tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-368550282024-03-23T14:10:47.961-04:00Kreyol KurtThis is the blog of my life and times in Haiti with the Mennonite Central Committee. MCC is a North American relief and development organization active in over 50 countries around the world. In Haiti, MCC runs programs in reforestation as well as peacebuilding.Kurt Hildebrandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00054283140180055778noreply@blogger.comBlogger70125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36855028.post-66202944973864306992010-06-04T20:41:00.004-05:002010-06-04T21:44:48.927-05:00Hispanola is a Bird #3My brother came to Port-au-Prince two weeks ago. He was checking out a place where his church might send a work team, but we were lucky enough to have a few days together.<br /><br />Here's us at the airport:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_0Rk8MDUGtpI/TAm5OyQMEtI/AAAAAAAAGPw/9Tra4fkwVHc/s1600/IMG_0305.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 300px; height: 400px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_0Rk8MDUGtpI/TAm5OyQMEtI/AAAAAAAAGPw/9Tra4fkwVHc/s400/IMG_0305.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5479114085331899090" border="0" /></a><br /><br />I took him to a house up in the mountains above the city where people on my team go to take a break from the crowded streets of Port. After I showed him around and we started eating the tasty (greasy) fried street food we had picked up, he said, "okay, I'm not waiting any longer to hear the end of the story from your blog. What happened next?"<br /><br />First of all, I'm sorry that I wrote the first two parts of this story back in January and February and am only just now getting the next part out there. Second, I imagine that some people who know me and have read this blog are much more interested in what's happening in Haiti right now, considering that it's not in the news much anymore. But I'll try to sum up what I told my brother up there in Kenscoff.<br /><br />For me, the story of those first couple of days is closely tied together with the story of J and R who miraculously survived the collapse of their 5-story apartment building. When I saw them on the back of B's motorcycle, I could hardly believe it. Even though I would have spent all night looking for them, I couldn't imagine how anyone could survive that fall. B told me that their next door neighbor, an American woman, was at a hospital down the street with M, and that her back was probably broken. They were lying in the yard with a few hundred other people, the hospital staff long since overwhelmed. B told me I should go check on another hospital that was closer to downtown to see if they could get her admitted there.<br /><br />So I got back on the motorcycle and headed down that way. I got to Champs de Mars, the huge public space where the palace is located. It was already filling up with people. Before turning the corner to swing by the other hospital, I thought I should check and see if it's true what I had heard about the palace. From my memory, it was actually fairly intact at that point, and for the first couple of seconds I thought that its collapse may have been only a rumor. But once I saw the minaret-type rooftops on the left and right sides slumping towards the front lawn, I realized that it was just a matter of time until it would be demolished.<br /><br />Today Champs de Mars looks like a refugee camp that's been there for years. The palace continues to decompose slowly. It appears to have had a few truckloads of rubble hauled away from the front of it, but otherwise it remains a poignant national symbol of What the Hell Do We Do Next?<br /><br />I turned around and drove back up the hill towards the CDTI hospital that would hopefully at the very least have a few beds set up out in the yard where we could get J and R's neighbor set up with a neck brace or something. A block before I arrived at the hospital, I looked to my right and saw the Sacred Heart cathedral. The face of it had dissolved into a slope of bricks, coming up around the ankles of the life-size sculpture of Jesus on the cross which was perched on the corner of the front of the lot. This was another jolting moment, and I thought about the wedding I'd been to there back in 2007 which I wrote about <a href="http://kwhildebrand.blogspot.com/2007/07/haitian-wedding.html">here</a>.<br /><br />I wanted to be further along than this, but my battery is almost dead and it's probably best to just publish this and keep writing more later. My calendar program is now set to remind me each week to write on the blog, so I don't intend to leave this story hanging for much longer.Kurt Hildebrandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00054283140180055778noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36855028.post-77093322897395043082010-02-10T23:41:00.000-05:002010-02-10T23:42:11.890-05:00Hispanola is a Bird #2I handed the baby to a man who clearly had some practice holding kids. They decided it was best for him to get away from the wrecked building and over to the gathering of people where they could hopefully find some someone with a bottle and formula. The baby couldn't have been more than 3 months old. <br /><br />The mother was almost free of obstruction. She had become much calmer, and was instructing us about where to dig. Her husband had died in the collapse and now laid next to her with one arm slumped over her midsection. I still think about this family. The man was large. He had probably died from a sharp blow to the head, since we could see most of his body and it wasn’t pinned down under anything. He had given his life to protect his family. And his wife had suffered lots of scrapes and cuts to protect her baby. And because they reacted automatically the way they did, without any time to think, their baby was alive without so much as a scratch. <br /><br />We dug around the mother’s legs a bit more and moved some big chunks of the concrete flooring before we were able to lift her out. We sat her down on a flat piece of concrete. We gave her some of the bottled water that had been in that sideways crushed refrigerator. She had been stuck in that building for probably five hours at that point. When she caught her breath, she looked up at us and asked, “what happened to this building?” A younger guy bluntly replied, “This building?! This whole country has been destroyed! It’s finished!” She stared at him blankly, unable to process what he was telling her. After another minute we carried her down a path of concrete, twisted metal railings and a fallen telephone pole to get her over to the crowd that had spontaneously formed. <br /><br />I asked around again if anyone had seen a younger white couple, and still nothing encouraging. I realized I had no choice but to move on and check on the rest of the team. I walked back up to where my motorcycle was parked. My t-shirt was still with the man from the other building, all covered in blood and concrete dust. But I didn’t quite realize that I was half-naked until I got on the bike and was hit with the wind-chill. <br /><br />I was climbing up Canape Vert, on my way to check on another American couple, A and B, when I heard honking behind me. I pulled over and there were A and B on their motorcycle. It was an incredible relief to see them. I told them that I had been down the hill looking for J and R, and that I was afraid that they might be gone. They said they were just down there as well, and that someone had told them that J and R hadn’t come home from work yet when the earthquake happened. I wanted to be encouraged by this, but it was difficult. <br /><br />I got around to explaining why I didn’t have a shirt on, and B told me he had one in his backpack. I’ve never told B this, but I always saw him as the number one person I would want with me after some kind of apocalyptic event. He’s always as cool as a cucumber yet prepared for whatever. And sure enough, at that moment he was able to give me the one thing I needed most, other than cell phone service. <br /><br />We traded all the information that we had, and made a plan to check on the rest of the expats. I showed up at M and E’s house and there was already a small gathering of team members and other friends. We all told our stories. E was the group mother, full of positive energy and seemingly unfazed. She encouraged everyone to drink water and at least have some bread and peanut butter. We all hurried to process what we knew of the situation. Every now and then someone would say something that would remind us all that there were surely thousands of people alive but trapped under concrete. And we all responded with silence. I learned that the supreme court building had collapsed, that the Caribbean supermarket had collapsed, that the Montana Hotel had collapsed. I heard that the national palace had collapsed, but then the word was that it was only a wing of the national palace that was damaged. We all figured that the way rumors travel in Haiti, we should maybe take all this news with a grain of salt.<br /><br />After A and B showed up, we came up with a plan to go back down the hill looking for J and R. I would go check with their coworkers who would have seen them last, and then check the office where they worked in case they had gone there for shelter. M and B would go drive around their neighborhood. <br /><br />I left E and M’s house to drive down Delmas, the biggest arterial in Port-au-Prince. The street had become a vast campground. Where there used to be four lanes divided by a median, there was now two, and in some places only one, snaking back and forth between the two sides. Everywhere people sat on mattresses or blankets or just sheets on top of the asphalt. They swayed back and forth with their arms in the air, singing. <br /><br />I drove by the corner where the Caribbean supermarket used to be visible high above the 15-foot walls that surround its parking lot. Now I could see nothing beyond those walls. Some buildings had fallen right onto Delmas. Others had collapsed sideways. It was very dark, and I remember at times seeing the silhouettes of buildings that seemed perfectly intact, but were several degrees off kilter. <br /><br />I arrived in the neighborhood where some of J and R’s coworkers live. Everyone had brought chairs and mattresses out into the street and were talking in hushed tones. Because there were no working streetlights I announced myself. I couldn’t see anyone but I asked them to tell me who all was there. Then I asked if anyone had news about J and R. They said that no, the last time anyone saw them was at 4pm, when they left work. I told them that I had seen their apartment building, and that it was completely collapsed. There was a heartbreaking silence. It may have lasted only three or four seconds, but it felt like forever. <br /><br />Then someone said, “They probably went grocery shopping after work.” <br /><br />Someone else: “No, they liked buying things on the street, they were probably outside when it happened.”<br /><br />“They’re probably safe with some friends of theirs who live in the area.” <br /><br />It had probably been eight hours since the earthquake, and maybe seven hours since I saw J and R’s apartment building in shambles. I’d been through all of these possibilities over and over again in my mind and was craving some certainty. I took off again for their neighborhood. This time I went along the roads that I knew were relatively clear. When I arrived back on their street, I went to talk to people at that same improvised gathering where we had brought the mother and baby. I asked the first person I saw if he had seen a white couple. He said no. I started running towards the building to climb back up and see if I could maybe hear something. As I ran away I heard someone say, “Blan!” (white guy!) I ran back. A man told me that he had seen a young white couple.<br /><br />“Did the guy have a beard??”<br /><br />“Yes!”<br /><br />“Did she have long hair??”<br /><br />“Yes! And glasses.”<br /><br />“Glasses?” R didn’t wear glasses. But I thought, what are the odds this isn’t them? “Where did you see them last?” <br /><br />“Just around the corner in front of the police station. The guy had some blood on his face.” <br /><br />We ran together up the hill and around the corner to the police station. As we were turning on to Canape Vert I heard Theodore shout from one of the groups of people huddled next to a floodlight there. “Hey, did you find your friends?” <br /><br />“I think so! I hope so!”<br /><br />And right at that moment I saw B – shirtless himself this time – coming towards me on his motorcycle with J and R perched on the seat behind him. I don’t know what sound I made, but it was probably something between a shriek and a laugh. I bear hugged them and told them how happy I was to see them. They told me that they had been at home, in their apartment on the fifth floor, when the earthquake came and it all fell to the ground. I was dumbfounded. At one point I remember I was so happy I slapped the tops of their helmets, perhaps to make sure they were really there. J, in his typically kind manner asked me to take it easy with the slapping, and that’s when I saw the dried blood on his face. <br /><br />B told me to go check on M, who was waiting in the parking lot of a hospital with a woman who probably had a broken back. We made plans to meet up later, and I took off down the hill in that direction.Kurt Hildebrandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00054283140180055778noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36855028.post-68158544516362329852010-01-26T00:03:00.003-05:002010-01-26T09:38:12.041-05:00Hispanola is a Bird (title to be explained later) #1I can't sleep. Tomorrow will mark the second week since an earthquake forever changed the lives of everyone in and around Port-au-Prince. <br /><br />When the earthquake hit at 4:50pm, Tuesday the 12th, I was in the MCC office/guesthouse. Everyone had left for the day, and I was sitting down to write a couple of e-mails when it came. At first it felt like intense nausea. I hung on to the ironwork that surrounds the porch area of the office and rode it out. Having experienced a pretty strong earthquake in Seattle back in 2000, I quickly figured out what was happening, but was still baffled. Natural disasters come with the territory here, but they're usually weather-related. After the shaking stopped, the first thing I noticed was a rising cloud of dust everywhere I could see. I ran around the house to survey the damage: a bunch of broken glasses on the kitchen floor; the library turned upside-down; water gushing out of a broken pipe in the tank on top of the house; the wall that separates the back yard from the ravine behind it simply disappeared. <br /><br />Immediately, everywhere, shouts rose up. People waved their arms around and screamed, desperately, "Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Thank you God!" <br /><br />No, it wasn't sarcasm. It was, from what I could tell, two things - thankfulness from those that were spared, and a surrender to the second coming of Christ. And in those first disorienting moments, I was ready for anything, and wouldn't have been much more surprised to see the sun blotted out of the sky. It felt biblical indeed. <br /><br />But soon enough I felt able to focus my thoughts and I went to speak to the people who live in the rickety lean-tos in the ravine behind the house. Looking through the huge gap where the wall had fallen into the ravine, I asked them if anyone had been hurt. They said no, thanks be to God. "Are your houses okay?" "Yeah, they're fine." and sure enough, everyone's houses looked fine. I could hear people wailing in every direction, but at that moment I saw very little destruction, only a large dust cloud that continued to rise and dissipate. I thought to myself, maybe it wasn't so bad.