It's a Port-au-Prince Christmas

This was my first Christmas ever away from home. I didn't have very high expectations. Driving around Port-au-Prince, it's clear that Christmas here doesn't bear much in common with the North American version of the holiday. Strings of lights are rare when you have to burn gas in a generator just to keep the inside of your house lit. For the most part, the Christmas displays seemed to exist solely for the benefit of missionaries and other homesick blans (UN, embassy, and NGO workers). For example, the big plastic Christmas trees decked in lights in front of Gold's Gym. Or the life-size, mechanized Santa Claus creepily ringing his bell outside the door of a fancy French bakery. The more white people a store is visited by, the more likely you are to find inflated snowmen and reindeer and other ridiculously out-of-place items.

There is a Haitian version of a Christmas tree which is often seen in roadside markets. They usually take a tree about 4 feet tall, strip all its leaves and paint it white. Another tradition is making little houses and churches, about the size of a classroom globe. The buildings are put together with paperboard, windows and doors are cut all over the sides with patterns of colored tissue glued to cover the holes. Then a candle is placed inside. Not the safest of decorations, but very pretty.

My contribution to Christmas this year was the same as it usually is back home: almond roca. I wasn't sure I'd be able to pull it off. I had to roast skinny Haitian almonds and use raw cane sugar, but otherwise I was able to find all the same stuff. Of course once it was made, I wasn't really sure what to do with it. I was afraid the chocolate would melt in the heat, so I put it in my little fridge. The inverter batteries didn't last very long, and my fridge lost power, and as the cold almond roca went to room temperature, water condensed on its surface. I could go on, but suffice it to say that by Christmas day when I was giving away the last bit of roca it was a melty, chocolatey blob.

I spent most of Christmas Eve just hanging out with Charity, who runs the MCC office, and her friend Trish. Trish, I discovered, went to Seattle Pacific and graduated just a year before me. The most surprising thing about that was the fact that we didn't recognize each other immediately as fellow alumni. Basically she came here right after college to teach elementary school. She fell in love and got married to an Arab Haitian. Confused?

Another random fact about Haiti is that there are thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian people - mostly Christian - living in the capital. Click here for an interesting article on this phenomenon. They came in several waves for several reasons, and though they all speak Creole and call themselves Haitian first and foremost, most live in an insular community in the hills above Port-au-Prince. But the insularity is only social, Arab Haitians are completely integrated into the business scene, owning most of the supermarkets and some of the sweatshops in Port-au-Prince.

On the evening of the Eve, I went with Charity and Trish to a get-together at the house of an American missionary. There was a short service before the food came out. We sang Silent Night by candlelight, which I'm used to doing every Christmas Eve in Medford. There were probably about 25 people there - mostly Americans, mostly missionaries.

I'm a little wary of missionairies in Haiti. Well, everywhere. Many missionaries are the absolute salt of the earth, people who are giving what they have to give driven by pure compassion. But too often it seems that American missionaries confuse the military and economic superiority of the US with some kind of moral superiority. They see Voodoo as devil worship. I'll write more about the very complicated subject of Voodoo later, but right now I'll just say this: it's not devil worship.

So anyway, at this Christmas party I got to talking with the host a little bit. He's a doctor who's been providing free medical care to peasants in the southeast for 20 years. A fascinating person, definitely one of the salt-of-the-earth types. He was a conservative in the sense that he was generally pessimistic about human nature. But instead of blaming Haitians for all of the country's problems, as conservatives often do, he was keenly aware of the destruction wrought by US economic and military policy. As he gave me example after example, he waived his arms around the room at his other guests and said, "These people all think I'm nuts!" And indeed I did get the sense that other people had heard it all before. I plan to spend more time with this doctor.

So all in all it was a lovely Christmas Eve, comforting and challenging. On Christmas day, I got together with Matt and Esther (reforestation workers), Charity (country representative), and Trish and Tariq (SPU girl and Haitian husband) for pumpkin pancakes at Charity's house. Later I went hiking with Matt and Esther. Here's Matt and I, looking out from a point so high that we were in a cloud:



And here's Matt and Esther's adopted daughter Gabriela, aka most perfect baby of all time:



The day after Christmas Matthew, Esther, Gabriela and I went up to a place called Seguin. To get there you drive southeast out of Port-au-Prince for an hour until you're way up in the mountains. Then you leave your vehicle behind and walk. The landscape is stunning up there. The climate is quite different. The people selling used clothing have laid out jackets and sweaters. Instead of seeing oranges and bananas for sale everywhere, it's carrots and leeks. It seems like every square inch of farmable land is being used for something. Impassible slopes are terraced into little rows, and the road is always going up, down, or sideways along the steepest of grades. All the while you're passing villagers, mainly women in groups, walking and gossiping about whatever while balancing enormous loads on top of their heads.

And then, after four hours of this, the road levels out and you arrive in a pine forest, one of the few areas in Haiti that is, at least officially, protected from deforestation. We stayed in a lodge surrounded by flowers and grass. I was so beat from the hike that I laid down for a nap. Even in the middle of the day it was cold from the mountain wind. I tried to find a spot with filtered light so I wouldn't freeze:



But the light wasn't filtered enough. I actually burned the backs of my hands, I think for the first time in my life. And my face is peeling heavily right now.

The lodge is run by a fascinating character named Winnie. His parents were both Haitian, one black and one Arab. He lives up there in his mountain paradise, spending his days philosophizing about the problems and potential of his beloved Haiti. He's got wind and solar power, and he's always experimenting with plants and even a fish pond. Here's Winnie with Gabriela:



We all felt like we could have spent a month up there. Each day I woke up with a little shiver, put on my boots and walked out to a hill where I could see all the way to the ocean off the southern coast. Perched on a rock in the middle of one of Winnie's future bamboo forests, huddled in my fleece, listening to The Flaming Lips on my iPod, it was hard to imagine a more perfect moment.

