Two days in the valley

Okay, I know it's been a couple weeks since I posted anything up here. Believe me I've tried. The flesh is willing, it's the satellite internet technology that's weak. But I'll make it up with photos and video and a couple good stories.

Last weekend was my second "konbit" here with MCC Haiti. Konbits are meetings we have, three times a year, with the whole staff altogether in one place, and not divided between Port-au-Prince and Dezam, as we usually are. The word "konbit" refers to a Haitian work crew that's assembled for a specific task, such as hoeing a single onion field. Crews like this can be seen all over Haiti at all times of the year, sometimes working to the beat of a hired drummer. For our konbit, the city folk went out to Dezam, located in the Artibonite valley, the place where I did my month-long homestay. As soon as we rolled into town I got all nostalgic for those early days of breathing clean air, walking for about two hours of each day, and struggling mightily to understand what people were saying. Don't get me wrong, I still struggle to understand, just not as mightily.

It was great to have a break from Port-au-Prince. We spent a day checking out some of projects that are part of MCC's reforestation program. But to get there, we had to cross the Aribonite river:



Here's a couple photos from the tree nursery, which was our first stop. We had a time to sit down and try and identify trees (I failed miserably, hence the confused expression).



Then this guy and others took turns explaining what each species was good for, be it fruit, wood for houses, or using the leaves in medicinal tea.



All of the baby trees in this shot are growing in little clear bags, as you can see.



In Haiti, the quickest and easiest way to get drinkable water, unless you live by a spring, is to buy a little bag of it for a few cents. Bad news is that this creates lots of litter. Good news is that the bags can be picked up and used to plant trees, in fact they're perfect for it.

MCC is also active in the schools in the area. We visited these students who were using the bags in a mini-nursery they had set up next to the playground. We ate mangos together and the students taught us how to cut open the pit and get the seed and plant it.



You know, sometimes as an outsider who's working alongside Haitians all day, I feel like I'm wearing two hats. And other times, I feel like I'm wearing two hats because I'm wearing two hats.



Here's us coming back from our visit to the other side of the Artibonite.



Here's the official staff shot:



And how could I not throw in this picture of Gabriela? This is from Easter in the pine forest. Check out the needles on the ground!



That was a great couple of days, which I haven't yet written about here. We played games by the fireside and went on long walks through the misty forest. We played baseball with only improvised equipment and we visited the local market which was jam packed and lively, in spite of the rain and mud.

Fortunately, I was able to spend both the first and the last weekends of April in a pine forest. This last weekend I returned to Seguin, which is perched up at the top of a mountain range from which you can see all the way to the southern shore of Haiti. I was there for two days after Christmas with Matt and Esther and Gabriela. I returned this time with those three as well as a couple of their cousins, Nate and Dan.

The day began at 4am. We drove uphill from Port-au-Prince for an hour or so and then parked and started walking. It's a four-hour hike, with very steep hills, both up and down, to arrive at the pine forest. There are only little pockets of trees along the way. Mostly you're looking at rocky slopes where every inch of decent soil is ploughed and molded into rows. In many cases you see multiple crops planted together. I should have pictures, but something always keeps me from pulling out the camera. Maybe it's because I know the image could never do justice to the sight of mountains beyond mountains, nearly treeless, covered with thousands of little farms, which are pressed together into an asymmetrical, organic quilt.

At the bottom of the last big ascent, we started looking for somewhere to take a break. Haitians love coffee, and some of the world's best grows here. But outside of Port-au-Prince or a nice resort, it's hard to find coffee that isn't presweetened. Normally I take it straight, but after trying some of the sweet stuff during my homestay in Dezam, I drink it when I get the chance. Andeyo, people brew it up in cauldrons roadside, sweetened with a heavy dose of sugar cane syrop. I knew it would hit the spot before the last big climb.

Our hiking party decided to park it at the next little cluster of houses. When we did, I asked if anyone was selling coffee. No dice. But then Esther started talking to a woman who lived there, and she said she had some she could reheat. A man brought a steaming mug out to me a few minutes later. It was delicious. When I asked how much he wanted for it, he just shrugged and said, "whatever you pay me."

