Therefore, after a mostly sleepless night (as I mentioned in the previous post, it was HOT until the AC cooled the room to comfort… and then it kept cooling until it was COLD)… we got up bright and early and piled into the car.
And then realized that the tap tap parked in the compound with us was blocking us in, and we had no idea where the key was. So I got Erin into the driver’s seat of it and gave her a quick lesson in “stick shift in neutral and be ready to hit the brake” and Steven and I pushed the truck out and then back into the compound, so we could make good our escape.
In the prototypical Port-au-Prince way, we circumvented a huge line to get our tickets and check our luggage as my brother knew a guy who (for a couple dollars) knew a guy who could bump us to the front of the line. We were running a bit late and it wasn’t worth the added stress, so we took the “pay to expedite” option, got all checked and settled in, and got to marvel at one of the best charades in the city. The airport is one of the nicest and newest looking buildings in Port-au-Prince, to help give arriving foreigners the impress of a clean and improving city where things are run efficiently and effectively. It is, unfortunately, a sham. It also made for a very nice waiting room for the plane, what with brand new cafe offerings and some honestly delicious food for breakfast.
Passport exit-stamped, signed ticket in hand – I appear to be ready to depart the island of Hispaniola for the Unitedest of States
There are several layers of irony here, I think, that the American Airlines logo is falling apart a bit in the middle while trying to look so clean and crisp:
The American Airlines sign in the Port-au-Prince airport… needs a bit of repair, the ‘m’ is falling off. The sad fact is that the monies put towards beautifying the area in and around the airport is done to make things SEEM nice and good… while the majority of Haitians fail to see any governmental aid.
It was a long day of flights (made slightly longer as a tropical storm above and around the Bahamas, a black wall of stormy warning, had us divert further out over the ocean!) – and it turned out that my brother and I had been put on different flights for the final Philadelphia–>Cleveland leg of the journey, with me being stuck for a 4 hour layover beyond his departure time. We begged and pleaded and turned the dial on our puppy dog eyes to 11… and I was moved onto the same flight. A clean sweep, then: no travel problems for the entire trip down and back, on 6 different airplanes total!
Off the plane into Fort Lauderdale, glad to be back on US soil
Our parents were, in their typical lovely style, were there and beaming to see us home safely; my mom also did the typical European thing and had flowers for us both on getting back from a flight. Given that Steven and I both smelled… seasoned, after a day of travel in various levels of heat… the sweet smell was likely a good addition to our trip home.
I was surprised to see my Subaru as the car to bring us all home, but it was a good thing: our luggage BARELY fit in the car, so we almost needed the roof rack:
Our folks came to pick us up in my Subaru – figuring that the roof rack might be necessary with all the luggage we brought back. Unintentionally, a very Haitian welcome – vehicles in Haiti make CONSTANT use of roofracks in safe ways (and otherwise)
I am not much one for souvenirs, but I did end up being given or buying a few things:
The Haitian flag and banana art were gifts from some new Haitian friends; the machetes were my gift to myself
There is also a concentrated art district in Port-au-Prince which does some simply amazing metalworking with, of all possible media, 55 gallon oil drum ends. They get a picture of what you want rendered in metal and then they replicate it by hand from a single piece of metal. I love DIY and actual skillsets; though I didn’t personally buy either of these (they came back with Steven), I am thoroughly impressed with their quality:
Some of the *amazingly* talented metalworking from artists in Port-au-Prince. They are given a picture of a logo or the like, and then using a single metal oil drum lid… they reproduce the symbol
In short: it was a busy week in Haiti doing as much good for as many people as we could in self-sustaining programs or through skills taught; but saddening due to feeling like our work was merely a drop in the bucket of all the deep needs in and of Haiti.
Retrospective on this trip, especially as compared with my prior abroad experiences
To step back from the chronicling of the important moments to to the trip, I want to close with a bit of a written reaction to my having broken my self-imposed moratorium on my being involved in international development work, something I put in place several years ago. The causes for that are disparate, from having experienced both the depths of people not caring at all for local suffering in a given area (Zambia); to people caring so intensely for their perceptions of a local situation that all people in that local situation suffer more (Israel/Palestine). Haiti somehow fits in between these – people care enough to send a lot of international aid and relief funding and material; but it is wildly mismanaged and/or corrupted away to nothing. Further complicating things for me, I have for years tried to spend a lot of time thinking and acting on what I think matters most, or truly makes life worth living. Many aid programs are aimed at this (clean water, for instance, is not an unreasonable goal to push for in all societies for all people). Some other programs are, with noble intentions, trying to make poorer peoples more like Europe or the United States… and this isn’t always for the best. There is an old line of argumentation, often called lifeboat ethics, which in short is worried that due to limited resources, richer countries should be careful about trying to help too many poorer countries. Haiti is more of a lifeboat itself, in a couple of ways. Those in power and who have joined them consider their own little lifeboats (their walled off compounds with mansions and expensive cars) the only things worth saving, and do not deign to help their starving or sickly countrymen. Haiti itself, though, is an island with limited resources. It is said that in the 1950’s, the population reached 3 million people and it was declared that local resources could no longer support all those people. In 2015, Haiti is approaching 10 million souls. I am in the weird position of knowing that dependence on foreign aid is allowing the Haitian population to grow larger without any shared growth in their capacity for provision of services; but also not wanting to abandon all of those who are stuck swimming outside of the lifeboat. Therefore, I am disinclined to want to work through the larger aid organizations which are often tied to certain cultural objectives. That points me to want to work within smaller groups.