But eventually we did have to leave. When we finally made it back to the truck, we found it had been incorporated into the market.

Dwa moun

"Dwa moun" is Creole for human rights. When people here ask me what I'm doing in Haiti if I'm not a missionary and not a soldier, I say "m'ap travay sou dwa moun." - I work on human rights.

In many ways it's an office like any other. There are computers, meetings, deadlines and egos. But some distinctly Haitian aspects as well: our daily lunch together as a staff; the handyman who is grooming and adoring his fighting rooster when he's not out running errands; the boss who surivived an assassination attempt. In 1998, not even during an especially turbulent time in Haiti, he was shot twice in his car just a half block from the office. There were two MCC volunteers in the back seat at the time.

The lunches are amazing. I've been trained onto the Haitian food schedule, where lunch is by far the biggest meal each day. Breakfast is usually about the second biggest meal. And oddly enough, as far as I can tell, the most popular breakfast food in Haiti is spaghetti. As the story goes, some Italian company came here in the 80s trying to get their foot in the door of the national food market. They realized that Haitians wouldn't give up rice for lunch, and dinner is usually pretty small, so they somehow convinced people to start eating spaghetti for breakfast - probably by giving away a whole lot of free noodles. And indeed it is quite inexpensive, so it caught on quickly. When I was out in Dezam I had it about every other day. It was always prepared with a little bit of smoked fish to give it flavor, but no marinara or anything like that.

But back to lunch. There's almost always rice. To accompany it there may be fish, chicken (the best ever) or conch meat. And always there is a big pitcher of fresh squeezed juice. Most of the juices they make are incredibly sour, which is why there are always big sugar pourers on the table. And my do the Haitians love their sugar. The coffee made on the street in Dezam was sweet to the point where it must have been super saturated. Adding one more tiny spoonful of sugar would probably have caused the whole thing to crystallize. I heard once that it was made with straight juice from the cane, which I don't doubt. It would definitely explain why I couldn't find coffee anywhere that didn't already have sugar added.

My pad is up the hill from downtown Port-au-Prince in an area called Petionville. In a lot of my reading about Haiti, I saw Petionville referred to as a wealthy suburb. It's true that there are some wealthy people there, but "wealthy suburb" is a little misleading. Most "wealthy suburbs" don't have throngs of people out walking around, stands selling chicken, pork and fried plantains on the sidewalk, enormous trucks belching diesel exhaust, and an occasional barnyard animal here or there. Just a few doors down from my studio is the entrance to a sprawling shantytown with people densely packed into concrete houses and tin shacks, stacked right on top of each other against a steep slope. Across the street is a building where a big brass band practices most every night. I've got their repetoire down by heart now.

Life inside my apartment isn't much different than other places I've lived with one major exception: electricity. When I was gearing up to move here, I was told in a phone interview with MCC that there was only four hours of electricity a day. I thought to myself that this must be a worst-case scenario. "As little as four hours a day" is surely what they meant to say. Wrong-o. Four hours if you're lucky. Because of this, most houses that can afford it have an inverter, and maybe a generator. An inverter is a device that pulls power off the grid during those rare hours when it's possible - and a generator if necessary - and stores it up in big car-size batteries. I've had to learn to be very, very economical with the inverter power. All of my light bulbs are those energy-efficient coiled flourescent types. When they're not getting enough power they blink like strobe lights. The first time this happened to me was in the bathroom as I was brushing my teeth; it created a kind of horror movie atmosphere. I have a mini refrigerator which, even on it's lowest setting, takes more power than the inverter can provide in any 24 hour period. So at this point the refrigerator is another storage area. Maybe someday I will use it to cool food.

This probably sounds miserable, but it has it's charms. Most nights, after a certain point when the lights start blinking, I transition to candlelight. There's something very soothing about it. I may not be ready to give this habit up. And no refrigerator just means buying food fresher and more often. And every time I hit the streets of Petionville in search of produce or a ready-made meal, I can count on seeing, hearing, or being right in the middle of some kind of excitement. It gets the blood pumping.

Gotta run. Next time: Christmas in Haiti.

Have some log

We just had a little Christmas party here in the office, complete with Kompa music and a buche de noel - which in case you don't know is a French holiday treat: a chocolate cake shaped like a log.

I was on the phone last night with my family and my mom was asking lots of basic questions about my living and working arrangements in Port-au-Prince; I realized I should probably post the same info here.

I work in an office with 14 employees. The organization is called Reseau National de Defense des Droits Humains - RNDDH. That means National Human Rights Defense Network. Of the employees, all are Haitian save myself, a Belgian named Stephanie, and another MCC volunteer named Jessica. Jessica and I live next door to each other and carpool every day along with her roommate Bethany who works for a sort of Haitian human rights coalition called POHDH with a somewhat broader focus than ours. The way MCC works is that I'm provided with room and board, plus a living stipend of $66 a month. In exchange for this, I work full time as a volunteer.

I'm still getting going here, reading old files and learning about how the organization does things. I've already started translating documents from French into English, and eventually I'll translate from Creole as well. Most of our documents are written in French, but Creole is the language of the office. I'm making steady progress with that too, though of course I still get a little frustrated every time I strain to understand something. I'd give one of my kidneys for the ability to understand French and Haitian Creole effortlessly. But there's a Haitian proverb that says: "piti piti zwazo fè nich." Which means, little by little, the bird builds its nest. The language will come.

Eventually the work gets a lot more interesting. I'll be going on delegations to prisons where we interview the inmates and find out whether they've had charges brought against them, if they've been abused, things like that. We do police trainings where we tell them exactly which human rights laws they're bound by and what could happen if they transgress those laws.

Is it effective? Hard to say. Much more often than not in Haiti, the guys in uniform have been the bad guys. In fact, why not a...

Very, Very Brief and Simplistic History of Uniformed Men in Haiti - 20th Century

The first example of this was the U.S. Marines. They occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934. The reason they gave for this was "political instability." The actual reasons had a lot more to do with business interests and keeping Germany - then investing heavily in Haiti - from getting an strategic and/or economic foothold in the region. So it was money. (duh.)

