Okay, I’m finally going to sit down and write about my trip to Cuba and Jamaica. But first I have to talk about an incident that has somewhat haunted me. It happened just before I left on my Caribbean vacation. I tried to write about it then, but I just wasn’t able, emotionally.

As I mentioned in my most recent post, my birthday was on October 31st, and I was lucky enough to have a couple parties in my name, both of which were wonderful. But the best party, without a doubt, was held on the weekend after. I hosted a joint birthday party along with three women who are working at GHESKIO, an AIDS clinic and research facility in Port-au-Prince.

To prepare for the big day, I got up at 4:30 am to ride my Honda down to the MCC guesthouse where we were to hold the party. There I met up with Joseph, the MCC chauffeur, and Saul, the guardian who lives there on the property with his family. We took off in the pickup towards La Saline, the number one place in Port-au-Prince to purchase a live goat on Saturday mornings.

I stayed in the car during the actual negotiation and purchase so as not to double the price. Here’s a picture of Saul and Joseph returning with their find. I snapped it through the rear-view mirror of the pickup.



After that, we picked up a hundred oranges and passionfruit, spices for the goat, a giant sack of charcoal, a pile of avocados, bunches of plantains, a couple flats of soda, and plenty of other things that I can't even remember now.

Let me explain how parties work in Haiti. If you throw a party, it is assumed that you will provide food - including some kind of meat - along with rice, beans, and a bevy of side dishes and a plethora of desserts. A wide assortment of soft drinks must be available. Most occasions also provide a healthy supply of Prestige, the national beer. And believe me, this is the bare minimum. Asking invitees to pay anything is a faux pas most grave. When I invited people in my office to the party a couple days ahead of time, they got very excited, and then got down to business telling me how not to blow it. I heard stories about foreigners living in Haiti who threw parties where there wasn't enough of this or that or big events where people were asked to chip in at the door. My coworkers were slapping each others backs, laughing hysterically at the thought of it.

So, does it seem like the expectations are a little high for hosts and hostesses in the poorest country of the Americas? Yes, they are. Ridiculously so. People go absolutely broke and into debt all the time just trying to fulfill their social obligations. The other option is to have friends over just for drinks and dessert or maybe just for some rice and chicken, but this requires you to insist at every opportunity that you are not throwing a party - it's just a little get-together.

As unfortunate as that is, it's great to go to a party knowing that you'll be well taken care of. But for our own party, we tried to lower the expectations a bit, reminding people that it was just us ignorant blans throwing it. The party was going to cost plenty already, and we were all on pretty tight budgets. We let people know we wouldn't be providing drinks. Still, we wanted to go for it and throw a party that was a step above the chips-and-salsa hangouts that we are used to back home. So we decided to kill and barbecue a goat.

I'll be merciful with the pictures from that whole process. I'll just show you a video of just before the deed was done...



...and what the goat looked like about an hour later.



As you can imagine, goats aren't very meaty. This one cost us about $30. A female. We could have gotten a male with more meat for about $45. And $60 would have bought us a strapping "chatre" or neutered goat, which is the meatiest of all.

For the slaughter, they cut the jugular while keeping the windpipe intact so that the goat would stay alive long enough to pump out as much blood as possible. After this rather excruciating display, Joseph went and pulled a long-stemmed papaya leaf off a tree. He removed the leaf and inserted one end of the two-foot long stem into a slit cut into one of the goat's rear ankles. He started blowing, and the goat's fur began separating from the muscle. The bubble grew and grew until the goat became an inflated goat. The ankle was tied off and the goat hung from a tree for slaughter. In about fifteen minutes, using only a machete and a kitchen knife, they had a bucket of organs and a bowl of meat.

I didn't stick around for the rest of the process, but it involved thoroughly washing each morsel of meat with sour oranges. This tenderizes the meat and removes that gamey, goaty smell and flavor. Then the morsels are marinated for hours in a sauce that includes a long list of spices, the only one of which I remember is garlic. Eventually, the goat is roasted over coals, in what they call buccaneer style. The result is a big plate of tender, delicious and flavorful meat. Unfortunately, the big plate wasn't quite big enough to feed everyone there at the party. The birthday kids all went without, but most people got at least a few bites. Plus there was a mountain of rice and beans, crispy fried plantains, salad, and plenty of other food. Plus a few pitchers of fresh squeezed orange-passionfruit juice. Plus three birthday cakes and an artistic birthday jello, made by the husband of one of the birthday girls.

The party was a great success. Probably fifty or sixty people all told. Some photos:





And the birthday kids:



But I have to write now about what happened afterwards. One of my coworkers had come to the party with a birthday present for me. I put it down on a table in the kitchen while we continued to prepare some of the food. Later, as the last of us were leaving, I looked and saw the gift on the table, and decided I would pick it up the next day when I came to clean up the giant mess left from the party.

The next day, the gift wasn't there. I hoped there was an explanation. I looked at my house, just to be sure. I called everyone that might have known where it was. But the more I looked at the situation, the more it seemed to me that the gift was taken by Saul. Saul is my friend. He is a warm and cheerful man. Physically, he is somewhat imposing, which is thrown off by his surprisingly high voice.

I played through the facts over and over again. Saul was the only person who had been in the house during the time when the gift disappeared, except for a woman who is living in the guesthouse - another friend of mine - who wasn't able to make it to the party until later on, and went straight to bed anyways as she was exhausted from writing papers for her online graduate courses. It was either Saul or her that took it, and I immediately suspected Saul. How could I? Things have gone missing at the guesthouse before. One time, just a couple weeks after I arrived here, I lost some cash. I was sure that I had left in on my dresser. The same thing happened to a female colleague. From that time, I had always held a little suspicion of Saul. It seemed to me at the time that he was the only person who would have the access, or at least he would have the most access. The truth is, things just go missing a lot in Haiti. It happens to everyone who lives here long enough. It's a very poor country, and of course people steal. Most houses in Haiti don't have a simple nuclear family living inside. Most live with relatives or friends. And in big houses with guards and housekeepers, there are even more people. And there is therefore a steady stream of friends and visitors coming and going, hanging out and what not. The MCC guesthouse is no exception. This is what I was told when I mentioned back then that the money seemed to have been taken - that it was probably someone who slipped in unnoticed when there were a lot of people around. Or perhaps a friend of one of our Haitian support staff who was visiting, saw the money, and couldn't resist what would seem to them like a lot of cash.

I still don't know what happened to that money. If someone took it, I don't know who. And of course I could have lost it all on my own. I always assumed it was Saul, though I never felt like I could ask him directly. When the gift went missing, however, I felt like I had to say something. He is the guardian, and MCC trusts him to keep things from getting stolen. If he himself is stealing things, well, that's not acceptable. I started thinking about how to deal with it. The next day after the gift went missing, I was in the office for a meeting and I took the opportunity to ask Saul if he had seen it. I tried to phrase it in a way that would allow him to save face by saying that he had it, but only because he wanted to make sure that it was safe until he could give it to me in person.

So I explained the situation, and he said he clearly remembered seeing the gift, but that if I didn't have it then he had no idea who did. I was frustrated. I became even more convinced that it was him. I began thinking about how I would deal with the issue. Often in Haiti, when someone needs to approach someone else over a very sensitive issue, they will send a third party to talk for them. I decided to take this route. I spoke with Garly, our office administrator, who I like a lot and consider a very thoughtful person. At times I felt uncomfortable there as a white man telling a Haitian man that I thought another Haitian man - his friend - had stolen from me, and I wanted him to help me find out if it was true. I tried to lay out the situation as fairly as I could. I told him that if Saul had taken the gift, and he simply gave it back once confronted, nothing drastic would happen. But I had no idea what to expect from my emissary. I became very afraid of the possibility that it would turn into an ugly situation. That Saul would be fired. That he would be forced to find not only a new job, but a new house for his wife and three children. And yet another part of me felt that I had been violated. The episode was like an open wound in my mind that festered more each day. I wanted badly for it to be resolved.