That said, smaller groups of aid and relief workers are not always free from their own foibles. There are many well-intentioned but poorly-implemented approaches to what my brother calls the “weekend warriors” of international development work by small teams of people over a short period. This sort of “voluntourism” brings well-intentioned people to a place where deep need exists; but as non-experts, their plans are very much a combination of “let us have a chance to see and experience the local culture” along with “well we can do A, B, and C to help.” A, B, and C are typically either 1) low-complexity jobs which could have been done by local people in need of paying work (and with the price of plane tickets, the money that could be sent to pay for locals to work instead of flying volunteers out is often sizeable); 2) more skills-oriented jobs like carpentry (again, which could have been done by local folks to give them jobs); or 3) the more intangible benefits which come with playing with and paying attention to orphans or children in general (which is WILDLY important for those kids’ development and flourishing… but also somewhat less valuable if those kids won’t have clean water and food, much less a job, when they grow up). And so you get the dichotomy of people who went and helped and DID something to combat suffering, and the heady satisfaction that accompanies that… alongside the stark reality that perhaps not much good was done, in the final tally. The Onion, a satirical “news” source, really hit the nail on the head with their pillorying of Facebook profile pictures and abroad experiences. For my part, there is nothing wrong with sharing photos or written stories of your abroad experiences (take, for example, this blog). Instead, my concern lies with the inflated sense of accomplishment which is often felt by those who embark on their voluntourism trip, do a little bit of short term good, and then come back and never have a sense of the potential ill caused by their trip along the lines of the above.
Moving a few steps even less-involved than voluntouring, you have people who speak in impassioned ways about helping those in need, but lack some combination of actual skillsets; money to donate; or the will to make themselves change their own habits to support helping those in need. From a good 5 or 6 years ago, I remember the below unsourced photo which decries the absurdity of claiming that social network slacktivism is good for much of anything. “Liking” or commenting in a passionate (and typically uninformed) way doesn’t do anyone much good at all: it might make a person feel good for doing so, but as this image satirically points out… it isn’t making a lick of difference for those in need:
Liking something on Facebook doesn’t provide many folks in Africa with clean drinking water. My frustration with people who act in a way that suggests otherwise makes my blood boil, and gives me whiplash from shaking my head in annoyance.
In short (or rather, long), there are MYRIAD ways in which good intentions can and do go awry, and I decided years ago to wash my hands of getting involved in that for a good long time, for my own health as I was too stressed and depressed about it.
THAT SAID: having outlined how many types of doing or wanting to help others go awry… this trip to Haiti was honestly a refreshing experience for me. My brother, in partnership with local folks, put together a program which used 4 weeks and 4 different teams of volunteers to work towards specific, achievable goals. They taught swim lessons, a survival skill for the inhabitants of a storm-battered tropical island; built a wall with razor wire around an orphanage to keep those kids and their few worldly possessions safe as they grow up; they fed the hungry which is very much meeting an immediate need but it was done as part of a locally-run, internationally-funded food kitchen which operates on a weekly schedule; and more. I myself had the chance to go down and bring a skillset not possessed by (m)any volunteers or Haitians, and repair all the computers at that computer school. I also got to help teach good practices for administering a classroom of computers, which will help preserve all the work I did for a long time to come and therefore enable more Haitians in Jacmel to learn there. Even more exciting in a longer term sense: I have succeeded in getting a grant to be able to send down 15 laptop cooling pads for the computer school, to help combat the severe heat which is deleterious for electronics!!
I hope the above gives a better sense of my short summary above, when I said that “feeling like our work was merely a drop in the bucket of all the deep needs in and of Haiti.” In many ways, my stark tallying is true, that we did very little compared to the towering heights of problems stacked against Haitians. On the other hand, though, I am proud of my brother, and proud to have been a part of one of these trips: because against all odds, our good intentions were paired with good planning, and, I daresay, as a result we effected truly good outcomes in partnership with local Haitians and in ways which are self-sustaining over the short and long term.
Coda
As I close my chronicle-writing for this first trip, let me be clear: this will not be the last post on this particular blog. I am planning to go back to Haiti next summer, likely as a co-leader for a particularly large group of volunteers alongside my brother. I also hope to do a lot of preparatory work from home towards that end, and with a couple of sustainable energy projects in mind to bring down to Haiti with me. Stay tuned for updates as the calendar draws nearer to our ~June 2016 trip to Haiti!
The final morning in Jacmel involved a lot of tired people trying to load their possessions and themselves into vehicles as quickly as possible. We had all given our all over the preceding week, and it was showing at this point. Thankfully, many of us had packed the night before, so we just got to play “how can we tie down luggage atop vehicular roofs in such a way as to avoid dumping possessions over mountaintop edges,” a high-stakes game indeed. Spoiler: aside from a moment when a suitcase dangled off the side of the Toyota (once we were off the mountain, thankfully) – we got there, all people and luggage with us and accounted for.
The IL team in the van; the OSU + me team in the Toyota. Luggage to spare.
A final photo of the group…
Steven, Pastor Marky and his wife Sydney, and the team
… and of Steven with his Haitian co-conspirators, so-to-speak…
Nathan (left), Sydney, Steven, Pastor Marky, and Emmanuel (or Mannu). An administrative and leadership team to die for!
… and we were off in our convoy of two.
We left the way we came, through a gate proclaiming JACMEL, on the only arterial road between Jacmel and Port-au-Prince:
JACMEL! [and advertisements]
Traveling through the CRAZY Mountain Passes to Port-au-Prince
Soon after passing through the GATE OF JACMEL (I don’t know why, but the font for the sign made me read it like it was being yelled!), we began to get a great final (re)view of Haitian scenic gems… as well as a daytime education/baptism by fire in “you can apparently go faster than you think and not die, while driving in the mountains!”