The U.S. Marines reintroduced slave labor to the country. This, over a hundred years after Haiti accomplished the only successful slave revolt in history, and over fifty years after the U.S. had freed its own slaves. The Haitian people hated and fought against the occupation. The Marines eventually left, but not before gifting the Haitian people with a trained standing army. Why in the world would Haiti need a standing army you ask? Surely it was all put in the language of "maintaining order."

Well, the army maintained something, namely a state of brutality and oppression. In literature about Haiti, it is often remarked that this country is a tragicomedy. This institution that is supposed to defend the people was in fact public enemy number one. Sometimes it would chafe against the wealthy Haitian elite, sometimes they were indistinguishable, but always they have been willing to crush, with ruthless efficiency, any challenge to their power. Those challenges came from above and below. The number of coup d'etats in the last century is beyond tragic, it's in the realm of funny. And as if it weren't bad enough that the army was originally created and trained by the United States, the dark alliance continued as new generations of military thugs would go to the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, to learn how to keep the unarmed masses in their place.

The biggest break in the army's dominance came during the Duvalier dictatorship. The first Duvalier, "Papa Doc," recognized that the military was a threat to him, and so he undermined them every way he could. He disrupted the army's leadership while training and recruiting his own private militia, the Tonton Macoutes, of which I wrote in earlier posts. The name literally means "uncle knapsack" and refers to the legend of the Haitian boogeyman who would come at night and stuff naughty children into his woven bag. The macoutes were in reality much worse, but since this is a brief history, I won't dwell on the gory details. I'll just say that their uniform was denim fatigues and a red scarf and shades.

When "Baby Doc" Duvalier was forced from power in the mid 80s, the army finally regained power and, along with the old guard of macoutes, initiated several of the bloodiest years in Haiti's history. They disrupted elections, installed a president of their choosing, then got rid of him after scant months in office. The next era was that of Jean Bertrand Aristide. He was a radical priest, and a proponent of liberation theology. He got 67% percent of the vote in Haiti's first truly free and fair elections in 1990. He gained this popularity by speaking the obvious truth, that the Haitian people had been abused for much too long by the army and the wealthy elite, that the United States had too much power over their lives, and that they would continue in misery unless those structures were fundamentally changed. Eight months later he was deposed by, say it with me, the army. The CIA almost certainly helped.

One of the supposed reasons the army gave for taking him out was that he was trying to raise a militia of his own, as Papa Doc had done. In exile, Aristide fought and fought and fought to get back to Haiti. When Bill Clinton came into office, he finally got an offer: return to Haiti with an escort of 20,000 Marines and finish out your presidential term - but only if you accept a World Bank restructuring plan. It was exactly the kind of thing he railed against while he was running for president, but it was his only chance, and every day he stayed away from Haiti was a day of horror for average Haitians. So he took the offer, and when he returned, the people came out and swept the sidewalks and danced in the streets. But over time it dawned on many of them that he had changed in his time away. Perhaps it was all a lesson in just what it would take to hang on to power in Haiti. In the face of the Marine presence, most of the army abandoned their posts as they weren't able to carry out their campaign of terror any longer. But they didn't abandon most of their guns.

In response to this, Aristide declared the army officially disbanded, and to this day it doesn't exist. But the Haitian National Police, formed after the army was disbanded, contains many of the same old bad guys.

So, back to where I started. The place where I work trains police not to violate citizens' basic human rights. But the people I work with are quite aware that the police continue to be an oppressive force here. Many cases of kidnapping take place only with the assistance of the police, as has been well documented. And that's just one example.

Anyways, more on work later. And next time I'll write about my cool new bachelor pad.

More Dezam

Here's a few more photos from my time living in rural Haiti. Actually, this one is of my first Creole tutor, Jacky Cherie. He wrote a book of poems in Creole that's quite nice.



These are the hills above Christan. 60 years ago they were thick with tropical rainforest. Now the trees are gone, which even affects weather patterns. Less rain falls now in Haiti than ever before.



Here's a photo from the rice harvest. What you do is cut down the stalks with a sickle, then pile them up, and this guy bats them against that stone a couple times and shakes off all the little husked grains. I took a turn at batting myself, which was, of course, hilarious to everyone.



Here's some photos of my wonderful host family. First, my host uncle Miguel, who in addition to managing a bunch of little crops, is a beekeeper. Those are bees in his right hand and a little smoker in his left which was full of smouldering wood shavings. He gave me a bottle of delicious fresh honey as a going away gift.



Here's his daughter Midgline. She would beg me to sing songs like the national anthem, the alphabet, stuff like that. Her friend with the notebook is Sandrine.



Here's Sandrine braiding Denise's hair - always a community activity.



The littlest kids just wail the whole time this is happening. It's very painful apparently, but it's the only way to manage such kinky hair without relaxing chemicals (expensive) or dreadlocks (incredibly rare in Haiti, even with Jamaica just a few miles away). This is why most boys just shave it off periodically. But here's little Bechi, my host brother, with his hair waiting to be braided. For a while he had it ultrapoofy and going straight up, and he looked like one of those troll dolls.



Here's Rosalie, my host mother, with Bechi, and grandma. Grandma scared me a little at first, the way she would sit on the porch and sleep, snoring with her eyes open. She used to be the town butcher. The last MCC homestay person went to wash clothes at the river with Rosalie. She offered to scrub some from Rosalie's load, and got handed the bloody meat dress.



Grandma again. She really grew on me.



On my last Saturday I went on a hike with Matt and Esther and little Gabriela in tow. We walked up along the side of a river for a mile or so, until steep walls of limestone rose up from the bank.



From there, we were hiking in the river, through a winding gorge and all kinds of beautiful gnarled rock formations.



