How do YOU eat a Mango?

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

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

Picture this …

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

Then picture this …

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

Petonville

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

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

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

If I run out of sunblock –

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

Boulyon

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

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

The Incinerator Homerun

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

Teeth

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

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

The Missionaries of Charity

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

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

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

My first joke!

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

Prized possessions

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

How priorities shift.

Waiting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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