<br /><br />I went up on the roof and plugged the hole in the water tank with a felt-tipped marker wrapped in a t-shirt. I tried making a few phone calls, but none would get through. The same exact thing happened after the Seattle quake, so I knew it was no good trying after that. I grabbed my backpack and prepared to head out on the motorcycle and check up on everyone. Right after I put on my helmet and locked the front door, J, our Haitian administrative assistant came running through the front gate. He was hysterical. He was weaving around, as if no longer in control of his tiny frame, clutching his bible in one hand. He was alternately speaking to God and wailing in anguish for his family that he had not yet seen and for whom he feared the worst. It was almost as if he didn't see me, but he came towards me all the same and his legs gave out from under him as soon as his head collided with my chest. I sat down on the driveway and held him like a child. He spewed out a dreamlike narrative of the utter destruction that he had seen. <br /><br />After maybe 15 seconds, I told him that we would go immediately to his house and make sure that his family was okay. We took off on the motorcycle and were soon driving through shell shocked crowds, and everywhere people with their arms in the air and faces turned upwards. The road was littered with cinder blocks from fallen concrete walls. Here and there were wrecked cars, already abandoned. As we neared J's house, we drove by what used to be a large, beautiful hotel. Only a third of it remained, and a boy was dragging a lifeless woman out of its parking lot towards a growing, awe-struck crowd. The sense of nausea and disorientation came back in force and J amped up his semi-coherent rambling. <br /><br />A minute later we were at his house where he collapsed into the arms of his wife and two kids. Thankfully, they showed no signs of injury. I said goodbye and took off towards the apartment building where one of our team's couples lived, the one closest to downtown. Now on major streets, there were wrecked cars everywhere, giant buildings reduced to rubble, fallen trees, and downed power lines. I can hardly believe that I made it through the surging crowds of people, almost all of which were trying to get up the hill and away from the city center as quickly as possible. It was very dark except for my own headlight and the illuminated cellphones all around. At times it seemed like there was no way to get down the hill against the rush of people, and yet even turning the motorcycle around seemed impossible, so I pushed on with a lot of honking and apologizing. Eventually I arrived in what was my old neighborhood. I gave J and R this apartment so that they could be walking distance to work. I came around the corner and saw, in the place of what used to be a five-story building, a pile of concrete no more than twenty feet high. My old apartment, J and R's place, had been a corner unit on the fifth floor. My heart sank. I stopped the motorcycle and ran to the nearest person and asked him if he'd seen a white couple in the area. "I saw an older white woman being pulled out of that building there," he said pointing in the direction of J and R's place. "You're sure she was old??" "Yes, white hair." <br /><br />I scrambled up to the top of the building, standing on that same spot of the roof where I used to go to watch the sun set over Port-au-Prince bay. I shook and staggered and screamed J and R's names as loud as I could. I felt like I was dying. I thought of J and R's parents, and how they might not even know yet that there had been an earthquake in Haiti. I got down on my knees to see if I could hear anything. A baby's cry came out from somewhere under the concrete.<br /><br />Just then a man came climbing up on top of the building. He was shirtless and carrying a hammer. He asked me if I could come help him. I told him that my friends might be in this building. He said that yes, they might be there, but we had no way to know, and there was someone pinned under rubble in a building a block away, and that we could save him. I think this man is the closest thing I've seen to an angel. His name was Theodore. He was calm, but insistent that I come help him save someone who wasn't a friend or even an acquaintance of his. Just a total stranger. And he kept referring to the trapped man not as a man or a person or a victim, but as a life. "We have to go now, we can save a life." <br /><br />"But can't you hear that baby crying?" <br /><br />"Yes, this building is full of people. We'll come back. But right now we can go and save a life." <br /><br />I still don't know how to feel about what I did next. It's as if the distinctions between all people were erased. I am personally responsible for some 23 national and international staff, and at this point I only knew that one of them was safe. And where I was standing at that moment, I could hear a baby crying under the rubble. And yet I stood up and told Theodore that I would follow him, because we could save a life. <br /><br />We walked across the roof of the building and down the other side and up the street to another collapsed building that before the earthquake was almost identical to the one where J and R lived. Sure enough, there was a man, lying on his left side, with his right arm and right leg pinned under a mess of concrete and rebar. The man was calm and coherent, definitely in shock. Theodore began hammering away. He asked me to take off my t-shirt and put it over the man's face to protect him from flying bits of cement. We were positioned right at the bottom of a big concrete avalanche waiting to happen. Every ten minutes or so another tremor would come and we would stumble down the side of the building to safety, wait a few seconds to catch our breath, and then climb back up. I don't know how long we worked to free the man, but it was probably about 90 minutes. After a half an hour, we all exchanged names. Other people came and went from time to time, sometimes shining a flashlight so we could see what we were doing. After about an hour, both limbs were still pinned. His right arm was clearly broken in several places. When we dug out his right leg so that we could see almost to his ankle, we realized that it was another person's arm that was wrapped around his foot. This was the final obstruction. At one point I was yanking on this arm as hard as I could, literally trying to free this one life from the grip of death. When we finally got him free, we carried him down to the street, and laid him out. <br /><br />I told Theodore I had to go and he said he wouldn't be far behind, but that he had to make sure the man got some medical attention. I ran back to J and R's building. The baby was still there crying. It seemed to be coming from under a smashed, sideways refrigerator. I don't know if it was a really cheap refrigerator, or if this was one of those super-strength adrenaline moments, but I ripped that refrigerator apart with my two hands. Then I was lifting big chunks of floor and rolling them off the side of the building. Soon a few other guys joined me. A woman began screaming for help. I told her to save her strength and that I knew where she was and that we were coming, but she just kept screaming. After digging for maybe 20 minutes we lifted a huge slab of concrete and could see into a space under a section of floor the woman on her back with a tiny baby almost perfectly upside-down against her waist. I laid down on the floor slab and reached down and under and got a single hand grip of the baby's onesie and pulled him out using the other hand to cradle his head. He was by all appearances unharmed. <br /><br />Well, shoot, that felt good to get down in writing. But it's late now, and my computer battery is almost dead. I'm still sleeping outside, as is everyone I know. The aftershocks just keep coming, at least one each day. But we're all feeling phantom aftershocks every now and then too. <br /><br />I guess I'll have to tell this story in a few installments.Kurt Hildebrandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00054283140180055778noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36855028.post-81695084654032857082010-01-06T07:54:00.001-05:002010-06-05T07:27:03.399-05:00On the long and winding road in HaitiThis may well fall under the "you had to be there" category, but here is a video - a trilogy if you will - of myself, dad, and Tad coming back into Port-au-Prince after our motorcycle trip in southwest Haiti.<br /><br />Enjoy (I hope!)<br /><br /><object height="505" width="640"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/G4Pk-plDNRI&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/G4Pk-plDNRI&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="505" width="640"></embed></object><br /><br /><object height="505" width="640"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/rC_dfJCx4C0&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/rC_dfJCx4C0&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="505" width="640"></embed></object><br /><br /><object height="505" width="640"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/ObnNj4-SsVc&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/ObnNj4-SsVc&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="505" width="640"></embed></object><br /><br />And the photos (I'm hoping to get some captions in there before too long)...<br /><br /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&hl=en_US&feat=flashalbum&RGB=0x000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Fkwhildebrand%2Falbumid%2F5422698777650281345%3Falt%3Drss%26kind%3Dphoto%26hl%3Den_US" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" height="400" width="600"></embed>Kurt Hildebrandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00054283140180055778noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36855028.post-74212402465437163102009-05-13T20:49:00.004-05:002009-05-13T21:51:38.504-05:00Awesomest camera everHere's some photos from my amazing shock- and water-proof camera, which my folks got me for Christmas. The girl is Hillary, who many of you know and love already. My next post will be about our trip to Gonaives.<br /><br /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&hl=en_US&feat=flashalbum&RGB=0x000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Fkwhildebrand%2Falbumid%2F5323649900263567377%3Falt%3Drss%26kind%3Dphoto%26hl%3Den_US" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" height="267" width="400"></embed><br /><br />And you can click on this picture to see a video I took:<br /><br /><a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/FMWE9NNAqxJz2A62iFuD6A?feat=embedwebsite"><img src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/_0Rk8MDUGtpI/SeHpvAGPPwI/AAAAAAAAEbM/pOu40cgjpII/s144/P4100125.jpg" /></a><br /><br />Oh yeah, and here's my favorite picture of Gabriela:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_0Rk8MDUGtpI/SguHA8R_s5I/AAAAAAAAEeQ/JaeoA4CtzVU/s1600-h/P1160098.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_0Rk8MDUGtpI/SguHA8R_s5I/AAAAAAAAEeQ/JaeoA4CtzVU/s400/P1160098.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5335506633801839506" border="0" /></a>Kurt Hildebrandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00054283140180055778noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36855028.post-48705257393732334242009-04-08T20:09:00.006-05:002009-04-08T22:33:24.579-05:00Go fly a kiteI just had a lovely experience. April is a windy month in Haiti, and that means that it's kite flying season. Anywhere you drive around Port-au-Prince, you'll see kids on rooftops and hillsides and running around in dirt soccer fields flying colorful, hexagonal kites. Most people who read this blog (though it's so outdated now that I've probably lost even my own mother's attention) know that I'm a bit of a kite fanatic. I've got a few kites at home, mostly the two-string steerable variety. They're a far cry from the very disposable kites you see for sale all over the city these days. They're made with sticks and colored crete paper or cellophane. They usually cost somewhere between 10 and 50 cents, as they come in a range of sizes, from as small as an LP to as big as an umbrella. But the shape is always the same - three sticks tied together at the middle, with a string connecting the tips, wrapped in some sort of material. I've seen kids whip these things together in a minute using twigs and a plastic sack. I've always loved that about Port-au-Prince, and looked at those hundreds of kites fluttering above the slums as a welcome sign. Unfortunately, I didn't bring any of my kites, and besides it seems to be a kid thing. I guess it's kind of a kid thing in the states too.<br /><br />However, I was getting on the motorcycle to leave the office today when I looked up over the front gate to the roof of a house some ways away, where I saw a full grown man with one hand at hip level and another one in a fist held up, doing a downward tugging motion that could only mean one thing. I was seized with inspiration that if this guy could enjoy flying a kite, or "monte kap" as they say in Creole, on this cool and breezy afternoon, so could I.<br /><br />I blazed home, since it was already 5:30 and the sun wouldn't be up for much longer. I stopped on the way and picked out a nice blue, orange and black kite. I got to my apartment building and walked up to the roof where I passed some of the neighbor kids, hanging out in their usual spot in the stairwell. "Wow, nice kite!" they admired. "I'm going to go fly it right now, you can come watch if you want," I said, thinking to myself, yes, come and learn from the master.<br /><br />It was a total debacle. I thought, how hard can this be? I tied the roll of string to the short piece coming out of the center of the kite, and hung it over the ledge of my five-story apartment building, which was plenty windy as usual. The kite kind of went in circles but mostly dove downwards. I reeled it in and tried again and again with no luck. The kids hadn't shown up to watch yet, but I was beginning to attract a crowd of people in the building next door, who were slapping each others backs and laughing at my pathetic attempts. Then I lost the roll of string over the side of the building. Eventually I got the attention of a passerby who knotted the string so it wouldn't unravel anymore, allowing me to pull it back up to the roof. By then the three or four kids from the stairwell had shown up. They could see that I was getting nowhere with this. Humbled, I asked them what I was doing wrong.