On the way back I noticed this. It's a bean crop. There's a little bit of dirt down below, but these stalks are pretty much just growing up through rocks, fed by water from the river flowing on both sides.

Life Andeyo

Haitians that live "andeyo" are rural folks--probably 99% of them are very poor. I just got back yesterday from my monthlong homestay in the Artibonite valley, which was definitely andeyo. I'm not sure how to begin describing the experience. Life there was a lot how I imagine life in the old American west, as in homesteaders and what not. Consider:

There's no running water or electricity.

Work barely stops, though there's a relaxed pace to it. Kids have time to play, but a lot of their day is work too.

School is a great idea on paper, but the learning is all by rote, the books are ancient, and it can sort of get in the way of survival sometimes, so it's not the highest priority.

Every night I ate and then later read by the light of a kerosene lamp.

And, people refuse to smile for photographs.

Seriously, these are some of the smiliest people I've ever met. They would be all giggly getting into position to pose for a photo, and then as soon as I start counting, everybody goes stoic on me. For example, here's what grandpa looks like:



Here's what he looks like when he's aware his photo is being taken:



For the most part, life for people out there has hardly changed in 200 years. I washed my clothes by hand. I harvested rice. I thumbed dried indian corn off the cob so it could be ground, by hand, into meal. In some ways Haiti is the least stable country in the hemisphere. In some ways it's the most stable.

But it wasn't all Little House on the Prarie the whole time. For example, two sundays ago there was a national election for magistrates. There was a polling place in Dezam, the town of a few thousand people where MCC's reforestation office is based. My homestay was in the village of Christan, about 4o minutes uphill on foot. I walked down to Dezam that morning to attend the Catholic mass with Jean-Remy, one of MCC's Haitian staff.

Actually, let me digress here a minute. It was a special sunday to honor the patron saint of Dezam, so mass began at 9:00am instead of 6:00am which is usually (!) the case. There were lots of decorations and people were taking photos with a cheesy painted beach scene outside of the sunday school building. Big special day. During the service, as the choir worked through an extra long and happy number, six women with baskets on their heads came and slowly sashayed from the back to the front.



The baskets were full of fruits, veggies and sugar cane, and two of the women even added live turkeys to the mix. The homily was nice. It stressed the people's duty to vote, to vote not for friends, or friends of friends, but for candidates who were honest and who cared about the needs of all Haitiens. At one point in the service, during a calm moment, I remember hearing some commotion outside. But soon the choir was singing again and I thought nothing of it.

Afterwards, I was invited to the priest feast. It was myself, Jean-Remy and his wife, the padres, and a couple dozen others.



Apparently, being the only "blan" in the place obliged me to pour the champagne you see there for everyone. No mishaps, fortunately, except I probably shouldn't have given any to the girl that looked about 16. Or her brother who was in his early teens (I hope). But their dad didn't seem to mind, and it was only a little.

After about an hour of feasting, I walked fat and happy back up the hill to Christan. On the way I met one of the guys from the rice harvest. He told me that the election had been disqualified in Dezam because it was violently disrupted. A truckload of guys showed up waving revolvers and a couple of shotguns and started turning over tables. They ripped up ballots and fired in the air to scare people away. One man was shot in the hand. I even heard from a couple of people later on that a man had been killed.

Two miles down the road to the Port-au-Prince was the administrative office for the election. My Creole tutor was working there as a volunteer monitor for the Lespwa (hope) party, which currently holds the presidency and is supported by a legitimate majority of Haiti's poor, which is to say a legitimate majority of Haitians. Around the time of the disturbance in Dezam, monitors from several non-Lespwa parties began tearing the office up. Weapons were brandished. Ballots were burned.

And the most scandalous, in my opinion, is the fact that in both of these situations, the armed UN soldiers -- dispatched to ensure calm and security during the election -- ran. I'm a pacifist. I'm not saying that I wish the UN soldiers had started mowing down these "vagabonds" (as villagers would always refer to the thugs). But it certainly begs the question: what in the hell is the UN doing here?

8,500 armed personnel. $500 million a year. You see them everywhere you go in Port-au-Prince. A couple of soldiers from Brazil, China, the Philippines, Senegal or wherever sitting atop a tank-like vehicle or a big jeep, chain-smoking, hands gripping a gun big enough to take down a helicopter. Just watching the cars and foot traffic go by. How does that make anyone feel safer? The posh neighborhoods uphill from PAP have a ridiculous real estate bubble inflated by all these blue helmets who need somewhere to live, and whose housing costs are covered despite already high salaries. I don't know how much the UN soldiers make, but I know that starting pay for UN policemen is $90,000 a year. It's high because there are bonuses for serving in such "dangerous" circumstances. Several reports have found that some of the worst human rights abuses in Haiti are being perpetrated by these soldiers. Should we be surprised? The commander of the Chilean contingent has been linked to some of the most heinous violence that occurred under Pinochet.

Please challenge this if I'm wrong, but as I understand it Haiti is the only country, now or ever before, to be occupied by the UN without a civil war. There's not even the threat of civil war here, not even close. Sure, there's gangs and a drug trade -- but nothing like as bad as it is in parts of Brazil, as one example. And yet Brazil gets to spearhead this mission that benefits nobody except the tiny wealthy Haitian elite that owns all the rentable real estate. That's a little simplistic. Other people benefit, but certainly not the average Haitian. I could go on, and I will, but I should save it for some future post.

So back to the election. Sounds like what happened is for some reason the secrecy of the ballot in the Dezam precinct was compromised. Some fanatical supporters of the opposition parties got word from the monitors that the election wasn't going their way, and decided to disrupt. The whole thing is really complicated, and I don't know how to resolve this kind of problem, beyond the no-brainer of ensuring that votes are kept secure and secret until after the election. But this is exactly the kind of thing I'll be working on in my job, which began today.

