures of the scene in Port au Prince, including the destroyed cathedral, and the sight of three US Marines managing air traffic control on a folding table in the blazing sun alongside the landing strip at the Port au Prince airport. After a break in the air conditioned offices, we said goodbye to our friends and headed off to our next stop – the bank.

It took the banks about 11 days to open again after the earthquake, preventing many other businesses from opening and many people from going about their normal lives. People were buying and selling in Dollars and Euros even more than usual during those days. But finally on Saturday they opened again, and by today the Gourde was trading oddly higher than usual against the dollar. It was nice to be inside a totally professional, well organized institution after the craziness of outside. There was more air conditioning, and professionally dressed people, and the general feel of normalcy. The trader we met with told us that their phones and Internet weren’t working today, and it took her about 15 minutes to find the exchange rate and make the trade … but at least we got what we came for. We exchanged our “where were you during the earthquake?” stories and conversation about the exchange rate, and liquidity, and the importance of the banks in Haiti’s present and future, and then we went on our way.

The next stop was a grocery store in Petonville. I had actually been to this store once before – where, astoundingly, I ran into the one person I know who lives in Petonville. Patrick handed me 25 US dollars and told me and one of the security guys to go in and buy the stuff that we need that we haven’t been able to get since our usual grocery stores no longer exist. I found the store not too different from the last time I was there back in December. There wasn’t quite as much fresh meat and produce as before, the shelves were bit more sparsely populated, and there were guys with semiautomatic weapons inside – which I do not recall the first time. The cash registers also all had signs saying “cash only.” We bought syrup for French toast, soy sauce and hot dogs for fried rice, canned peas for many of our usual dinner concoctions and a can of Pringles to eat on the road. We’ll now be able to enjoy a few more interesting meals in the next few days!

Finally, we drove to Food for the Poor, a huge international aid organization that warehouses much more than food for distribution to charitable organizations and sometimes directly to individuals. Incidentally, much of the food that I’ve been eating in the last year comes from there as well. We have a group of students who have been going there each day to translate for some Jamaican doctors who are here working in the small clinic. We went to pick up the kids, and the US volunteer who was supervising them, at the end of their day’s work. On the way, we dropped off Patrick and Minel so they could make their way to the funeral of the sister of one of the staff members who had died in one of the collapsed university buildings. When we got near Food for he Poor, winding through some very small streets in a very crowded and poor neighborhood, we were informed that the way ahead was blocked because they were distributing food, and there was “dezod,” a wonderful Kreyol word that basically means trouble. So again, Ganiel the expert driver, wound through those same tiny streets in reverse, then swung around to the other side of the entrance, where we found the kids waiting patiently.

I know that many people in Haiti these days are not living lives nearly so functional and normal as this. The scenes on TV of machete wielding gangs and fights over bottled water and food are real, and in places like Site Soleil they may actually be quite common. But it’s also true that even in and around Port au Prince people are getting back to business … not business as usual … but back to some sort of normalcy. And that’s the “normal” that we managed to accomplish in five hours today, with a land cruiser, a skilled driver and 25 US dollars.

Friday Night Fun and Satruday Relaxation

2010-01-24T07:51:00.002-08:00

By the end of the school day Friday, we had about 70 students left. These are kids who either can’t go home, or just really don’t want to yet. They’re not sleeping on the soccer field anymore, but most still aren’t sleeping back in the dorms yet. We’re hoping for Sunday night, if all goes according to plan. We decided to organize a fun activity for everyone on Friday night after dinner, so Coqmard (one of the oldest students who pretty much runs the show around here sometimes) and I planned a giant game of team pictionary. This is one of my old PHA stand-by’s, and I knew that the kids and staff at LCS would love it. We organized everyone into teams and spread them around the basketball court, then handed out a mini white board and marker to each team. Coqmard and I had made a list of words in Kreyol for the teams to draw, and the race began. For hirty minutes kids – and staff – were racing around the basketball court to get the words, flying back to their teams, drawing their little pictures and running back. Most importantly, they were laughing hysterically the whole time. The winners got candy, and everyone got a bottle of King Cola and we followed with about an hour of singing and jokes and dancing and games. One thing I love about the kids here is that they are so willing to play. There’s no “this is mad corny” or “too cool for school” attitude here. They just love to play together – the eleven year olds, the nineteen year olds and the staff all laugh at the same jokes and know the same songs. After two hours of playing and consuming a staggering quantity of sugar, it was time for bed. I don’t think anyone was thinking much about earthquakes last night. We were all too busy laughing.

Today, Saturday, I relaxed. I slept until 6:15 (which, trust me, is sleeping in around here) then ate breakfast with the staff not the kids, the first time we’ve done that since the earthquake. I spent time writing and e-mailing and organizing the hundreds of pictures I’ve taken in the past two weeks. I took a nap. I finally really cleaned my room. I had previously picked up everything that fell down during the earthquake, but I hadn’t cleaned up all the dust or reorganized the shelves or mopped the floor until today. I spent time with another staff member figuring out how to hook up a second computer and the phone at the same time to our library Internet connection. Then I sat down on the couch to read the book that I was reading when the earthquake struck. It was kind of eerie actually to sit in the same spot re-read the same sentence I was reading when the floor started shaking violently under my feet. I think I would have sworn off reading – or maybe sitting on that couch - for the rest of my life if an aftershock had hit while I was sitting there … but nothing happened. In the evening we had Mass at school with many of the kids who stayed for the weekend, dinner, and long after dinner conversations. My plans for Sunday are not much different.

Aftershocks

2010-01-24T07:51:00.001-08:00

The psychology of aftershocks is impossible. For the first few days the aftershocks were frequent, and when they happened people standing outside would stop what they were doing and brace themselves, and people inside would run outside. Though they never lasted long, and never caused any damage, they rattled people’s nerves so much. We all started imagining them after a while so if someone moved a table, or jumped off the top bunk suddenly, it could cause a whole roomful of people to startle. I started trying to see if water in a glass on the table was moving to figure out if the shaking was real or in my head. One morning at about 5 am we had one that had me and two of the people I was sharing a room with out the door in about 10 seconds. Somehow others slept, but we were up for the day. Then they got smaller and smaller so that by Sunday morning we all slept through one. We were getting ready to start moving kids back into buildings on Wednesday morning. Then, with all of the kids standing outside on the basketball court at about 6:15 am, talking about going back to sleep inside, we had another long, fairly strong rumble that evidently registered at 6.1. I was so furious – not because anything was damaged or anyone was hurt but because all these kids who had been building up the courage to go back inside for days were back to totally terrified again. We backed off on sleeping inside the dorms, but did move kids off the soccer field into two partially enclosed spaces. Sure enough, at about 4 am, there was NOT an aftershock, but someone thought they felt one, screamed, and created an absolute panic. I woke up when I heard every dog in the neighborhood barking like crazy. Great. This is awesome.

Then this afternoon, as I walked around with a sixteen year old who is really just terrified, we had another one. The details on this would be almost comically ironic if they weren’t actually so heart breaking. I was walking around with this kid showing him the difference between support columns that failed in the earthquake, and good columns. I’m getting quite good at talking about load bearing columns, diagonal cracks, and visible rebar in Kreyol … but I digress. We were standing at a place where there actually is some structural damage, but I was showing him that it’s not dangerous to stand on, that normal use would not cause any problems. He was totally following my logic, nodding in agreement, and to show him that this one wall wouldn’t fall over, I kicked it as hard as I could. He had just finished saying, “I see … it’s not even moving” when IT STARTED MOVING. Are you kidding me? Seriously? The kids ran out of the classrooms with a reasonable degree of calm and order given that the earth had just moved under their feet for about the thirtieth time in a week, and I looked at this kid with tears in his eyes and just said, “I’m so sorry. I guess we’re just going to have to live with this for a while.”

So, it would be really great if this would stop so we could all feel a tiny bit less crazy all the time. Yesterday I was teaching a Spanish class with some of the youngest kids (who I don’t usually teach, but I’m the only Spanish teacher in town right now ….) when I noticed that one little girl had her head down and was sobbing. I helped her to her feet and we walked outside for her to get some fresh air and she started calming down. I asked her if she was scared to be inside and she said no, so I asked why she was crying. Through her tears she explained that the little boy behind her kept hitting her in the head. I was ecstatic. An eleven year old girl crying because a boy is hitting her? That’s so NORMAL! I know exactly how to deal with that. Guess which naughty boy had me sitting next to him for the rest of the period?

Finally on Friday morning, while all the kids were all outside at the morning assembly, there were two small aftershocks, and no one really moved. They gasped a little, but didn’t stop what they were doing, and didn’t run anywhere. Maybe we’re on the way out of this finally.

Going Inside – Tuesday January 19

2010-01-24T07:49:00.000-08:00

It’s been a week since the earthquake and during that time we’ve managed to take care of basic needs, and even provide some entertainment and intellectual stimulus for kids. Peter brought a pair of binoculars back after Christmas and has been taking them out onto the soccer field (where the kids are still sleeping at night) and teaching little astronomy classes. We had soccer and basketball tournaments yesterday. Last night Jon and I carried out something we had started planning last Monday – before plans changed. In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday, we played the audio of the last 5 minutes of the “I have a Dream” speech for all of the kids last night, then announced a speech competition – “what is your dream for Haiti?” We even had a group of about 10 kids who stayed around and listened to and read along with the entire speech while we talked about Civil Rights in the United States. I think the speeches – which they’ll write in English – will be pretty wonderful.

But it still wasn’t school, and a bunch of kids in a school not going to class for a week is just sort of unnatural. So today, we had school. We’re running a shortened schedule, since we don’t have all of our teachers and can’t use all of the classrooms, and only have about half of our students right now. We’re using all of the outdoor classrooms, and a few in the less damaged classroom building. We know that the building is structurally sound, but it has some cracks that look really scary even though they’re not on load bearing supports. (Oh, did I mention that my next career will be forensic engineer? This stuff is fascinating ….) So, it took some convincing, some hand holding, and lots of patient explanations of what the heck load bearing supports are, but we did get almost everyone inside. Many stood or sat right next to the door and a few only made it 20 minutes or so, but that’s a good first day. I told them I didn’t care if they learned anything or even listened to a single thing any teacher said all day. All that mattered today was getting back to a routine, and going back inside.

