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.