But while I'm on the political note, I have to mention this too. Remember grandpa from the pictures above? He's a charming, gentle, very likeable old man. His sandals are made from an innertube that was cut into strips and artfully woven into something wearable. Grandpa used to be the most feared man in Dezam. Let me explain: The Duvalier dynasty ruled Haiti with an iron fist from the 50s to the 80s. They’re responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of Haitians. Most of these murders were carried out by the ‘tonton macoutes’ – Creole for boogeymen. It was an all-volunteer army, untrained, uneducated, but armed and loyal to noone but the dictator. Their only objective was to intimidate and squelch any kind of political dissent whatsoever. For this loyalty, they were given carte blanche to confiscate any property they saw fit and inflict any violence they thought necessary, with absolute impunity.

I discovered just before I arrived at my homestay that Matt and Esther, the Canadian couple that does reforestation with MCC, had recently gotten this info. We really don’t know the extent of grandpa’s activities with the Macoutes, but we know that he did beat the hell out of a lot of people in and around Dezam back in the 70s. The whole thing really got me to thinking – how could this sweet old man, who couldn’t have weighed more than 150 pounds in his prime, do such things? And moreover, how did he get away with it? Was it fear of further reprisals that kept the villagers from exacting revenge? Did poverty train them to accept it as part of life in an unfair world? Does the church bear any responsibility?

Nowadays, grandpa is beginning to succumb to dimentia. I'd like to think that this is because somewhere deep down he wants to forget the horrible things he's done. But realistically, most everyone, myself included, find it all to easy to justify their moral shortcomings.

Okay, sorry this post is so long. I've got lots more photos and thoughts, but I'll post those later. One last little bizarre tidbit for now. One day, sitting on the porch of my homestay, I observed their horse scraping it's teeth against the limestone bedrock (which due to erosion is visible over about a quarter of the front yard) looking for pieces of loose dirt, and then eating the loose dirt it could find. I was baffled. This horse wasn't in as bad of shape as a lot of the bony nags you see andeyo. Plus there were decent patches of grass just a couple of feet away. I turned to my friend Jackson and asked, "Hey Jackson, why is the horse eating dirt?"

"Oh that? That's because the horse needs minerals that are in the earth."

"Are you sure about that?"

"Yeah. Earth has lots of good minerals, which is why people eat it."

"People!? People eat dirt here?"

"Yeah. Especially pregnant women."

"What? Do you eat dirt?"

"Sure. Everyone does."

I tried to unfurrow my brow and not think too much about what I had just heard. Ten minutes later Jackson showed up with something in his hand. "Felix, do you want to try some for yourself?" He held out what looked like a couple of light grey meringues: flat on the bottom and dollop-shaped. I thought, maybe I misunderstood him earlier. These didn't look so bad. And shoot, I'll try anything once. I took a taste, and guess what? Tasted like dirt. On the salty side, sure--but still dirt. I couldn't help my grimace as I handed this earth-cookie gift back to Jackson and told him I wouldn't be having any more. Apparently my cultural sensitivity stops somewhere between tasting dirt and eating dirt.

halfway homestay

So I'm back in Port-au-Prince for a little weekend break in the middle of my monthlong homestay out in the "country." So far village life has been delightful. There's tons of walking around involved, which is always nice.

So I'll start by describing Creole. Basically, you don't have to conjugate verbs for plural or for tense or anything. Instead, there's just these little tense markers. In French, to say "I jump rope," you say "je saute corde." And if you want to say "I jumped rope" or "I'm going to jump rope" or "I will jump rope" it gets complicated. In Creole: "M'sote kod"

I jumped rope: M'te sote kod
I'm going to jump rope: M'ap sote kod
I will jump rope: M'va sote kod

You get the idea. It's very simple. And the masculine and feminine stuff from French is all gone, which is great. And the spelling is totally phonetic. This is a HUGE improvement on French, where you don't pronounce the last 1-6 letters of most words. Or worse, you DO pronounce them, but only in a coy sort of hinting way. In Creole, if you spell it, you say it. And you say it just the way you spell it. When people ask me where I'm from, the answer sounds the same whether it's in French or Creole. But it's not spelled the same.

"from the United States"
in French: Aux Etats Unis
in Creole: Ozetazini

I'm not sure why, but it's really fun to write and speak a phonetic language. Maybe because you don't have to worry about being a bad speller. Because basically a bad speller is someone who spells something the way it sounds, instead of with the arcane spelling that has evolved in the language over hundreds of years. Sow wen ahy trahy too wrahyt eenglish fonetikalee, it looks lahyk ayv got abowt half az manee brayn sels.

So, written in Creole, the name of the language is Kreyol Ayisien - hence the title of this blog. But that's a little misleading too, since I don't go by Kurt here. Since I arrived in Haiti, my name has been Felix. Kurt's just a little too clunky and German and hard to pronounce for French and Creole speakers. I picked Felix because that was my name in French class in high school. And in Creole spelling, it's "Feliks." Pronounced "fay-LEEKS."

Anywho, here's a run down of most days so far during my homestay. I first wake up with the sun and the roosters at about 5:30. Get up and and out bed by 6:30. Breakfast - maybe some bread, avocado and coffee - by 8:00. In the meantime I'm either reading or playing with Bechi, the 2-year-old at my homestay who sits on the stoop to my room and sings a one-word song when he wants me to keep him company: "Feliks, Feliks. Feliks, Feliks." Then I head down to the larger town, Dezam, where MCC has their big reforestation office. I meet up with Esther, a Canadian working here with her husband Matthew, and go to visit a school. Esther wrote a really great environmental education program in Creole and is working with all of the local schools to get the materials taught, and taught well.

And not a moment too soon, either. The environmental situation in Haiti is dire. I try to be optimistic about most things, but this is a special challenge. Haiti was about 98% covered in forest when Columbus first landed here. Now, about 2% of that original forest cover remains. Two damn percent. Haiti's covered in these mountains, and they're almost all totally bare, covered only in shrubs and grasses. I wouldn't really call it ugly. The mountains are like giant versions of the rolling grassy hills around Ashland, OR, or even Pasadena, CA. They look like trees never existed there, but it breaks your heart to know that before too long ago, it was all lush tropical forest.