One of the mountains, as seen from the mountains!
Just one important note: all the photos in this section were taken with my Pentax DSLR camera through a tinted car window while the car was moving in uneven lighting on a very hazy day. I can’t believe these photos came out as good as they did!! 🙂
… I am such a sucker for offroad vehicles in river-crossing scenes. Its like they set this up for me to photo as we drove by!!
I find it poignant that on our trip out through the natural beauty of Haiti on the way to the corrupt capital of Port-au-Prince… we still were confronted with governmental corruption and mismanagement, even in the middle of no where. This bridge was a civil engineering project designed to withstand future earthquakes or tropical storms, to connect the main road between Jacmel and the capital, to the mountaintop communities outside of Jacmel. The money, however, was profoundly mismanaged and so on one end, the bridge simply stops. On the other end, the last small portions of funding were apparently put into fill gravel, to make the road (roughly) reach the bridge. So, in fact, this bridge goes to no where. Such good intentions, sufficient initial funding, and then political corruption and mismanagement led to the entire project being a waste:
This bridge which leads no where, just outside of Jacmel. Designed to connect the main Jacmel–Port-au-Prince road to the mountain communities, this is how it looks as of last week, utterly useless. It is a professional and safe civil engineering project, which ran out of money as the government mismanaged the donated funds.Even with the hazy conditions, the view from the mountain roads was fantastic
People who never before got car sick definitely found their stomachs turning at points, along the severe curves and corners to the road through the mountains. The Haitian driving culture of using your horn to let others know “I am here/I am coming this way” was VINDICATED fully on these curves, where you cannot see around corners and the road is often *JUST* 2 cars wide… not a lot of margin for error, particularly not with commercial trucks and vans barreling around the corners in more than one lane at a time!
This is the best photo I got to show off JUST how sharp some of these mountaintop corners were. Steven tells me that this skimpy guardrails are a relatively new addition, which is INSANE given the sheer dropA good shot showing that the deforestation of Haiti is literally turning the earth there brown over time, as topsoil is carried away from wind and rain alike
We eventually made it through the mountains and drove back through Léogâne, into the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, and eventually to the international airport. We pulled to the outgoing flight drop-off point, and in the span of maybe 5 minutes unloaded 12 people, their various luggage and personal articles, and closed the cars back up. I don’t know where we summoned the energy and intensity from, but I suspect that traffic causing the IL team to arrive at the airport VERY close to their departure time… had something to do with it!
A Hi Lift jack mounted on a roof rack, a snorkel, and more offroading gear on someone’s normal daily driver in an urban area. These are the sorts of mods I am doing to my Subaru!!
Steven, Nathan, the OSU WonderTwins and I went off to the American restaurant of Haiti, Epi d’Or. The food was all very expensive and very rich, but OH so deliciously unhealthy at the end of our trip. Satiated with fries, donuts, and pizza… and the full cake we bought and brought with us to our lodging for the night, for which we then departed.
Arrival to Notre Maison, an orphanage in Port-au-Prince which rescues abandoned special needs infants and raises them
We arrived at Notre Maison, which I will interchangeably call Gertrudge’s, where we would stay for the night. Put in simple and stark terms: Haitian culture in general does not allow for special needs or developmentally disabled infants. In Port-au-Prince, they are routinely left to die atop trash piles across town. A local woman named Gertrude decided this was not acceptable, and so she began to walk the trash heaps looking for infants left to die; she brought them back to the orphanage she began; and started to raise them as her own. A doozy of a story.
The sign in the kitchen of Notre Maison. Please, go and read about their work… and consider donating towards their operating costs and amazing work at their website
At this point, my brother had been leading teams in Haiti for 4 weeks and was exhausted; I had been up past 1:30am the night before and was exhausted; Nathan was exhausted… so we stumbled into the oven-like bedroom at Gertrude’s, popped the window vent slats to get some of the hot wind in, and passed out at 2pm, in the heat of the day, for 2 or 3 hours. It takes a certain level of exhaustion to pass out in 100+ degree heat, in a growing pool of your own sweat, with daylight shining in your eyes… but we had all managed to qualify for it!
A gorgeous view from the roof of Gertrude’s in the 100+ degree heat
Per the posted rules and out of my own disposition, I didn’t take photos of any of the kids (in some cases, now adults who have spent their entire lives at Notre Maison). Those can be seen on their website. The night, therefore, was spent entirely in conversation with, of all people, a sister of one of the IL team members we had spent a week with, who interns at Gertrude’s! We talked about the ups and downs of international development work in general, and the specific difficulties of working within Haiti. A nice analytical closing evening to a week spent working with and for those Haitians we were lucky enough to meet and befriend; and many more besides.
The courtyard and main entrance to Gertrude’sThe rooftop tables at which we met and chatted with the interns at Notre Maison, and tried to cool down in the winds off the seaGertrude lives in this yellow home; while I didn’t get to explore the whole orphanage compound in my short stay there, it was a very Byzantine layoutThe trash-filled property next door, which used to be used by a man to burn trash ~20 hours per day, throwing billowing clouds of soot into the orphanage. Have I mentioned how much I wish I could change Haitian cultural attitudes about burning garbage?
Steven, Nathan, and I. Friends [Romans? Countrymen??]The night began to drop, we headed to the bedroom where the really new AC unit had been running full blast for ~3 hours to try and put a dent in the stored heat and humidity in the room… and was still struggling to get rid of them, though it was noticeably less miserable in the bedroom as compared with the outside.