One week after the party, I stopped by the guesthouse to pick up my mail. Garly was there along with Saul and Joseph. I wasn't expecting the confrontation to happen then, but before I knew it we were sitting down together around the dining room table. We talked around the issue. I never accused Saul directly, but everyone there, including Saul, knew that I suspected him.

Garly and Joseph calmly and carefully laid out the facts, and arrived at the only conclusion possible, which is that the gift must have been taken by either Saul or the woman who was living at the guesthouse who, alas, was not Haitian. I said that I would go talk to her and ask about it, but being convinced that she hadn't taken it, I said that I didn't know what to do if she said no. Faced with the real consequences, I said that if both she and Saul denied responsibility, we would just have to forget about it. But Joseph and Garly were insistent that we could not do that. That it was necessary for us to resolve the issue for people to feel secure in that house.

So I went upstairs to talk to my friend, the woman living there. I began to ask about the gift, trying not to sound accusatory in any way, and she quickly said, "Oh yeah, I have that, was that yours?"

My first reaction was a wave of relief. There would be no further confrontation with Saul. Then my friend started feeling extremely guilty. She had been exhausted that night, and she saw something she thought was leftover from the party, and assumed it didn't really belong to anyone. And I told her then, and honestly still believe, that I completely understand. I've lived in big houses before where people are always coming and going, and the idea of property gets blurry. I explained my relief that it was her and not Saul, and that I did not in any way consider her a thief. She began crying all the same. That felt horrible.

Then I went downstairs to clear things up with Saul. I went out into the yard and found him and Garly and Joseph. I quickly explained that the gift was upstairs and everything was okay. I looked at Saul, and began to tell him that I was sorry. Before all the words came out, he winced, and then began to cry, and then sob. He staggered towards the door as Garly and Joseph moved to stop him. They held him and tried to calm him and explain why it was necessary to do this, and why it wasn't my fault. Joseph wisely said that we had to take this kind of thing head on because, "se Ayisyen nou ye": what we are is Haitians. He acknowledged in these few words, that being Haitian meant dealing with these kinds of accusations - and that overcoming these perceptions could only be done with fearless transparency. But Saul just stopped and said yes, while that may be true, he always felt that I was accusing him. And he continued to cry.

He was right. I always accused him. He could barely eat during the prior week. To be accused of stealing in Haiti is a very big deal. Thieves in the marketplace are sometimes beaten to death. And for Saul, to be accused by a white man, someone he considered a friend, was more painful than I can imagine. I'll never know what it feels to be judged like that. It was prejudice pure and simple, and prejudice hurts. I could probably spend the next ten years here and not see another Haitian man cry. It's very rare. But I saw it that day because of the emotional violence I had inflicted on this kind man.

I looked at Saul and it dawned on me just what I had done. I began to cry as well. Immediately he embraced me and told me that everything was fine, and that I shouldn't worry about it.

I couldn't stay at the house, I had to leave. I went home and didn't really go out much for the rest of the weekend. I kept playing over the events in my mind, wondering how I could be so wrong, so presumptuous. I felt like a monster. The comforts were few and small. I called Garly to tell him that I was having a very hard time with it, and he assured me that he too had thought it was most likely Saul who took the gift. Still, I though, how much of that was due to the way I explained and interpreted the whole affair from the beginning?

I went back to the house a couple days later, just to tell Saul that I still felt awful, and that I didn't deserve his forgiveness, and that I would be marked for the rest of my life with the lesson I learned there. Again the tears flowed. He just smiled and put his hand on my shoulder and that said it all.

I know this is a very personal thing to write on my blog. I was reading Geez magazine (if you're unfamiliar, check out www.geezmagazine.org) and I came across a quote that struck me. An activist named Sherene Razack "observes that white, privileged and respectable identity builds itself by being able to enter places of degeneracy and come out unscathed, willing and ready to tell the tale." I saw myself in this description, and I regret that. I do want to keep writing about my experiences here. Haiti has a tale to tell that's worth hearing. But not for the sheer thrill of it. It's important to hear because it reflects back on all of us who live lives of comfort and convenience, and who never have to suffer injustice and racism the way that people here do. I don't want to seem unaffected by the reality here. I am affected. I am quite scathed. Haiti has exposed me to my own ugliness, and as much as I'm ashamed of that, I don't want to hide it and pretend that I'm invincible and righteous and intent on teaching the people of Haiti a thing or two. I'm just glad I have an excuse to be here for the time being.

Year one, year thirty

Last Sunday, October 28th, was International Prisoners' Day. To mark the occasion, I went to the National Penitentiary with a couple of my Haitian colleagues.

Imagine a U.S. prison big and crowded enough to hold about half of the country's prisoners. Now imagine that it was built just a couple of blocks away from the white house. Imagine that there was one day every year when the highest ranking officials of the prison and justice systems, along with a bunch of journalists and human rights activists, sat down together on one side of the main prison yard under a big tent. Across the aisle from these civilians was a corresponding number of prisoners, selected to represent all of the inmates. Imagine a religious service held there in the prison yard that emphasized the dignity and worth of all prisoners, stating in no uncertain terms that they were no different from anyone else, and that all free people would be judged for every injustice suffered by those incarcerated people. Then, imagine representatives of the government taking turns speaking to the crowd, doing their best to provide explanations for the problems of the criminal justice system. And finally, imagine that the prisoners themselves were then able to send their own representatives up front to say whatever they want, no matter how angry or inflammatory.

This was the scene, more or less last Sunday, and it was quite remarkable. The shame of the officials and the anger of the prisoners was not without reason. The prisons here are hellish. International treaties on prisoners' rights declare that each prisoner should have at least 4.5 square meters of space to themselves. In Port-au-Prince's National Penitentiary, as in most of Haiti's prisons, the actual figure is less than a square meter per inmate. The prisoners are packed in their cells worse than sardines; they have to sleep in shifts because there is not enough room for everyone to lie down on the floor at once. Many suffer from tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, beriberi (vitamin B deficiency), contagious itchy rashes, and other sicknesses which are impossible to contain in such overtaxed conditions.

Only a tiny fraction of the inmates have even been convicted of any crime. In Haiti it is legal to lock someone up once they have appeared before a judge to learn what crimes are being brought against them. But after that time, they are not supposed to spend more than two months in prison before going to trial. Of course, the vast majority of the prisoners at the National Penitentiary have been there for at least two months - some longer than two years - without yet going to trial. The reasons for this include corruption, gross incompetence, and a plain lack of resources on the part of the justice system.

Still, all told, I was impressed by the courage of the state authorities to acknowledge these problems, and the courage of the inmates to speak out against them, demand better treatment, and continue to hope that a better future is possible. The Haitian government is the author of many -- NOT all, but many -- of it's own troubles. But on this one occasion, you have to give them points for humility.

Special mass for the prisoners:




At times the priest's voice was drowned out by prisoners chanting in anger from their cells. It was a painful reminder that we all might be equal in God's eyes, but that spiritual reality means precious little to these miserable detainees.

Here's one of the prisoners speaking to the audience.



He was calm and dignified, but his words were heavy with determined, righteous anger.

The director of the penitentiary authority:



I've actually met with this man before. He's a giant. He is also a very serious and somber man, who I dare say feels real compassion for the prisoners that have been put under his charge. More than you can say for many of the wardens of individual prisons around the country.

The director presenting trophies to the soccer teams that won the tournament they played on the prison yard concrete.



There were also awards given to the winners of the dominos and checkers competitions. All of the winners were given the microphone to make a victory speech. And every one of them opted instead to denounce their conditions, demand justice, or mourn fellow inmates who had died.

Finally we were given a tour of the prison from the top of the wall that surrounds the complex. Here's some of what I saw:









How do you feed three thousand prisoners?



Surely this was made special for International Prisoners' Day -- the rice doesn't usually have beans in it. And even on this day, the beans were pretty skimpy by Haitian standards.