This afternoon an engineer finally arrived on campus to inspect the buildings. After six days of Tricia and Molly Bowman trying to work their contacts from the states, we finally got a guy from one of the Haitian firms that consulted on the construction of the most recent buildings. This guy was amazing. He had attended a funeral in the morning for a family friend, then fought the crazy city traffic (full of NGO people driving themselves around alone in their cars ….) to get here. He walked around with us for about 2 hours, inspecting cracks, tapping on beams with a hammer, and patiently explaining some construction basics. Earlier in the week I had walked around with a few people to take pictures of all of the relevant cracks to send to the states, so I walked around with him to point out some of the most … interesting … ones. The long and the short of it is that none of our buildings is going to fall down. If there’s another serious earthquake, one of them would probably be damaged, so we should do some work to support the columns in that building. The thing that blew my mind was when he was inspecting one superficially cracked column, he said, “wow, you guys did not have a 7,0 earthquake here. I’ve seen buildings just like this one downtown that are significantly more damaged.” Wow. I don’t even want to imagine what that felt like to those people downtown.

Now that we’ve reoccupied some buildings during the day, it will soon be time to reoccupy them for sleeping. The rule of thumb is that you wait for three days after the last aftershock to reoccupy a building that sustained any damage. That will be tomorrow afternoon. Let’s hope we can convince the kids that their beds really are more comfortable than the grass outside … even if there is a crack on the wall.

Tuesday January 12, 4:45 pm

2010-01-18T08:42:00.000-08:00

7.0
The first thing I noticed was a sound like a freight train. I was sitting on the second floor of the administration building where we live, with Mary and Kristen, two other volunteers. I thought the generator next door was turning on, and something was wrong with it causing it to make a louder than usual noise. Someone said, “what’s happening?” and I realized the floor was moving and things were rattling around. When I think of it now, I think I noticed the floor was moving in waves … or maybe I’m just imagining that after the fact. We never said “earthquake” but someone said “what should we do – should we get out?” I didn’t think I could stand up anymore and was afraid to run out and fall, so I said “no, get the fuck down.” (I actually have no memory of saying that … someone told me later that’s what I said.) My instinct was to climb under the little couch in our common room. Looking at it now it’s sort of hilarious to note that there’s about 12 inches from the floor to the bottom of the couch. I wouldn’t so much have fit under there. I remember looking at the walls to make sure that nothing would fall on us and I just got down and covered my head. Mary somehow had the presence of mind to pull the standing fan down with her so it wouldn’t fall. I became conscious of so much screaming outside, and I remember wondering if this was a big earthquake or just a tremor, never having experienced one before. And then it stopped. People say it was about 20 seconds, but it felt like forever.

The next thirty minutes though were actually the scariest. When it stopped we got up slowly, totally bewildered, and walked out of the building holding on as we went down the stairs, knowing that the aftershocks would start any minute. As we rounded the corner of the stairs – which are actually outside – I noticed that the front wall surrounding the campus had completely fallen down into the street. I heard screaming. My legs were like jello and heart was racing. I remember thinking about adrenaline and that maybe that’s why my heart was racing and that maybe the magical powers that adrenaline supposedly gives people would allow me to do whatever needed to be done in the next few minutes. As we emerged I saw that the planter by the door had fallen and shattered. I saw kids running toward me and the front basketball court where they always gather, crying, or using every shred of their strength not to cry. I ran the other way toward the first building to go inside and make sure the kids were all out. I had this image in my head of a kid being too scared to get out, or an injured kid inside, and an aftershock coming and knocking down the whole building. I remember thinking it was totally idiotic for me to go inside any of those buildings, but I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

There weren’t any kids inside, but as I came out, two terrifying sights greeted me. The head maintenance guy, a really big guy, was running full speed past me with a little girl limply in his arms, yelling for help. Then I saw that that two water tanks that hold our drinkable water were gushing out water. The possibility that we had serious injuries, or that we might have drinking water problems in the aftermath, had not yet hit me. I watched as the pickup truck filled with - I couldn’t tell how many - injured kids and a few staff members raced out of the driveway. I kept running around through two more buildings screaming for kids to get out, then ran back to the basketball court where they were gathered as they always do, actually standing in the lines in which they always stand. Most were crying, holding on to each other. The adults were all walking around trying to comfort kids, having no idea what the hell was going on themselves. Zanmy, the assistant principle who is only 26 himself, got up on the table as he always does and quieted the kids. I actually don’t know what he was saying because my Kreyol brain wasn’t so much functioning in that moment, but I stood next to him, just to be another adult standing there. At some point there was a strong aftershock that had me jumping off the table to get on the ground, and the kids all screamed and ran toward the center of the court, away from all the buildings and the front wall that didn’t actually exist anymore. I knew that aftershocks were normal, but it occurred to me that they probably didn’t. These were some absolutely terrified kids.

Settling In
In the next hour we moved the kids to the back soccer field, away from the chaos that was unfolding on the street outside. When I got back there I saw that part of the wall around the soccer field and playground had fallen too, and learned from another volunteer that seven kids had been injured when that wall fell on them. The next few hours were spent calming kids, keeping them away from the walls surrounding the field (afraid that a strong aftershock could knock them down), securing the drinking water, rigging up some lights and a TV because – amazingly – our solar panels were completely intact and we had working electricity in most buildings. Fortunately, the school’s cooks had just finished making dinner when the earthquake struck so some people carried the huge pots and the kids’ bowls outside and passed out food. We rolled the drums of diesel fuel away from the now crumbled front wall into a more secure location in case any kind of unrest or looting happened. About ten of our security and maintenance guys sat in a circle by the now wide open front gate, and despite the chaos, seeing them there I felt – almost – totally safe.

At first we still had cell phone contact within Haiti, so staff members were feverishly calling family and friends, and we even had cell contact with the US at first so we could report and get information from the staff there. But after a few hours, all but one of the Haitian cell companies went down and we were left cut off from the US, so those first hours were extremely complex in terms of decision making. We were missing our two senior most leaders who happened to be away from the school that day, many staff members had not yet returned to campus from their universities for the evening, and the rest of the staff had moments of total clarity, but were clearly struggling to hold it together at other times. One learned that his eleven year old cousin had been killed when a wall two streets away fell on her. Another heard of an injured family member, but before he could get more information, lost cell contact. Others just waited, not knowing anything. In this context we had to make decisions about whether or not it was safe to run into buildings even for a moment to take out foam mattresses and sheets for the kids to sleep on. We had to decide how to handle the parents who were arriving. We had to decide what area we would use as a bathroom. Meanwhile, there were radio reports of a tsunami warning, and predictions of more intense aftershocks. We had some kids descending into total shock while they waited, hoping that the next parent in the door would be their own. Those reunions made my heart ache, and made the rest of the kids even more anxious about the fate of their own families.

By 9 pm we had everyone lying down somewhere and the movie Happy Feet on the TV. Unfortunately we couldn’t find the DVD remote in the chaos of the totally upside down library and couldn’t switch the language to French, so, we just watched it in English. The story was clearly not what mattered. The kids never got totally quiet that night. We played movies all night, just to provide some distraction. There were moments of singing, and moments of praying and moments of sobbing. Older kids just walked laps of the field in small groups, with so much nervous energy. Little kids slept. At some point we went back upstairs to our own rooms to gather warm clothes, toothbrushes and our own mattresses when one volunteer suggested we grab out passports and wallets … just in case. Later on staff took turns sleeping, as well as we could. The aftershocks continued, at first eliciting screams from the kids, and eventually just making us all gasp a little, and then go back to sleep. Haiti in January is actually kind of chilly at night, probably in the sixties, and the kids were all wearing their play clothes from earlier in the day. I gave a little girl in shorts and a tank top my black hoodie, and another boy one of my sheets. It was a cold, mostly sleepless night.

We awoke with the sun just before 6. As I gathered myself and my belongings together, I remember thinking, “Here we go. This is the beginning of the real work.” After moving all of the mattresses to the side, we gathered the kids as we do every morning, in their usual lines, and one of the oldest students got up in front of them and led them in a prayer of profound thanksgiving. We still knew little of the extent of the damage and death outside, but we knew we were blessed to be alive, and together in a safe place. They sang a song of thanksgiving, “mesi bondye pout tout ou bay nou … thank you God for all you give us.” I stood to the side and watched them singing, wrapped in sheets. I was utterly humbled by their faith.

We spent the rest of the day cooking … literally, the next nine hours. Most of the Haitian staff were still trying to get information about their families, or hadn’t yet returned, or were out with the kids, or just weren’t really in any shape to help. So it fell on the nine US American volunteers to make breakfast for 400 Haitians. We decided that it wouldn’t be possible to make three meals each day, so we settled on a mid morning meal, and a late afternoon meal. Unfortunately there was a probable gas leak in our industrial kitchen, so we were left to do all the work in the small residential kitchen. Spaghetti for breakfast is a staple in Haiti, but we didn’t have any hot dogs which are a typical part of the meal. So we boiled pot after pot of spaghetti, made pot after pot of a simple tomato sauce, and carried it all in shifts out to the back soccer field to serve the kids class by class. It took five hours to cook the food and feed everyone. When it was done, and all the dishes were clean, we started on dinner, a simple plate of rice and beans.

The New Normal
We’re now on day six since the earthquake. We still spend most of our time cooking and cleaning, but have settled into a state of near normalcy. The kids still sleep outside, and during the day set up a little tent city. They made a shower area to take bucket showers. Yesterday they were washing their clothes and hanging them to dry all over the playground. We have the meal serving and cleaning down to a science, and many more of the Haitian staff are able to help – or rather lead – the cooking process. Consequently, the kids are also much happier with their home cooked Haitian food as opposed to that very mysterious Italian style spaghetti we made them on that first bewildering morning! We’ve also been able to feed almost 100 people from the neighborhood at least once, and sometimes twice each day. We are so blessed that the earthquake struck at the beginning of the month. Our freezer was full of meat, and our pantries full of rice, spaghetti, beans and some vegetables.

Within our own school, the rebuilding is beginning. Students and staff moved the pieces of concrete block from the front wall that fell into the street. The kids help with the meal prep and cleanup. We knocked down the balcony banister that was precariously perched on the third floor of a classroom building. On Saturday we climbed on the roof of a building to clean the solar panels. Kids are cleaning up the shelves and books that fell all over the library and returning it to some state of order. We’re still awaiting confirmation from an engineer that all of our buildings are inhabitable despite the cracks, but we’re trying to get people used to the idea of being in them – and on them – so though the kids aren’t sleeping inside yet, we’re starting to make use of the buildings whenever we can.

In the country the rebuilding is clearly coming, but hasn’t begun in earnest yet. There are still bodies all over the streets, and huge piles of rubble that used to be the hospitals, the universities, churches, supermarkets, peoples’ homes and schools, and the national palace. But we hear the reports of four thousand American troops and billions of dollars of aid on its way. Every day there are more and more planes in the sky and I’ve started playing a little game with kids – and adults – that whenever a plane flies overhead we imagine what’s in it. Doctors … machinery to remove the rubble … beans … firefighters … pepperoni pizzas …?