It was a mostly sleepless night, for the first part saw us too hot and sweaty/sweating to fall to sleep. At some unknown point the AC had cooled the room enough to be able to pass out. After that, of course, the AC continued to cool the room and we had passed out in boxers alone due to being so warm… so we froze!! That made for a tired day of departure and travel the next morning – the story of which shall get its own blog post, so stay tuned for ~The Exciting Conclusion~ to this trip!!!
Prepare for a very lengthy post; mostly due to our having a WILDLY busy Wednesday in Haiti…
A wall around the orphanage; razor wire atop the wall
After gathering all the orphans, orphanage staff, and our team of volunteers for a group photo…
All of us, in front of the orphanage (and THOROUGHLY enjoying the shade)
… we dove into our various tasks for our last workday. The team again took up their assembly line positions between “pile of cement to mix” and “temporary wooden trough atop new wall” and passed buckets of cement to the wall, and empty buckets back. Consider for a moment the sheer scale of the walled compound around the orphanage…
The view of the assembly line of razor wire workers, from cement mixing to pouring atop the wall – as seen from the roof of the orphanage
… and then realize that in 4 weeks, my brother Steven organized and led 4 teams of volunteers to 1) Put in a foundation; 2) assemble the wall block by cement block; and in our fourth week 3) drape razor wire and then cement it into place atop the orphanage. All of this also happened in extremely miserable temperatures and high humidity – so this was one SERIOUSLY good job!
Emmanuel the assistant pastor of the Lutheran church (left) and Pastor Marky the head pastor, discuss the orphanage wall situation with a local worker
The last portion to the security wall around the orphanage compound will be a pair of lockable rolling metal gates, which I hope will come soon to really make the wall operational.
The addition of razor wire was accomplished by pegging up some scrap lumber into the cement walls; laying the razor wire into the trough; and then pouring wet cement in a bucket at a time. The gap on the right is one of two in the wall, where a rolling gate will be installed.Haitians and Americans working making a concerted combined effort to make the razor wire a realityKristy and I rocking shades for shared and dissimilar reasons (it is bright, we agreed… but at this point in the week, my regular glasses were lost so all shades, all the time for me!)
My task at the orphanage was to photograph all the different things going on, but I worked hard to get good action shots (as seen above and below) of this final stage of the wall construction.
From Haitian to volunteer to Haitian to volunteer, the newly-mixed cement gets passed over to the work pouring it into the temporary wooden troughs; once set, the razor wire will be a permanent security feature for this walled compoundOrphans surrounded me insisting on 1) CONSTANTLY playing with my smooth and soft hair and 2) asking me ALL about my parents, siblings, and job in FrenchThe Cement Conga Line
The area around Beaudouin was lovely t0 see, with more trees than one often encounters in Haiti given the vast deforestation. It is my hope that this natural abundance can be husbanded over time, but I am not going to hold my breath.
The view from the roof of the orphanage on this clear day was often spectacular…… but Haitian cultural expectations of throwing trash into piles until burning it frankly makes the beautiful scenery a mismatch for the human habitation thereof
Starting medical charts for the orphans
While the razor wire project continued apace, my brother and our translator Nathan went up to the rooftop of the orphanage, with myself and the local Haitian called the Praying Man (who is looked to both for prayer and medical assistance, given his 15+ years apprenticing with visiting American doctors).
Some of the orphans, practicing their modeling skills
My brother, being the clever young man that he is, recognized the peculiar need of these orphans for as many defenses against ills in their lives as possible and figured out a way to help them medically over their lives to come. In short: he realized that starting medical charts for them in the here and now, even when medical assistance won’t always be available, could prove to be invaluable to saving their lives some day. At the very least, it is passively and actively implying that there is GREAT importance to one’s health and paying attention to it; modeling good behavior is often unexpectedly important to inspiring good behaviors.
Steven taking temperatures and pulses and the like; Andrea and her daughter Katrina writing the information into the charts; Nathan translating – all atop the orphanageThe multi-page medical charts, one for each orphan. The reality is, they might not always be able to get the medical care they need… but by establishing a baseline for their medical history, the possibility that they receive appropriate care is much higher
Another important aspect to this medical checkup, as the next section will further highlight, was to slyly give training to the Praying Man in the use of the various implements in the deluxe EMT kit my brother had purchased to bring down with him:
The Praying Man, taking blood pressure as part of the medical chart creation
Solar power (yay!) lights for enabling safety and productivity at night (yay!!!!). A small step towards energy independence and reliability at the orphanage
The last few charts done (it was a process my brother had done over the month he was there, for a total of 36 fairly intensive medical charts created), the next experience really warms my heart.
The Praying Man, the (surprised!) proud new owner of an extensive EMT kit
Andrea, Steven, Nathan and I took a quick side trip at this point, for another emotional moment of growing in partnership and trust with one another. The lady who we visited, at 88 years old was FAR beyond the Haitian life expectancy of 65 years old. She was only complaining of aches and pains across her whole body (likely osteoporosis), which is a slim list of symptoms compared to what she could be experiencing. After giving her painkillers and instructions, we stepped back outside for a special moment…
Steven leading a house visit to help a very old lady (life expectency of 65 means this ~88 year old was VERY old) who was complaining of a variety of pains.