So what happened? A whole series of tragedies. The first was the French, who logged the hills heavily, mostly for mahogany for their furniture back home. But mostly it's the Haitiens themselves who cut down the trees. Most Haitian kitchens use charcoal to cook. For many decades people with no other source of income would go cut down trees, or at least a few big branches each day and make charcoal with them. Haiti is one of the most densely populated countries in the hemisphere, which of course exacerbates the whole cycle.

But two things specifically made it much worse, and guess what, the they were both caused by the US. First, there used to be something called the Creole pig, a tough little breed owned by almost every Haitian family. They were a sort of a "piggy bank" if you will; they could eat anything, or very little at all, and whenever a family needed some cash, they could just sell one of these. The USDA became very concerned about an outbreak of swine flu in the 80s, and so started a program where they killed every one of these Creole pigs. They replaced them with grade A American oinkers, which, though much more valuable, were much too expensive for most families to take care of. This caused many people to head to the hills and make charcoal when they needed the extra cash for whatever. The second tragedy is that when Jean Bertrand Aristide was reinstalled as President of Haiti in 94 by 20,000 US marines, he did it by agreeing to an IMF program that got rid of all gas subsidies. So the people who were using gas for cooking and heat suddenly joined the rest who were using charcoal, and as with the Creole pig scandal, this caused a rapid acceleration in deforestation.

But as bad as that all sounds, MCC actually can point to some success in this area. The village of Christan, where I'm living, used to be totally visible from up on the hill in Valereux (where I take my Creole lessons). Since MCC started working there 20 years ago, the forest cover, at least in the village, has grown to where the school is now the only visible rooftop.

Okay, where was I? So I go to a school with Esther and watch the environmental education in action. Then it's back to my homestay for lunch - probably a giant plate of rice with a bean sauce covering the whole thing, and some okra and a couple morsels of beef or goat on top. Then it's off to my Creole lesson, a nice 30-minute hike to Valereux, the next village over. These I'm taking from a guy just a couple years older than me named Watson, he's sort of the town bookworm.

After Creole, I walk back to Christan in the blazing afternoon sun. Even though I'm way out there in the sticks, I'm constanly passing people. There's just so many people everywhere you go. And they couldn't be friendlier. In the mornings they all say 'bonjour!" and afternoons are all about "bonsoir!" Sometimes people with walk with me for a bit and just shoot the breeze. Ask me questions about where I come from and how many siblings I have. "Does your father have a car?" "Does your mother have a horse?" "Does your father own a horse?" "How many animals does your family own?"

Once back in Christan, I change into my board shorts and head down to the river for my daily bath. Plenty of guys just do this nude, but there seems to be a cutoff at about age 20 where guys at least keep their skivvies on, if not some trunks, while they soap up. The women bathe and wash clothes right around the corner, and everyone can see everyone else when they're coming and going, but there's a certain code of conduct where it's understood you don't stare. Only the little kids stare, and mostly just at me, since I stick out like a sore thumb.

By 6pm it's starting to get really dark. As mama Rosalie cooks up pudding (made with flour, rice, and a lot of sugar) for dinner, I talk with here brothers Miguel and Levi about their crops, or I play games with some of the kids in the neighborhood. Once dinner is served, I go inside to eat it alone. They insist on this, and I would hate it, but Bechi always comes and sits on my lap while I eat to keep me company, so that's nice.

Then, I go back to my room and read by the light of an alcohol lamp for as long as I can, but I'm usually out cold by 8:30. Gotta go now, but stay tuned for more stories of village life, including about my senile grandpa who used to be one of the nastiest government terrorists in the area, but now is a sweet old man.

Leaving Port-au-Prince

If you've read all these posts so far, you may be thinking to yourself, where's the beef? Great Kurt, so you went to Haiti, but it looks like it's been a vacation, and Haiti's supposed to be one of the most miserable places on Earth. What are you even doing there?

The answer is, at this point I'm not doing much. The last week, since returning from the retreat up north, has been my in-country orientation. I've had a few meetings to learn about how MCC policy works, dealing with money, and everything else. I've had two hours of Creole lessons every day. And I've had some cultural lessons and a tour of Port-au-Prince.

But in this short time, I've seen quite a bit. Still, I'm hesitant to write too much about it just yet. White people have a long, long history of coming to Haiti and writing lurid accounts of what they see here. These descriptions are often mere reflections of the writer's own subconscious racism. So I don't want to jump right in and make a bunch of generalizations about anything.

But here's some photos from my tour around Port-au-Prince. This is the memorial to victims of the 91' coup when Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced from power by the military.



Nearby is this memorial, constructed by Papa Doc Duvalier as a memorial of three hundred years of slavery up until the revolt for independence in 1804. If you haven't read the history of this time, trust me, you won't be disappointed.



This is one of a series of paintings in an Episcopal church downtown depicting biblical scenes in a Haitian setting. This is the wedding at Cana, where Jesus turned water into wine.



I spent a night up in the hills above Port-au-Prince with a couple named Carla and Ron who came to Haiti with MCC to do reforestation about 21 years ago. Below is Carla with Rebecca, MCC's policy analyst for Columbia and Haiti, and Ari, a man who hid in the MCC guesthouse for months during the coup of '91. He was politically active, and his life would have been in danger had he not found Carla.



Now, Ari and Carla do cultural education for people coming to work in Haiti, which is why I went to stay with them. Carla's husband, Ron, does a lot of Creole to English translations. There are a whole bunch of expatriates in Haiti, between missionairies, NGO workers and UN personnel and soldiers. But Ron and Carla are incredibly unique in that for the last 12 years they've been living here unattached to any outside organization or support of any kind. And at times, they just barely scraped by. I'm just guessing, but there can't be more than a handful of Americans in Haiti that are in the same situation.