<br /><br />Well, duh, my kite didn't have a tail. At first, I thought this was a purely ornamental thing, and therefore unnecessary. But in reality, it's more of a rudder that keeps the kite moving straight up. One girl delegated another to go get something to use for a tail, which in this case ended up being a scrap of lace. Then, it was pointed out that I hadn't rigged up the standard little string harness. Pretty soon, there were ten kids buzzing around, prepping the kite and giving me a remedial course about how this is done in Haiti. The ringleader, a gangly teenager who was as tall as me and clearly the authority in all things kite, was like a master crafstman - a Stradivari of crete paper kites. He attached the tail, tied up the harness, carefully measuring the amount of string needed in proportion to the radius of the kite. Pretty soon, he was flying it, making it do all kinds of cool tricks. At one point, the leash was at least 100 meters long. By then, dusk was fading into evening, the moon was rising, and I was surrounded by a gaggle of kids cheering me on as I took a turn flying, pulling off a couple of loop-di-loops, slowly regaining my kite ego. It was fun.<br /><br />Here she is:<br /><br /><a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/1h7PM_eRctK8NvqBYruEhQ?feat=embedwebsite"><img src="http://lh4.ggpht.com/_0Rk8MDUGtpI/Sd1jQICaEUI/AAAAAAAAEZk/94Q6O20J2Rk/s400/P4080008.JPG" /></a><br /><br />I'll write soon about other current affairs, like my new job as the representative of MCC in Haiti, my wonderful girlfriend, and the cool underwater camera I got for Christmas.Kurt Hildebrandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00054283140180055778noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36855028.post-58019964132650183652008-12-25T00:00:00.004-05:002008-12-25T00:36:39.163-05:00AnticipationDing, dong. It's the stroke of midnight, Christmas Eve. I'm sitting at gate C14 in Dulles National Airport, where I'll soon be lying down to sleep. Early tomorrow morning, I'll be on my way to San Francisco, and then on home to Medford.<br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4tf3AjLUJf7g8yJSsXk0JOBfymAY8HlEwkOdNY-OeHteV1jvhssdyQnfV0jSmyiLVTVfa8nNpyh-D2YHQ3F9P1o0Zr38mnRMNuZWnf_LYFo88x-zSRvnpMtndD5-3cjTZRbkNzA/s1600-h/Photo+88.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4tf3AjLUJf7g8yJSsXk0JOBfymAY8HlEwkOdNY-OeHteV1jvhssdyQnfV0jSmyiLVTVfa8nNpyh-D2YHQ3F9P1o0Zr38mnRMNuZWnf_LYFo88x-zSRvnpMtndD5-3cjTZRbkNzA/s400/Photo+88.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5283597062233392690" border="0" /></a><br /><br />It's not how I planned on spending this Christmas, especially since it's the first time I've been able to travel home in three years. My plane from Miami was late because of weather in Chicago, and through the domino effect of delayed flights, that translated into me spending the night in Washington D.C.<br /><br />But really, all told, I've got it pretty good. I've seen plenty of people who are much more exhausted, and have been put through much more than I. And I feel the most sorry for the United Airlines customer service people, dealing with countless travelers who are missing their loved ones, stuck on the wrong side of the country, and on the verge of tears.<br /><br />And the best part of the day by far, was commiserating with a woman on my same flight from Miami to D.C. I was worried about missing my connection to San Francisco, she was trying to figure out what to do since she wouldn't make her flight to Montreal. It wasn't until we were getting ready to deplane that I saw her Haitian passport. So then I got to wish her a merry Christmas in Creole and talk Haiti for a little bit. Most people I know who have lived in Haiti and then visited Miami, New York, or Boston have some story about hearing people speaking Creole on the subway or at a store or something like that, and getting a chance to say hi as an honorary member of the Haitian diaspora. If you ever get the chance, I highly recommend it.<br /><br />Just being a foreigner in Haiti and speaking Creole is always a lot of fun. I can't count how many times people have been amazed to hear me speaking their language, and tell me stories about other <span style="font-style: italic;">blan </span>they know who lived in Haiti for years and never learned anything other than hello and goodbye. It's always immensely appreciated. If you try speaking French, you're likely to get corrected on a number of things, but say it in Creole and you're golden. But speaking to a Haitian expatriate who might not get the chance to speak their native language often is like showing up at a stranger's house with a rare gift for them, and being warmly received for making the effort.<br /><br />Tomorrow I'll be enjoying my first white Christmas since I was maybe 10 or 11, if memory serves. To everyone out there who is celebrating Christmas, either alone or with loved ones, blessings be upon you. I hope the season finds you well.Kurt Hildebrandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00054283140180055778noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36855028.post-24545612319649467332008-11-19T18:55:00.006-05:002008-11-19T23:45:03.050-05:00No excusesNow that I've been so lazy in posting things here that there's only one person even checking it anymore (yes, mom, that would be you), I'm determined to get back on the ball. At the very least, I should point you to the blogs of two new couples who are on the team, who are still relatively new to Haiti and taking it all in. The first is of the <a href="http://thompsonowak.blogspot.com/">Thompsonowaks</a>, Sharon and Bryan, who are from Philadelphia, and now live in Dezam where they work on the reforestation and environmental education programs. The second is Ben and Alexis <a href="http://blexi.blogspot.com/">Depp</a>, who live here in Port-au-Prince. She works at a Haitian human rights organization like me, and he is a photographer for a microfinance organization called Fonkoze.<br /><br />I know it's normal for people in my situation to spend a lot of time thinking, and communicating with people back home, about the new, exotic place where they find themselves living. But as the months wear on, the mind is less boggled and the senses are less saturated. Crossing the street no longer makes the heart race.<br /><br />But Haiti is an unending feast of observations. There's no shortage of things to write about. And really, I'm often just as amazed and baffled by this place as I was when I first arrived. In addition, I've just moved into a new place. It's a fresh, new experience. I'll post photos or a video soon. It's an apartment on the fifth and top floor of a large, concrete building. From down the street, the building looks just so slightly off. The up-down lines don't quite run parallel. The floor plan of my apartment would resemble a slice of pizza, with the shower tucked into the tip, followed by the kitchen, living/dining room, bedroom, and finally the terrace as crust. It's got access to a walled-off section of the roof, also shaped like a wedge, where I dry my clothes. And there's a nearly steady breeze which keeps it nice and cool.<br /><br />The most interesting part, for me, has been living without an inverter and batteries. The state power grid generally gives about six hours of electricity every 24 hour period. People of means usually have an inverter system, which charges 4-8 car-size batteries during those six hours, and then provides energy, hopefully, for the rest of the time. When you're using a system like this, florescent lights and energy-conscious habits are not a proud badge of environmental stewardship as much as they are a very practical strategy for keeping the lights on. Living like that was interesting for those 18 months in my first apartment. But now, I'm trying something new. I'm seeing how the other half lives, even if only in a limited capacity. After all, most people in this city can't keep typing on their laptops that have their own built-in battery, connected to someone else's wireless internet that is itself connected to an inverter, as I am doing right now. But it is an interesting exercise in appreciating randomness, because you never really know when the power is going to come on. Or if it's going to come on at all. Sometimes a good 48 hours will pass with no power at all. And when it does come on, you can hear a collective shout of joy from the surrounding houses. Now I'm one of those happy shouters. The state power company is called EDH, for Electricité d'Haiti, and their logo is a big lightning bolt over a gear. Fitting, I think, because the role EDH plays is much like that of Zeus - lounging on his cloud, lightning in hand, arbitrarily deciding when to strike. The difference, I guess, being that people look forward to the lightning that EDH sends. Today, it was already on at 6:30 when I got home, which is much earlier than usual. I think it was because there was a big soccer game on. And I have noticed that customarily in the week before Christmas there will be very little electricity each day, but then it comes nonstop for a solid 24 hours at least. The gods of EDH are apparently not without sentimentality.Kurt Hildebrandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00054283140180055778noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36855028.post-43041717836528635452008-09-13T12:21:00.004-05:002008-10-08T09:19:06.963-05:00Summer round-upThere's been no shortage of drama for me in Haiti, nor for Haiti in general, for the last three months. The MCC team has gone through some big changes, including the resignation of our country director, the arrival of four new service workers, and the celebration of 50 years of MCC in Haiti.<br /><br />I moved out of my apartment, fell in love, busted my tail working on a huge grant proposal from the European Union, and got malaria. These items are listed chronologically, not in order of significance.<br /><br />And Haiti? Well, let me tell you. Haiti, which generally has a conservative attitude towards homosexuality (as I've noted here before) managed to end up with a prime minister who is a lesbian. What's more, this is after several other candidates for the position, nominated by President Preval, were rejected by Parliament on technicalities. Prime ministers here go through much of the same process as nominees for the supreme court in the United States.<br /><br />Not that the prime minister's private life is anyone else's business, but it's kind of an open secret. While Prime Minister Pierre-Louis has publicly denied these rumors - to not do so would be political suicide - every media outlet in the country held an open debate all summer about whether or not Haiti would be ruined if its government was being run by a homosexual.<br /><br />The turning point came about halfway through the summer, shortly before the Senate was set to debate whether or not to confirm the nomination. One day I showed up at the office and went to say hello to the director, Pierre. In his office was a woman standing up and screaming into a telephone while Pierre held his hand over his mouth and gave me a look that said, "don't ask." I came to find out that the woman was the mother of a sixteen-year-old girl who had been raped by a sitting senator. It just so happens that this senator had said on the radio, just a couple days prior, that his Christian faith would prevent him from voting to confirm a known lesbian to run the government. Apparently the United States does not have the market cornered on shocking levels of hypocrisy among it's elected leaders. I can't say for sure that this turned the tide, but I think it took the wind out of the sails of those who were trying to make a moral case against the nominee.<br /><br />And then, right around the time that the new prime minister was assembling her cabinet, a series of devastating hurricanes and tropical storms hit. Many of you have written to check in on me and express your grief at the images you've seen or the stories you've heard. Thank you. I've been fine. Port-au-Prince was not hit very hard other than Hanna, which caused a few trees to fall over. One day on the way to work I actually had to ride my motorcycle over a fallen telephone poll. But Gonaives is in especially dire straits. Just yesterday MCC sent a delegation out to survey the damage and determine how aid money could be spent. They had to switch vehicles about seven times because of damaged bridges, flooded roads and the like. The photos they brought back are heartbreaking. People are living on their roofs. The streets are filled with water. Some actually had a flowing current.<br /><br />In the midst of the onslaught from Hanna, the UN actually abandoned its post in Gonaives. But for the people without tanks and amphibious vehicles, it's been a day-to-day struggle living on their rooftops and occasionally foraging through the mud in what used to be their living rooms and bedrooms for salvageable belongings. According to the official count, there have been 700 bodies recovered. The receding waters may reveal many more. It's unlikely it will approach the 2,000 killed by Tropical Storm Jeanne in 2004, though by all reports the flooding this time has been worse.<br /><br />Please continue to keep Haiti in your prayers. Some of you have written asking how you can help. It's been frustrating being right here, and yet having few options for ways that I myself can help the victims. As relief efforts get more organized, I'll post information here for those of you who would like to contribute.Kurt Hildebrandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00054283140180055778noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36855028.post-53384819146785727342008-08-10T23:14:00.005-05:002008-08-10T23:19:04.363-05:00At long last, photos from the motorcycle trip with my dad and John Mills way back in April. If it's going too fast, hit pause and go through at your own pace. You can click on pictures to see them full size.<br /><br /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" width="400" height="267" flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&captions=1&RGB=0x000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Fkwhildebrand%2Falbumid%2F5232545310670237777%3Fkind%3Dphoto%26alt%3Drss" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"></embed>Kurt Hildebrandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00054283140180055778noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36855028.post-74345674841087935762008-07-11T10:42:00.004-05:002008-07-11T10:47:38.768-05:00The whole world is watchingI had to post this <a href="http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/insideusa/2008/07/2008767111386154.html">article </a>Lindsay sent me. It's a piece by Al Jazeera on rice imports to Haiti.Kurt Hildebrandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00054283140180055778noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36855028.post-64918576520841330342008-07-01T16:36:00.003-05:002008-07-01T17:19:30.656-05:00The missionariesCatching up a little bit...I'll fill in some of the highlights of the last three months. One of them was during the motorcycle trip with my dad and John Mills. I'll get photos up here soon. But let me tell you what happened on our first stop. Halfway between MCC's reforestation office and the city of Mirebalais is a beautiful waterfall called Saut d'eau, or Sodo in Creole. It's also a sacred Vodou site. Here's a <a href="http://kwhildebrand.blogspot.com/2007/06/hallowed-ground.html">post</a> about the first time I went there. So my dad and John and I are riding up this very steep, rough road to get to the falls and we passed a bunch of pasty white folks. As we got off the motorcycles and walked down to the falls we were talking about this group and wondering who they might be.