Now the real trauma of what happened in this country is known to us all, and is hitting this community in personal ways. Though all of our students and staff are alive, we did have seven students with injuries, two of whom are still not quite right. Students and staff are learning of family and friends who were killed when houses collapsed, or the university collapsed, or the wall on the side of the road they were on collapsed. Some still haven’t heard from family members at all. People coming from the outside are wearing masks now, as the smell of death is everywhere in the city. Some put toothpaste on their upper lip to disguise the smell, and all have horrific stories or walking through downtown, or Delmas or Petonville and climbing over corpses and rubble to get where they’re going.

Many people are so scared that this hole is just too deep for Haiti to come out of. They’ve heard of international aid on its way before, only to have corrupt government officials line their own pockets with it. They’ve had hope for change before, only to have the harsh reality of daily life in Haiti break those hopes to pieces. They wonder out loud if this isn’t some kind of punishment from God. I have found that people here express joy so freely, but hope doesn’t come as easily. The radio reports are that foreigners are leaving the country in droves. There are lines outside the US embassy of missionaries and NGO workers and others waiting for evacuation to the Dominican Republic. How can people be hopeful when everyone seems to be abandoning them? Today I was sitting with a group of little children from the neighborhood coloring pictures. Not that any of us really knows anything about art therapy, but the idea of giving little kids crayons and paper after a crisis just seemed like a good idea. One little boy, about seven years old, drew a picture of a girl, and a house, and a boat with a little Haitian flag on the top. I asked who the girl was and he said Kristen, one of the other US volunteers. I asked who the house was and he said it was my house. I asked who was in the boat and he said “blan”- white people, which colloquially means foreigners. I asked where the boat was going and he said “nan etazuni.” To the United States. Even as Kristen and I sat next to this little boy, he was so sure we were on our way out the door. We assured him that we’re not going anywhere.

Koman ou ye?
We try to ask each other and the kids “how are you” as often as possible. The answer depends on the moment. Loud noises still make us all jump. The US Air Force lanes are coming in around the clock right now, and they’re HUGE and fly very low, very loudly. Every time the generator turns on, I flinch. The aftershocks which sent us all running outside a few times a day and night seem to have stopped. However, the sensation of moving floors and dizziness (which we’re calling “earthquake feet”) still comes and goes for everyone, especially at “ground zero” – where you were when it happened. Unfortunately for me, that was where I live, so every time I went back inside I had the sensation of moving and shaking. On Saturday I decided to go and spend about three hours in there cleaning the whole place top to bottom, organizing all the things that fell down. Then last night we finally all went back inside and slept in our own beds and it was the best night’s sleep I’ve had in a week.

As for the kids, they are amazing. I asked one 16 year old boy yesterday how he was and he said with a huge smile “everything’s OK. My family is good. My house is totally broken and they’re sleeping outside, but everyone is good.” Some haven’t been home yet, and I’m starting to worry that some of the older kids are delaying the reality as long as possible. We’re encouraging them to go home, just to see, as long as it’s safe. We’re afraid that we may lose many students. Most people in Port au Prince are transplants from the countryside. If they lost everything here, many will just go back to the family home in the provinces.

Now I’m in school mode again. I’m working on a modified school schedule so on Tuesday we can start having some academic classes with whichever kids and staff members are here. The country has officially cancelled school for a month, but we will carry on as well as we can. The cooks will come back tomorrow, so the volunteers and staff who have been cooking and cleaning all day can get back to being teachers … sort of. We’ll incorporate many hours of work into each school day, so we can fix everything on our campus, and when the resources become available, we’ll help the neighbors rebuild their houses

I’m not afraid there will be another big earthquake, and the aftershocks rattle me – literally and figuratively – a little less each day. The security situation in the country is OK. Yesterday we drove around a bit and saw people out selling things on the street, and even some tap taps running. Those people aren’t stupid. They wouldn’t do that with marauding gangs all over town. The presence of a huge US military force will be good. The relationship between Haitian civilians and the US military is actually excellent. People see them as helping to maintain order and peace. Our food situation is secure, and we’re managing to find the things we need. Today we bought 720 eggs and even found bread for breakfast tomorrow. No one really knows what the next months will bring, but we’ll make plans, then scrap them and start over as the situation demands. Maybe in February, the week when Carnaval should have happened, the volunteers will spend some time in the DR sipping cocktails with umbrellas in them … or maybe we’ll just stay here and work. Time will tell.

VACATION!

2009-12-13T01:34:00.000-08:00

I'm headed home today for a month of relaxation and spending time with family and friends ... and of course enjoying all the comforts of home. I'm not sure what I'll do first when I get to the Miami airport. Will I stop for a Starbucks peppermint latte, or a mojito, or french fries, or a salad or ice cream ... or all of the above?

The last week has been hectic but fun. Our last day of school was supposed to be Thursday, and then the Christmas party would be Friday before the kids all headed home for the vacation. But ... I guess you can do this in Haiti ... on Monday the director decided to just move everything forward a day so that the volunteers could get out of town early on Friday for a weekend in the mountains. Guess who cheered louder at that announcements, the adults or the kids?? We then left "laplen" (the valley) on Friday afternoon and drove the three hours up to Belo, which is at about 6000 ft. in the mountains to the south. One of the board members has a house there and he invited us to come up and spend some time together away from school before heading home. It was delightful. It's "cold" there in the mountains - it was around 60 when we went to bed - and I used a blanket for the first time since I've been here. But seriously, it felt SO COLD. (I'm a little afraid that it's 25 in Boston right now ...) We had time for some good long walks and long talks while roasting marshmallows and sipping rum.

Now my bags are packed and I'm trying to figure out how to dress for travel from Port au Prince to Boston in December. FLip flops? Hoodie? I just home the family remembers to bring me a jacket at the airport!

jwaye noel tout moun!

Franklin

2009-12-05T02:55:00.000-08:00

A few people have asked this week ... so I wanted to let you know that Franklin was released yesterday and came home at about 5 pm last night. He looks great, was smiling and joking like always, and joked that the prison was crazy and "I wish you could all see it." To which everyone responded - no thanks. That was a long two weeks.

Advent

2009-11-30T14:19:00.001-08:00

Today is the first Sunday of Advent. I always love this season because I love Christmas, and the anticipation of Christmas, and the music we sing during this time of year is just so much fun. This year though that anticipation has a whole new meaning for those of us who are really just dying to come home for a month to see family and friends, sleep in our own beds, curl up under a blanket and read a book on a snowy day, eat our favorite foods that do not involve rice or pasta and enjoy a nice merlot with dinner. Two weeks until I come home … more than four weeks until Christmas …

But I’m trying to keep my head in the game here and enjoy the things that are wonderful about being here. We had my absolute favorite lunch today – diri ak sos pwa (rice with bean sauce and other yumminess). This morning I went outside and there was one of our security guys up in a coconut tree throwing them down to the ground where someone else chopped them open for a little midmorning snack of coconut milk and the fleshy stuff inside. It’s mango season finally and they’re insanely delicious. Yesterday we spent a day at a fancy hotel and sat out by the pool all afternoon. We had cheeseburgers and fries for lunch! The weather is absolutely gorgeous now and I get to wear flip flops every day. I did yoga outside this morning about 6:15 before breakfast. The kids here really do crack me up every day. Their favorite game now is saying “yo gusto” to me because that’s about the most grammatically incorrect thing you can say in Spanish and I told them it makes me cry when I hear it. Now they just think that’s funny and say it to me as often as possible to watch me scream and run away.

Life is good here – but I can’t wait to be home for a while!

Turkey Day

2009-11-30T14:17:00.001-08:00

Thanksgiving was wonderful. It was also my birthday, which made it extra special. In the morning at the daily school meeting, all 358 kids sang happy birthday to me in 4 languages. That was a pretty good start to the day! There were about 15 visitors from the United States here for the week, so we planned an incredible meal for them, the 9 volunteers, the 6 Moynihans, and about 20 of the staff members who live at the school. We had class that day, so the cooking happened in 2 kitchens all day long, and as people ran in and out to go to class, we’d basically tag team each other in and out of the cooking. The baking started at 9 and we sat down to eat at about 7:30 and throughout the cooking process we listened to Christmas music! At various points we didn’t have water in our kitchen and had to get water from one of the wells, and the electricity was out for a while too. These things are pretty normal around here, but definitely added a certain challenge to our Thanksgiving dinner prep!

Our menu included …
Sweet potato casserole
Green bean casserole
Garlic mashed potatoes
A salad with cashews, raisins, and so many tasty fresh veggies.
A fruit salad with mangos and bananas
Stuffing (from a bag … but who cares?)
Freshly baked dinner rolls
Turkey and gravy
A GIANT pot of rice and beans
Apple Crisp
Peach cobbler
Pumpkin Pie
Sweet Potato Toffee Pie – so delicious I almost died.
Chocolate Chip Cookies
Cake
Whipped cream
Freshly squeezed Grenadien juice (maybe it’s guava? I’m not sure but I love it.)
Ice cold Coke.

It was wonderful. We had enough food for everyone to have seconds of dinner AND dessert (which is an amazing accomplishment around here.) We sat outside at 5 big tables and miraculously, there weren’t even any mosquitoes that night. The most surprising thing that we all kept commenting on was how much it really tasted like Thanksgiving … not a cheap imitation, but the real thing. Even the dessert leftovers that we enjoyed the next day tasted like the real thing. It was wonderful to share this favorite American tradition with so many other people – and to enjoy so many tastes of home!

Something I never knew I was thankful for

2009-11-30T14:16:00.002-08:00

Weds. November 18 was a big national holiday here. It’s the anniversary of the last battle of the Haitian Revolution in 1803, when the last French ships finally sailed away after a brutal, long battle at the last fortress on the north coast. After our morning assembly in which kids did dramatic readings of Jean Jacques Dessalines’ pronouncement on that day, and sang a few extra patriotic songs, Mr. Hubert, the principal, quietly informed the staff of an unfortunate incident which had taken place the night before. Franklin, a recent LCS graduate and current staff member, was studying in his university library while some student protests were going on outside. University students protesting their situation is practically a daily occurrence here, but this one had special significance because it was on the holiday … and because in their exuberance they lit a few cars on fire. One of these cars happened to belong to a high ranking government official. Well … the police sprung into action to catch the perpetrators of the violence, and when they couldn’t find them, they just swept into the library and arrested the first 13 people they saw. Franklin was one of them.