* * *

Wednesday was a fairly significant milestone. It marked my 365th day in Haiti, as well as my 30th birthday. I had a party at my office for lunch, along with Stephanie from Belgium, who's birthday was on the 30th. Then that evening I had my fellow MCCers and Remi over to my house, where my landlady/Haitian mother cooked an amazing, all local feast for us. Photos here:

Birthday 2007

I was kind of lazy and didn't write any captions. Remi did a better job on her album here.

I've heard several Haitians refer to a folk belief they have, that if a person isn't married by age 30, they will never be married at all. So all day on Wednesday, my Haitian coworkers were wishing me a happy birthday and promising to find me a nice wife, or telling me that they'd be praying for the right woman to find me. Even Russa, my Haitian mother, true to her role, gave me a big talk about how she was just sure that this year I would meet that special someone. Then she said something that my own mother definitely would not have included: "Because, Felix, I don't have to tell you that there are all kinds of dangerous diseases out there like AIDS and what not."

Uhhh, right. I'm not too worried about getting AIDS, so this wasn't a big selling point for marriage. I'm not one for superstition, either. But for all those women out there who are, I've got two words for you: last chance. Just one year to go! Start your engines! Fly, row, swim, do whatever you need to do to get to this island if you want a shot to be Mrs. Felix. Because if this fish gets away before Halloween 2008, he's gone for good!

I'll alert the coast guard to prepare for the major spike in immigration to Haiti.

* * *

Finally, I wanted to share some photos and video from the Gede celebrations. two Saturdays ago I went to a seminar on the celebrations that occur within Vodou every November 1st and 2nd. These are national holidays, and they focus on a class of Vodou spirits known as the Gede, who are the mediators of the life and death cycle. Chief among them is a figure known as Baron Samedi - sometimes depicted as a black man, sometimes as a skeleton, but always wearing a black suit and top hat.

One of my coworkers invited me to go with him to the Port-au-Prince cemetary -- the Gede ground zero -- on the morning of November 1st. The colors of Gede are black, white and purple, as you'll notice. The video Dafus and I took below is pretty rough, and I didn't edit it at all. I'm leaving it in its entirety for those of you who are really curious. First you'll see us approaching a crowd gathered around the black cross of Baron Samedi, where people are lighting candles and offering prayers and pouring out sacrifices of rum. Then, you'll see a couple of men dressed in purple and black approach from far away while the crowd makes a hubbub. There's some debate whether these men were actually gay or only pretending to be gay, but everyone started chanting right away men masisi!, which is a somewhat vulgar way of saying "here come the homosexuals."

Homosexuals live very secret lives in Haiti because public persecution can be very serious, but there was a certain tolerance on this occasion. There was also a lot of tolerance for taking photos. Normally, snapping close photos without permission can get you roughed up in Haiti, but people weren't bothered at all when Dafus and I were snapping shots or taking video.

After the scene by the Baron Samedi cross, you'll see some panning footage of the cemetary chapel as well as the tall, New Orleans-style graves. In Haiti, the graves are almost always these above ground plots for stacking caskets, or they are shaped like little houses. you'll be able to pick out a couple of those in the video too.

Finally, you'll see a crowd of people dressed all in white, chanting and singing. These are a bunch of new initiates into the Vodou priesthood. There's a lot more I could write about the things I saw there, but I don't even know where to start. Feel free to send questions, and I'll try and answer them.

Here's the video:

Here's some photos:

Gede

You can take the boy out of Seattle...

I don't think that Seattle deserves the reputation it earned among some editorialists as the birth of the anti-globalization movement. I was there at the WTO protests in November 1999. It was pretty cool to see burly teamsters and other union members marching alongside wacky environmentalists dressed as turtles. Not to mention the Wiccans, the indigenous central Americans, the students, the hipsters, the hippies, the enviro-yuppies and the giant paper mache puppets. And then there was me and my fellow churchgoers, marching along under our patchwork banner: "Mennonites for Fair Trade." As if there weren't enough strange juxtapositions already, we spent a couple of blocks marching alongside a train of women who chose to go topless on that cold November day. Perhaps it was in this sense and this sense only that Seattle was a new kind of thing: a massive mobilization where people from very different walks of life decided to make a statement that they didn't like the trends they were seeing in the world.

It was a fun, even whimsical time. I'm proud that I was a part of it, even if it was eventually overshadowed by property damage and tear gas. The voices were many and varied. Robert Reich, the former labor secretary, was talking about that term, "globalization," when he said that never before has a word gone so quickly from meaning nothing to meaning everything. That is, a couple decades ago, you would just scratch your head if someone used the word globalization, and now it seems to encompass everything from the internet to McDonalds to worldwide jihad. So when all those people came together in Seattle, there wasn't much of a unified message beyond, "we're paying attention, and we don't like what we see."

That said, the vast majority of those gripes are rooted, I think it's fair to say, in the liberal trade policies that have made the United States of America the wealthiest, most dominant nation of all time. The people who run the United States are smart. They know they've got a good thing going, and they know how to make it even better. That's why the ideology of free trade is nicknamed the "Washington consensus." Remember that all those protests were directed at President Clinton. There's practically no difference between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to trade. (Nor on the military, really. As my pastor once said, putting a Democrat in the White House wouldn't do anything more than put a happy face on the American empire).

There is a vocal minority on each side of the isle that is plenty angry about losing jobs to China or environmental degradation, to be sure. But is there any chance in these modern times that someone could get elected to the highest office and actually treat the concerns of poor Americans (either in the national or the continental sense) as anywhere near on par with the concerns of the business community? I think not. Especially when the academics are backing them up all the way with endless charts and graphs that all say one thing: don't worry, we're still getting richer.

Inequality is growing everywhere?

Don't worry, on average we're still getting richer.

Glaciers are melting and storms are getting more extreme?

Different scientists have different opinions. The predictions are pretty speculative. But I've got good news: these numbers right here tell me that we're still getting richer. Besides, we're going to invent a way to make energy from garbage, like in Back to the Future.

We're spending more than we're making and we're only getting away with it because China and Japan are buying treasury bonds and financing our irresponsibility?

I know! Isn't it great? It's almost as if there's nothing we can do to stop getting richer! Woo hoo!

So anyways, as you might have guessed, Haiti hasn't been one of the big "winners" in the game of globalization. Most people would imagine that because of this, Haiti is nothing but a drag on the world economy. As Paul Farmer and Noam Chomsky have argued, however, there are plenty of ways to make money off of a pariah state like Haiti. The bourgeoisie do it. The Dominican Republic does it. And the United States does it. Well. And they all do it with a pitying attitude, like they deserve a pat on the back for finding ways to squeeze wealth out of the poorest people in the hemisphere.

I bring all this up to say that it could actually get worse. There's a free-trade agreement being proposed between Europe and poorer countries in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific rim. The agreement would only further weaken Haiti's feeble industry by reducing or abolishing tariffs on imports. Before it signed similar trade deals with the United States, Haiti was able to feed itself. Now it is the dumping ground for subsidized rice and any other product that can't compete in markets elsewhere. Supposedly it's worth it to undersell the local producers and put them out of business, because at least it brings prices down for consumers. But in reality, the consumers see very little change in their purchasing power, and it's the importers and retailers that make a killing.

So a lot of activists in countries that would be affected by this agreement have been staging protests. Luckily I got to see some of the action right here. Haitians love protesting even more than those ragamuffin Seattle people. My organization collaborated with other NGOs to do a press conference, a big concert, and, of course, a march. In another odd similarity between my life here and in Seattle, there are steep hills everywhere. In Seattle the protesters usually try to stick to the flatter parts of the city. But here, last Tuesday, I found myself trudging up an urban mountain, sweating profusely, carrying part of a banner that said, among other things, "BARE APE!"