A couple hours later we had arrived at the lodge - a guesthome maintained by the Seguin Foundation, which exists to protect the pine forest and ecourage other agricultural innovations. One such innovation is the bamboo forest they planted a few years ago with the aid of Taiwan. In addition to all the good work they do, they run this lodge which, though very rustic and almost electricity-free, has hot showers. These come in very handy on those chilly mountain mornings. They also feed you meals that use mostly local products. They guys that run the place are incredibly laid back. When a bunch of French people showed up (without reservations, I might add, ahem) the director came and asked us if we wouldn't mind sleeping upstairs in his house. Not only did we get a free meal out of it, the attic was even cooler than the lodge. When it's clear, you can look out the window and see the ocean, 6000 feet and many mountains below. When it's misty outside, the clouds blow right in through one window and out the other.

After some food and a nap and some more food and a sudoku, four of us hiked to the actual town of Seguin, which is a 45-minute trip from the lodge. Halfway there, across a few acres, we could hear a semi-musical racket coming from a little wooden shack. We went to investigate. We found a squad of about 8 kids dancing and singing, some banging on cooking utensils or beating their palms against the planks of their little room. The kids themselves seemed almost miniature. I don't know if it's the climate or the diet (or lack thereof) or what, but there is a marked difference in the size of people up in mountains. They were singing church songs in Creole. Esther danced with a couple of the little boys. They sang and sang and sang, excited to have some strange, large visitors, but really more excited just to be singing. Eventually we decided we should keep going and left the party, walking along little picturesque gardens as their voices grew faint. I though to myself, if I saw that scene in a movie or a painting, I would think it was cheesy and sentimental, some lame attempt to romanticize the poor. But it was real, and it was one of the more enchanted moments of my life.

But that was Saturday. Sunday, for me, was a bad day. Not bad like where you lock your keys in the car. That would have been easy. Sunday was comically bad. It started after breakfast. I walked back to the director's house, where we slept, and walked upstairs to my bed. There I found my wallet sitting on top of my shorts, though I thought to myself that I wouldn't normally leave it out like that. I picked up my wallet looking for the sixty American dollars I brought. It wasn't there. My heart started thumping and I looked through my bag and all my other clothes and all around the bed and over and over again in the wallet, and found nothing.

The first thing I thought, was that I should just ask to borrow some money from Matthew and forget about the whole thing. I was terrified at the thought of confronting the director, who trusted us enough to let us stay in his house, who treated us like family. But after a while, I decided he would want to know that it had happened, and I would still pay for my stay there, without question.

Esther and I went to talk to him. She explained the situation, and he very calmly expressed regret and surprise at what had happened. I felt like a jerk for even bringing it up. They started talking about what could be done and I ran upstairs to get my things together. When I saw my wallet again, I thought, you know I should really make absolutely sure. I opened it up and quickly discovered those three twenty dollar bills crumpled into a little side pocket. I was mortified. I actually considered not mentioning it - saving myself the embarrassment. In hindsight it isn't quite as serious, but at the time it felt like I had just informed someone that their house had burned to the ground, and now I had to go say "just kidding!" So I bit the bullet and ran out and apologized a million times and still felt like a mean, distrustful person.

Eventually we took a walk to the local waterfall. We stopped at the stream and took off our boots and waded upstream until it was deep enough to plunge into the cold spring water. It was, like everything else in Seguin, somehow perfect. Eventually I forgot about the ugly business with the money. I was feeling good. Then I walked back to where we had left our stuff. In the place where I had left my socks sitting on top of my hiking boots, I found only socks. Just as with the equally horrible revelations of that morning (I've been robbed; I haven't been robbed, but I said I was), it was a moment that made me stop as my mind churned through the awful implications. But it was also so perfectly fitting, that it was hard not to laugh at the whole thing. Still, I thought, the car is on the other side of a four-hour hike on a rocky, steep path. I can't just stop by the nearest Payless Shoe Source. Plus I'm taller than pretty much everyone I meet here; what are the chances that I'll find something to wear?

I walked barefoot back to the lodge, which was probably about a mile. Fortunately the trail was mostly surrounded by a soft bed of pine needles. But when I got there, I had to go to the director, humble as I've ever been, and tell him that my boots were stolen; yes, I looked really hard and am sure about it this time; and can you please help me?