When I first heard about this, I honestly thought it was kind of comical. Franklin is one of the sweetest, gentlest, actually most socially awkward people I’ve met here. He’s also brilliant and speaks English better than I do. But the thought of him getting caught up in something like that was just so absurd. I just assumed they’d sort it all out and he’d have a funny story to tell tomorrow. Then I looked in the faces of the Haitian people around me and realized that this was no joke. At all. There was true fear in their eyes. I came at this situation from an “innocent until proven guilty” mindset, and that’s not how criminal justice works here. I assumed that given the total lack of evidence connecting him to any crime, that they wouldn’t even be able to charge him and keep him in custody. Well, here they don’t really need evidence to keep someone in custody, and people sit in jail for months and years awaiting trials. They were confident that he would be OK as long as he stayed in the city jail, but if he was transferred to the prison … no one ever really finished that sentence, but they didn’t need to. I knew what they were afraid of. Franklin the bookworm who frequently talks to himself because honestly, he loves the sound of his own voice … in a Haitian prison. It really was terrifying.

Of course the people who run this place mobilized immediately to plead the case of not only Franklin, but the other 13 students and faculty members who were arrested with him. People in jails here don’t get food (or actually, they have to pay for it) so families and friends have to bring food. So people here started making 14 sandwiches every day to bring over there. They did all the work that a court appointed lawyer would have done ... if there was such a thing as a court appointed lawyers here. After three days, our fears were realized when the students were transferred to the prison. And then the weekend came, and there would be no further action on their case until Monday. The case had become a political football. The cops couldn’t admit they had screwed up, the government minister whose car had been burned was furious, and no one wanted to touch it with a ten foot pole. If they let them all go, they’d look weak. Someone had to pay for the violence … but there is literally ZERO evidence connecting any of them with the crimes.

This past week it has become clear that the authorities will have to release them, but not without trying to make themselves look good first. They’ve heard each person’s case separately, and released the least likely suspects first (a professor, 2 women, a library staff member – who’s also an LCS graduate.) There are four still in prison, and Franklin is one of them. /The “good” news is that the police treatment of all of them has been excellent. Families and friends have been allowed easy access to them. They have been held separately from the rest of the prison population, and by Franklin’s description and still positive attitude, they have not been mistreated. It’s Friday night and people are confident that Franklin and the others will be released Monday or Tuesday … after another weekend in prison.

I just had no idea how totally naïve I was about “justice” in the developing world. Evidently this is quite common in many parts of the world – that prisoners can be held without charge or evidence, and that dehumanizing violence inside prisons is the norm. I know that the American criminal justice system has problems, and that innocent people sometimes go to jail, and that many poor people do not trust the system at all. But I also happened to read last week about student protests at the University of California in which many people were arrested for occupying a University building. The line that caught my attention was about a woman who was arrested, charged and released, “to await her trial in 60 days.” We US Americans are lucky people. Franklin’s been awaiting his day in court in prison for the last 10 days. Hopefully it will come on Monday or Tuesday.

Food

2009-11-30T14:16:00.001-08:00

I’ve written a lot about food since I’ve been here – what we eat, and how we prepare it. I haven’t said much about how we think about food here. I should step back a few years and explain something first … In the last ten years I’ve worked in schools with significant immigrant populations, and where a huge percentage of the students live in poverty (as it is defined in the United States.) I have often been really uncomfortable with the way I see these kids interact with food. Whenever there was a pot luck dinner, I would get so irritated when I would see kids race to the table and fill their plates with no consideration for saving food for anyone else. When there’s ever free food, I would be genuinely embarrassed to have to make kids empty their pockets of the stash they had had taken. I have often said to kids, “come on, you act like you’ve never seen food before and will never see it again. Relax …”

In our first few weeks here we struggled to work out the proportions of how to prepare food for 30 people every day. There were a few days when the last people in line didn’t get much to eat at all, and no one ever got seconds. Given that we didn’t have much control over what we ate, and didn’t have the ability to go out and get our own food if we didn’t like whatever was served, it was hard for us to manage our food intake. We found ourselves getting mad when others took too much food. If someone unexpected showed up to a meal, we’d jealously eye the food on their plate. We would eat really quickly hoping for seconds, and then go get them even if we weren’t totally hungry. When visitors bring a bag of M&M’s, we devour it in about 11 seconds. Now, I need to emphasize that we have enough food here and no one’s wasting away. We don’t often have extra, but we generally have enough. We get three meals a day, and they’re usually good meals. But just that little fear that we might not get as much as we want, or that the next meal might be one that we didn’t love, turned us into some pretty greedy, food hoarders. I finally understand why people who have grown up without an abundance of food around them act kind of crazy at a pot luck buffet because all of us volunteers have watched ourselves demonstrate some of those same unflattering behaviors in the past few months. When you can’t have as much of whatever you want, whenever you want it, things get complicated. I really never understood that before.

Reverse Harvest

2009-11-14T13:25:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving is coming up soon … I LOVE Thanksgiving! I always remember loving Thanksgiving, and not just because my birthday always falls on or around the 4th Thursday in November. I love that Thanksgiving is about three of my favorite things – food, my family, and organized team sports. There’s no big drama around gifts or parties or fancy outfits or spending money (well, except the money we spend on the feast!) Maybe I would feel less relaxed about it all if I was the one in charge of orchestrating said feast, but since I remain just a sous chef in the dinner prep, it’s pretty much just fun for me.

Much to my dismay, Thanksgiving is not observed in Haiti. But since LCS is undeniably a bi-national organization, it IS observed here. We still have school, but in the afternoon there’s a big American football game that the staff play and the kids all watch. And for dinner, we have a feast. Everyone prepares their favorite dish, and we eat our faces off (or so I’m told!) Since my birthday falls exactly on the big day this year, I’m especially looking forward to sharing my own birthday festivities with this Caribbean flavored thanksgiving.

The Haitian Project (the US nonprofit that operates Louverture Cleary School) has an annual activity called the “Reverse Harvest” to encourage US Americans to use Thanksgiving as an opportunity not only to express our gratitude for the many blessings we share, but also to participate in an act of solidarity with those around the world who have so much less. The idea is to spend the day on November 20th fasting, in whatever way is appropriate for you, and in prayerful reflection on the important connection between ourselves and the billions in the world who will not have enough to eat at all on November 20th. Either before the day, or at the end of it, you can then decide on an amount of money that you did NOT spend on food that day, and make a contribution to an organization working to improve the chances of those who are hungry in the world. Obviously I hope you would choose to contribute to Louverture Cleary School, but honestly, if there’s some other organization that’s important to you, make a donation to that organization. Really, we’re all on the same team here.

A few facts about LCS …
It costs 7 dollars a day to feed and educate a student at LCS.
Nothing is wasted here – we get our rice, pasta, sugar, and cleaning supplies donated by Haitian businesses and international aid organizations. Every dollar goes a long way here.
Not only does LCS feed 350 children three healthy meals each day, we continue to feed about 40 children from the neighborhood lunch each day as well.

If you want to participate in the reverse harvest, send an e-mail to development@haitianproject.org to sign up officially. The Haitian Project will send you some readings and reflections as well as ideas about how you might spend the day. Or, just do it on your own. If you are willing and able to make a contribution, you can do it online, but there’s a small fee on the credit card transaction, so it’s actually better to write a check and mail it directly to: The Haitian Project, P.O. Box 6891, Providence, RI 02940

Thank you! I’ll be thinking of all of you – and be thankful for all of you - on my birthday!

Haikus

2009-11-14T13:24:00.002-08:00

I love to write Haikus. I just think they’re hilarious - short and sweet and witty. Ever since college I’ve always loved writing haikus as a sort of narration of the funny events in my life and in the lives of my closest community. So, my time in Haiti has been no different. Here are a few stories – and the Haikus that they inspired – that I’ve written and posted on the wall in the past three months …

1. I had this weird looking bug bite on my hand that turned out to be a chigger. Gross. Has anyone ever had chiggers? I guess they’re pretty common in warm climates, even in the south of the United States. They’re these little bugs that literally live under your skin and keep burrowing until they die. The best way to kill them is to put nail polish over the little trail of bites to suffocate the little bastards. After a few weeks of wondering what the hell it was, I tried the nail polish trick, and it worked. But before it was all gone, I composed the following haiku to the Chigger I named Pepe:
A Chigger Haiku:
Dear Pepe, Please will
You stop burrowing under
My skin. Thank you. Bye!

2. Then there was the runaway cow. I mentioned that the school purchases a cow for slaughter about twice a month. Well, this past Friday, he got loose from the place he was tied up on the soccer field. First I saw him running around while the little neighborhood kids played soccer around him. Then they caught him by the rope around his neck and retied him. I, needless to say really, was terrified as this fairly large bull ran around among about 20 small children. They were utterly unbothered. Then later that night – it was a Friday, so the students were gone – as some staff members played a campus wide game of hide and seek, suddenly we saw this huge shape emerge from the soccer field (which has a door, mind you.) Sure enough, the bef was loose again! This time he started running all around the whole campus. And he ran quite a bit faster than I was really comfortable with. A few people tried to catch him – by the tail, by the rope, but nobody could. Finally we just ushered him back to the soccer field and closed the door tightly. You’ll all be glad to know that the cow in question then punished us by crapping ALL OVER the soccer field and playground. But we got the last laugh because we ate him for lunch on Monday.
A Runaway Cow Haiku
Um … guys, where’s the bef?
Holy crap he’s after us!
I’m not scared … are you?

3. Have I mentioned the mosquitos in this place? Ugh. I hate them. Anything that contributes to the death of mosquitos is my friend – even the horrible smelling insecticides we spray all over the place. But the best mosquito killers of all are the little lizards – geccos actually - who crawl around the walls, chirping quietly as they eat the mosquitos for lunch. One night as I watched this joyful ritual, I composed the following haiku:
A love poem
Little lizard friend,
You crawl around eating bugs.
I think I love you.

4. Way back in August, I played one of my favorite community games. I wrote the first two lines of a haiku and left the last line open for people to complete. It was after we had our first experience with Haitian mangos, and with the different methods which Haitians and US Americans use to enjoy the mangoes. Here’s the community Haiku that emerged:
A Mango Haiku
How to eat mangos?
With a knife or with your teeth?
• Both ways require floss.
• Knife? The Haitians glare
• Your face is sticky
• Better have a plan
• Haitians have more fun
• Either or, it’s a chore
• Knife? Here Bolito … Bolito is one of the many dogs who roams this place begging for food and licking himself constantly. No one really likes Bolito.

