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