It had nothing to do with primates. APE stands for Accord Partenariat Economique, which is French for "trust me, it's a win-win situation!'' "Bare APE" is Creole for "Block the Economic Partnership Agreement." The march was a lot of fun. There were between 50 and 100 of us for most of the time. We chanted, we sang, we danced. At one point we came across a completely unrelated protest and we stopped and pumped each other up to carry on our spirited, yet peaceful display.

The march almost got a ugly at one point. We stopped in front of the French embassy to register our outrage. At that moment, a UN vehicle came down the driveway to leave. We sort of got in their way and made them listen to what we had to say. Eventually, the big white SUV pushed its way through, and just as it broke free of the crowd someone threw a rock through the rear window.

The culprit--a one-handed man, incidentally, who was not part of the march--was immediately surrounded and loudly denounced. That didn't stop a Haitian website from posting a big picture of the shattered window (I also appeared in a photo attached to the same story, marching along with one fist in the air). And later in the day, probably as a result of the rock-throwing incident, a couple of guys with guns showed up. Lindsay and I got our picture taken with this nice gentleman because he was also an American:



The only way I knew his nationality was a little flag sown on the back of his kevlar vest. He had no official markings of any police or military agency, which makes me wonder if he was a private military contractor à la Blackwater. He kept his finger on the trigger like that the whole time, and muttered at one point that if anyone got out of line he was going to "kick some ass." His colleague, a slightly less evil-looking Austrian man, asked us how much we paid all of these Haitian people to protest with us. Charming.

All in all it was a good day of protesting.

A week and a half before that, the MCC volunteers in Port got together to celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving -- or as the Canadians referred to it, "Thanksgiving." I know, weird. And we did our part to make it as local as possible. Josh and Marylynn even killed and plucked the chickens themselves. I made a fudge/mousse sort of thing using Haitian cocoa and avocado. You can read about it on the website for the 100-mile diet here. We're about a quarter of the way down.

What I did on my summer vacation from my own blog.

My sincere apologies to family and friends. I've been fairly distant for the last month or so, both on the blog and on e-mail. There's been lots of problems with the internet both at RNDDH and at the MCC office. Basically everyone in Haiti is connected to the internet through the same sattelite service, which I assume means we're all using the same sattelite. I have no idea how these things work. But I've wondered if there might be something wrong with this one sattelite, and if this island might eventually be cut off completely from cyberspace. Seems like things are better now.

So, here's some of what I've been up to in the last month:

We had a team retreat. The reforestation team in Desarmes met up with those of us in Port-au-Prince for a few days at a resort called Club Indigo. The place was beautiful, if just ever so slightly dilapidated. Up until 1993 it was the Club Med. It's been rehabilitated lately, and has a nice kind of faded-glory ambiance to it. They even still use the Club Med plates and coffee cups and disposable napkins and paper placemats with a map of all the Club Meds in the world, circa 1990 or so. On this little map, Haiti is refered to as "the Magic Island." And best of all, whereas the food was probably all European back in the day, it's all pretty Haitian now. This was really good news for our Haitian staff. If there's one thing I can say confidently about Haitians - those who have not spent time off the island, is that they are not very adventurous when it comes to food. As far as they are concerned, Haitian food is far superior to any other kind. One day Josh (Canadian) was talking to Joseph (our Haitian chauffer) about favorite foods. I can't remember what Josh said - probably Thai-style noodles or something exotic like that. What is Joseph's favorite kind of food in the whole world? Rice. What that means is that every single day of his life, Joseph sits down to at least one meal of his favorite food in the whole world. "Yesssss! Sweet! Rice, AGAIN!"

But anyway, Club Med. There were pools, ping pong tables, a beautiful beach, a soccer field, what more could you ask for? We played a soccer game pitting the reforestation staff against the Port-au-Prince staff plus the reforestation team's administative assistant. So basically, it was the burly outdoorsy Haitians and North Americans versus the pencil pushing Haitians and North Americans. And guess who won. Pencil pushers, 10-0.

We did a lot of fun games and team-building stuff, but the highlight was probably the first-ever screening of "Crokinole" in Haiti. Let me explain: Josh Steckley, who works here in Port on advocacy issues, made a documentary with his cousin before he came to Haiti. Crokinole is a sort of board game where you try and flick a little puck into a circle. It's like a miniature version of curling. Not far from where Josh grew up in southern Ontario there is an "international championship" every year. The movie is really funny. I don't know if you can call something a "mockumentary" -- in the style of Spinal Tap or Best in Show -- if it's based on real life. But that's the feel of it. Catch Crokinole fever here.

Speaking of filmmaking, Josh and I spent a morning trying to get some good footage of the streets of Port-au-Prince. He's got some great ideas for short films he can make to get the word out on Haiti, and how US and Canadian policies affect people's lives here. So one day we devised a sort of hidden camera so that we could get some candid footage. We came up with a pretty cool one, made from a small cardboard box with a hole in the corner where we placed my little Nikon digital, but then all of our batteries ran out, so we didn't end up with much footage. And when Marylynn (Josh's wife) saw our little project, she just shook her head.

I'm lucky to have a team full of really cool people. But the winds of change are blowing here at MCC-Haiti. The first departure is Bethany, my next-door neighbor, and moto-pooler for the last two months. During most of my absence on this blog, I've been commuting by motorcycle to work, usually with Bethany on the back. She's a great sport. When she fears for her life, she keeps it quietly to herself. There should be a video game of driving in Port-au-Prince, complete with blind taptap drivers, blinding clouds of exhaust, and obstacles ranging from packs of dogs to chains of schoolchildren to guys trying to run across the road with 12-foot planks balanced on their shoulders. So Beth is now finished with MCC, and will be back at home in British Columbia before too long. And tomorrow Matt and Esther and Gabriela are moving to Port-au-Prince. They're finished with MCC, for now, but fortunately they'll be sticking around on the island for a little while. Matt will be working with an NGO here in the city while Esther balances between working with the foundation for the pine forest in Seguin (best place in Haiti - refer to earlier posts) and managing a campaign to get NGOs in Haiti to buy only local products. I'll be writing much more about that later. For people that like to vote with their dollars, there can sometimes be tough choices between buying fair-trade, buying organic, and buying local. In Haiti, buying local is clearly the way to go. More and more I'm convinced that this is true everywhere. "Organic" and "fair trade" can be pretty vague concepts, easily abused to make a quick buck because it's "cool" or whatever. When it comes to buying local I'm a more conscientious shopper here than I've ever been. But will I and my fellow MCCers be able to eat nothing but Haitian products for a year? Haiti imports something like 90% of the food it consumes, mostly thanks to the United States' bullying trade policy. So if a local diet can be done here, it can be done anywhere. Tune in and find out!

So those are the departures from team MCC-Haiti. In the arrivals department, Lindsay Williams has just finished her first week working with me at RNDDH. She's settling in nicely. I love the people that I work with at RNDDH, but I couldn't describe it as an easy place for a North American to get integrated. But already Lindsay looks like a really good fit. She's got her own blog too, which you can find listed under "MCC blogs" over on the right. I've made some other additions over there including a brand spanking new Haiti blogs section. There you can get a flavor for some of the political currents in Haiti. Also there is a blog by Rhemy Aleppo, a woman who is teaching in Haiti through the Reformed Church's development organization. She's originally Nigerian and so she's got an interesting perspective on life in Haiti, where people will often assume at first that she is a native. Also check out "three innocents and a spirit", which is a blog by Carla Bluntschli and Ari Nicolas. I haven't written nearly enough here about Ari and Carla. They've certainly been the most influential people for me in terms of understanding what Haiti is all about. Carla is an American who came here in the 80s with her husband Ron and daughters to do reforestation with MCC. Ari is a Haitian man who spent months in hiding at the MCC guesthouse, where I'm sitting now, after the coup of 1991. He's one of those people that just exudes wisdom. When he speaks, you listen. The blog is in regards to their play. They've been touring around the states for weeks now with a dramatic representation of the encounters between the indigenous people of the Americas, the Europeans, and the African slaves.