That was the end of the awful part of the day. By a great stroke of luck, the guy that cooked our meals for us had boots that fit me perfectly, and he said I could use them for the hike down. Undeserved grace.

The return trip was as pleasant as could be, and Sunday night we were back in Port-au-Prince eating at the fancy pizza and gelato joint. Even with a big plate of tabouli in front of me, I was already missing the mountain.

Wow it's late now. I've got some pretty cool photos from a tree distribution I participated in yesterday. I hope to get them up soon. Until then.

Here's how you keep a room full of Haitian cops from falling asleep in the middle of your human rights training.



Here's a translation of the song:

M gen yon doulè ki nan tèt mwen, ki kembe mwen anpil,

I have a pain in my head, which is driving me so crazy,


kembe mwen anpil, fòk retire l!

driving me so crazy, I've got to get rid of it!


Then it moves down the body so the "doulè" is...

nan bra mwen: in my arm

nan vant mwen: in my stomach

devant mwen: in front of me (this is where people are giggling with their hands over their pant zippers)

nan pye mwen: in my foot

nan ren mwen: in my hips

They have another song like this, but more reminiscent of "Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" where you're bending and slapping and the song gets faster and faster. We're lucky no guns went off.

Sick day

I'll start this by apologizing ahead of time. I'm a sucker for a good disease story, so now it's my turn. Beware: if you don't like details, or if you don't want to know how juvenile I really am, you may want to skip this one. Actually, I'll try to go light on the scatology, I mostly wanted an outlet to talk about how cool my landlady is. That will make sense later.

Here's the story: two fridays ago I was sitting up in Jessica and Bethany's apartment. We were trying to figure out what to do with the evening when in a matter of minutes I went from feeling great to ultraqueasy. I tried to play it cool for a while, but then decided I'd rather spend the evening hugging my own toilet than someone else's. I walked down the stairs from their apartment, took a few steps towards the big iron gate, and couln't even muster the will to get out my key. I launched a volley of vomit into a bed of palm trees and other foliage. And then another one, and then another one.

I'm not a puker, so every time it happens I feel like I'm going to die. But once it was all out, I went home and actually felt pretty fine. Then a week later I woke up in the middle of the night feeling awful, and spent probably 50% of the next six hours on the toilet, hating life. I'm surprised my skin didn't turn raisin-y, I was losing so much liquid.

And in what seems like a pattern, today, exactly a week later, I woke up feeling half dead. Knowing that I was full of awful things that needed to get out somehow, I called Jes and Beth and said I couldn't work, spent my first marathon session on the can, and then tried to go back to sleep. Eventually, I heard a knocking at the door and in my haze, lying there in my underwear, I said, "oui?" The housekeeper just walked right in and started pitying me and asking what was wrong. Then she disappeared and my landlady came up the stairs, in full-on mother mode. I still don't know her first name. To me she is Madame Assali, or simply, the Madame. She loves telling me thatI'm like a son to her and taking care of me. And the food she cooks for me! I hit the jackpot for sure.

So anyways, she bursts into the room where I'm curled up in pain, still just wearing the underwear mind you. If I'd had my wits about me, I would have probably been really embarassed, but I mostly just sat there thinking, helpmehelpmehelpme. She asks a couple quick questions and then rattles off a huge list of things I should do. Then she disappears and comes back with something she called "tea":



I have no idea what was in that tea, but the awful taste would tell me that it was doing something good. I hope it's not assumed to be medicinal just because it tastes bad. Funny side note: in the office I take my coffee without cream or sugar, which Haitians refer to as medikaman: medicine.

So I choke this stuff down. Then I had a banana, because as awful as I felt, I knew I needed something in there. And bananas, like raisins or yogurt are supposed to slow down the plumbing a little, right? But when the madame came back and saw the banana peel, she tsk tsk tsked me, saying that when you're not feeling good, you shouldn't eat bananas unless they're underripe. So I'm not quite sure what to do with the advice. Sometimes, I just know she's wrong. Like when she told me I shouldn't have plants in my bedroom because they breathe oxygen just like me. I just nodded nicely. I can't argue with her, she's got an amazing green thumb. Her yard is lush with big leafy plants. But inside her house - not a one. I've since discovered this is fairly common for Haitians.