Los Debates

2009-11-14T13:24:00.001-08:00

In my Spanish classes this week I decided to organize an activity that would get ALL of the kids speaking Spanish instead of the usual kids who love to speak and participate all the time. I made a bunch of debate topics about ridiculous things, and each pair of partners chose a topic to debate, and had a class period to prepare a two minute debate. Then the class voted. It was pretty fun. But I had to think hard about debate topics that would be relevant and interesting to the kids here. I thought I’d share the list, since it gives a pretty good clue about what kids here are thinking about:

Which is better …
Bolito vs. Anyan (two of the dogs on campus)
Boys vvs. Girls
Soccer vs. Basketball
Brazil vs. Argentina (the two favorite international soccer teams in Haiti)
Coca Cola vs. Tampico (this horribly sugary “juice” drink that everyone here buys
Incinerator vs. Compost (this one really turned into “which job is worse?” Compost definitely won that debate!)
Mosquitos vs. ants (also became a debate over which was worse)
Haiti vs. United States
French vs. Spanish
Cats vs. Dogs
Toussaint L’Ouverture vs. Jean Jacques Dessalines (two leaders of the Haitian Revolution)
Short people vs. Tall people

It was pretty funny. Some of them are remarkably good debaters, even in their 4th language. They were intended to be 2 minutes each, but today the two girls debating Dogs vs. Cats were so passionate, and the class was full of commentary and counter-arguments, that I think I let it go on for about 10 minutes. Oh well, managing the clock in the classroom never was my forte.

A Menu!

2009-11-14T13:23:00.000-08:00

I went out for dinner the other night! It was wonderful. I had mentioned the other day that I really missed being able to CHOOSE what I want to eat, instead of just eating what’s served according to the school schedule. And lucky me, the opportunity arose for a few of use to go out to dinner with a few of the board members who were in town. We went to one of the fancy hotels in town and sat by the pool outside under the stars. The place reminded me of my image of a Graham Greene or Hemingway novel – a mix of local people and foreigners sharing cocktails around wicker tables while impeccably dressed Haitian waiters run around cracking jokes and serving food. The menu wasn’t large, but it had Steak au pauvre on it and that’s what my body was screaming for … PROTEIN. It was delicious. So was the beer and the espresso ice cream we had for dessert. I go out to eat at least twice a week at home, and none of those meals ever tasted as good as this one.

Halloween – Machetes at the Nuncio’s

2009-11-01T08:04:00.001-08:00

The night before Halloween we celebrated Samantha’s birthday with a costume party, cake and adult beverages. I wasn’t sure how the whole costume thing would work, since they don’t do costumes on Halloween here at all. But I was delighted to see how everyone rose to the occasion! I was a tap tap – one of those Haitian pick up truck / buses that’s always painted absurdly bright colors and usually has a bible quote written in English. Mr. Hubert, the principal and philosophy teacher for the oldest students, was Nietzsche – hence the serious face, white moustache and “God is Dead” quote. Jon was Route National 3 – so he’s covered in trash and a nice sign that says “don’t throw trash here.” We had a crazed surgeon, a bunny rabbit, an LCS student, a few rappers, a cocktail waitress, and oh yeah … Peter was a square. He wore a square around his neck and pulled his socks and shorts way up, and just generally acted like a big nerd all night. Very clever. We had a great time!

On Saturday we spent the day working at the Papal Nuncio’s residence. The Papal Nuncio is like the Vatican’s ambassador to a country. The Nuncio is responsible for representing the interests of the Vatican to the government, as well as recommending Bishops for appointment and lots of other bureaucratic things. The Nuncio in Haiti right now is a Philippino Bishop who speaks like 7 languages. Of course Patrick Moynihan – who knows everyone – knows him well, so he volunteered the services of about 15 staff members (and of course his own family) to come help with a pretty significant work project at the Nuncio’s residence.

I must first describe this place. It’s in the hills south of Port au Prince and the house has an absolutely stunning view of the plain below – including the city, the airport, the bay and the mountains to the north. It’s strange to see Haiti from above. It’s so quiet and beautiful. You can still hear the muffled sounds of real life below though – horns honking, tap tap’s music blasting, the cheers from a soccer game, children crying, bells ringing to announce the approach of a shoe shiner … but it’s just so peaceful from a distance. The house itself is beautiful. It has this strange mix of European décor with classic art work from Haiti. The chapel reminded me of Italy – full of silver and dark wood – but with angels made of metal on the walls that are clearly made in Haiti.

Our work project involved clearing small trees from a back hill slope as well as trees on the front of the property. With the help of some of the staff from the house, we cut down trees, chopped them into manageable sized pieces, and fed what we could through a chipper to create mulch to spread on the newly cleared areas. It was hard work – but so satisfying to watch this enormous pile of tree parts that was taller than any of us get smaller and smaller as the wood chipper did its thing. My machete wielding muscles are quite sore today however. There are few activities so demanding on the muscles in one’s forearms as chopping with a machete.

Now it’s Sunday and I have exams to grade. 100 of them, to be exact. And grading Spanish exams requires an attention to detail that I’m not really accustomed to – because it sort of matters if you spell something with an e or an a … that’s kind of the whole point. Off I go!

Exams – and sharing

2009-11-01T08:02:00.002-08:00

This picture shows how kids here study – they pour over their notebooks trying to memorize everything in them. Frequently that means they walk around in circles murmuring out loud to themselves in order to commit everything to memory. Can you say “kinesthetic learners?”

The kids have been taking exams all week. They have a whole week of exams at the end of each quarter, and their exams count for 50% of their quarter grade. It’s crazy to watch them work on an exam sometimes for three hours, sometimes for 30 minutes and know that this work represents half of their grade for the class. They work so hard during the exam time! There’s no screwing around or joking about “I’m gonna fail …” as my American students unfortunately do sometimes. They just get to work and don’t stop until they’re done. Today I was proctoring exams in a room that’s right on the edge of the property across the street from a place that makes cement blocks. They run some incredibly loud machinery at that place, and by the end of two hours of listening to it, my ears were ringing. But somehow it seemed not to phase the kids at all. It’s like they’re just so used to things being uncomfortable, or having to make do in a bad situation, that they don’t even notice the deafening roar outside. I wish I could be so relaxed about things.

What’s so nice about having a big campus with lots of outside space is that as soon as they’re done, they leave and can go outside and study or run around and play. It’s perfect! Work hard, play hard, then be back in time for the next exam. There’s a two hour lunch / play break in the middle of the exam days! It makes me a little sad to think of the limitations of what we can do with our little school in Cambridge – where releasing the kids for two hours in the middle of the day to blow off steam is not an option. It would be so good for them!

Watching the kids take exams has also made me think more about something I’ve noticed a lot since being here. In general, Haitian people are incredibly generous with what they have, in a way that is frankly kind of embarrassing when I consider how stingy we Americans can be sometimes. If someone comes in to dinner with an avocado, they cut it up and pass the pieces around. If one kid doesn’t have money for a snack, her friend will give her a bite of his snack. It’s like everything is for the community. I asked James about this one day and he said that of course there are plenty of greedy, stingy people in Haiti, but that in general, people see sharing food as “money in the bank.” They know that this time they might be the one with the food, but next time they might be the one without, so it’s best to share now to ensure that others will share next time.

Why did exams make me think about sharing? I watched as 28 kids in the room shared one little white out pen. They just tossed it back and forth around the room, without causing any disruption or drama or without the owner of the white out complaining that everyone was using all of his stuff. I watched kids share calculators, passing them around without talking or complaining, or telling each other to get your own darn calculator. The most amazing moment was when one little kid’s blue pen ran out. He asked me for one, but all I had was black (and for some reason that is utterly inexplicable to me, they are required to write only in blue pen.) He then asked the rest of the kids, but no one had one. So he sat there for a while trying to make the pen work. Then, without even talking, the kid next to him just handed him his pen while he read the next question. The pen-less kid then scribbled down answers until the other kid tapped his arm to give it back. They went back and forth for the next 30 minutes sharing one blue pen to write two exams. I was amazed. This simply would not happen in the United States. We are all accustomed to having what we need when we need it, that we kind of fall apart a little when inconvenienced by loud noises outside an exam room, or having to share our white out, or not having a pen, or having to share the avocado that I bought with my own money with whomever’s sitting at the table. It’s humbling, really.

The many uses of Coca Cola

2009-11-01T08:02:00.001-08:00

Aside from providing a sweet, frosty treat at the end of a long, hot day, I have recently discovered two other important uses of the world’s favorite cola. First, we’ve had some recent concerns about our drinking water – not that it’s bacteria ridden, but that we might actually be over treating it with chlorine. It hasn’t been a problem for me personally, but a few other volunteers have been sick on a few recent weekends after the chlorine treatment happens. So, they’re drinking bottled water, boiled water … and coca cola. I don’t know – does it settle the stomach? Does it re-hydrate? Or is it just tasty? Anyway, we’re working on the water situation, and in the meantime, some people are taking precautions and drinking Coke.

Then this morning … we went to our usual Mass with 400 children and families at the Missionaries of Charities in Delmas. We came in two cars, and on the way out, discovered that one driver had left the lights on and the battery on the truck was dead. First we tried pushing it down the hill while she tried starting the ignition – evidently sometimes this works. It didn’t. So we pulled the other car up next to the truck and tried jumping it. But either the cables were bad or something, because it wasn’t working at all. Then as a small crowd of neighbors and people coming out of Mass gathered to watch, a man with a local mechanic shop came over with his tools and just started helping. They tried everything, but nothing worked. The highlight of the efforts included sending a tiny little kid around the corner to buy a coke, then using the coke to clean off the battery acid from the battery so the jumper cables could get a better grip. I think I had heard of this before, but would not really have believed it if I didn’t witness it with my own eyes. This crusty, baked on battery acid just pulled away. It was amazing. And gross. Well, the end of the battery story is that it never actually worked. We ended up taking the good battery out of the car that worked, putting it in the truck to start it, then taking it out and putting it back in the other car to start it … then putting the bad battery in one of the already running cars for it to charge. Is that freaking brilliant or what? Who needs AAA?

Parli Italiano?

2009-11-01T08:01:00.002-08:00

Early in the school year I mentioned to some kids that I speak Italian. Or more accurately, there was a time in my life when I spoke Italian quite well and I can probably still sort of fake it. 2 kids asked me if I would teach them Italian and I agreed. My brother brought my old Italian book from home down to Virginia when I was there for Bobby’s wedding, and so last week I announced to all 350 kids that anyone who wanted to learn some Italian could come during play hour on Tuesday. Now, I need to explain that play hour is a sacred ting here. School ends at 3:30, then kids work / clean until about 4:30 or sometimes 5. Play hour is 4:30 – 5:30 before dinner and evening study hours. During play hour there is a soccer game on every square inch of flat ground. There is a card game or dominoes game on every table. It is one moment in kids’ days here that is utterly unscheduled and belongs entirely to themselves. But despite all this, the night of my first Italian club meeting, I had a bout 25 kids show up.