What else has been going on? I've had the use of a laptop for about a month now. It's pretty old, and not good for much other that watching DVD's. This means that instead of enriching myself with books, I've been watching films like "S.W.A.T." and "Bridget Jones' Diary." I probably could have spent that time better. I really knew it was getting bad when I found myself watching the featurette on the making of "Hitch."

On a less pathetic note, things are going well at work. It's been incredibly busy for the last month, and especially these last two weeks have flown by while I leave each day feeling like I've sunk a little deeper into the hole of work that I had planned to crawl out of. But at least it continues to be exciting and interesting. And at times, it feels like maybe, in some small way, I'm able to actually make a difference. A couple weeks ago I went on a routine visit to the Port-au-Prince central police station. We spoke with all of the people that were being held in the jail there. One young man informed me that he had been there for months, which is bad enough, and still hadn't seen a judge. The Haitian constitution says that all people arrested by the police should spend no more than 48 hours in jail before seeing a judge to find out exactly what charges are being brought against them. So my coworkers and I brought up the issue with the chief investigator. Long story short, this detainee's file had been shuffled into the archives accidentally. Sloppy bookkeeping turned this poor man into a ghost. It's impossible to say how long he would have languished there if we hadn't come along to point his case out to the police. The investigator was sincerely embarassed (rightfully so) and promised that they would do everthing to get him out of legal limbo as soon as possible.

I'll leave it off there for now. Like I said, things are good here, despite my relative silence. I very much appreciate all the e-mail I've received from people with news about what's going on with y'all. Love,

kurt

My First Hurricane

I'll just come out and say it, so you can judge me however you want: Hurricane Dean was a letdown. I wanted more. I know that's a horrible thing to think, let alone write, but there it is. I only say it because I've heard other people, blans and Haitians, say the same thing. And actually, I got a better show than most of the people I know in Port-au-Prince. The capital just got a little bit of rain, nothing compared to the torrential downpours that hit the city at least a couple times each week in the rainy season. When the hurricane came, I was on the southern coast, a little closer to the action.

On Friday I flew from Port-au-Prince to Jeremie, a good sized city, and one of the most remote parts of the country. If you look at a map of Haiti, it resembles a lobster claw, with the southern half of the country as one long peninsula. Out at the end of the peninsula, on the north side, sits Jeremie. Jeremie calls itself the city of poets, and it has produced some great writers, including Alexandre Dumas, who wrote "The Three Musketeers" among other books. The city is well-known for a pastry you can get there called "konparèt"; it's about the size of a hamburger bun, but sweet, dense, and hard as a rock. The closest thing I can compare it to is biscotti. It's made with lots of ginger and it's delicious.

I was glad to be flying because I've heard nothing but horror stories about the road that connects Jeremie to Les Cayes, the nearest city. I went there for another human rights training for police officers. All day Friday was perfect and sunny. Saturday was noticeably windier, but still quite sunny. The UN outpost next to where we did our training was busy stacking sandbags all around their compound. I was supposed to fly back to Port on Saturday afternoon, but the flight was canceled on account of hurricane. But generally, people weren't very anxious about it, speaking casually of the coming storm, which they referred to as "move tan" pronounced to rhyme with "mow a lawn." In literal translation, move tan is Creole for "bad time" or "evil time" and refers to tropical storms, hurricanes, or anything that causes a day or two to go by without sunshine.

So, with no flight back, my coworkers and I had to decide what to do. Most of them had come a few days earlier by SUV to take care of other stuff. We decided to drive to Les Cayes, hopefully getting there before dark, and well before the hurricane. Thing is, there were six of us, and only five seats. I knew they'd be happy to cram four into the back seat, but I figured I'd just as well ride in the back with the luggage, and they'd definitely be more comfortable that way. So for five hours I was getting pitched around with the cooler and suitcases while we worked our way south. I can't overstate how bad the road was. It would have been impossible without a 4x4, and even then it was slow and torturous.

We landed at our hotel in Les Cayes, which happened to have CNN. One of their correspondents was in Port-au-Prince, breathlessly reporting that people were doing nothing to prepare. The computer models showed the storm coming right for us, since Les Cayes is out at the southwestern end of the peninsula. It looked like a buzz saw tearing through the city. After a little while I went upstairs and slept right through the whole thing.

In the morning, one of my coworkers came and woke me up to survey the destruction. He had woken up at 3 in the morning when the eye passed by several miles to the south, and said that the wind was very strong. When I went outside to take a look, it was cloudy and rainy and windy, which is incredibly rare here in the morning. The wind wasn't too very strong, but every few minutes a big gust would come through and rattle the tin roofs all around us, threatening to pull off the ones that weren't nailed down tight. Off on the horizon I could see the hundreds of coconut and palm trees that line the seashore, their branches flapping in the wind like pompoms held out the window of a moving car.

We left Les Cayes after breakfast. We got news that the worst part of the storm would be rolling through there at noon, so it seemed prudent to hit the road and get further inland, driving east back to Port-au-Prince. Leaving Les Cayes we drove along the coast where the water, usually azure, was muddy brown and beating against the shore in big, rough, irregular waves. The wind was intense along the shore, pushing the car around quite a bit. As the road took us away from the coast, we saw banana and plantain trees that had been blown down in their fields. Several big trees had been knocked down onto the road, but they were already pulled off to the side and in the process of being hacked into firewood.

The drive back was generally uneventful. Around 11, we hit the tail of the storm, which packed the biggest punch. It was a solid wall of rain that forced our chauffeur, who normally drives like a maniac, to creep along, hunched over the wheel and unable to see, even with the wipers full-speed. But once we made it through that it was smooth sailing. We got back to Port-au-Prince and talked to people who said the storm was a little anticlimactic for them. Oh well, maybe next time.

Just kidding.

Sort of.

The Family Hour

My family, or most of it, was here from the 21st to the 30th of July. I was so excited in the week before they came that I could barely concentrate on work. And then once they were here the time flew by and before I knew it we were saying our sad goodbyes at the airport.

I asked my mom, dad and sister to jot down a paragraph about their experience here. Here's what they had to say.

Dad:
A vacation in Haiti!!! Friends gave me THE LOOK when I explained that Haiti was our destination. Now, eleven days after returning, I can report that it was a great time. Exiting the airport and seeing the BLAN, Kurt, across the parking lot still ranks as one of the highlights of the trip. Other highlights:
*Visiting with Kurt's (Felix's) co-workers and getting a sense of the mission
*Cool showers out of a 5 gallon bucket
*Gabby's Birthday party
*The beautiful beaches and warm water
*Driving through the DR and having the road blockaded by 40 women and children
*-and them telling us that they wanted our money................ so they could make soup for their husbands/fathers for Father's Day, which was the next day, and then seeing them all laugh hysterically, was wonderful.
*Watching and listening as Kurt conversed with the Haitian people and sensing his pride in this country and its people
*A late night meal by candlelight, roadside in Desarmes--best egg sandwich I have ever had
*Meeting and seeing some of the most beautiful people I have ever met in my life
*Holding our son again
*Meals, travel, conversations, sweating together, laughing, praying and having most of our family together again was just so good!

Now I am looking forward to that motorcycle trip across Haiti!!

Don (Dad)

Mom:
Haiti is such a place of contrasts: Intense poverty, but a wealth of pride in its history and culture. Poor infrastructure, but orderliness with street vendors' merchandise and sweeping of front steps. Lack of organized labor, but Haitians are well-dressed, polite and their children follow suit. We found the people to be lovely and accommodating. The food was wonderful (although we said, "Nyah-ah-ah" to Kurt's offer of a bite of goat stew). Haiti is not for the faint of heart....but one can't help but be impressed by its most important resource: its people.