My brother, talking through our translator and friend Nathan, explained that based on his many years of apprenticing and his decades of serving as a bastion of prayer and care within the community, let the Praying Man know that we are entrusting him with the EMT kit and the responsibility for the health of his fellows which it entails:
The Praying Man, now the VERY proud owner of that deluxe orange EMT kit. The ear to ear smile here was true of most of Nathan’s translating; the picture below saw the Praying Man again revert to the typical Haitian response to having their photo taken: no smile whatsoever. But the joy shared between us was immense at this moment.The Praying Man was SUPER excited about being entrusted with this kit to aid him in ministering to both the spiritual and physical needs of his communityThe Praying Man doing his thing – walking down the dusty trail, eyes open for the next person who he could help.
Just like the razor wire wall as an edifice, and the ESL classes continuing long after our teams depart… it is my sincere hope that the Praying Man with his new orange bag of medical salvation shall be another sustainable outcome for good from our work in Haiti.
A brief chance to drive in Haiti
As my blogs and Facebook have indicated more and more over the past months and perhaps 2 years, automotive mechanical projects have become more and more of an interest of mine (a core part of the constellation of being self-prepared for anything and everything)… you can imagine how excited I was to have the chance to drive a stick shift vehicle on the VERY rough roads!!
The Chevy Sidekick I got to drive, with a VERY poorly-maintained clutch (it took some SERIOUS muscle to budge… and then it would stick down and not release… making for an interesting driving experience!)…… which, in the typical Haitian fashion, had a somewhat grammatically inaccurate sticker atop the windshield as a sort of Christian totem of protection. Another one I saw a lot of was “Christ Capable” – likely not implying that their Toyota pickup truck isn’t capable of Christ’s miracles, but rather implying “through Christ I can do anything”
A Jaunt into the Haitian Mountains; my own personal lecture on Vodou
So.
In the midst of an already super busy day (something not mentioned above – I got to do some emergency file recovery when the ESL final exam file got corrupted; and then walk back and forth to the local Jacmel print shop in the heat to get the tests printed for the evening’s exams), I was privileged to have the chance to take a drive with our good friend Nathan to the beach and Jacmel art district; and then up to the mountaintop leading to Bassin-Bleu, so I could grab some good photos of the city as a whole, the coast, and the views.
Quite delightfully, Nathan was happy to discuss all manner of topics: from his impending seminary education to become a Lutheran pastor, in the US (next year; very exciting for him!!)… to the Haitian iteration of “voodoo” (which is more correctly rendered “vodou”), and so without further ado, here is my own personal introduction to Haitian…
Vodou
As a disclaimer, the following does not purport to be a systematic exposition of the Haitian vodou belief system. This was the tale as told by one Haitian man, as remembered by me a week after the fact, and without anywhere CLOSE to enough time to get the full story.
Vodou, somewhat like the language Creole, is the process of “creolization” – the syncretic combination of a series of distinct ideas and content into one combined mass. Haiti, at one point, produced something like 45% of the sugar consumed by Europe – because it was an island covered in slave plantations for sugar cane, run by the French. The slaves, as Nathan told it, were intentionally split apart from their fellow tribe members once in Haiti, to discourage resistance (not least of all because different tribes spoke incompatible languages)… and given the sheer number of tribes who had members sent to Haiti as slaves, that means a LARGE bank of indigenous African tribal religious beliefs got uprooted and again planted into Haitian soil.
These different tribes, very generally speaking, had a STRONG worldview based on the presence of spirits good and ill in and around the powerful things around them (the weather; large animals; large trees or mountains; and more). Monotheism didn’t really have a place to develop amongst such a pluralistic set of faith communities. Quite the opposite, the developing Haitian vodou pantheon had many seats to start and kept making more and more. One of the trees we drove past on the way up the mountain towards Bassin-Bleu, for instance, is simply gigantic: and, as Nathan explained, it is quite certainly a site for vodou veneration and ceremony. Based on its majestic size and stature, it is assumed to have a big and powerful spirit (“loa” as they are called in vodou) animating and/or protecting it… a spirit powerful enough to worry about if it gets angry. And so, in a very materialistic sort of way, the tree is propitiated by those ceremonies and rituals:
This is a very old-growth tree (especially for the deforested expanse of Haiti), and as such it is almost certainly a Vodou holy site, a place where prayers are offered to propitiate the spirit associated with the tree
It may sound odd, to speak of a materialistic bent to the vodou tradition given the above emphasis on spirits. But vodou very often takes a serious approach to the practical problems of everyday life. Nathan shared at length the story of his father talking with a vodou priest. The priest went to a woman’s house who complained that in the middle of the night, time and again, she was awoke by the dishes in her closed cupboard clattering. The priest explained that she had to buy a certain candle and ONLY use it for this purpose; and then get a certain nice kind of drinking vessel also to be used solely for this spiritual intervention. Twice a day she needed to face a certain corner of the house, light the candle and drink all the water she could fit into the drinking vessel. The priest explicitly told her “this will get rid of your problem.” But, it is fascinating to note, he explained to Nathan’s father that he was lying to this woman. He explained: “I don’t want to worry her, but the fact of the matter is that the spirit rattling the dishes was not going to leave just because of ME or MY instructions. Quite the opposite: the tasks I gave to this woman were merely to satisfy the restless spirit residing in or perhaps near the house. Nothing and no one will move it, all we can do is try to make it comfortable so it leaves us alone.” In a weird way, this sort of strong emphasis on spirits… is actually as means to materialistic ends. The spirits are all real, can be REALLY annoyed and thus in need of propitiation… but we just gotta deal with them in this life as we try and go about said life.