<br /><br />"Missionaries," my dad said.<br /><br />"Really? Are you sure?"<br /><br />"Oh yeah. You can just tell."<br /><br />So, we got down to our skivvies and climbed up the rocks to get behind the falls. It was gorgeous, as always. I pointed out the half-full bottles of rum and candles and other little effects that had been left there as offerings. Nobody really knows what to expect from a Vodou holy site, and my dad and John were just taking it all in.<br /><br />I looked down below and the white people started filing in and staking out an area near one of the lower falls. I noticed that one of them had a good number of tattoos, which is when I started to doubt my dad's theory. Then they circled up and held hands and appeared to be singing. I thought, maybe dad's right. But the sound of the falls was so loud I couldn't tell if it was kumbayah or what.<br /><br />When we decided to hit the road, we went back down to where our clothes were. There I found a woman I know who is a travel agent for groups coming to Haiti. I asked her who these mysterious white people were. She informed me that it was a group of Vodouisants from Philadelphia who were here to be initiated as priests (houngan) and priestesses (mambo). That's right, white Vodou people. I've known for a while that there is a lot of academic interest in Vodou, and even the rare white person who will participate in ceremonies and undergo possession. I was not, however, aware that there were enough non-Haitians practicing Vodou in the whole United States, let alone Philly, to justify a group initiation of about 10 new houngans and mambos. I suppose they could be going back to Philly to minister to Haitians living there, but I reeeeeeeeeally doubt it.<br /><br />I love telling Haitians that story. Some aren't surprised at all, but most of them give a kind of laugh like "what are those crazy white people going to do next?"Kurt Hildebrandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00054283140180055778noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36855028.post-39239536649439439472008-06-11T14:54:00.006-05:002008-06-11T19:12:08.634-05:00Back and fatI'm back in Haiti all safe and sound after three and a half weeks in the states. I guess I never got around to all that blogging I was going to do, but someday...<br /><br />I definitely need to write about the political thing. Over the course of my trip back home, Obama won the nomination and Haiti is now has a good case of Obamamania, or whatever you call it. I can't count how many times I heard people here tell me that the United States is too racist to ever elect a black president. That might rub a lot of my fellow U.S. citizens the wrong way, but you hear it a lot around here, and as far as anyone knows, they could be right. We won't know until November. But, something really changed after he won the primary. While people in the states were getting frustrated with Clinton's refusal to concede, Haitians were just coolly waiting to hear the catch. Many were sure that Clinton would eventually win, despite Obama's lead. And so many were genuinely surprised at the outcome.<br /><br />As for me, it's good to be back. Most every Haitian friend I've seen since coming back has been lavishing me with praise for putting on weight while I was back in the states. It's a Haitian thing. When you haven't seen someone in a while, and you want to tell them that they're looking good, you tell them that they're getting big. They mean it literally, but it's complimentary because it's seen as a sign of health and happiness. As far as I can tell, it works the same way as "have you lost weight?!" in the U.S. They use the word "gwo" which means to get bigger, and is sometimes used interchangeably with "anfòm" which means "in shape." (I'm definitely not in better shape.) Even if there is no real change, people will say that you've filled out. The fact that I did pack on a few pounds only adds to the excitement. Here's some of the comments:<br /><br />"You're so fat!"<br />"Wow, you're huge!"<br />"Even your face is getting nice and fat!"<br />"Did you join the U.S. Olympic team while you were over there?"<br /><br />One man, a senator who visits my office from time to time, came through today. I haven't seen him in a couple months, but he took one look at me and said "you must have just come back from the states."<br /><br />All of these exchanges were in Creole. But my favorite one was with one of my colleagues who always practices his English on me. "Welcome back. You are fat. No no no no! I'm only joking. (20 seconds of laughter and knee-slapping) You're not fat. You are heavy. Yes, that's right. You are overweight."<br /><br />I think that in my colleague's English course his teacher probably told the students that it's impolite to use the word "fat," and that the words "overweight" or "heavy" should be substituted. I hope the teacher at some point lets the class know that North Americans don't take kindly to being told they've put on weight, no matter what euphemism is used.Kurt Hildebrandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00054283140180055778noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36855028.post-12970724802518422342008-05-19T19:30:00.007-05:002008-05-20T00:36:00.007-05:00Waiting for BubbaLast night I was on my way to use the bathroom and the secret service told me to hold on and wait while President Clinton finished up in there. A little context: I am back at home in Medford, Oregon right now for vacation. My sister got married on Saturday in a beautiful service at a winery. Here she is on her way to the altar with dad (who also performed the wedding):<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp1.blogger.com/_0Rk8MDUGtpI/SDIdmYAYF2I/AAAAAAAABeg/o7ddZEcd9j4/s1600-h/daddy+loves+bride.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp1.blogger.com/_0Rk8MDUGtpI/SDIdmYAYF2I/AAAAAAAABeg/o7ddZEcd9j4/s400/daddy+loves+bride.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5202253064682608482" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Here's the new husband and wife:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp0.blogger.com/_0Rk8MDUGtpI/SDIeBIAYF3I/AAAAAAAABeo/1rU2o-gHQzg/s1600-h/husband+and+wife.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp0.blogger.com/_0Rk8MDUGtpI/SDIeBIAYF3I/AAAAAAAABeo/1rU2o-gHQzg/s400/husband+and+wife.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5202253524244109170" border="0" /></a><br /><br />And here's the three Hildebrand kids all together:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp2.blogger.com/_0Rk8MDUGtpI/SDIeWoAYF4I/AAAAAAAABew/_UiplpUQbyE/s1600-h/hilde+kids.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp2.blogger.com/_0Rk8MDUGtpI/SDIeWoAYF4I/AAAAAAAABew/_UiplpUQbyE/s400/hilde+kids.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5202253893611296642" border="0" /></a><br /><br />What can I say? The wedding was perfect. Everybody cried a lot. And then everybody danced a lot. The bride and groom arrived at the reception with my sister driving a creamsicle colored 1960s Vespa, and her new husband in the sidecar. Yes, a Vespa with a sidecar.<br /><br />It was of course a big day for my sister. Kind of a big day for me too, just in the fact that it was my first time back in the states since I left for Haiti in November 2006. And it was my first time back to my hometown since August 2006. The wedding was a flood of faces that I haven't seen in two, four, even ten years. Naturally everyone was asking me what it felt like to be back and whether I was freaking out or not. I generally told people that if I had gone straight from Haiti to some random place in the states for, say, a conference, and had to stay in a hotel and be surrounded by strangers, I probably would have gone nuts. But, being surrounded by family and friends made it possible for me not to miss Haiti too much. My digestive system couldn't be fooled though. It's still in open rebellion against non-Haitian food.<br /><br />I'm hoping to spend some of my time back home on this blog and fill in some of the big gaps since I haven't been very good about blogging for the last few months. For now I'll just finish the story about the former president.<br /><br />If you're following the US democratic primaries, you'll know that tomorrow, May 20th, is Oregon's day to vote. It sounds like Barack Obama may clinch the majority of pledged delegates. Over the weekend he held a rally in Portland that was the biggest in US political history. Bill and Chelsea Clinton were campaigning in Southern Oregon over the weekend, giving a talk at the state university in Ashland (just south of Medford) on Sunday. A neighbor and friend of ours owns a restaurant in Medford - and we got word that the Clintons would be eating there Sunday night afterwards. So after all the friends and family and the bride and groom left town on Sunday, mom and dad and I decided to go down and try to get a look at the former president.<br /><br />Once we heard he had arrived, I left the outdoor patio to walk through the restaurant to the bathroom and get a glimpse on the way. I squeezed by Chelsea, and then I saw the big, pink-faced man himself. He was dressed just like he is in the picture below, which came from the Medford newspaper:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaOPwBJhxfUrZfCcazOuh4GuOB2eQTnmE5NF8I9aBu9DvKSgqjzHykTI4sITdFhrX4LquR5UilBTCO8UrgKzG6YJeOWixhjOos67cFtw0g1DKuPRnlOe-nvclEQy6g-HJf2BIkBA/s1600-h/bilde.jpeg"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaOPwBJhxfUrZfCcazOuh4GuOB2eQTnmE5NF8I9aBu9DvKSgqjzHykTI4sITdFhrX4LquR5UilBTCO8UrgKzG6YJeOWixhjOos67cFtw0g1DKuPRnlOe-nvclEQy6g-HJf2BIkBA/s400/bilde.jpeg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5202251956581046098" border="0" /></a><br /><br />I was going to walk by and pretend I didn't recognize him, but before I got there, he turned around and went to go take a leak. So I ended up waiting outside the bathroom. A burly secret service guy told me to step back away from the door. And so I stood and waited. When the door opened up, and the security detail turned around to lead him to the dining room, I waited for just the right moment and grabbed his collar and slammed him up against the bathroom door and shouted in his face, "Because of your craven political posturing Haiti has become dependent on subsidized rice exports from the United States! Thanks Bill! Now the country is starving and protesting and rioting and the prime minister lost his job because of forces far beyond his control! Forces that you helped set in motion! Haiti's food problems are more your fault than his! Shame on you! SHAME ON YOU!!!" That's when I got the tasered.<br /><br />Kidding, of course. I just let him walk by and then took my turn in the bathroom. But I do wish I could have told him that. If you want to read more about the factors that created Haiti's current crisis with food prices, <a href="http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/17233">here is an article</a> that gives a good analysis of the situation, though it doesn't specifically name Clinton's role in forcing Aristide to drop tariffs in 1994.<br /><br />I'll write more this week about the motorcycle trip in Haiti with my dad and his friend John, and also about how Haitians are viewing the US presidential race.Kurt Hildebrandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00054283140180055778noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36855028.post-42719488753493309662008-04-27T09:42:00.003-05:002008-04-27T10:08:13.209-05:00Follow up on "Lavi chè"My teammate Lindsay made a comment on that post that is worth copying here. Specifically, what she says about Preval's comment to "pase cheche m."<br /><br /><br /><blockquote>Lindsay said...<br />Here are my 2 cents worth (which you, Kurt, already know but others might not)...<br /><br />The Le Matin photographer was shot with a rubber bullet. Still shot, but at least it wasn't lethal.<br /><br />Digicel is also well known amongst the population for its foundation's work, which may have added to it being protected. Saul also sighted the 50gd phone cards Digicel sells, which are more accessible for the general public.<br /><br />I heard that Preval's inital statement was "pase cheche m," meaning he wanted to join in if people were going to protest. hmm...I wonder which he actually said...<br /><br />Shortly before Preval's speach was broadcast on TV, there was a series of shooting by the palace. We figured it was evoked by the crowd getting impatient. During Preval's broadcast, you could hear that very same round of shooting in the background. So he did record it in advance, but not by much.<br /></blockquote><br /><br />I really misunderstood what Preval was saying, but Lindsay gets it right. He wasn't making a "bring it on" type of provocation. He was saying that if the crowd was protesting the high cost of living, they should come by the palace and get him so he could join in the protest. A funny note is that when they took him up on his offer, he reportedly sent word that he couldn't come out and join them because he didn't bring his tennis shoes to work that day. So protesters showed up with tennis shoes for him to wear. No more excuses after that.Kurt Hildebrandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00054283140180055778noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36855028.post-65536327910406651062008-04-18T18:32:00.007-05:002008-04-27T10:13:26.240-05:00First the disclaimer. I am a guest blogger. My name is Don Hildebrand and I am proudly known as Kurt's dad.<br /><br />John Mills and I arrived this morning. John is a close friend from college and and we have shared many adventures over the last 35 years. Riding bikes across Haiti is the current goal.<br /><br />Because of the situation in Haiti the past 2 weeks, we considered postponing our trip to a later date. And in fact there have been some truly terrifing moments since we have been here---but they all were a result of the car ride out to Desarme this afternoon. Somehow we arrived safely and no pedestrians were hurt either.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRLpU2GbYTy6_SMM9shqnbsoEA4JUj5ejYaMbkl8gy_MrfQS7A9Em2ayI8vuwk3uV7TEkfaGuAyi1SLYgm4tPVJ99VmZ7ZdJ3IK4VwZusG_e6trr4UJoXdYSfrhSmK1_dt_o1cPg/s1600-h/IMG_2699.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5190736150234018194" style="CURSOR: pointer" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRLpU2GbYTy6_SMM9shqnbsoEA4JUj5ejYaMbkl8gy_MrfQS7A9Em2ayI8vuwk3uV7TEkfaGuAyi1SLYgm4tPVJ99VmZ7ZdJ3IK4VwZusG_e6trr4UJoXdYSfrhSmK1_dt_o1cPg/s400/IMG_2699.JPG" border="0" /></a><br /><br />It is a beautiful country in so many ways with so many beautiful people. We rested a bit after we arrived and then took a walk to see some of the reforestration projects that are happeining here. Jean Remy, a resident of Desarme began planting trees on a wood lot about 20 years ago and you can see the result. As we were walking through the woods we came upon several large baskets with clothing, ghord shells and some money inside of them. Apparently voodoo practices take place in the woods from time to time. Brian, our guide and host of the Mennonite project here in Desarme said that when people try to drive out an evil spirit they will come here and cleanse themselves. They remove all their clothing and change into new clothes and leave other objects like the money and ghords that have some special significance. We left it all undisturbed.