And Holly:
One of the most impressive things I observed about Haiti was the community. Considering the very little I've learned about Haitian history (about as much as Cuba), I knew enough to realize that the small country has pretty much seen it all. However, despite the amount of violence and danger that we usually associate with Haiti, it is yet another place of community, of homes, of families, of friends. On a normal walk down the street I exchanged more "good mornings" than in my own hometown, and even the most persistent hawkers will share a laugh when possible. The people we came into contact with on our short visit were always hospitable in a way that seemed more customary than merely kind. And while I'd like to say it was because of Kurt's Kreyol that people were so quick to converse, I think it has more to do with the culture. We met a few nationals or second generation Haitians visiting from the States, and each one was so eager to move back to Haiti. This was also common among many Californian Central Americans I've met in the past few years, however the Haitians I met were not doing various hard labor jobs away from their families. These were privileged Haitians who were given the opportunity to leave home and pursue a completely different life. There was a sincere appreciation from the people I talked to that did not dismiss either their American or Haitian culture, but preferred the Haitian lifestyle to that in the States. I realize that this is not the case for all, that many Haitians would probably love to go to America and work, as many families depend on expatriate earnings overseas. Maybe it's because of my own discontent with parts of our culture that I would so gladly live somewhere else that it was refreshing to hear of such appreciation. Either way, the country's political and economic situation are definitely not making people want to stay- it's obviously because of the community and culture. These are of course the most important assets to any country, and in my own experience, Haiti is rich in both.

* * *

I picked up mom, dad and Holly at the Port-au-Prince airport on the morning of the 21st. Right away we drove out of the city and up the interior coast, called the Arcadian Coast. We stopped at a place called Moulin Sur Mer, or windmill on the sea, which used to be a sugarcane plantation, but now is a beach resort and a museum.

I had imagined my family showing up here, being somewhat bewildered by the sights and smells, and I would confidently stride in and show them how Haiti works. But in what became a sort of theme while they were here, I had plenty of firsts, bests, worsts, new experiences and revelations of my own while they were here. For starters, I had never been to Moulin Sur Mer before. I showed up with my family, and walked around thinking that this has to be one of the loveliest places I've seen in Haiti.

We walked into the buffet area just as the best man was delivering his toast at a wedding reception held there on the beach. It was typically flowery and tedious, and of course in French. We didn't waste much time. After eating we jumped in the warm Caribbean water and just floated around, catching up on everything that we could think to ask. If I remember right, we were the only white folks at the place -- somewhat surprising, considering that it wasn't exactly cheap to get a day pass there. My family looked around at our Haitian beach-mates, remarking about how beautiful everyone was. It's something they continued noticing throughout their stay in Haiti.

After the beach, we continued driving until we arrived in Desarmes. We walked out and bought egg sandwiches on the street, which is always one of my favorite part about visiting the reforestation program, and my dad mentioned it above as well. The next day, Sunday, we woke up for some bread, fruit and delicious Haitian coffee. We took a little hike and looked at the Artibonite river, guided by Esther and Gabriela:



Then we hoofed it over a small ridge to check out the view of Desarmes, and all the trees growing there, thanks in part to the work they've been doing there for the last 20 years.



On Sunday afternoon, Matt and Esther had a party to celebrate the one-year anniversary from when they brough Gabriela home. Check out their blog about the event here. There was pineapple upsdide-down cake, water baloons, bubbles and other fun stuff. The Haitian kids who came with their parents to the celebration were all dressed up, and not quite ready to go crazy with water baloons and the like. Some were more outgoing...



others not so much:



On Monday we drove back to Port-au-Prince in time for lunch at my office. Even though the Hildebrands were running late, everyone there waited until we arrived, after 2:00, to eat. It went well. My boss, Pierre, welcomed my family by telling them that they were much better looking than me. Oh yes, this was another theme: everywhere we went in Haiti, people said the exact same thing, "you parents are so young!" Then, inevitably, about ten minutes later, at least one of the guys would take me aside, put his hand on my shoulder, and discreetly say into my ear, "Kurt, your sister is very beautiful." I never really knew how to respond to this. Thank you?

There was a good mix of me translating for coworkers, coworkers doing as well as they could in English, and my family just speaking English to each other. My mother thanked them for lunch with a box of See's Candies which somehow, miraculously, didn't turn into a box of See's chocolate syrup in the tropical heat.

After lunch, we got back into the car and took a little tour of Port-au-Prince. At the absolute busiest, hottest part of the day, I attempted a drive down Jean Jacques Dessalines (the George Washington of Haiti), which is basically main street. The building facades all rusted and crumbling, traffic at a near standstill, and the street and sidewalks pulsating with human activity. Merchants selling everything from produce to cell phone chargers sat beneath umbrellas, crowds pressed up against them. At each intersection was a mountain of slimy refuse, much of it organic matter trimmed from produce. And there we were, watching it all from the cool, air conditioned bubble of a beige Nissan SUV. As I was focused on not running anyone over -- surprisingly hard, considering we probably never got above 10 miles per hour -- a man was standing outside of the car trying to get my family's attention. I didn't see him, I just heard their responses. "Kurt, this guy just said he was going to kill us." "Wait, what's that mean? He wants to eat us? He wants to kill us and eat us?!" "Oh, and now he's acting all nice like he wants to be friends with us."

This became a big revelation for me. The man in question approached the car windows to get their attention. First, he drew his index finger across his neck. Then he moved his fingertips, clustered together, towards his mouth. Then he smiled, hand held out. My family was surprisingly calm during this confusing display. The very next day, I saw a young boy make the same gesture as we passed. Finger across the neck, hand held out. That's when it all came together for me.

In my nine months here so far, I've been in some fairly dicey situations. Apocalyptic rainstorms, surging crowds, belligerent police, stone-throwing mini-riots. Last night I was at a vodou ceremony (more about that later), which wasn't scary at all, though I can imagine a time in my life when that would have been nothing but heebie jeebies. But, the scariest moment, hands down, happened on an afternoon in February. I was hiking around the hills north of Port-au-Prince with a friend, when we passed a field where two men were working. They were about 200 feet away. When one of the men saw us, he turned towards us, shrugged his shoulders with his arms up in the air -- a machete in his right hand -- and then pretended to slit his throat with the machete, and finally put his arms back up in the air. I have always assumed that the throat-slitting gesture is a fairly universal way of saying, "I am going to kill you" or "you're going to die" or something along those lines. I didn't think he was actually going to come kill me. It just struck me as a very hostile gesture. In my mind, he was saying, "Who do you think you are? You don't belong here, and you're going to learn that the hard way, maybe even the violent way, and there's nothing you can do about it." How wrong I was.

What I realized that day when the little boy made the same gesture, is that in Haiti, it doesn't mean "I'm going to kill you," it means "I'm dying." So the man standing outside of our car that day wasn't telling my family that he wanted to kill and eat them, he was telling them that he was starving to death, he needed food, and he needed them to give him either food or money. The scary machete guy was just asking me for some money, nothing more, nothing less. Amazing what a little miscommunication will do. It still chills me to think about the impression that machete guy left on me. It was always there, in the back of my mind. Anytime I felt like I was getting really comfortable in Haiti, this red button marked REMEMBER THE MACHETE GUY would start blinking and beeping. Nice to know it was unnecessary. That's not to say that Haiti is Disneyland, but it's good to realize when your own fears have been unfairly projected onto other people.

Anyway, as intense and interesting as the main street tour was, we all breathed a sigh of relief once we got out of the hurly burly of the downtown market. Our tour of Port-au-Prince continued the next day when we drove up into the mountains overlooking the city, where it looks so much more peaceful:



The two nights that we slept in Port-au-Prince, we stayed in Bethany's apartment, which is right next door to mine. As luck would have it, a blown transformer had knocked out all the power on the block. (to this day, we haven't gotten power back.)

I've gone weeks with only one or two hours of power a day, but I'd never been stuck with absolutely no electricity, at least not until my family came to visit. But we made the best of it. We lit candles. We took bucket showers (no power means no pumping the water up to the tanks on the roofs, which means no running water). And generally we crashed out pretty early.