A vodou temple up in the severe mountain heights between Port-au-Prince and Jacmel. Note the abstract representation of the tree in red – vodou will almost ALWAYS tend towards abstraction in its artwork, I was told
I mentioned monotheism above (the notion that only one god exists and is worthy of praise). The French and other colonial nations on Hispaniola all made efforts to convert the slave population to Catholicism, and something interesting happened. On the one hand, Haitian vodou is at its core the amalgamation of many other faiths into one general disposition on the world and the spirits within it. On the other hand, the Catholic church was (and still is) surprisingly flexible when it comes to incorporating local belief and tradition into its attempts at missions amongst non-Christian (think, for instance, of all the locality-specific iterations of “Our Lady of Guadaloupe”). As you might imagine: these two religious blocs being willing to meld into or with other beliefs… led to some SERIOUS syncretism between Catholicism and vodou. Haitians would “convert” to being Catholic but in every conceivable way map the various core loa (spirits) within vodou onto the saints, Mary, and even Jesus of the Catholic faith. This syncretism was so complete for so long that even today, Haitian Christians actually do not consider Catholics to be Christian. Nathan confessed some worry, because as a Lutheran Haitian even he is sometimes under suspicion because of the similarities between Catholic and Lutheran denominations. That is a STRONG association between Catholic and vodou beliefs, I daresay.
Finally, rather than monotheistic, I would call Haitian Christians (and vodou practitioners alike) “monolatristic,” just like the Israelites of Exodus. They believe in one god above all other gods and spirits… but in a very real, visceral way, they also believe in the presence and power of ALL sorts of other spirits. It was particularly interesting to hear about some of the commonly-held beliefs of Haitians regardless of religion. The presence of electric lights, or perhaps urban areas in general, are inimical to the operations of the evil spirits associated with/venerated by aspects of vodou. Thus, as Christianity has spread to the cities and even towns of Haiti, vodou has been pushed to the backwater, upper mountain regions. Not to be crass, but ALL Haitians act on the reflexive belief that after urinating, you have potentially exposed yourself to losing some of your vitality and power… and so will spit after urinating. Even Haitian Christians, who consider this a false and indeed silly belief… still end up doing it. It is THAT ingrained in the culture!
As I started by saying, not a complete or academic presentation on vodou, the above is just the description and details I picked up from Nathan… but I certainly think it was an interesting introduction!!!
Exploring the mountains, a breathtaking view of the coast
The core purpose of the drive on which I got such an interesting education in vodou and Haitian beliefs, however, was to get some glorious photographs of the scenic and natural gems of Haiti. And hoo boy, let me tell you, I got some good photos!!
We started at a nearby hotel, where we sort of talked our way in to get photos of the coast:
The day was very hazy (oddly enough, 85%+ humidity makes it hazy outside) but the coastline is gorgeousFrom small boats for fun by private parties…
We then drove down to the beach in front of the Jacmel art district, with a view of the port of Jacmel (it is “legally closed” by the national government, but a local very rich family apparently still runs commercial ships into it for themselves. As I have said many times – Haiti is all sorts of corrupt), with a FANTASTIC wind off the sea:
… to large commercial vessels being used in an extra-legal way for private purposes (the port of Jacmel is officially closed for use by all parties)Wall of artwork in the art district of Jacmel, Part IWall of artwork in the art district of Jacmel, Part II
Finally, we took the more circuitous route up some SEVERE inclines, some rough “roads,” and generally speaking an absolute lack of guardrails or other safety infrastructure.
It was all so, so worth it:
The narrow “road” we traveled up the mountains to get these photosHere is the extralegal commercial ship using the Port of Jacmel you saw in an earlier pic… as seen from a TALL mountaintopJacmel and the southern coast of Haiti, as viewed from the mountaintop road leading to Bassin-Bleu
One of the general benefits of a mission/volunteerism trip like this is a WILD perspective shift anyways; how cool it was to step outside of the tall walls of the streets of Jacmel and get far enough away to struggle to even see the city!
Having lost track of time due to transit time and engrossing conversation alike, Nathan and I were suddenly called that we were already late in returning! So, we started the circuitous and dangerous trek back down the STEEP mountain:
This mountain road was playing for keeps, because whereas a 22% grade might not sound THAT bad…… it is a HELL of a steep incline on foot or in a car, even a 4WD car like this Toyota
Even on the way down, and in the midst of a hazy day, the views were simply spectacular:
A city nestled within the mountains
We also got a really great look at the Bridge Which Goes Nowhere. A foreign aid program to build a safe bridge from the main road to the mountain where we were coming down from, the money was mismanaged to the point that mid-construction, the bridge was left unfinished. The photo below shows the side where a gravel embankment has been created to one side of the bridge… the far side of the bridge is simply a dead end hanging up in the air. It is for this sort of reason that Steven and the teams of volunteers placed such a high premium on finishing all the projects we started: that sort of achievement is VERY noteworthy in Haitian culture.
This is the fabled Bridge Which Goes Nowhere – a well-intentioned project to improve transit onto the mountain, but abandoned before completion due to mismanagement (and therefore dearth) of funding
English as a Second Language (ESL) graduation ceremony!!!
Nathan and I, after nearly running out of fuel in the mountains (we were traveling on fumes and dreamy memories of petrol at the end of our drive) and refueling in town, made it back to the guest house, whereat we jumped back in the car and rushed over to Beaudouin. There, the ESL students were working hard through their final exams:
Rebecca (left), Steven, and Kayla – putting finishing touches on the ESL final examThe ESL final exam in progress – very exciting (if not a little nervewracking for the test-takers!)I must speak to the unbelievably good-natured attitude of this gentleman who lost an arm to amputation (presumably due to a post-surgery infection). The look of pride on his face as he got his certificate for completing the class (see below) is a very special sort of satisfying for me. He continues to fight regardless of difficulties. Noble inspiration for us all, particularly in well-off situations where our “problems” are typically just “I need a serious attitude and outlook readjustment”
After the test, we had a few speeches from Steven, Valdo (below, the local Haitian who would continue the program after we leave) and others, the real payoff was seeing the pride on the faces and body language of those graduating from their respective levels of proficiency.
