Konbit

I'm in the middle of my first "konbit" with MCC Haiti. Out in the sticks, a konbit is a work crew, assembled to do a harvest or dig a ditch or something like that. Within MCC, it's a meeting we do a couple times each year where all of the Haitian and blan staff get together and plan out the coming months. It's nice to get a break for a few days from the office, though I'm really starting to get comfortable there. I've even got a couple of new nicknames, or "tinon"s. Fito, who sits next to me, calls me "direkte," but my favorite is "blalman." Blalman is the words blan (white) and Allemagne (German) smooshed together. At first I assumed that this was because of my German last name. But I was totally off. A couple of the guys in the office assign soccer teams to people according to how much they eat. Big eaters are named after countries with strong teams. Someone who eats like a bird will be called Saudi Arabia, or the United States, for that matter. Pierre, the boss, loves to heap food on employees' plates, especially mine. And since I always eat every last bit, I'm called Germany.

Speaking of work, here's a good moral dilemma to chew on, if you feel like it. Jessica, the other MCC worker in my office, told me about something that happened last year. She was in the office one day when a couple of lawyers came and said that they needed to go to a police station and help get a man out. The story: the arrested man's brother was a mechanic who did some shoddy work on a car. The car owner's dad was a cop, so he showed up at the mechanic's house. The mechanic wasn't there, but his brother was. The cop and his partner beat up the mechanic's brother and tossed him in the clink. This kind of thing is all too common here.

So these lawyers showed up in the office looking for help for this poor man whose human rights had clearly been violated. When they saw Jessica, they eagerly asked her if she was available for the afternoon. She said yes. On the way to the police station, they told her what to say, and insisted that she speak only in English, even though she speaks Creole perfectly well. Be as blan as possible, they told her. This would supposedly attest to the fact that she was connected to powerful people, organizations, or governments, so much so that she didn't have to bother learning the language. The lawyers hoped this would sufficiently scare the policemen, who otherwise would have simply waited until some family member showed up to pay a hefty bribe.

Well, it worked. The mechanic's brother was released from jail. A wrong was righted. But it grieves me that the wrong was righted only by a larger wrong. Jessica felt really conflicted about the whole thing after the fact. Was she in fact reinforcing racism? Why should a seemingly clueless white person be able to do things that even trained Haitian lawyers could not? It's a toughie. I'm sure I'd do the same thing she did. It's not like she made anything worse. But still, it doesn't leave one with a sense of satisfaction.

There's a lot of stuff I would love to write about work, though I'm not really at liberty to do so because of the sensitive nature of human rights cases we work on. The good news is that kidnappings have hit a lull. Apparently it's pretty normal for crime and political unrest to mellow out during carnival season. I'll write more about this later, but every Sunday between New Year's and Mardi Gras is a huge party in the streets of Port-au-Prince. It disrupts absolutely everything, apparently including crime. I haven't yet taken in one of these carnival nights, just been stuck in traffic waiting for a cha (pronounced "shah") to pass. A cha is a party on wheels. Most are as big as a giant yacht, loaded with speakers, a dj or live band, and maybe a hundred or so people. There will be a guy in the front with a long stick to lift up power lines as the cha slowly rolls down the thoroughfare. And the streets are full of people, some with masks or hoods on, hanging out and waiting for the music to come to them. I'm sure I'll get some good photos sometime between now and Ash Wednesday.

I'll wrap it up now. We're about to head for dinner at Chez Wu, one of the two Chinese restaurants in Port-au-Prince. From what I hear, the Haitian version of Chinese food has a lot more goat than in North America.