On our last night in Port-au-Prince, I was lucky enough to introduce my family to the Assalis, the family from which I rent a studio. I was worried that my landlady would be out of town and unable to meet them, but her trip was delayed, so they got to meet her after all. My mother came bearing gifts: aplets and cotlets, which my landlady loves, and smoked salmon. They couldn't have given us a more gracious reception. Madame Assali chided me for not letting her cook us a big Haitian dinner. She called her 15-year-old daughter Tarah, who spends the school year in Tampa Bay, down to entertain the family in English. While they were all chatting, Madame pulled me into the parlor boutique that she runs out of her house. It's an aromatic little showroom where she sells fancy French perfumes and toiletries and designer clothes and shoes and that kind of stuff. She made me pick which fragrance of body wash my mom would most appreciate: citrus or lavender. I protested that it wasn't necessary, and she wouldn't hear anything of it. She wrapped it in newspaper and then wrapping paper and a little bow, all the while going on and on about how great my family is, how young my parents look, how gracious and perfect my mother is, how I really should have told her earlier so she could cook dinner, on and on. Just as we were finally about to go deliver this little gift, Monsieur Assali showed up.

Robert: What's that?

Russa: It's a gift for Felix's mom.

Robert: What about his dad? Why is everybody always giving things to moms? What about dads?!

Russa: Alright, let's wrap up this [very fancy looking hygiene product].

Robert: That's what I'm talking about!

Me: Please, really, you don't need to-

Robert and Russa: Nonsense!

-- the wrapping rigamarole ensues again, we're on our way out again --

Russa: But what about Holly? We can't just give Felix's parents these gifts and leave Holly with nothing! What about this lotion?

Robert: Yes, good idea! Wrap it up!

Me: Honestly, please, please don't worry about it.

Russa: I can't believe you didn't give me the chance to cook for your family!

At this point, my 75-year-old, charming, toothless landlord sidled over to me, put his hand on my shoulder and said, "Felix, your sister really is very pretty."

So we finally got out of there after being showered with gifts. We stashed them in my apartment and then headed out for dinner. Before we could open the front gate, my landlady called me back over.

Russa: Felix, Tarah just told me that it's your mom's birthday today!

Me: Yes it is.

Russa: Well, I just gave your family welcome gifts, but I had no idea it was your mother's birthday!!

Me: Oh, no, please, madame, don't-

Russa: I have to give your mother something! Would she like this painting?

Me: Of course she would like it, but it really isn't nec-

Russa: It will be wrapped and waiting for you when you get back from dinner.

* * *

On day five we took a bus to the Dominican Republic. The music was way too loud. It was all Dominican music until we got to the chaotic border crossing. Once we left Haiti and were driving across the smooth-paved Dominican freeway, it switched to Haitian music.

We found a hotel in Santo Domingo, across the park from the first cathedral built in the western hemisphere.





There were a lot of firsts in Santo Domingo. First hospital; first monastery; first fortress; first paved road; tallest building of the 16th century and that kind of thing. Dominicans are very proud that this was the first island where Christopher Columbus chose to settle down. We walked right by the house where Columbus' son lived for many years, as well as the house of Cortes, where he lived before he set out to destroy the Aztec civilization of Mexico. I couldn't help thinking that this island is so full of history and tragedy. European colonization started here. The utter annihilation of the indigenous population was done first here - I wonder if Columbus would be celebrated as much if even a tiny fraction of those Taino and Arawak people had survived the 16th century. The intercontinental slave trade started right here. The only bright spot is the Haitian slave revolt, the only successful one in history. And even after this, Haitian society went to war with itself, slavery began again in earnest, this time with Haitian masters. It also invaded the Dominican half of the island, and was later kicked out. A hundred years later the Dominican dictator Trujillo ordered the killing of 20,000 Haitians who were living on the Dominican side as field workers. Both sides of the island have had more than their share of tragedy, and they have nursed a steady grudge towards each other, despite the fact that their economies are completely intertwined. Haitians provide no less than 90% of all agricultural and construction labor in the Dominican Republic.

But anyways, I should really wrap this up. We hit the beach, we snorkeled, we ate delicious seafood, we drove many miles through the lush Dominican countryside. It was relaxing and wonderful. We stayed at one beach with, literally, boatloads of white folks getting shipped around like cattle, boozing all the way. We were a little more low key. We hired a fisherman to take the four of us out to an island for swimming and snorkeling.

Then we drove from the south coast to the north coast. Instead of a beach packed with pasty whitefolks, we found this beach where, with a couple exceptions, you couldn't see anyone on that entire stretch of sand in either direction. Mom and I were out in the waves when an official coast-guard looking guy showed up and told Holly that we shouldn't get too far out, because there were sharks in the water. Maybe that explains why the beach wasn't so crowded.



That night, the random hotel we found in the middle of nowhere served us a big, beautiful Dominican dinner, family style. Dad and I followed it up with island-made stogies. The next couple of days took us back to Santo Domingo and then back to Port-au-Prince, and then, for my dear family, back to the mainland. I still can't believe how quick it all flew by. It took me no time at all to get comfortable with them being here. But when they left, I became so aware of how much I had missed them in those first 9 months, and how much more I would miss them now that they'd visited and seen my life here.

So to console myself, two days after my family left I went on a dirt-bike trip with the other MCC guys. We spent three days and two nights up in the central plateau. Except for me getting giardia, and Brian getting a flat tire, it was a pretty smooth ride. We spent a couple afternoons at a waterfall called Bassin Zim. Here's me almost plowing over Josh as I dive off the rocks.



Here's what the falls look like from above, where there are three more pools:



And here's the whole thing. Those light colored dots near the middle of the photo are me and Brian, to give you a sense of scale.



Here's what we looked like when we got back. No Brian doesn't have an identical twin, this is a composite of two photos.


And just to bookend this post with another significant Gabriela life event, her baptism was held on the day after we got back from the bike trip. You can read about it on Matt and Esther's blog here.

Haitian Wedding

Two Saturdays ago, I went to the Sacre Coeur Cathedral in downtown Port-au-Prince for a special treat: the wedding of my coworker Rosy Auguste.



Beautiful, isn't she?



I don't expect to see a lot of weddings in my time here. From what I've seen and heard, they don't happen very often. There's definitely not a wedding industry the same way there is back home. I believe that Seattle has something like three different wedding magazines. Seattle Bride and Seattle Wedding and that kind of nonsense. Rosy, on the other hand, had to wait for her mother to visit the United States, where she bought the wedding gown and brought it back to Haiti.

I can't say that weddings are rare. On the whole, there's plenty of Haitians getting married. But doing the whole official wedding thing doesn't seem to be a big "must" for most Haitians. This may be due to economics; weddings are pretty expensive no matter where you are. But at the same time, Haitians both rich and poor place a very high priority on baptims and funerals, often going way into debt for the sake of these social and religious obligations. But when it comes to marriages, there is a much more relaxed attitude.

This could be because dating is taken very seriously, there's nothing casual about it. Haitians don't generally "date around" much. They refer to their boyfriends and girlfriends as "menaj," which comes from the French word "ménage" that usually refers to a married couple. There is no step below menaj. You don't work your way up to menaj. Once you've declared that someone is your menaj, it's assumed that you are quite serious, perhaps even living together as if you were married. Perhaps with children. Women in relationships like this are often referred to as the "madam" or wife, of their boyfriend. Men, however, don't earn the title of "mari" or "husband" until they produce a ring. There's also a fairly common practice of men who are already in relationships taking a "ti menaj," or "little girlfriend" or two on the side. This double-standard is a Latin America-wide phenomenon, and some would say it's much less common in Haiti than in some of it's Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking neighbors.