Later on she brought two more things. The first was lunch:



That's a sort of cornmeal chowder with pastries stuffed with aransol, a smoked fish from Canada. In the pitcher is hand squeezed lemonade.

The other thing she brought was laundry soap. She insisted that if I was feeling achy, I needed to take a shower with a bar of brown laundry soap and lather up twice. This goes back, I think, to the Haitian love of cleanliness that I've mentioned in another post. To me it sounded like washing your car when it needs an oil change. But I've got to say, I did feel significantly better after that shower. She then gave me another bar of soap and some fancy French body wash, because clearly, the blan has some hygiene issues if he's sick this much.

For dinner, this showed up:



That's a potato soup and a giant hunk of what I think is goat. When she unveiled it, I was reminded of that part in the flinstones opening where they get a side of dinosaur ribs and it tips the car over. I thought, there's no way I can eat this thing. But sure enough I sent back an empty plate and bowl. And because I did, this showed up next:




Why? Because there's always room. I'm not sure if there's always room for a liter of jello, but I eventually put it all away.

So I wouldn't say I'm back to 100% yet, but I'm definitely on my way. I owe some of that to the pill of ciproflaxocin I took after lunch, but I know that my Haitian mother's special regime helped too.

t-shirt

Once again, my time has evaporated. I hope I'll be able to put a couple videos and photos up tomorrow from the police training as well as Easter weekend. For now, I want to start doing something new here, which is to tell you about the hilarious t-shirts I see around Port-au-Prince. Here's three of my favorites so far, which were all written in English:

• Fat People are Harder to Kidnap
• I Survived Haiti!
• Hebrew School Dropout

As is the case all over Latin America, second-hand clothing from the states is really popular here. One of my favorite t-shirts ever was one I bought in Nicaragua. It has a picture of a plate of rice and beans, the preferred breakfast, lunch and dinner of Nicaraguans. The other day I saw a Haitian boy wearing the same shirt! Within the last year, that t-shirt probably traveled about as many miles as I did, minus the trip to Europe - and who knows, maybe even including that. Bizarre.

Anyways, I hope to get more interesting stuff up soon. I'm determined not to get lazy here. It's true that I'm settling in more and more and Haiti is becoming home. But there's no lack of things to write about or photograph.

Good cop, bad cop

So this last weekend I was up in the central plateau on a delegation to do a training for police officers. For two days in a conference room, we explained to these policemen, prison guards, and SWAT-team-like elite unit dudes how they were expected to go about their work without violating the human rights of Haitian citizens. It was a very interesting time. I'll try and post a video next week of one of the songs we made the cops sing to keep from getting too drowsy after lunch.

At the end there was a time for general debate and discussion, and several of these cops talked about how they were underpaid (if their paychecks were coming at all) and understaffed (roughly one officer per 1,000 Haitians in some areas). My coworkers were able to get it across to them that as difficult as these conditions are, they are never an excuse for violating human rights. Still, it was a grim reality check. The whole thing coincided nicely with a book the MCC team is reading for discussion, called "Walking with the Poor." The author points out that non-poor often play god in the lives of the poor, making them believe a "web of lies" about who they are and why they are in their place. But what's often missed by development workers and peace and justice activists is the fact that these local, oppressive non-poor are often held under the thumb of some wealthier group that spreads its own lies, and which is also a victim to some even wealthier, more powerful group. This ladder goes from local to regional to national to international. And where does it end?

It's tempting to say that it goes to the desk of the president of the United States. There's no doubt that he has the ability to make decisions that ripple around the world, and even affect people in rural Haiti. But, and this is especially true of late, it's hard to see George W. Bush as a man in control of anything. I can't help feeling sorry for him sometimes, torn as he is between so many competing interests and facing all of the consequences for the horrible decisions he has already made. He seems just as trapped in the web of lies as anyone else.

Anyway, this will be quick. I'm taking off tomorrow for an Easter weekend with my fellow MCCers in a big pine forest that rests up agains the border with the Dominican Republic. Should be wonderful. Word is that it get's cold at night there. Woo hoo! Anyway, I'll have more to share when I get back. Hope you all are having a nice Easter or Passover or whatever else.