They all brought their little notebooks – because learning in this culture = what you write in your notebook. But they’re so incredibly good orally. They listened and repeated and when I corrected their “too French” or “too Spanish” accents on certain words, they fixed them – perfectly. They approach language the way I do. They wanted some rules and frameworks to organize it all, but mostly they just wanted to call out the things they wanted to learn and have me say them and write them for them to repeat and write in their notebooks. They’re so scary good at memorizing things that a few days later lots of them still remember what I taught them and they’re greeting me with “buona sera” and announcing “ho fame!” in the middle of Spanish class. I really can’t believe I’ve stumbled into a culture of people who are as completely obsessed and nerdy about language as I am! I also can’t believe I have an excuse to study my Italian again … in Haiti. Who woulda thunk?

Trash progress

2009-11-01T08:01:00.001-08:00

Route National 3 Trash update … we have completely cleaned both sides of the road for about 7 streets, and are working on the last two streets in the opposite direction from school. At Santo 3, the site of one of the ugliest piles which is now completely clean, the local government put up a sign that says “Santo 3 is not a place for dumping trash. Blah blah blah … you will be arrested and fined if caught dumping trash here.” So wow, somebody noticed. Now the question is whether or not the local law enforcement has the ability to actually enforce this new rule. We shall see …

Down on the other end of the road, at Santo 9, is the latest and grossest pile that we’re working on. It’s actually more of a cesspool than a pile. And there’s been so much rain lately that it’s lots of trash swimming in a sea of … water. They were out working on a big hole to start burying the trash in when a man came over and explained first in Kreyol, then in perfect American English that he owns the property and is working on fixing the drainage and getting the city to come over and pick up the trash so he can fix the drainage. Corey asked him when this was happening … soon or in January. He answered, “I know, I’m not waiting for this bullshit country to do anything … I’m meeting with them this week.” Again … we shall see.

Lasagna twa kwizin

2009-10-10T12:08:00.001-07:00

Tonight was one of those awesome “this doesn’t happen in my normal life” experiences. It was a crazy day. Class in the morning, helping with the little kids’ meal program and play time around 2 pm, then cleanup hour with 24 LCS kids from 3:30 to 5, then it was time to start making dinner. Monday night is lasagna night, and my cooking team and I have a lasagna factory that’s a pretty well oiled machine. But we were getting a late start, and I knew the water would take forever to boil on our little stove top, so I knew we would never have dinner on the table by six. Then we discovered that we didn’t have any gas for the stove in our kitchen. Normally we’d just use the school cafeteria kitchen in that situation, but there’s actually no stove in there. Everything they make for the kids is made on burners in giant pots. So …. We prepped the sauce in our kitchen. Boiled the water for the pasta in the Moynihans’ kitchen across the street, made the sauce in the school kitchen (because the stove at the Moynihans wouldn’t be big enough for two big pots of water and a big pot for making sauce.) One person watched the water and cooked the pasta while three others made the sauce. Then we walked it all across the street to put it all together and bake in the Moynihans’ oven. In the end we were only thirty minutes late and 30 people enjoyed 4 lasagnas and a side of leftover rice from Saturday. Three Kitchen Lasagna was an unexpected success.

A dirty problem

2009-10-10T12:07:00.004-07:00

I find myself thinking about trash a lot here. At home I sometimes marvel at how much trash I could produce in a week, but then I’d just put out the barrels and the recycling on Tuesday morning and by Tuesday afternoon they’d be empty again, ready for me to refill. Where does it all go? I guess it goes to a landfill somewhere, but I have absolutely no idea where, or what it looks like, or who manages it, or what it smells like. I also have no idea how much our system of waste management costs. I guess that’s what property taxes are for … but I really don’t know.

Here, the trash problem is unavoidable. At the school it is a very tightly managed process. Metal, glass, compost and burnable trash are separated. The metal cans need to be crushed with a shovel and thrown with the glass into the metal pit in the corner of the playground where they will stay for … eternity, I guess. The compost is added to the pile, turned every few days, and sifted every few weeks. Everything else – including plastic – is thrown in the incinerator and burned every few days. We’re even working on saving certain types of plastic and metal that can be recycled. Within the school walls, this process works well, and it is rare to find a piece of trash out of place.

Outside the walls of LCS it’s a different story. Trash is everywhere. On the drive from the airport to the school one passes piles and piles of trash on the side of the road. Sometimes the piles are on fire with thick black smoke drifting into the air. In the neighborhood around the school there is trash littering the gardens and yards and roads – from plastic bags to metal cans to plastic bottles. What the heck are people supposed to do with it? I know they burn their own trash near their own homes, but there’s no public sanitation system. There are few public trash cans (and these are only in the city, not in the surrounding towns.) I really can’t figure it out.

We’re working hard with the kids to get them to take a real responsibility for the neighborhood around the school as well as for the school itself. We’ve started taking little groups of kids out in the afternoon during cleanup hour to pick up the trash in the neighborhood and bring it back to the school’s incinerator to burn. The hope is that after it’s clean, we can install some public trash cans, and teach our neighbors to use them, and to bring them into the school to be burned when they’re full. But wow, these first few days of this project have been hard. It reminds me of the most challenging PHA community service day ever. Try to convince a bunch of teenagers to pick up trash with their hands, when they know that these are just a few streets in all of Haiti, and that they will probably just look the same tomorrow. Seriously, it’s like getting PHA kids excited about raking leaves in a Somerville park in October when there are still tons of leaves on the trees overhead. Feels a bit like shouting into the wind. But after a few days, when the kids started to see progress, their attitude started to shift from feet dragging and whiny to cautiously optimistic to genuinely proud of their work. The best part was when the little kids from the neighborhood joined us, because if this is going to work at all, it’s going to be because those same little kids get their parents to use the trash cans instead of just dropping their trash in the street.

Then yesterday we took a small group of the oldest students out of the neighborhood onto the national road nearby. It’s one of the reasonably well paved roads (thanks to the US army corps of engineers back in the 1920’s) but it is lined with piles of trash up to the ankles. We went out with shovels, pickaxes, wheelbarrows, buckets, some diesel fuel and matches. For two hours kids, teachers, staff, and volunteers raked the trash into piles, pulled out and crushed the metal cans, and lit the piles on fire. I know, it’s gross. Burning plastic is dangerous and the fumes were kind of gross. But like I said, what else are people supposed to do? And maybe it is just a few streets in all of Haiti, but I guess we have to start somewhere.

Study Hours

2009-10-10T12:07:00.003-07:00

I love watching these kids work during study hours each night. They know how to study in a way that I only dream that my American students would. They don’t just “do homework” to get it done. They study. They crowd around each other’s notebooks reviewing the day’s notes. They walk around outside reading their notes out loud to themselves. They sit alone in little corners quietly reading. And they do it with minimal adult supervision. There are adults on duty during study hours, but we’re just there to answer questions, and occasionally manage the noise level or wake up a sleepy student. But they just seem to understand that success in class requires significant work outside of class. Of course the work that they’re asked to do here is much more about memorization and regurgitation than the work that we generally ask of our kids in the States. But somehow in our efforts to structure everything so much, and hold kids accountable for every little thing, we’ve taught them that they only have to do exactly what we tell them to do, and if it’s not going to be “checked” the next day, then there must not be any work to do. I don’t have any brilliant insights on this one yet, but I’m working on it.

On the other hand … I wish the kids here had half of the critical thinking skills that my PHA kids have. In class the kids here are so good at copying notes and doing concrete tasks, but struggle so much to think outside the box or ask original questions. It’s not that they’re not capable, but they haven’t been asked to do so often enough. The oldest kids are better, because they’ve had many years of American teachers, but the younger ones’ heads explode a little when you ask them to do something that doesn’t have a right answer. Many seem scared to speak up in class for fear of being wrong or being laughed at by their peers (which happens all the time and makes me CRAZY!) I sort of miss the kids who will just say whatever they’re thinking, or play devil’s advocate or passionately defend an unpopular opinion. I guess that’s why I’m here. We’ll see if I can make any progress on that this year.

Names

2009-10-10T12:07:00.001-07:00

The names around here are killing me. KILLING me. There are 350 kids in the school, and I teach 200 of them. But I only see each class 1 or 2 or 3 days each week, so I am struggling to learn their names. Add to that the complication that some people here go by their first names, others go by their last names, and others go by nicknames formed by combining the first few letters of their first and last names. And add to that the complication that I’m terrible at learning kids’ names anyway. And add to that the complication that all of these kids are Haitian. I’m accustomed to having about 10 Haitian kids in a class, and 7 Latino kids and 6 White kids. That makes the odds that I’m going to guess a name right a LOT better for me. I know, I know, it sounds like I’m saying all the black kids look alike. I’m not and they don’t. I’m sure I would be having the same challenge in a classroom full of 25 white kids with the same hair color. Oh, and did I mention that they’re all wearing uniforms? That really doesn’t help. It’s getting to the point that it’s kind of awkward for me to keep asking their names, since it’s probably the 7th time I’ve asked each one his or her name. Maybe by Christmas …?

Target

2009-10-10T12:06:00.000-07:00

It was so good to be in the United States last weekend! I indulged in 4 Starbucks iced lattes in four days, ate more meat in those days than I’ve had in the past seven weeks, and of course spent more money in seven hours than I have in those seven weeks. Specifically, I spent 20 dollars on food on the plane and in JFK airport (but it was a REALLY good salad …) That’s almost as much as I’ve spent on laundry, peanut butter, cokes and cookies in Haiti since August 9. The strangest part though was Target. I love that place. I haven’t been gone long enough to have forgotten what it’s like to be in a Target store. But what was a little shocking to me was how after about 17 seconds there, I so quickly fell back into my old “shopping = entertainment” mindset. I just sort of wanted everything I laid eyes on. I found myself wishing I was going back to a cool climate just so I had an excuse to buy a cute jacket, and dreaming of an apartment in Somerville to decorate. I haven’t thought about that stuff in so long … but 17 seconds in Target was all it took. There’s certainly nothing wrong with all of that per se, but it’s been sort of nice to not always be thinking about what else I “need” all the time. Turns out I really don’t need much – but wow, those iced lattes were delicious ….

Bobby and Lauren’s wedding was delightful of course. They have a remarkably mature sense of style for being 23 years old. Their wedding perfectly fit their personalities, and their priorities and their tastes. Aside from the red shoes and the wonderful centerpieces and the tasty food, the best thing to me was their decision to forgo the traditional wedding favors in order to make a contribution to Louverture Cleary School instead. I put out some brochures about the school – and of course some donation envelopes – and lots of people took them. Who knows how many will be returned with checks inside, but I just appreciated the opportunity to invite people to think a bit more globally than we usually do at a wedding. And like I said, it was all just SO delightfully Bobby and Lauren.

Check out some pictures in my Picassa album!

2009-10-10T11:54:00.000-07:00

Off to Virginia!

2009-09-20T08:58:00.000-07:00

I leave on Thursday morning for my brother Bobby’s wedding in Virginia. I’m so excited to see everyone and to enjoy a weekend of relative luxury. I’ve already planned my first meal when I arrive at JFK Thursday afternoon … an iced coffee and a salad with chicken on it. I can’t wait! Then on to Virginia Beach for wedding festivities and a shopping trip to Target. I realized that my red strappy sundress will absolutely need a little sweater on top of it since I have some fairly ridiculous sunburn lines on my neck and arms. And my always exposed toes are crying for a pedicure. And before flying back here, I’ll pick up all kinds of essentials (and some treats!) to bring back to the volunteers. I figure they’ll probably end up covering my classes while I’m gone, so I may as well make it worth their while! All this and a WEDDING too? What a great weekend!

A Three Shower Day

2009-09-20T08:57:00.000-07:00

I had one of those days today where I did nothing that I thought I’d do, but didn’t waste a single minute. I guess that’s an experience lots of people can relate to, but the particular nature of my weird Saturday will especially resonate with people who have spent any time in the developing world. My plan for the day was to get lots of schoolwork done, read a little, go for a run (around the soccer field) and make dinner. A good plan for a Saturday in Haiti.

I woke up at 6:45 and was pretty delighted that I had managed to sleep in. It’s hard to do that here usually. I gathered up my laundry, the soap, some bleach and my hundred Goudes (about $2.50) to pay the lady who would wash my clothes. After my first attempt at washing my own clothes a few weeks ago I gave up in favor of the ladies who can do it about a hundred times better and faster than I can. Anyway … breakfast was at about 7:15 and we had my favorite tasty, absurdly sweet oatmeal. Yum. After breakfast I caught about 15 minutes of Internet time, then decided to go out to the back basketball court to run and work out a little. In the early morning sun (about 8:15) I can last running for about ten minutes. Then I pretty much die so I seek shade and do whatever new exercises I can think of using a resistance band and playground equipment. I’m getting pretty good at it! After my thirty minutes, I took shower number one. Those are the showers when I love not having hot water! So far, that’s exactly what I planned to do today.

At 9:15 we had a volunteer meeting that lasted until about 10:30. The fun part of that meeting was passing around the bag of Snickers that one of the board members had brought from the states! It’s totally normal to lick the wrappers of bite sized Snickers bars, right? Anyway, when that meeting broke up is when my day got weird. Since one volunteer wasn’t feeling very well, I told her I’d take care of her turn at the compost pile. I’ve been here six weeks and somehow have never had to deal with the incinerator or the compost, so I decided it was my turn.

Maybe you have a little compost bucket in your kitchen or backyard, and if you do, I think that’s awesome. I hope to do the same when I return to the States. But wow, the compost pile for the food remains of 400 people who eat three meals a day here … now that’s really something. It’s in two side by side concrete enclosures that are about 6 feet by six feet each, and when we started shoveling it, the pile was well over 18 inches deep at some spots. The task is to move the whole pile from one side of the pit to the other side so that the contents mix up which speeds up decomposition. Today we had the added bonus of sifting the compost which means that every shovel full gets put onto a wooden sifter with a mesh bottom. Two people then shake the sifter back and forth over a wheelbarrow to loosen any of the good soil that has formed, and then toss the remaining compost contents onto the new pile. Aside from being physically demanding work for Peter and me, and aside form the fact that it was in the 11 am sun, the most unpleasant part was that it smelled very strongly like baby vomit. Well, at first it smelled like baby vomit, but as we got to the bottom of the pile where the material was more dense and wet, it started to pretty much just smell like shit. And my other favorite part was that as we shook the sifter over the wheelbarrow, pieces of wet dirt and whatever else fell through the mesh landed all over my feet. Tasty.

After about an hour and a half we were done and spread the disappointingly small amount of dirt around one of the gardens. We put away the tools and I looked down at myself … and decided that the next part of my day would be dedicated to washing all of the clothes and shoes I was wearing. Too bad my laundry lady was already done with the rest of my clothes! Shower number 2 then took place at about 12:15, and even though I was physically clean at that point, I just couldn’t get the faint smell and taste of baby vomit out of the back of my throat for hours. Lunch however – chicken avocado salad - was delicious. And my sneakers are now better looking than they were when I got here!

I spent the next 2 hours washing my clothes and scrubbing my sneakers with a toothbrush and rinsing them in copious amounts of bleach and detergent. This task really shouldn’t take 2 hours, but I’m incredibly bad at it, so it did. Another afternoon meeting, followed by dinner prep which included a near catastrophe in the making of rice for 25 people, followed by Mass and a delicious dinner then led to my third unexpected shower.

During dinner, it started pouring. POURING. Rain here is serious business – it comes on fast and strong. As I took my first few bites of the very tasty dinner we had made, I heard the first sprinkles and ran outside with a flashlight to collect all of my clothes off the lines outside. I managed to rescue most of it before the real downpours, but by the time I made it back inside and sat down again, I was pretty wet. As we ate and listened to the pouring rain and thunder, the roof overhead started to leak a bit. Since I was already soaked, I didn’t really care that there was water dripping on my head, so I just kept on eating. It was a nice little pseudo-shower. Finally, after dinner I headed upstairs to put away my laundry and do some writing … when I remembered it was my turn to clean the bathrooms. Damn. So now, it’s about ten and I might go enjoy shower number 4 before going to sleep. So much for my plans for the day. I guess the schoolwork will have to wait until tomorrow?!

RIP – Bef la

2009-09-20T08:55:00.001-07:00

Last Friday I walked out to the soccer field to play with the little kids from the neighborhood and there in the corner was a cow. At first I thought that somehow a cow had wandered onto the property, but one of the LCS students assured me that this was totally normal. Every few weeks, the school buys a cow, slaughters it, and all 400 of us eat if for lunch. Okay. So as the bef wandered the field chewing on grass, the kids played soccer around him and I cracked jokes about whose team he was on and why no one was passing the ball to him. That weekend we found out that the cow would be slaughtered on Monday morning, and a few curious volunteers planned to be up in time to watch. I decided I’d watch from a distance, but I wanted to get a picture of our friend the cow before he met his demise. So, I wandered out to the soccer field at about 5:45 am … bummer … too late. There he was bleeding out between the two goalposts, as a man who had covered himself in the ash from the incinerator (to keep off the blood splatter) began to butcher him. That afternoon when the neighborhood kids came for lunch and to play, I asked them where our friend the cow was, and why he wasn’t going to play soccer with us again. “nou te maje li!” they happily shouted. WE ATE HIM! I guess people here have a much greater awareness of where their food comes from than most Americans do.

Elev yon an klas la

2009-09-20T08:53:00.000-07:00

I hesitate to write much yet about kids in class because it’s only been a few days, and I know that these are just first impressions. So as school progresses, I know I’ll write more when I know them better as students and as people, but here’s what I see so far.

First of all, these kids look so good in their uniforms. Tuesday morning as I came downstairs and saw them all walking around outside, I just smiled to myself. The boys where dark green pants and light yellow button up shirts, and the girls where the same shirts with green plaid skirts, white socks and black shoes. To be fair, this particular color combination would look pretty terrible on most white people, but these kids look gorgeous in it. They wear their uniforms with a certain pride and care and wouldn’t dream of sitting on the floor or getting their uniform or school shoes dirty. In a country with so much dust and puddles, it amazes me how clean people generally look.

In class on that first day, kids were excited and nervous and chatty with each other, and realized quickly that teaching here will require all of the same kid management skills that I have collected over the years teaching in the states. They want the adult in the room to be in charge, and they very much want to learn, but they’re also kids and will take any chance a teacher gives them to do the things that kids do.

I am incredibly impressed by their Spanish skills. I’m teaching the oldest kids who have had Spanish for three to six years already, and even the youngest of them are quite capable of asking basic questions, expressing simple ideas, and understanding me pretty well. I thought I’d have to review lots of basics with them, but I really don’t think I will. They know what they’re doing … on to the subjunctive! There were moments when I just had to laugh to myself at the sight of ME speaking my second language to a group of Haitian children speaking their fourth language. I’m so accustomed to the mistakes and broken accent of English speakers’ Spanish, but it will take me a while to get used to the grammatical challenges and unique accent of Kreyol speakers’ Spanish. In each class we mostly spoke Spanish, but when kids couldn’t express something clearly in Spanish, they used English, and when they didn’t know how to say it in English, they looked it up in a French dictionary first. And I threw around French and Kreyol when I could to check their understanding. The whole thing blew my mind.

I discovered quickly that my teacher personality seems to work here. A good mix of structure, insistence on listening when other people are speaking, lots of smiles and lots of jokes … by Friday I had more kids listening to each other and raising their hands to participate. But the actual stuff I do in class every day will be wildly different from what I normally do. My reliance on paper and print materials will not work here. I’ll let you know when I figure out how to deal with that.

From Zero to Three Hundred Fifty

2009-09-20T08:50:00.000-07:00

Sunday night before school started, we were all ready for the real action to begin. Enough painting and cleaning and planning and talking and adults. We were ready for some kids. Well, Monday morning, there they were … all 350 of them! They arrived mostly by foot and tap tap with their parents. Most were carrying small bags, thin mattresses rolled up, small buckets and backpacks. They ran around greeting each other and stood in little groups all around campus while their parents waited in line to register them. It was the first of many times this week when I’ve smiled to myself with the thought that kids really are just kids – no matter where.

Mr. Hubert, the principal, had told us that there would be a parent meeting in the morning at 9 am on the basketball court. In the back of my mind I wondered where they would all sit, since I had never seen more than about 30 chairs anywhere in the school. At around 10, when the meeting finally started, I had my answer. Who needs to sit? They all just stood and huddled around one of the round cement tables under the big mango tree while Mr. Hubert stood on top of the table and projected his voice so that most of the people could hear him. Of course, that’s exactly what a parent meeting in Haiti would look like!

After the kids got settled in their dorms and cleaned up the campus and played lots of soccer all over every single cement and grass surface in the place and ate dinner, we had a whole school meeting during which, surprise, the kids all stood on the basketball court and whoever was speaking stood on the round table under the mango tree. They heard from the principal, from Patrick (the director of the project) and from 2 board members (one Haitian and one American) who came to be present for the start of school. What I loved was that this meeting wasn’t about rules and logistics. It was about who these kids are expected to be as human beings. They talked about hard work (inside and outside of classrooms), about putting others before themselves, about studying not just for its own sake, but to be better able to serve people around them and the world as a whole. I don’t know, maybe the kids are jaded having heard it all before, but I felt pretty inspired to get to work!

And then the kids dispersed to their dorms, the lights were cut out at 10 pm, and it got eerily quiet again … until Tuesday morning.

The Schedule

2009-09-20T08:47:00.000-07:00

Many of you know of my obsession with school schedules. I spent MANY hours this past summer working on the whole PHA high school schedule, and it became something of a Holy Quest for Perfection in School Scheduling. Well, perfect it was not, but it ultimately worked. Why am I mentioning this …? Because I finally got my LCS schedule on the Friday before school started, and it’s sort of fascinating / hilarious to note some of the similarities and differences between school here and school there.

Similarity # 1: The schedule is a source of anxiety and stress and pitched battles over what’s really important in the life of a school.

Similarity # 2: The schedule is never done on time. I’ve watched teachers – especially brand new teachers – practically go insane because they don’t have their class schedule yet for so many years, and this year was no different. Somehow they think that this whole mystery and complexity of teaching will be made magically easier by the piece of paper in their hands that tells them in what order and in what rooms their classes will meet. “How am I supposed to plan my classes if I don’t even know when they meet?” My somewhat jaded response … “ummmm …. It doesn’t actually matter that much. You just think it does.”

Similarity # 3: The schedule includes nasty compromises all over it. At the end of making the PHA schedule this summer, I felt kind of gross for having to compromise on many details that I know aren’t best for kids or teachers, but which were simply unavoidable given the limited resources of minutes, humans, and classrooms. Some of the compromises that the LCS schedule makes, however, would be almost unthinkable to PHA folks. Here are some of my favorites:
1. I have three double blocks in the week. All three have the first period in one room and the second period in a different room.
2. Many teachers see one section three times in one day, two times another day, and that’s their five periods of class for the week.
3. There are classes scheduled to meet outside in the tables y the basketball court. (which makes the old PHA “annex” seem kind of luxurious!)
4. One volunteer just discovered that her section of biology only meets 4 times a week while the other teacher’s section meets five times. It is now up to her to go fight for that last hour.
5. When a teacher is double booked – supposed to teach two classes at once – another teacher is assigned to cover one of the sections. (OK fine, to be fair, that DID happen once in the PHA schedule this year ….)
6. There is absolutely, unequivocally, no such thing as anybody “owning” a classroom. My 16 class periods meet in 5 classrooms.

Some other fascinating things about the way school works here …
1. There are 11 40 minute periods each day. Oh ... and everyone doesn't get a personal copy of their schedule. It's posted on sheets of paper in one location in the school, and the kids have to go and copy it down. And it's also not posted as a weekly grid, but as a list of classes each day. A little harder to follow!
2. Each quarter, there’s a whole week for exams, and students expect a week of review. That leaves about seven weeks of teaching each quarter. This one exam counts for 50% of their grade in each class each quarter.
3. School goes from 7 am to 3:25 pm, and is followed by an hour of school cleanup in which all 350 kids are at least loosely engaged in a work activity
4. Kids are often late for class after their lunch period because about 15 kids in each lunch block are assigned to clean the dishes. I have recently discovered this is also a very common excuse for why kids might be late to class in the period after their lunch ….
5. Every night the kids are required to be in a classroom (or hallway near a classroom) studying from 7:30 to 9:30. I love it! More on that later …
6. Lights are out at 10. And when I say lights out, I’m not kidding. They cut off the generators to the dorms. It gets very quiet all of the sudden!

Want to help?

2009-09-12T14:22:00.004-07:00

I appreciate the e-mails and blog comments and especially the actual letters and cards that many of you have sent in the past month. It’s wonderful to know that you’re enjoying my stories, that maybe they’re giving you something different to think about, and that you’re keeping me and the school in your thoughts and prayers. Now as the start of school is a few days away, I thought I’d ask if you are willing and able to make a small financial contribution to Louverture Cleary School in order to help get the year off to the best start possible. This school operates entirely on the generosity of others – who give their time, treasure and talent in different ways. Just last week we received the amazing news that a single donor will be buying the school a new Land Cruiser so that more students can get out into the community to work with the Missionaries of Charity, and so that all of the volunteers can actually go somewhere in one car! Such extraordinary generosity in difficult times is truly remarkable and a wonderful testament to the fact that people who know this school well believe completely in its mission to rebuild Haiti through the education and formation of one child at a time. I don’t expect any multi-thousand dollar contributions, but it doesn’t take much to make a huge impact here. It costs $7 to educate, house and feed a child here each day which means that the annual cost of each child’s education, room and board is less than $1,000. As you’ll read in the next few posts, nothing is wasted here, so you can be sure that any contribution you make will be getting to the people who need it. If you’re interested, please click on the Louverture Cleary School link on the right and click on “make a donation.” If you’d rather write a check, there are instructions on how to do that too. Thanks in advance if you decide to help – either now or at some point in the future.

You wouldn’t think …

2009-09-12T14:22:00.003-07:00

It would be hard to give away food to children in a starving country, but it turns out that it was. At lunch each day in the school cafeteria, the cooks dish up HUGE plates of beans and rice and the special sauce of the day. We watched day after day as kids who were at school to work on cleanup and maintenance projects ate about half of their plate, then scrape the rest into a big container. And most of us couldn’t even remotely finish a whole plate! We wondered what was happening with the leftovers. After a while we confirmed that workers were taking those leftovers home to feed their animals. While we all certainly appreciate the animals’ need to eat, it just seemed the height of absurdity that animals were getting our leftovers while there are a hundred children within a half mile radius of the school who don’t get enough to eat every day. We decided to start collecting the leftovers and then inviting the neighborhood children in for a meal. Good idea, right? Well, we made a few critical miscalculations. All of the leftovers ended up in one bowl (even though we DID ask people to scrape what they wouldn’t eat off their plate before they started eating) and we brought the bowl out to serve in lots of little bowls to the kids. Therein lay the problems. First, it looked to some people like we were serving all the scraps from plates AFTER people had eaten. Second, it’s considered somewhat uncivilized to eat rice out of a bowl here. Bowls are for soup or cereal, rice is served on plates. So on our first effort at feeding hungry kids, we ended up instead with some angry, offended parents. Not what we were going for.

Your first reaction to this story may be outrage – and it was definitely many people’s first reaction here too. How could these parents of hungry children be so foolish as to turn down perfectly good food? Can “beggars” really be choosers? No wonder this country’s so screwed up if people will let something so minor as bowls vs. plates get in the way of feeding their children? I think there’s some merit in all of those arguments, but this experience was also an incredibly important reminder about basic human dignity. No matter how poor and desperate a person is, she has the right to defend her own dignity – however she chooses to define that, even if I think it’s absurd. And if she perceives that our gift of food – no matter in what spirit it was offered – was presented in a way that disrespects her and her children, then she absolutely has the right to refuse it. It feels kind of gross to us – entitled, arrogant, ungrateful – but would you let your children eat food that you thought had been thrown away? Of course not.

So after our hurt feelings subsided a bit, we went back to the drawing board. Instead of serving the food from one big bowl, we plated it ahead of time, and made sure that each plate looked nice. Instead of just inviting the children in, Christina went to their parents first – and she wisely chose the ones who had made the biggest fuss last time – to make sure they understood that these were leftovers taken off plates before people ate rather than after. Since our first failed attempt, every afternoon for the past two weeks we have fed about thirty children lunch. They come in together, sit down, share plates, drink as much clean water as they want, the big ones help the little ones eat, and then they help clean up before going to play at the playground. We haven’t figure out how this will work logistically once school starts, but at least we know now that we can do it, and that our efforts are appreciated by the children and their families.

Community organizing 101: you need to actually get the community involved in the organizing, or it might not be appreciated the way you think it should be! And if at first you don’t succeed … go back to the drawing board!

Teeth 2 – Franzi

2009-09-12T14:22:00.001-07:00

Remember the story about the little baby from the Missionaries of Charity with the dental abscess? Well, here’s an amazing follow up. No, this is not the story of the miracle cure of that particular child. We haven’t been back since our first, visit, so we don’t know what happened to her. But about a week later, a little boy from the neighborhood came in to the school with a swollen mouth, fever, and terrible pain. Corey, the future dentist, took a look at him and confirmed that he too had one totally rotten tooth, and a terrible infection. Luckily, this one wasn’t as far along as the little girl at the orphanage, so Corey was able to scrape out the decayed inside of this kid’s tooth. He gave him some Tylenol, and his parents said they’d watch it for a few days and if the swelling didn’t go down they’d try top take him to the clinic to get the abscess drained.

Then a few days later when we were serving all the little kids lunch, this one little boy kept following Corey around smiling at him. He didn’t even recognize the little boy, who’s name is Franzi, because his face had been so swollen when they first met. Four days after Corey’s little procedure, the swelling was gone, his pain was gone, and his fever was gone. He just looked like a totally gorgeous, happy ten year old.

Don’t cry over spilled paint

2009-09-12T14:21:00.002-07:00

In these last weeks before school starts, everyone’s busy painting classrooms, fixing desks, and cleaning and painting dorm rooms. Much has been made about the need for staff to model good work habits for kids, and one of those that kids often don’t do so well, is taking good care of tools and conserving resources. I had all this in mind as I organized a little group of five girls to clean and paint the inside of a particularly grimy looking classroom. As they washed the walls down, I was carefully moving a table so as to prevent paint from dripping on it. Of course, in the process, I completely knocked over a totally full bucket of paint. So much for my lesson in preserving resources! As the girls asll gasped and gathered around, I looked and them and asked, “uh oh, what should we do?” Luckily, I think maybe they’ve spilled a can of paint or two in their day because the oldest one, without even blinking, just said, “start painting!” So they started dipping their brushes and rollers in the giant paint puddle on the concrete floor, and started throwing it up on walls. Then I went and found a dustpan, and one of the girls and I cleaned up pretty much the whole big puddle. Two hours later, the room was all painted, the puddle was all cleaned up (hooray for acrylic paint and cement floors!) and we all had a quick thinking lesson in improvising when things don’t quite go as planned.

Out and About: Cold Coke and Sugar Cane

2009-09-12T14:21:00.001-07:00

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.

How do YOU eat a Mango?

2009-08-31T19:53:00.002-07:00

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 …

2009-08-31T19:53:00.001-07:00

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 …

2009-08-31T19:52:00.004-07:00

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

2009-08-31T19:52:00.003-07:00

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 –

2009-08-31T19:52:00.001-07:00

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

2009-08-31T19:51:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-27T19:18:00.003-07:00

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

2009-08-27T19:18:00.001-07:00

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

2009-08-27T19:17:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-08-21T15:52:00.001-07:00

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

2009-08-21T15:51:00.003-07:00

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

2009-08-21T15:51:00.001-07:00

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

2009-08-21T15:50:00.002-07:00

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 ….?

2009-08-21T15:50:00.001-07:00

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

2009-08-21T15:49:00.002-07:00

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

2009-08-21T15:49:00.001-07:00

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

2009-08-21T15:46:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-16T06:14:00.002-07:00

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

2009-08-16T06:14:00.001-07:00

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

2009-08-16T06:13:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-16T06:12:00.000-07:00

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.