But maybe there is a real split between Haiti and the rest of Latin American when it comes to marriage. Whereas abortion is completely illegal here, much like other Latin countries, divorce is as easy as can be. The laws are incredibly accommoding. Steely Dan even wrote a song called "Haitian Divorce," owing to the fact that there used to be a sort of niche market for "divorce tourism" here in the 70s. North American couples that wanted to untie the knot without all the legal fuss could get it done in an afternoon, and then stay for the weekend and come home tanned and ready for life as a single once again. Haiti is to divorcing what Las Vegas is to getting married. You can even get a unilateral divorce here, no matter how much your poor spouse protests.

But like I said, weddings still happen all the time, and I'm sure they're usually as lovely as the one I saw. It's especially interesting that Rosy chose to have a traditional wedding considering this: her father was a prominent houngan, or voodou priest, who had several madams. Rosy was the last of the thirty children he fathered. We've never spoken at length about it, so I don't know if her mother had a traditional catholic wedding or not, but I would guess not.

* * *

I also wanted to follow up on one of the comments to the last thing I posted here, about sayings in Creole. Matt shared one of his favorites, which I totally should have included the first time:

M ap kraze rak
I heard this a few times in my office before asking what it meant. A "rak" is a big bunch of trees, or a small forest. The phrase "m ap kraze rak" literally means, "I'm going to destroy a forest." People say it when they're about to leave somewhere. "Whoa, look at the time, I'm going to destroy a forest." The idea is that you're going to take off, you're going to hit the road, you're getting out of there at full speed, and you'll be going so fast that there won't be any trees left standing near the path you blaze.

My friend Almarie e-mailed me about the phrase "anpil bet" or "lots of animals" referring to wisdom. Whereas I thought it had to do with valuing wisdom as much as livestock, she had a more enlightened understaning: "my theory is one more based on animism, and on all the animals really being there, talking, with input, like in mythical times." A couple of days ago, a friend used the phrase this way, "moun sa a te gen anpil bét nan tét li." Translation: That person had a lot of animals in his/her head" -- which means "that person was incredibly wise." In light of this, I think Almarie has it right.

These are a few of my favorite things...

...that Haitians say. I've said before here that Haitian Creole has a lot of colorful expressions, perhaps to offset the utter simplicity of the grammar and vocabulary. Here's some of the more interesting expressions I've learned in the last few weeks:

Tèt nèg
Literally, it means a black man's head. In normal conversation, it's used to describe something that's expensive. If Haiti had Starbucks, you'd probably hear someone say "You're getting a frappuccino?! Those things are a black man's head!" The expression probably goes back well over two hundred years, to the days of slavery, when saying that something cost as much as a human being may have been shorthand for "it ain't cheap."

Radyo trant-de
Or, Radio 32. It's another way of saying "the grapevine." Why number 32? Because there's 32 teeth in most people's mouths. "What? Those two hooked up? That's crazy! Where did you hear that?" "Oh, you know, Radio 32!" I don't know if I've ever seen people that love talking as much as Haitians, which of course means that they're also terrific gossips. I can attest to this by the fact that I've heard at least 4 other expressions for "the grapevine" in addition to Radio 32.

Bèt
A friend of mine, a Haitian journalist, was recently in Geneva for a human rights seminar. When he got back I called him up and asked how it was. He replied. "Li te vreman enteresan. Te gen anpil bet la." Translation: "It was really interesting. There were a bunch of animals there." Huh? I got off the phone with him and asked one of my coworkers about it. He just laughed and said, that's a way of saying a lot of useful information was shared. "Bèt" comes from the same latin word that gives us "beast" in English. Here, it refers to any animal. Insects are called "ti bèt," or little beasts. But in the context of a classroom, a seminar, or a long conversation with a wise person, when you say that there were animals there, or that a person had a bunch of animals, or that you gained a bunch of animals, you're saying that you learned a lot. This has become one of my favorite sayings; my theory is that it reflects how much Haitians value knowledge. Since animals are a form of wealth for most Haitians, it means that learning something new is like someone handing you a nice fat pig. But that's just my theory.

Depi berejenn goumen ak konkonmb
This one is rare, and it makes absolutely no sense to me. When something has been a certain way for a long time, Creole has a couple ways of remarking on it. You can say "se konsa", or "that's how it is." You can say "it's been like that since the king was a colonel," which has a nice ring to it, even in English. Or you can say "se konsa depi berejenn goumen ak konkonmb." Which means, literally, "it's been like that since eggplant fought with cucumber." I've asked people to explain this to me, and so far everyone is at a complete loss. Of course, those are some of the best expressions, the ones that nobody can figure out, though we go on using them, like habits we don't remember picking up.

Sa ki pa touye w, li angrese w
"What doesn't kill you makes you fatter." I'm not sure if this means the same as, or the polar opposite from "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger." It could go either way.

First Annual MCC Haiti Film Festival

This year, tying for the coveted golden rooster prize, were two films: one by Josh Steckley, and one put together by Matthew Van Geest and Esther de Groot.

First, by Josh Steckley, a video montage of life in Dezam, set to the music of an a capella men's chorus that performed at MCC's last team meeting. Critics are calling it a "tour de force" and "cinéma vérité at its finest."



And finally, the cinematic event that has everyone talking: Gabri Walks! Yes, Gabriella -- star of such films as Gabri Stands! and Gabri Tries to Eat a Cat! -- is now fully mobile. Watch out red carpets everywhere! This timeless tale of a baby walking takes a surprising, twenty-first century twist. To find out what, you'll have to watch it yourself. Hint: it makes walking while chewing gum look like child's play, so to speak.

Hallowed ground

Last weekend was my third return to Dezam, where I originally went for a month to learn Creole. The MCC reforestation project holds what it calls "livrezon," or delivery, each year around June. This is when their network of tree nurseries hand out thousands of trees for free to the peasants that live in this part of the Artibonite valley. I drove out with Josh and Marylynn on Saturday, picking up a couple watermelons from roadside stands on the way.

We woke up early Sunday morning to get the word out. Teaming up with tree nursery workers, we fanned out in teams of three or four and visited churches. We talked about the importance of trees, which of course wasn't lost on any of these people. We also informed them that because there had been three days of no rain, the delivery wouldn't happen on Monday morning unless the dry spell was broken. I've never actually been affected by a lack of rain before in my life. Supposedly a few years ago in Seattle was one of the worst droughts the city had ever seen, but the water kept flowing out of my tap the same as ever. Here, just three days without rainfall is enough to disrupt the normal flow of life, and everyone feels it.

Unfortunately, the rain didn't come Sunday afternoon as we had expected. So the livrezon was delayed, and we came up with other plans. Not far from Dezam is a place called Saut d'Eau, literally "jump of water."



A couple of weeks ago I received a care package from my home church, Seattle Mennonite. Among the goodies were a stack of letters written on recycled squares of paper. One of them was from Jennifer Delanty, whose children I taught in Sunday school. Last year, when Jennifer found out I was going to Haiti, she was very excited, and recommended a book to me called Quitting America. It's by a civil rights lawyer named Randall Robinson, who has fought many years for reparations for slavery. In the last few years, he got so fed up with the cynical politics of race in the Unites States that he up and left to live on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, the birthplace of his wife. Quitting America is a challenging, and sometimes angry book. It has a whole chapter of righteous indignation towards the misery of Haiti, and America's complicity in it. Definitely not for the faint of heart, the proudly white, or the blindly patriotic. And while part of me (regretfully) was put off by his very strong rhetoric and blanket statements, what he said had a ring of truth to it. In the end, while I knew I couldn't truly understand his point of view, I felt like some of my reasons for moving to the Caribbean overlapped with his.

So I was delighted to see a letter from Jennifer included in the care package, the last line of which struck me deeply: "you walk on hallowed ground!"

She's right. I feel it often here. But I rarely feel it as strongly as at Saut d'Eau, which is a vodou pilgrimage site. Each year during Easter week, and at a couple of other times, massive crowds pack into the steep hills that surround the falls, digging their feet into the mud to experience the mystical healing powers believed to be there. Plus it's beautiful and refreshing.





And as always, Gabriela stole the show: