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.