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSX1idTIZ21hXYo-8xaOsz8N6qUHOz2koCMLQ8wRWEV3AVYPtdaIDnFiUPpsDxtxD_kgZO8dJeY1ET1gjRs1Mi9UvcEYln7JjGqA0vaKXIbfTMUJrmmueRYlXGsTxLrxf4AlBxSA/s1600-h/IMG_2721.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5190737150961398178" style="CURSOR: pointer" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSX1idTIZ21hXYo-8xaOsz8N6qUHOz2koCMLQ8wRWEV3AVYPtdaIDnFiUPpsDxtxD_kgZO8dJeY1ET1gjRs1Mi9UvcEYln7JjGqA0vaKXIbfTMUJrmmueRYlXGsTxLrxf4AlBxSA/s400/IMG_2721.JPG" border="0" /></a><br /><br />The Artibonite Valley is beautiful and one of the most fertile places in Haiti. You can see rice and sorghum plants in the valley behind Kurt and John.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoJSRdpB-QALwGcEYXAKmJ3A8yOVUTaP0ogSVGY5ECpLu_IiMWAEYlPjJvDXDZXfvgPBlIUzUJswyTWmm-Ney8LBt12ILH0gE9kcjXQkfpHvodsbjKojEwRp45apyOuUE6GNhR_Q/s1600-h/IMG_2724.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5190738198933418434" style="CURSOR: pointer" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoJSRdpB-QALwGcEYXAKmJ3A8yOVUTaP0ogSVGY5ECpLu_IiMWAEYlPjJvDXDZXfvgPBlIUzUJswyTWmm-Ney8LBt12ILH0gE9kcjXQkfpHvodsbjKojEwRp45apyOuUE6GNhR_Q/s400/IMG_2724.JPG" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Tomorrow we leave for the motorcycle part of the trip. We will wind our way up to Papaye for tomorrow and then on to Cape Haitian on Sunday.<br /><br />But it is dinner time in Haiti for us and we are about to head off to the town square--a single street light at a crossroad. I am told they have great egg sandwiches there.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp1.blogger.com/_0Rk8MDUGtpI/SAk0ZOV6MbI/AAAAAAAABdU/h0Ng_uzpn_o/s1600-h/IMG_2723.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5190737653472571826" style="CURSOR: pointer" alt="" src="http://bp1.blogger.com/_0Rk8MDUGtpI/SAk0ZOV6MbI/AAAAAAAABdU/h0Ng_uzpn_o/s400/IMG_2723.JPG" border="0" /></a>Some wonderful girls met us on the hike and offered us some mangoes. They tasted so good. Here the guys are taking care of the natural result of eating those mangoes. Doesn't anybody carry floss anymore?Kurt Hildebrandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00054283140180055778noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36855028.post-50958030891795968272008-04-15T10:00:00.002-05:002008-04-15T10:05:15.647-05:00Lavi chè!Okay, so, where to begin? The initial outburst of street demonstrations has subsided. The movement began in the southwest corner of Haiti, in a relatively peaceful beach town called Les Cayes. There have long been murmurings of unrest over the skyrocketing cost of living ("lavi chè" in Creole). For at least four months there has been a vague expectation that something like this might happen. But a lot of factors came together to light the fuse. The UN force stationed in Les Cayes got drawn into a violent confrontation which incited a major demonstration. The protests were driven in part by students. <br /><br />The Haitian government responded by saying that the unrest was being provoked by drug traffickers. I have no idea what truth there is to this statement, but it certainly is true that drug traffickers have benefited from the chaos. The protests spread to Jeremie and other places before finally arriving in Carrefour, just west of Port-au-Prince, within a few days. <br /><br />I went to work on Tuesday morning unaware of what was going on in the city. By 10:00 a.m., there were large crowds in the streets all around our office, chanting, banging things around, making plenty of noise. I found out that a photographer from a newspaper where a friend of mine works was shot while taking pictures in Champs de Mars, the public area surrounding the national palace. The protesters nearly succeeded in destroying the barricade surrounding the palace, chanting all along that the president must leave the country.<br /><br />This is an intriguing part of the story. When President Preval was elected for his current term, in 2006, there were some questions as to whether some sort of runoff vote would be needed. There were reports of ballots being burned in parts of the country (my organization has photos) and crowds began forming. The masses of people that turned out in the streets were by and large the supporters of President Aristide who had been aggrieved ever since he left the country under murky circumstances on February 29, 2004. Their aim was clear: the obvious winner of the election – Rene Garcia Preval, former prime minister to Aristide, president from 1995-2000, champion of the poor – must be declared the winner immediately. The crowds stormed the Montana Hotel, where the election headquarters were located, and eventually everybody in charge decided not to test the wrath of a desperate population. Preval was declared the winner.<br /><br />If you’ve seen the movie “V for Vendetta” you probably remember a line where the hero says something like, “People shouldn’t be afraid of the government. The government should be afraid of the people.” So when I think about those crowds of people demanding that their sheer mass be respected, I think, sure, whatever, patience is a virtue, but if the point of a democracy is to represent the will of the people, then a big enough crowd is effectively a vote, and one that cannot be vetoed without destroying that democracy. The people protesting for Preval to be declared the winner were largely being driven by a distrust of the election authorities, thinking that the elites would pull their strings and use some obscure legal maneuvering to undermine Preval. This is not a paranoid delusion. Both rich and poor countries offer plenty of examples of the popular will being subverted even under the banner of democracy.<br /><br />However, this time around things were much more complicated. The enormous crowds of people protesting last week were the largest seen here since the 2006 election. Only this time, two years later, the crowds were demanding that President Preval leave office. The primary demand of all of the protests has been to lower the price of basic foods and gas. (Gas is over $6 a gallon here, the minimum wage is $2 a day, and most people are unemployed.) Secondary to these demands has been the demand for the UN mission to leave Haiti, and the demand for President Preval and Prime Minister Alexis to step down. <br /><br />So this begs the question, were these anti-Preval crowds made up of the same people that made up those pro-Preval crowds just two years before? Did “the masses” really turn so decisively against the man they used to support? In just two years? I won’t try to answer, but I’m sure it’s not just a yes or no kind of thing. People often think of Haiti as an overwhelming majority of very poor people with a tiny middle class and a tiny elite. There is some truth to this, but it’s a mistake to then assume that any one of these three groups thinks or votes all the same. The tension between Evangelicals and Catholics and, of course, Vodouisants, is another frame that doesn’t really adequately explain the situation. And, as in any protest, the property damage and looting was being carried out by a small minority of the people in the streets. Always good to keep in mind when you’re looking at pictures of mayhem and destruction. <br /><br />I was in the office listening to the radio reports of crowds of people forming all over the city, barricades of flaming tires going up on the main roads, windows being broken, etc. I started a googlechat (surreal? yes) with another MCCer, who was at a house outside of the city. His wife was stuck at her house right on the main road of Delmas which had massive crowds marching past it constantly. She watched the convenience store for the gas station across the street as it was looted until completely empty. It was only then I realized that this thing was going to last a while.<br /><br />A friend of mine called from Champs de Mars where she went to see the aftermath. The building for Air France was gutted entirely. One of the strangest things she observed was that Digicel was left alone. There are two major cell phone companies in Haiti: Digicel and Voila. They each have their signature colors, they each have endorsements from Haitian celebrities, and they each give away lots and lots of t-shirts and backpacks and the like. And yet the protesters drew a clear line between them. They destroyed a Voila office just a few doors down from a Digicel office. My friend saw one protester get beaten up by other protesters after he threw a rock at Digicel. She saw a guy raise his fist in the air and say, “Digicel. Respect.” She saw another man come out of the Voila office with a laptop. He declared that he could take it and sell it for a lot of money, but since Voila is run by thieves, he preferred to make a point with it. Which he did, by cracking it in two over his knee.<br /><br />I have to say that I’m baffled by this. It’s true, Digicel has superior customer service. It’s also true that Digicel has invested a lot into making Haiti’s soccer team competitive. But how in the world could that make such a crucial difference to an angry crowd? I don’t know. I guess it just attests to the fact that an angry crowd is not a mindless crowd. It is made up of people who are making very specific choices for very specific reasons. <br /><br />Around 4pm, people started leaving the office in groups, planning only to take routes that were verified as clear. There was one road I could take to get to my house up the hill in Petionville. My friend called from Champs de Mars to tell me that a big crowd had just left there to march up that same road. I thought I was going to be stuck at the office for another couple hours, but my boss told me to get on my motorcycle and high-tail it home while I could. <br /><br />Driving up Rue John Brown I passed a couple of burned out cars, one upside down. There were burning tires here and there, and several big trash containers had been upset into the street. In Petionville the mood was tense. Every other intersection had something burning in it. There were few cars on the road. I talked to all the other MCCers on the phone. I entertained the thought of getting up early and getting out of town to wait things out with friends away from the action. Ultimately we decided to hunker down where we were. <br /><br />On Wednesday I woke up and turned on the radio. There was lots of talk about protests in Petionville. I heard shots from time to time. I called my boss to check in and he made me promise to stay in my house all day. I was glued to the radio, while at the same time listening to the sporadic fire and the occasional roar of a crowd not more than a few blocks away. <br /><br />Radio reporters were talking about how the president had promised to make an address to the Haitian people at 8:00am, and everyone was hanging on to see what he would say. While he may in many ways be a captive to this horrible situation, his handling of the protests so far left much to be desired. His reaction to the Les Cayes protests, as I mentioned, blamed drug traffickers for the unrest. While this could be true, it also seemed to dismiss the validity of the protest, at a time when all Haitians are hurting, and some starving, because of rising food costs. When protesters announced to the press that they were going to come to the national palace and demand Preval’s resignation, Preval responded saying, “Pase cheche l.” This is Creole for “go and find it,” but a more appropriate translation would be Bruce Campbell’s “come get some.” Probably the best comparison is with George W. Bush, who responded to the insurgency in Iraq with “bring it on.” Note to all world leaders: don’t bluff with big crowds of thousands of people that already don’t like you. It wasn’t much longer after “pase cheche l” that the protesters decided to take the president up on his challenge. So here we were, a day after the protesters trashed his front yard. Millions of us with our ears cocked to the radio speaker, waiting to see what the hapless president would say. Eight o’clock came and went, and nothing. <br /><br />Mid-morning I watched a very large crowd come up my street, moving along at a jogging speed. In stark contrast to what I had expected, I saw a lot of smiles. The people in the front were carrying leafy branches. I didn’t see any guns or rocks. Eventually the crowd thinned out and then I saw people running a lot faster to catch up, as the sound of shooting got closer. Several of the people in the street ran into the narrow, clogged entrance to the huge slum of Jalousie, which is about 100 feet from my window. A white UN S.U.V. and two big armored UN vehicles pursued the crowd past the entrance to Jalousie, firing tear gas canisters into the slum. I saw lots of troops with guns, though I don’t specifically remember seeing any of them aim and shoot. It all happened pretty fast.<br /><br />Perhaps 15 minutes later I heard my landlady’s housekeeper running and saying “gas! gas!” Soon the guard, the housekeeper and my landlady and myself were all doubled over coughing with tears streaming down our cheeks. Being Haitian, they knew immediately what to do in the situation – we picked a few limes from a tree in the yard and bit into them, and then flushed our faces with water. Not long after that there was several minutes of intense gunfire coming from Petionville’s main park, a block away. I still don’t know exactly what was happening there, but I believe it was mostly the UN firing, since they have rubber bullets. The Haitian National Police were also in the mix, and they don’t have rubber bullets. But if live rounds were used, they must have been fired in the air, because otherwise what I heard would have been a massacre. There is still no clear picture of the casualties. I’ve heard six most often as the number killed, with 60 injured. That’s for all of Port-au-Prince, for the duration of the unrest. I’ve also heard stories about the UN bagging up corpses and chucking them into dump trucks, but these are probably not so reliable. Still, six?<br /><br />Sometime around 11:00am the radio started playing the president’s address on a loop. I’m not sure if the speech was ever broadcast live. I got the impression that he recorded it and sent it out to the media outlets. Reaction to the speech was swift and unanimous: BOO! People started calling into the radio stations to complain that the president didn’t really say anything. He talked about some long term solutions, but not enough short term ones. He talked about how the whole world is dealing with high food prices, not just Haiti. True, perhaps, but not what a starving person wants to hear. Everyone agreed that the president blew it. Some announced that they were still waiting for the president to address them, because what they had just heard must have been a joke. And yet, there haven’t been any major protests since the speech aired. The country finally had something to react to and debate about. It was like everyone took a big breath of air, stretched their arms, and took a look around. The situation we found wasn’t pretty. Lots of businesses damaged, which would surely mean more people unemployed. Everyone I talked to had the same attitude: the president hasn’t done enough to avoid the situation we have now, his speech definitely sucked, but those people who took advantage of a tense situation to break and steal things are making the situation worse for everyone. <br /><br />Shortly, the news on the radio shifted to a group of senators who was demanding Prime Minister Alexis to step down. This is where the politics get really murky, and I must confess I know very little about all the ins and outs of how this works. But as background, there was an effort just a few weeks ago in the senate to force Alexis out with a vote of no confidence. It appears that these senators are simply taking advantage of the situation to achieve a political victory against President Preval. Over the weekend, everyone went through the motions and Alexis found himself and his whole upper level of government employees without jobs. It’s too bad, really. True that there’s a whole lot of dead wood in the Haitian government. But Alexis has a good reputation as an honest, serious, uncorrupt prime minister. It’s hard to judge someone on job performance whose main task is to save Haiti. <br /><br />Well, that’s about it for now. Things are calm. Still a lot of broken glass everywhere. Lot of trashed gas stations. Other than that, situation normal. Port-au-Prince is already in permanent bunker mode with big walls and gates absolutely everywhere. There have been scattered reports of protests in other parts of the country – but never all at once. <br /><br />It’s frustrating to be right here in the country and still not have a clear idea of what exactly happened, why it happened, and what’s happening now. Oh, I should say, it’s kind of embarrassing that a story was on cnn.com quoting me as “Felix Kurt Hildebrand.” That’s just how my name got passed along to him. I’m not running around down here introducing myself to CNN as Felix. <br /><br />Also, I’m sorry I didn’t take any photos of anything I saw. It honestly didn’t occur to me until days later that I should have had my camera ready. Another MCCer on the team got some footage of the Haitian National Police beating a crowd of totally nonviolent protesters without provocation. <br /><br />Sorry this is so long, and congratulations if you made it all the way through! I’m sure a lot of it is vague, and you might have a lot of questions about what’s going on. If so, send them along. I’ll do my best. <br /><br />I’m not just saying this because I need a silver lining to every cloud, but there have been some positive aftereffects rippling out from the chaos. Communities pull together. It’s Haiti, so there’s always going to be a lot of sidewalk debate. But the sidewalk debates these days seem to be more about big picture stuff. How are we, as Haitians, going to free ourselves from the abusive international relationships that ensnare us? What can we expect from the government? Are we a free country, or an occupied country? None of these questions are simple. <br /><br />I also don’t want to gloss over the fact that the situation is, in every way, dire. Just looking at the numbers of people in Haiti who live on less than a dollar a day, I cannot possibly imagine how people aren’t starving by the thousands. The very survival of the Haitian poor is a miracle. But that’s how it was before the prices started doubling. <br /><br />Thank you, cousin Jay, for praying. Everyone else, whether you pray or not, please pray for the Haitian people, especially those who are most vulnerable, and all people suffering acutely from the convulsions of our global economy.Kurt Hildebrandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00054283140180055778noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36855028.post-20853886902981803102008-04-10T08:23:00.002-05:002008-04-10T08:31:52.016-05:00Safe and soundI know that it's been a really long time since I've written anything here, so I doubt many people will see this. But in case you heard the news about what's going on in Haiti and wanted to check in, I'm fine. Everything is calm now, Friday morning, April 11th. It's been chaos for two days. Lots of property destroyed. I heard five deaths and about 60 people wounded, but that seems really low. <br /><br />I will write a lot more about this later, but rest assured that I am okay and the situation seems to be more or less normal on the streets of Port-au-Prince.Kurt Hildebrandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00054283140180055778noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36855028.post-58537937522691532452008-02-22T11:06:00.005-05:002008-02-22T14:28:09.384-05:00At long last......the photos from the Caribbean vacation! Thanks Shane. Slacker.<br /><br />Enjoy:<br /><br /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&captions=1&RGB=0x000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Fkwhildebrand%2Falbumid%2F5169830261413647457%3Fkind%3Dphoto%26alt%3Drss" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" height="267" width="400"></embed><br /><br />You should be able to click on the photos to see them full-size and you can click the pause button to look through at your own pace.Kurt Hildebrandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00054283140180055778noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36855028.post-91101420471261852102008-01-10T10:24:00.000-05:002008-01-10T11:57:09.722-05:00Che - Bob 2007<p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">November 23: Port-au-Prince - - - > Miami, FL</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">I knew for sure that I was becoming at least partially Haitian when I caught myself staring, slack-jawed, at the endless lines of white people shuffling past me in the Miami airport. The last snippets of Creole faded away throughout the customs process. The stores were overwhelming too – I get the impression that the Miami airport contains more cash value in goods than whole swaths of Port-au-Prince. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Miami, FL - - - > Montego Bay, Jamaica</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">The last three flights of the evening arrive in Montego Bay airport at the same time, meaning that the beleaguered staff of four occupy a fraction of the agent booths, and are forced to process an instant crowd. Not that they could be hurried in any way. They took their time. When I finally made it out to the taxis, the first person I saw was a cheerful 40-something guy holding a sign that said “Esquerto” – my bogus Nicaraguan travel nickname from 2006’s adventure with Shane and Kamala. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">The cabbie’s name was Trevor. He became our man in Jamaica. I found Shane and Carly at our hotel - a place called Toby’s Resort - around 10:00 pm. We had a lot of catching up to do, and we did it over Red Stripes and barbecued chicken in a second-story, open air restaurant located right on the “hip strip” that runs parallel to the Montego Bay waterfront. The waitress was wonderful and she gave us all kinds of Jamaican slang. And there was a little Rastafarian guy named Troy there too. I asked him all kinds of questions about the religion. I can’t do it justice here, of course, but here are a couple interesting things about Rastafarianism: (apologies if this is not new information) </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">- Rastafarians have churches.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">- The churches always have a table to one side that holds the “chillum pipe.”</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">- The true Rasta man never consumes alcohol or tobacco.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">- They worship the 20<sup>th</sup> century Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie as a black messiah. Ethiopia is their holy land.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">- Their cosmology is shaped by biblical terms, and they represent oppression and suffering with the name Babylon in their music and literature. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">We were out pretty late and didn’t get up until 10 the next day. Our man Trevor was there waiting for us and we drove to Negril, a miles-long strip of perfect white beach. It’s almost completely developed with enormous all-inclusive resorts – the mothership of which, is Sandals. We didn’t go in or near any of these places, and chose instead to stick to the public beach with its endless restaurants and shops and beautiful sand. We drove back after sunset.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">November 25: Montego Bay, Jamaica - - - > Havana, Cuba</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Leaving Jamaica, Shane and Carly and I were all careful to watch the officials and make sure that they didn’t stamp our passports as leaving the country. This, of course, because U.S. citizens traveling to Cuba can be fined $250,000 and thrown in the clink for 10 years. Despite this, I read that some 100,000 Americans visit Cuba each year. Plenty of those are legally authorized trips, but most aren’t. Jamaica is a big entry point for this kind of illegal tourism, along with Toronto and Mexico City. So we knew that when the officials saw our U.S. passports and tickets to Cuba, they’d let it slide. They did. But, in the months after September 11<sup>th</sup>, when the Bush administration absurdly launched a crackdown on travel to Cuba, some Jamaican officials began stamping American passports again. It’s long since stopped, though.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">In preparation for the Cuba trip, I consulted with a friend of mine here in Port-au-Prince. She’s Cuban, and she runs a video rental near where I live. She renounced her Cuban residency by coming to live in Haiti for more than nine months. Since then, she cannot return for more than a few weeks at a time. She can never live in Cuba again. She has a friend who has an amicable ex-husband in Havana. My friend told me that he would drive us around Havana for $25 a day – a pretty good deal. She said he would come to the airport to pick us up, and that he would be dressed all in black and carrying a single red rose, for Carly. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">And true to his word, Manolito was there in black. As soon as we were introduced, he said in his very limited English that if asked, we were to say that we knew his ex-wife, which wasn’t true. We made it out to his car with our luggage, and then realized that we needed to check on something at the Air Jamaica counter, back in the airport. On our way back, we were approached by a young cop. He separated Manolito from us and spoke for what seemed like a very long time. Then we were escorted to a trailer set up as a makeshift office in front of the airport. I couldn’t quite call it an interrogation, but there were a lot of questions, mostly in Spanish, and they took our passports. There were a few cops there, and they were all pretty young and unintimidating. They didn’t give the impression that they knew or cared much about what they were doing. Eventually, they brought Manolito back to us. And then after that was an even longer wait, answering the same questions, sharing a half cup of coffee between us three Americans, Manolito, and the Cuban keystone cops. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Finally, we were allowed to go with our passports on the condition that we hired another cab to follow Manolito’s car, which would carry our luggage. Another $25 down the tube. We drove through the outskirts of Havana, then towards the Miramar district where we were to stay at an apartment with a nice retired woman named Dora. This was another arrangement made by my friend in Haiti. Manolito helped us carry our luggage up to the fourth floor of this modest apartment building in what is considered the “posh” part of Havana, where most ambassadors and embassy staff live. When we landed, Manolito broke it down for us about the ins and outs of Cuba. He explained that we could hire him for the whole day, and he could take us anywhere except the old city (the best part) and anywhere outside of Havana. So in the end we didn’t need help from Manolito. We opted to take taxis, which occasionally included beautiful fifty-year-old Chevys and what not. There are some 60,000 classic automobiles on the roads in Cuba. Most of them have Russian parts under the hood to help them along. Some are flawless like new, some of them are more like warriors of the Revolucion. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">According to my video store friend, everyone in Cuba has some way of making a little cash on the side. The government rations will keep you alive and not without luxuries like cigars and rum, but in reality people will want more than that, and there are a lot of ways to find it. One man lured Shane into a bar to buy some cigars. He had a big plastic gasoline container with a false bottom. He lifted it to reveal a box full of contraband. Cuban citizens buy these cigars for a pittance, but are forbidden to resell them. The government does what it can to funnel tourists into its state-owned stores where the cigars sell for many times what the Cubans pay. There’s a kind of ever-present moral dilemma. On the one hand, it’s nice to get a good deal, and it’s nice to help out a guy just trying to get a birthday present for his kid or something like that, but it’s not the same as in other countries. The Cuban government is of course repressive and far from perfect, but I don’t feel good about denying money to a cash-strapped state that is struggling to provide food, education and health care to every single one of its citizens, and doing an admirable job. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">The dilemma was the worst with the taxis. Unmetered taxi trips are a huge source of untaxed revenue in Cuba. Most cabbies wouldn’t negotiate much, they would just quote a price that would work out to be more or less what the meter would end up reading. But instead of that $5 going to further the revolucion, it would go into the guy’s pocket. Of course you could insist on using the meter, but we never really did.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">We went to Old Havana. Block after block of dense history, with the brightly colored, yet crumbling buildings morphing from one era into another. I could have paid $2 to see the hotel room where Hemmingway wrote some of his best stuff, but I opted out. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">There was music everywhere, and there was more laundry than I’ve ever seen in my life hanging out to dry between fire escape ladders. It’s one of those places that has such a look and feel to it, it makes you stop and soak it in. And of course, pictures don’t do it justice.