I can say that at this point I'm happy and (surprisingly) healthy. I feel like most times when I travel, I'm the first in the group to come down with some nasty bug. But so far, with the exception of the devil chicken episode, I'm feeling great.

My lessons in Haitian Creole, or Kreyol Ayisien, have been a lot of fun. I'll write more about the language later too. There's a lot of quirks to it. One is that everywhere I go, people will refer to me as "blan," which means "white." But it's actually just a general word for foreigners. There are UN troops from Senegal here who get called "blan" all the time. And to complete the irony, I'm a "neg." Let me explain. My Creole tutor is a great guy named Jacky Cherie - a kind of renaissance man. I'll post a photo of him, and hopefully a couple of his paintings, up here in the future. We were going over some slang, and he told me that the Creole equivalent of "dude" is "neg." Neg? I asked. Yes, he said. It's literal translation in English is "nigger." Half of the color drained out of my face. Then he calmly looked across the table at me and said, "But here it is not perjorative. You can say it to any man. Kurt, you are a nigger." At this point, the other half of the color drained out of my face, and I didn't quite know how to react, until Jacky started laughing at me. "Don't be embarassed! We're all just negs together here." Funny dude.

So my in-country orientation is done now, though Jacky should be showing up any second for my final Creole lesson in Port-au-Prince. Then tomorrow I head out to the country to spend a month with a family in the Artibonite Valley, outside of a down called Dezam. There's no electricity or running water, and I'll be bathing in a stream behind the house each morning. I'm mostly there to do intensive language study, because when I return I'll go straight to work at RNDDH, where Creole is the only language spoken.

I'm not sure if I'll be able to do any e-mailing or blogging during my month in Dezam, so don't be surprised if you don't hear from me. But please do send e-mails. There's a lot more to share and I'll get right to it once I'm back.

Back to PAP

Before we left, I took a second to climb this giant rubber tree.



We were in a pretty small plane on the way back. Jessica, who is working in the same office as I, got to be copilot.



Halfway to Port-au-Prince, I saw this out the window.



If you've read Mountains Beyond Mountains (and if you haven't, you probably should) you may remember that Paul Farmer built his hospital in Cange, in the Artibonite Valley. This was done in part to serve people displaced by this dam and the giant Lac Peligre it created.

Citadel

On our third day of the retreat we had a field trip. Guylene, the Port-au-Prince office manager for 9 years, brought her son, Sebastian on the retreat. Here he is. I couldn't help but think of the little lobster with the same name in The Little Mermaid, and at times Sebastian bore a certain resemblance. Pretty funny kid.



We drove to a place called the Citadel, a massive fortress built by Henri Christophe, one of Haiti's first rulers. He fought in the American Revolution on principle of opposing tyranny before coming back to Haiti and helping expel Napoleon's navy. Hard to get a sense of the scope here, but trust me, it's big.



Inside, it was a giant labrynth of mossy stones and long stairwells. Cavernous rooms and endless nooks and crannies. Plus loads of giant cannons, some of which were taken from Napoleon's defeated navy warships.



Here's Franklyn, one of MCC's workers on the reforestation project in the Artibonite Valley, with his daughter:



And here's Esther, another reforestation worker, with her adopted daughter, Gabriela:



There were a bunch of off-duty Pakistani UN soldiers visiting the Citadel at the same time as us. When were up on the roof, Esther started breastfeeding Gabriela and the Pakistanis just about lost it. Suddenly these guys all had cameras out and wanted to take turns posing with Esther and the baby, and then all the other women on the team, on and on and on for about 20 minutes. The whole thing was kind of embarassing.

Tough times

The first thing I did, after arriving in Haiti, was to get a ride from the international airport to the national airport. There, me and my MCC Haiti team members flew to Cap-Haitien for the annual retreat. I had no idea I was timing my arrival so well. So my first few days in Haiti looked a lot like this:



Reading in the lounge chair is Aileen, who teaches at a college in the southeast. Altogether, there were 23 of us, Haitian and North American, including a bunch of kids. I didn't really feel like I earned this retreat, with its perfect beaches, volleyball, snorkeling, and hours of backgammon, but I also didn't feel like complaining.

But there was some discomfort. The first night for dinner I ordered a spicy chicken dish called "poulet diable" which means devil chicken. Well, I woke up in the middle of the night and knew that something wasn't right. I ran to the toilet, and, down on all fours, excorcized the demon.

On our way

The last couple of days in Akron were a lot of fun, though it was tough to say goodbye to the other volunteers after an intense two weeks. A few of us did get a chance to get away and go hiking through the Middle Creek Nature Preserve and see the changing fall colors. Second from the left is Toby, my roommate through orientation who is now in El Salvador doing AIDS education.



On the last day of orientation, we had a sending ceremony, which is where I snapped this one:



None of the little people here belong to the big people here. There was a nice big happy family atmosphere.

Then it was done, and I started packing. I stayed up until 2:20am, when my ride showed up to take me and another volunteer to the Philly airport. At 6:15 I flew to Miami, and a couple hours later I was on a 737 bound for Port-au-Prince.

Surprise

Today was the halfway point through our two-week orientation. For the first week, those of us doing international assignments were joined by volunteers and salaried workers that were going on to positions in North America, whether doing development in Appalachia or overseeing student exchange programs in Winnipeg, that kind of stuff. Last night we saw them off. This morning, after our first session, we were told there would be a big announcement. We all looked at each other, confused, as about 50 staff members filed into the room and sat down. Then, we heard an announcement that Rob Davis, the Executive Director of MCC had resigned.

We were all pretty shocked, both the staff and the orientees. Rob was an incredibly charismatic guy who had come to speak to the orientees on a couple of occasions. MCC's a great organization and gets a lot of respect, but it's been around since the 20s, and so it doesn't change very quickly. They hired Rob about 18 months ago. He's not ethnically Mennonite (nor are most of the volunteers) and was seen as a good choice to push MCC in a more radical direction. I, for one, was pretty impressed by him. He had done a bunch of traveling in that time, and seemed to be making bold moves. For one, he hosted a meeting of American religious leaders with the president of Iran. Apparently, not even the Quakers were willing to get involved in this, but Rob felt willing to take that first step and meet with someone who is considered an enemy of the state. Read about it here if you're interested.

