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.