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">I don’t have much to say about the food in Cuba. We had some lovely meals, but overall it was unimpressive. The sandwiches sold on the street were nice and cheap and greasy and salty, but you can only do that so much. I do remember one restaurant we searched out after reading the Lonely Planet guide. It was a hole-in-the-wall that would have been more suited for Seattle, with it’s kitschy plastic decorations and shrine featuring a few Buddhas, a Jesus and a three-foot tall Native American. The beans and rice were delicious, and I got a giant chunk of ham that I could barely finish. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">We crossed under the canal in a big screaming black Buick from the 1940s, on our way to the traditional firing of the cannon. Every evening at 9:00, a troop or garrison or whatever of people dressed as colonial troops gets itself into formation and marches to the 16<sup>th</sup> century fortress walls to fire a cannon to the oohs and aahs of tourists both foreign and Cuban. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">We spent some quality time in the posh neighborhood where we were staying. We checked out a couple of the very un-communist-looking high-rise hotels on the water. Their pools were beautiful, the lobbies were like those of any other luxury hotel. Except, every single one had a wall with a series of photos from the revolution, including a couple good close-ups of Fidel and Che, chomping cigars. The words “A Moment in History…” were painted on the wall above the photos in English and Spanish. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">As far as I know, Cubans are not allowed as guests into hotels like this. The world of tourists and the world of Cubans coexist, though they are carefully segregated. The two populations pay different prices. They use different money. Each has their own restaurants, hotels, and forms of transportation that the other is forbidden to use. You heard that right. Havana has scores of hotels and restaurants that will kick out any Cuban citizen who tries to enter. I guess this is to discourage underground markets by cutting the supply of places to spend your illegally earned cash. A Cuban citizen could never afford to eat at these restaurants which only accept the tourist currency, which has ten times the value, but about the same spending power as the money that Cuban nationals use, if that makes any sense at all. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">But of course the two spheres do intersect in plenty of places. There are indeed hotels, restaurants, and of course cabs which serve both tourists and Cubans. By and large the Cubans we encountered were lovely people. Salty, for sure. Many of them are working on their English and eager to try it out. The woman we were staying with, Dora, was not herself Cuban. She used to work for a South American embassy in Havana. She was sweet and attentive and between her 60 year-old high school English courses and pathetic travel Spanish from me and Shane, we were able to communicate. Her favorite food to make for us was toasted rolls with scrambled eggs and diced hot dogs. Deeee-licious!</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">After a few days of Havana we headed to Varedero, a long, very thin peninsula with white sandy beaches on both sides. It is dotted with resorts and hotels of all shapes and sizes – thousands of rooms. Fifty flights a week arrive directly to the Varedero international airport from Toronto alone. It is surely the most un-Cuban place in Cuba. And yet, ironically, the all-inclusive resort is probably the closest we could get to the experience of a Cuban citizen. I’m being trite, but the cafeteria-style food, the little cups, the avoidance of circulating too much cash was, in the end, equal parts liberating and limiting. We spent two nights in an a lower-middle range all-inclusive. First time ever, I swear. Probably the last. Not that it was all that bad. There was certainly a variety of food, but nothing very special. The bureaucracy was stifling. It took something like six trips by foot across the sprawling compound to get beach towels, which involved deposits and receipts and multiple desks and unmotivated personnel. Getting reservations to the sit-down-and-order-like-a-real-restaurant restaurant was just too complicated for us. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">The best part was when we took the pedalboat. They had a few of those side-by-side bicycle-pedal style boats, but these ones were fitted with seats in the back, so Shane and I powered out past the waves and down the coast while Carly snapped photos from the back. We all took turns pedaling and steering. We checked out the other resorts. When we got back to our own beach, two hours later, we got chastised by resort staff. We had violated the rules on taking the boats out for 30 minutes at a time only. Never mind the fact that there were other pedalboats lying there unused.<br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Ican’t complain at all really. It was two days on a perfect beach in the Caribbean. But once we decided to quit the resort and find a hotel in town, we sort of wished we had done that in the first place. There, we found a restaurant that was in an old house – every wall of which was covered with graffiti, signatures, mottos, proverbs, drawings and whatever else. I can’t even remember what I got, but it was good. Italian I think. I know I bagged on the food earlier, but I do have to say that I was impressed by the variety of cuisines, styles, and atmospheres of the different state-owned restaurants we visited. I have no idea how much the management of these is controlled by the government. On the one hand, there was about as much ethnic variety in food as you would find in a mid-sized American city. Chinese, Indian, Italian, Spanish, Mexican. On the other hand, I noticed that for a lot of the bars and restaurants in Havana that were supposed to be “hip” had a similar look, and their signage was all in the same funky font. I imagined some poor guy at the Ministry of Restaurants or something trying to come up with cool names and slogans for these places.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">I didn’t expect to see products advertised in a communist country. But there were plenty of billboards displaying not only pro-government messages, but rum, cigars, and all kinds of other stuff. Not far from where we were staying was a restaurant with a giant inflatable can of Bucanero beer, Cuba’s own. The grocery store we checked out looked in many ways like something from the states. Except for that entire aisle devoted to mayonnaise. A lot of times they would put a couple hundred bottles of a single product on the shelf, right next to a hundred bottles of another single product. So it looked full, but it could have taken up only a fourth of the space. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Anyhow, back in Varedero – for our last night in bizarro Cuban resort-land, we decided to go see a cabaret. Don’t judge me! There’s a lot of different kinds of cabaret, and this was a very innocent, very Latin-American version of what goes on in Las Vegas and Paris and wherever else. In fact, I would have to say that Cuba is the country least polluted by sexual exploitation that I have ever visited. I’ll bet there’s more pornography in Salt Lake City than all of Cuba. It’s totally illegal.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Back to the cabaret - it was in a cave. With blacklights. The female dancers looked like peacocks and the vocalists blasted out song after song while people danced and spun around in perfect symmetry. It was called the Pirate’s Cave Cabaret, and had a seedy feel despite the ostensibly family-friendly show. I’m not sure how to account for the contradiction. It seems like most of the watering holes we saw in Cuba were somewhat seedy. Maybe this is because almost everyone engages in illegal buying or selling, so everyone’s got a little something to hide. Everyone’s a little on edge. Any time a Cuban gets stopped by a cop, they must be thinking of all the different ways they could get into big trouble at that moment. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">We went back to Havana for a couple of days, and then headed back to Jamaica. There’s so much more to write about Cuba, I just have no idea where to start. There were police officers everywhere. It’s Cuba’s answer to unemployment. In the neighborhood where we stayed, every intersection on the main road had a little booth with a cop inside. There’s pictures of Hugo Chavez all over that say something like, “welcome to your homeland, brother.” And how could I not mention Che?! He is more beloved than Fidel, and he is absolutely everywhere. Books, postcards, photos, posters, keychains, wood carvings, underwear, hats, and of course, t-shirts. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Cuba was lovely. Seven days was not nearly enough. There are some challenges there for the illegal tourist, for sure. We had to travel with all of our money in cash, since ATMs and credit cards that are issued by American banks are not accepted – and if they were used by accident, Uncle Sam and his Patriot Act could be all up in our business. Internet was expensive and slow, and at times seemed to be shut off, island-wide. There’s so much we didn’t see. Trinidad, Santiago de Cuba, the Isle of Youth, the tobacco fields of the west, the mountains, the cooperative farms, the caves, the Bay of Pigs. Next time.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">December 2: Havana, Cuba - - - > Montego Bay, Jamaica</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Coming back to Jamaica was our last big hurdle in terms of keeping our tracks covered. All of us had entry stamps to Jamaica, but no exit stamps yet. As long as we didn’t get stamped again until leaving Jamaica, our passports would only have a record of us being in Jamaica the entire time. But my immigration official didn’t get the memo. She had the stamp up in the air about to bring it down on my passport until I screamed, “STOP!” She looked up at me like I was crazy. I explained I was in Cuba illegally and that my passport must not reflect this. She said that she had to stamp it. I made her ask the official next to her, who backed me up and said it was okay not to stamp it. Which is why I’m not writing to you from sunny Guantanamo Bay right now. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">As cool as Cuba was, Jamaica was in many ways a relief. People spoke English. ATMs and visa cards worked. The food was fantastic. And best of all, Trevor was there. He met up with us at the airport food court before we took off for Ocho Rios, two hours away. Ocho Rios is a very special place in Jamaica, laying claim to both Bob Marley and civil rights activist Marcus Garvey. Trevor set us up in a perfect, classy old hotel right on the water. We had a room looking out on the catamarans, fishing boats and jet-skis that crossed from time to time. A short paddle out from our back yard was a long stretch of coral, just full of colorful fish, perfect for snorkeling. We spent the next five days there, managing to get in one good activity each day, but with plenty of time left over for cards, books, backgammon, iPod, and alternating between the pool and the calm, salty Caribbean. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">One day we went somewhere called the Dunn’s River Falls. Since we had arrived, everyone was asking us if we’d seen the falls, so we went. We didn’t know what to expect. What we found was a series of waterfalls, and chains of white folks from the all-inclusives, laughing and slowly walking up the rocky steps of the cascades wearing little rubber shoes. We had to pay admission and then rent the shoes. Once we had worked our way up the exciting part of the river, we changed back into street clothes and tried to leave. But to do that, we were forced through a little village of tourist trap shops with, hands down, the most aggressive sales guys I have ever seen. One guy grabbed my wrist, shoved a wooden carving in my hand, closed my hand, and continued to hold it there while he pitched me about how this was his gift to me, I just had to take a look at the other stuff he had to sell. Once we got out of there we all breathed a sigh of relief. It made me long for the more lackadaisical service workers of Cuba. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">The two countries seemed about as different as could be. And they aren’t in a hurry to understand each other, either. Everyone in Cuba asked us why we would want to spend any time in Jamaica. People in Jamaica asked us the same thing about Cuba. Jamaica is very unrepressed, convenient, expensive, and dangerous. Cuba is very safe, difficult, and bound by lots of rules. Jamaica has a lot more wealth and a lot more misery. There are three murders a day in the Capitol of Kingston. Cuba is very integrated, with lots of intermarriage between people of African and Spanish descent. Jamaica felt more monocultural. Superficially, it’s more like Haiti: almost totally black, and on average, poor, with a wealthy light-skinned and white elite as well as some smaller ethnic groups from Asia. The difference is that instead of white missionaries and development and relief workers and UN soldiers, like we have in Haiti, Jamaica just has a bunch of white tourists. And the streets are all paved and they have 24-hour electricity and fast food – that part’s pretty different from Haiti too. Drugs are everywhere. Walking down any street, really at any hour, you will be offered every kind of drug. We got used to ignoring it, even though a couple times we were accused of being racist for doing so. Needless to say, this doesn’t happen in Cuba. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">One of the great ironies of Cuba-American relations is that the hardliners on both sides have very similar ideas of social policy. Both abhor pornography, liberal drug laws and homosexuality, and have a soft spot for baseball and classic American cars. Fidel used to publicly denounce homosexuality as a decadent outgrowth of the cancer that is capitalism. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Jamaica on the other hand has a thriving sex trade and drug laws are just another opportunity for police corruption. They do share the aversion to homosexuality, though. Gay people are killed from time to time in Jamaica. It’s deeply offensive to the conservative Christians and Rastafarians alike. Whereas among the younger generation of Cubans, homosexuality is becoming more accepted. At one point while Shane and Carly and I were in a taxi driving along the malecon, the cabbie pointed out a big crowd sitting on the seawall. He snickered and said that they were all gay, and as we looked closer we saw that there were a lot of same-sex couples. Cuba’s a-changin’. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">December 8: Montego Bay, Jamaica - - - > Miami, FL</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz……zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">Miami, FL - - - > Port-au-Prince</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">It’s been said that Haiti begins in the Miami airport. In addition to the janitors, who are almost all Haitians, there are the planeloads that pass through, always hauling giant bags full of stuff for friends and family back in the city, town or village. As I start to recognize those Creole words, those vivid expressions, a part of my brain that is like a dried sponge begins to absorb each drop, getting more supple every minute. My favorite Haitian musician, Belo, was seated three rows behind me in coach. He was just as cool and humble in person as his songs would suggest. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">It felt so good to touch down in Haiti. I was picked up at the airport by Joseph, MCC’s chauffeur and one of my top ten favorite people of all time. He gave me all the news of friends, coworkers, the security situation and what not. He told me about the new class of police officers that just graduated from the academy. We passed a couple of them, wearing their strange new camouflage uniforms which look nothing like any other police uniform in Haiti. And on we rolled, catching up, running side errands, until we arrived at the big, locked gate to my house. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0cm;"><br /></p>Kurt Hildebrandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00054283140180055778noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36855028.post-55759464524839499642008-01-09T09:58:00.001-05:002008-01-09T10:52:21.239-05:00Cuba and Jamaica...Yes! Still working on it! In the meantime here's pictures of a pre-Christmas trip to Jacmel...<br /><br /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" width="288" height="192" flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&RGB=0x000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Fkwhildebrand%2Falbumid%2F5153499224016679153%3Fkind%3Dphoto%26alt%3Drss" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"></embed><br /><br />...a New Year's trip to Jérémie...<br /><br /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&RGB=0x000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2Fkwhildebrand%2Falbumid%2F5153468291662211569%3Fkind%3Dphoto%26alt%3Drss" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" height="192" width="288"></embed><br /><br />...and a close-up of my foot injuries from falling off a waterfall during that last trip. Believe me, it used to be a lot worse. I just took this photo after five days of antibiotics and not walking anywhere.<br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqtMuAGoD-bX5Rgre9nVPJv_Ft7y3Sn15aaoDQpI4MZXRLrkwIwhOaXQ-SexBx4yb60ltThZm2deMp0MjeEDRuawCaPNGTABn51Jxif7Rb-jlXXaLlVXPE2rJ7RV7YyS_QZX5qzw/s1600-h/DSCN0269.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqtMuAGoD-bX5Rgre9nVPJv_Ft7y3Sn15aaoDQpI4MZXRLrkwIwhOaXQ-SexBx4yb60ltThZm2deMp0MjeEDRuawCaPNGTABn51Jxif7Rb-jlXXaLlVXPE2rJ7RV7YyS_QZX5qzw/s400/DSCN0269.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5153494254739517666" border="0" /></a>Kurt Hildebrandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00054283140180055778noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36855028.post-87743540961272529702007-12-27T16:59:00.000-05:002007-12-28T16:07:00.976-05:00Okay, 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXDREwFUqBnWk0e_pYvxCfEfqM3BJorwS2H4Llh4K6ht0mdKTNZkR4JTBTfoVP1IYBdAAzdU064oxKYfb83sJur4MnE06DdxDaJQ5PW-mrLq3I6btI3Sw_gS1CYKHKr3EV35KVXA/s1600-h/DSCN0168.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXDREwFUqBnWk0e_pYvxCfEfqM3BJorwS2H4Llh4K6ht0mdKTNZkR4JTBTfoVP1IYBdAAzdU064oxKYfb83sJur4MnE06DdxDaJQ5PW-mrLq3I6btI3Sw_gS1CYKHKr3EV35KVXA/s400/DSCN0168.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5148776989079103890" border="0" /></a><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">faux pas</span> 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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...<br /><br /><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dxhbwIgjW4TpgEIAJKwfaFeS5YhcbBF1JOd0pZNvF-5wBZVPSenMWvhwXNw2_clIj7WTGlKu7DHPWc' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe><br /><br />...and what the goat looked like about an hour later.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvsEAbFNmC8dZ8bfhwelLEmoEiru6QBkhhC1bGy_MGeVsi7YldwfeFk_FgNSS5vQd70-erVvzA6FsrGLOLY6pUY9yGdJ97IpI2u9sdZ3nx_zcyksQFVo4qTALjyn4SodEla6Nzfg/s1600-h/DSCN0171.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvsEAbFNmC8dZ8bfhwelLEmoEiru6QBkhhC1bGy_MGeVsi7YldwfeFk_FgNSS5vQd70-erVvzA6FsrGLOLY6pUY9yGdJ97IpI2u9sdZ3nx_zcyksQFVo4qTALjyn4SodEla6Nzfg/s400/DSCN0171.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5148777895317203362" border="0" /></a><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />The party was a great success. Probably fifty or sixty people all told. Some photos:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp1.blogger.com/_0Rk8MDUGtpI/R3QuZGXD6dI/AAAAAAAAAk4/VWaehQBjB0I/s1600-h/DSCN0215.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp1.blogger.com/_0Rk8MDUGtpI/R3QuZGXD6dI/AAAAAAAAAk4/VWaehQBjB0I/s400/DSCN0215.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5148791282730265042" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp1.blogger.com/_0Rk8MDUGtpI/R3QtcGXD6cI/AAAAAAAAAkw/xB4OuqpRL0k/s1600-h/DSCN0197.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp1.blogger.com/_0Rk8MDUGtpI/R3QtcGXD6cI/AAAAAAAAAkw/xB4OuqpRL0k/s400/DSCN0197.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5148790234758244802" border="0" /></a><br /><br />And the birthday kids:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp0.blogger.com/_0Rk8MDUGtpI/R3Qsl2XD6bI/AAAAAAAAAko/JDJOieUcuQs/s1600-h/PB110096.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp0.blogger.com/_0Rk8MDUGtpI/R3Qsl2XD6bI/AAAAAAAAAko/JDJOieUcuQs/s400/PB110096.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5148789302750341554" border="0" /></a><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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?"<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.Kurt Hildebrandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00054283140180055778noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36855028.post-7775137983104783012007-11-03T22:08:00.000-05:002007-11-04T18:20:14.835-05:00Year one, year thirtyLast Sunday, October 28th, was International Prisoners' Day. To mark the occasion, I went to the National Penitentiary with a couple of my Haitian colleagues.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Special mass for the prisoners:<br /><br /><br /><a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/kwhildebrand/InternationalPrisonersDay/photo?authkey=db5sB0o5Uj0#5127915429285083698"><img src="http://lh5.google.com/kwhildebrand/RyoD6gDIOjI/AAAAAAAAAXs/ZU1tSeH3ZJs/s400/DSCN0053.JPG" /></a><br /><br />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.<br /><br />Here's one of the prisoners speaking to the audience.<br /><br /><a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/kwhildebrand/InternationalPrisonersDay/photo?authkey=db5sB0o5Uj0#5127915485119658562"><img src="http://lh6.google.com/kwhildebrand/RyoD9wDIOkI/AAAAAAAAAX0/20ikYPCuja0/s400/DSCN0054.JPG" /></a><br /><br />He was calm and dignified, but his words were heavy with determined, righteous anger.<br /><br />The director of the penitentiary authority:<br /><br /><a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/kwhildebrand/InternationalPrisonersDay/photo?authkey=db5sB0o5Uj0#5127915601083775586"><img src="http://lh5.google.com/kwhildebrand/RyoEEgDIOmI/AAAAAAAAAYE/eYW5Mu8SgaU/s400/DSCN0059.JPG" /></a><br /><br />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.<br /><br />The director presenting trophies to the soccer teams that won the tournament they played on the prison yard concrete.<br /><br /><a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/kwhildebrand/InternationalPrisonersDay/photo?authkey=db5sB0o5Uj0#5127915721342859906"><img src="http://lh5.google.com/kwhildebrand/RyoELgDIOoI/AAAAAAAAAYU/rrpL0pKgJN4/s400/DSCN0062.JPG" /></a><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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:<br /><br /><a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/kwhildebrand/InternationalPrisonersDay/photo?authkey=db5sB0o5Uj0#5127916412832594722"><img src="http://lh6.google.com/kwhildebrand/RyoEzwDIOyI/AAAAAAAAAZo/aBkKIqLQLms/s400/DSCN0072.JPG" /></a><br /><br /><a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/kwhildebrand/InternationalPrisonersDay/photo?authkey=db5sB0o5Uj0#5127916717775272818"><img src="http://lh5.google.com/kwhildebrand/RyoFFgDIO3I/AAAAAAAAAaQ/HCILJEogtqs/s400/DSCN0077.JPG" /></a><br /><br /><a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/kwhildebrand/InternationalPrisonersDay/photo?authkey=db5sB0o5Uj0#5127917125797166050"><img src="http://lh4.google.com/kwhildebrand/RyoFdQDIO-I/AAAAAAAAAbI/TICJtvDdh_4/s400/DSCN0084.JPG" /></a><br /><br /><a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/kwhildebrand/InternationalPrisonersDay/photo?authkey=db5sB0o5Uj0#5127917177336773618"><img src="http://lh4.google.com/kwhildebrand/RyoFgQDIO_I/AAAAAAAAAbQ/GrJzXcZfynQ/s400/DSCN0085.JPG" /></a><br /><br />How do you feed three thousand prisoners?<br /><br /><a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/kwhildebrand/InternationalPrisonersDay/photo?authkey=db5sB0o5Uj0#5127917254646184962"><img src="http://lh6.google.com/kwhildebrand/RyoFkwDIPAI/AAAAAAAAAbY/T2P0AtAemM8/s400/DSCN0086.JPG" /></a><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><div align="center">* * *</div><p></p><p>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:<br /><br /><br /><table style="width: 194px;"><tbody><tr><td style="background: transparent url(http://picasaweb.google.com/f/img/transparent_album_background.gif) no-repeat scroll left 50%; -moz-background-clip: initial; -moz-background-origin: initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: initial; height: 194px;" align="middle"><a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/kwhildebrand/Birthday2007"><img style="margin: 1px 0px 0px 4px;" src="http://lh4.google.com/kwhildebrand/RyoKFgDIPFE/AAAAAAAAAik/vnVlOybY53g/s160-c/Birthday2007.jpg" height="160" width="160" /></a></td></tr><tr><td style="font-size: 11px; font-family: arial,sans-serif; text-align: center;"><a style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(77, 77, 77); text-decoration: none;" href="http://picasaweb.google.com/kwhildebrand/Birthday2007">Birthday 2007</a></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br /><br />I was kind of lazy and didn't write any captions. Remi did a better job on her album <a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/rhemy007/KurtsBirthday">here</a>.<br /><br />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 <em>not</em> 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." </p><p> </p><p>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!</p><p> </p><p>I'll alert the coast guard to prepare for the major spike in immigration to Haiti.</p><p> </p><p align="center">* * *</p><p align="center"> </p><p>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. </p><p> </p><p>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 <em>men masisi!,</em> which is a somewhat vulgar way of saying "here come the homosexuals." </p><p> </p><p>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. </p><p> </p><p>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.</p><p> </p><p>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.</p><p> </p><p>Here's the video:</p><p><br /><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dy20QOj9j_Sci0tzic_hoZJPcO-q0RhAFNOSTb2eNX1ICXzFHAmA6paViIJFxVoi21INcjN7m5vF0M' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe></p><p> </p><p>Here's some photos:</p><p><br /><br /><table style="width: 194px;"><tbody><tr><td style="background: transparent url(http://picasaweb.google.com/f/img/transparent_album_background.gif) no-repeat scroll left center; -moz-background-clip: initial; -moz-background-origin: initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: initial; height: 194px;" align="center"><a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/kwhildebrand/Gede"><img src="http://lh3.google.com/kwhildebrand/Ryn_cgDIOJE/AAAAAAAAAhc/_7pWVXv2HG4/s160-c/Gede.jpg" style="margin: 1px 0pt 0pt 4px;" height="160" width="160" /></a></td></tr><tr><td style="text-align: center; font-family: arial,sans-serif; font-size: 11px;"><a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/kwhildebrand/Gede" style="color: rgb(77, 77, 77); font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none;">Gede</a></td></tr></tbody></table></p><p> </p>Kurt Hildebrandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00054283140180055778noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36855028.post-22772767189641893892007-10-20T14:38:00.006-05:002007-10-23T22:44:54.347-05:00You 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.<br /><br />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."<br /><br />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).<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Inequality is growing everywhere?<br /><br />Don't worry, on average we're still getting richer.<br /><br />Glaciers are melting and storms are getting more extreme?<br /><br />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 <span style="font-style: italic;">Back to the Future.</span><br /><br />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?<br /><br />I know! Isn't it great? It's almost as if there's nothing we can do to stop getting richer! Woo hoo!<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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!"<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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:<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifVkJAl8CXgjSydJ7hAP3QkoMsDwLxjaE-BKRYXiSATSxlnzvUeicc1BLNLBDf7Tp3UdUq24bNfc-UnJDpmaF87GGsluWs9E1BCqit0hMPCP_ClUoISHR6PuFYo5uUV-B4sVZnmQ/s1600-h/IMG_4834.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifVkJAl8CXgjSydJ7hAP3QkoMsDwLxjaE-BKRYXiSATSxlnzvUeicc1BLNLBDf7Tp3UdUq24bNfc-UnJDpmaF87GGsluWs9E1BCqit0hMPCP_ClUoISHR6PuFYo5uUV-B4sVZnmQ/s400/IMG_4834.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5123517532569035058" border="0" /></a><br /><br />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.<br /><br />All in all it was a good day of protesting.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://100milediet.org/category/thanksgiving-stories/">here</a>. We're about a quarter of the way down.Kurt Hildebrandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00054283140180055778noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36855028.post-68731411575703441402007-09-29T12:38:00.005-05:002007-09-29T16:17:51.658-05:00What 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.<br /><br />So, here's some of what I've been up to in the last month:<br /><br />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!"<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://www.myspace.com/crokinolemovie">here</a>.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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!<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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."<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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,<br /><br />kurtKurt Hildebrandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00054283140180055778noreply@blogger.com