Valdo (the local Haitian who is taking the lead on organizing and continuing the ESL after the volunteers all leave), thanking everyone and showing off his own perfected-English!
It is my contention that given the sheer joy of those Haitians who participated and their pride at having learned so much English in such a short time, that I want to give a space on this blog post to display the photos of each and every person with their certificate (unfortunately, I do not have all of their names, else I would give first names with each photo):
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After the end of the closing ceremonies, we were treated to a very emotional and rousing rendition of the Haitian national anthem. Unfortunately I only captured that small clip of it, but the level of enthusiasm for the their nation from those impoverished Haitians in the ESL class honestly surprised me. I was expecting more bitterness or frustration at the low level of governmental effectiveness; I can’t say for sure, but perhaps the belting out of the anthem was more of a vote of confidence in the nation of Haiti than its government? In any event, these very poor people were astonishingly generous – they surprised us by gifting each of us a Haitian flag (at $2 each, which is ~1 day’s labor for a pretty well-paid laborer, that is a LOT of money to have freely given us), which we used to participate in our own way in the singing of the anthem.
For those who don’t like a video, here is a still photo of that moment, flags all waving aloft with the rhythm:
One of the most special moments of the trip then happened, in my opinion. My brother was given a hand-made wooden desk ornament, to thank him for all his VERY hard work preparing for and then leading 4 weeks of volunteers in a foreign country. I am very, very proud of him:
In the view of the Haitians, my brother IS a doctor as he spent countless hours running medical clinics in the capacity of a paramedic or EMT, which Haitians did not understand the concept of… and having heard about Steven’s work at the hospital, saving the life of a 3 year old girl when the local doctors gave up, they decided to hand-make him this gorgeous wooden desktop ornament labeling him “doctor” (the left of it features the island of Haiti with its departments labeled and drawn out; the right features a palm tree).
We stepped outside in a jovial atmosphere, got a couple of final photos and said our goodbyes, and then the team departed for Pastor Marky’s restaurant in Jacmel.
The whole ESL graduating class and volunteers…… and my brother with the core Haitians who would continue to teach ESL for weeks and months to come, to their peers
A closing meal at Pastor Marky’s Chandelier Restaurant in Jacmel
The meal we drove to was VERY much anticipated by the team, famished at this point. And I can promise you: we weren’t disappointed. A huge spread of delicious food in a delightful atmosphere with our new Haitian friends: definitely a magical sort of ending to a hard week spent working.
The street-facing sign (and phone number, in case you’re in Jacmel Haiti and want some DELICIOUS food)Artwork of all sorts characterized the restaurant – between falling sun and my shades, I didn’t spend a lot of time trying to get more photos than this welcoming mural
The DELICIOUS meal served to us at Pastor Marky’s restaurant
The team of volunteers, our Haitian hosts and many of those who helped (and participated in) ESL. I am, for some reason, trying to do my best Stevie Wonder impression here with my lean…
We took a couple of further steps towards enjoying ourselves regardless of social cost: we sang the song and danced the dance associated with “La Touche.” I am not sure where this song came from, but the basic principle was to use silliness and a combination of French and English in the song with body movements to teach the English names of various major body parts. Good for a bunch of laughs? Yes. Good for teaching the major body parts to Haitians in English, so they might be able to help a future American volunteer doctor to diagnose them? Very yes!
Pastor Marky (red polo) offers an emotional address thanking us for our help, wishing us safety, and asking that we come visit our new Haitian brothers and sisters again some time soon
Later that night, back at the Guest House…
… I did indeed continue to work on fixing computers, my last chance to do so, until after 1am. At this point I was working to fix the personal machines of the pastors and some close Haitian friends of the guest house, all of whom I wanted to help. The reality, of course, is that there are limited hours in the day and I had a limited set of discs and flash drives with which to effect repairs. I couldn’t fix all the computers in need of work (likely: most of them in Haiti, given the computing tendencies I described in a previous post), but damn if I didn’t try!!
The evening closed with me going into a coma after packing up my stuff to prepare for our departure from Jacmel on the morning to come.
I know this will be surprising… but a portion of Day 5 involved….. fixing computers!
More computer repairs, in this case at the guest house due to a better internet connection…… and being ground floor and open door, we even had a chicken stop by to have a computer checked out!