But there were two things he said that really got my attention. First, that the goal of MCC should be to change the North American church. Second, that he chose not to call himself a "Christian" because of all the baggage associated with that word; instead, he considered himself a follower of Christ. It's pretty badass for the director of a major Christian relief organization to say loud and clear that there's something deeply wrong with the church, so much so that it's almost worth losing the "Christian" title altogether. I couldn't agree more.

So what happened? Why did he quit? And why so suddenly? Hard to say, but it seems like he just chafed against the very established culture of MCC a little too much for comfort. From what we could all gather later on, it wasn't so much his vision, but personality differences that broke the camel's back. And as much as I liked him and hated to see him go, this was a relief. If he had been pushed out for making controversial statements, I would have to reconsider spending three years with MCC.

Sorry if this was a boring post.

Amish and proud

Here's something I wrote to describe my dinner at an Amish household. The dinner happened just a few days before my mother was to teach about the Amish in her sociology class, so I wrote about my experience as follows:

We arrived at the Amish house just at dusk on a very windy day. The
mother came out to meet us in her dark blue dress, which she held in a
bunch by her knees while waving us in with the other hand. There were
about 20 of us, and as we filed in she told us "welcome to our home"
with an accent that seemed almost Irish, but only because it had a
sing-song quality to it.

Inside, we sat around their two large tables set up end to end between
the dining room and the kitchen. The house itself wasn't so different
from any other rural Pennsylvania farmhouse. The father had built it
himself in 1982, when, judging by his looks, he must have been in his
mid 20s. There were no light switches, but rather lanterns that looked
like nice ceramic lamps, hanging from hooks above the table and
hissing with the sound of burning gas. They had a sink with running
water, and even a gas-powered refrigerator.

It was a family of ten. Mom was clearly the boss of the house, and the
dad, mostly silent, looked like he could crack a walnut in his fist.
They had two boys and six girls, ranging in age from two to eighteen
years. The five oldest kids were buzzing around helping to set things
up while the three youngest girls played in an adjoining room. Every
one of these children was as blond as could be.

As soon as we all sat down the food started coming. But before we
could eat, the mother asked that we join them in a silent blessing,
which is how they prefer to pray. So we all put our heads down for
about ten seconds of silence, until she said amen. Then it was off to
the races. For starters there was warm bread, cut in thick slices,
which we slathered with the homechurned butter and fruit preserves
they had sitting out on the table. Then tray after tray of chicken in
gravy, followed by tray after tray of thick-cut ham. Then came the
corn, cut off the cob. Then the smashed potatoes, applesauce, peas,
green beans, and rice. We had no choice but to start stuffing our
faces if we wanted to make it out of there before midnight.

Amidst the feeding frenzy, I was looking around at the house. I know
that the most traditional Amish homes don't put up any decorations on
the walls, but this family had alot of the same kinds of things you
find in Christian homes all over America: Thomas Kinkade paintings;
inspirational poems; the fruits of the spirit written out in cursive,
etc.

But even if their wall hangings were a little modern, their dress was
straight up Amish. The dad and the boys all wore black pants with
simple black suspenders and no belts. Their shirts were long-sleeved
and dark blue or charcoal, buttoned right up to the neck. Mom and the
girls all had long-sleeved dresses; the youngest girls were allowed to
wear pink or purple, while the rest wore blues or greys. The reason
for this is that children are seen as naturally innocent, so they
won't use the bright colors as a mark of pride or individualism. The
idea behind the clothing is to remind them that they are part of a
community, so they don't place any value on making fashion statements
or doing their own thing, in fact they regard these as sinful. By the
time a girl is in her early teens, she's wearing the plain colors. By
her mid-teens, she will always wear a well-starched gauzy head
covering.

When they weren't talking to the guests, the family spoke to each
other using the low German dialect. This language was originally
spoken in Germany near the Swiss border. There were three German guys
in our group who were listening to the family and couldn't understand
any of what they were saying, which means that the language has
morphed quite a bit in the last 150 years or so.

After dinner we chatted with the family. I asked if they were farmers,
and the dad said that it was hard for all the Amish to farm at the
same time, so he made kitchen cabinets instead. Inevitably, the Nickel
Mines school shooting came up, though it was the mother, not us, who
mentioned it. Without getting very emotional, she said that it had
happened only about five miles away, and that they knew some of they
families who had lost children. Someone from our group told her that
people from all over the world had been amazed at the forgiveness that
the Amish community showed after the tragedy. She simply replied that
that was how they were raised, as if they wouldn't even know how to
respond in any other way.

After that, there was a dessert of cocounut cream pie, peanut butter
pie, and chocolate cake with thick frosting. It was over the top for
sure, but we didn't even want to say no.

Arriving in Akron

Well, how to begin. I'll just admit now that I'm writing this from Haiti, now that I feel like I've got a little time. So I'll try and reconstruct what's happened in the last few weeks.

First off, I arrived in Akron, PA for my MCC orientation fresh off a month in Europe (mostly Eastern. You can check out the photos here). In case you're unfamiliar with Mennonites, they're notoriously frugal, so I was surprised to arrive at headquarters, in this tiny town outside of Lancaster, PA (aka Amish Paradise) and find my living quarters looking like what you see here.





Not bad, eh? I spent the next two weeks in this comfy setting, talking to other volunteers who were heading all over the world. It was a diverse bunch, to be sure. Three families with kids, two going to Mexico and one to Rwanda. Several couples, and a bunch of free radicals. We played a lot of Boggle, Scrabble and Rummikub. I got a decent amount of reading done, and even fit in a few lessons on tape of Haitian Creole.