The repair process was actually really easy to manage, thanks to the decades spent working on my own computers and then the two years I spent working IT at Yale Law School – where I often had to juggle 5+ laptops at any given moment. It might seem silly, but those experiences actually made me EXTREMELY efficient at the task at hand, and resourceful enough to know which files to have downloaded to bring with me assuming no/bad Internet (like anti-virus programs and Adobe Flash and the like). But I took a break early in the day as we headed off to Beaudouin:
Going to feed the poorest of the poor in Beaudouin
I can’t actually link you to a website explaining the history of Beaudouin… because it is a new “city,” or rather, a shanty and tent town which sprang up for displaced Haitians in the aftermath of the earthquake in 2010. The government and/or its international relief partners have continued to fail to rebuild or offer help in rebuilding the homes for these people; and so by the time our team arrived in Beaudouin, more permanent structures for homes and community buildings alike have sprung up. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that these concrete buildings have taken root – I do not think many of these local Haitians are going to be leaving any time soon. Some of the buildings, like the Lutheran church, are actually in excellent shape:
The Lutheran Church of Beaudouin, which is also used for the feeding program and also English as a Second Language classes
And so, our team piled into the van with a 30+ gallon container of soup and broth and some accompanying food items, as we went to help pass out meals at one of the twice-weekly feeding program events. The church puts on a vacation Bible school-esque performance for the kids while the food is prepared (and equally importantly, while the youngest/smallest/weakest and developmentally disabled kids are fed first – see below). Then, with VERY careful precision, food is doled out to the assembled hungry kids into the various buckets, pails, and bowls, to ensure that there is not a riot by the hungry (to keep the volunteers safe) but also so that the youngest and smallest, fed first, have the chance to eat their meal and not be beaten by larger children or teenagers.
I am going to again quote myself from my Facebook posted penned that same day, as it captures a certain emotional intensity that I do not want to dilute by memory:
Back from feeding the poorest of the poor; where the youngest and smallest (and especially the handful of children with mental illnesses or developmental disability) are beaten up and have their food stolen if no protection is in place. A church full of kids and a few moms, all clutching pails or bowls of the least sanitary sort, with that certain look of desperation that resides in the eyes with severe, prolonged hunger.
Particularly heartwrenching for me was a younger boy in a white Polo shirt, bearing a metal bowl and understanding it was time for food… but licking the side of the bowl as he didn’t understand what he needed to do to get food. He was fed far in advance of others, to give him a chance to eat his food and not be beaten and have it stolen, but we had to fight to prevent a riot in the food line and couldn’t properly assist him. As we drove away, dozens and dozens fed, he had most of his meal on his face and neck, as he was struggling to control his movements… and Haiti has a strong culture of abandoning those with disabilities, there was no help to be had from his peers. All I could do was wave and smile, and insist in French “tu dois manger, maintenant” (you must eat now), to no effect.
Very much, a worthy readjustment of “I am hungry” and what that can mean for those without anything at all… and those without means or capabilities to protect themselves.
The sad fact of the matter is: Haitian culture does not have a place for the developmentally disabled. In the capital of Port-au-Prince, the stark reality is that infants found to have development disabilities are left to die on piles of trash, sometimes in the streets. I am not sure if that practice is copied throughout Haiti; but I do know that those parents of a disabled child will have no chance to even consider providing special care as needed. They are too worried about feeding themselves and the family to even consider anything else. And the need to feed one’s self, as I call out above, can and does lead to a very real “survival of the fittest” scenario amongst human beings, as the young, the weak, and the disabled are preyed upon and beaten to have their food stolen.
For anyone who feels a call to donate to help the continued feeding program of these kids in Beaudouin, please consider donating to Ministry in Mission, as it costs ~$1200 per month to feed these kids twice weekly. I know that for me personally, I suddenly looked a lot more discerningly at an $8 Chipotle burrito after being in a place where $2 per day was a pretty damned good wage; please consider skipping a meal out per week and donating that saved money to feed kids for whom food is a VERY uncertain prospect.
English as a Second Language (ESL) courses in Beaudouin
We traveled back to the guest house to clean up ourselves and mentally prepare ourselves for the next project… going right back to that Lutheran church in Beaudouin, to lead some of my brother’s ongoing courses in English for Beaudouin kids and adults alike. English is a vitally important skill for Haitians, and the fact that my brother has set up a program to teach it for free AND in such a way as to stay running long after our volunteer teams had departed. By working to ensure that the most proficient local Haitians were able to greatly grow in their English while we were there, and by leaving both the lesson plans and the associated materials (flashcard sets, for instance)… our hope is that hundreds will continue to learn English for weeks and months to come!!
Andrea doing a bandage wrap on Mark’s big toe (medical matters always seem to attract Haitian folks to see what is going on, based on my experience with my infected blister a few days prior)Steven giving an explanatory spiel to the assembled ESL students, prior to splitting into groups by age and ability
The church sanctuary was split into the varying levels of ability, and the church was awash in the gaggle of a word said normally by an American tutor; that tutor pronouncing the syllables and sounds slowly and VERY carefully; and then a slew of Haitian folks trying their hand at correctly speaking the same word back. The flashcards were very helpful as well, as they had images on them and thus the language barrier didn’t prevent the tutors from giving clues as to the word – in this and many other ways, it was a very streamlined process for both tutor and student.
A local of Beaudouin, his amputated arm is almost certainly the result of an infection from some other medical procedureSome Haitians have enough of a command of English to help teach – which is really the whole point of this ESL program. Help teach people… but help prepare them to teach their peers for a long time after the volunteers departSome of the kids in Beaudouin with Peterson (the security guard at the Guest House) and I
Checking out the Beaudouin orphange
While the remainder of the team continued to teach and tutor English, I walked over to the nearby Lutheran church’s orphanage for the orphans of the Beaudouin area. That is a bit of a misnomer, I suppose, as I was told that Beaudouin is a developing permanent residential area derived from a tent city made in the aftermath of the earthquake… so the orphans are likely from a bunch of different cities and towns across Haiti.
The view of the Beaudouin orphanage from the main road entrance
One of the other core tasks my brother set out with for the teams he led over 4 weeks: 1) install a rock foundation; 2) build a cement block wall; and 3) in the finally week, top that wall with the permanent installation of razor wire, all around the orphanage. In general this is a wise idea in Haiti, for the safety and security of person and property alike. The orphanage was in many ways the opposite of the typical Haitian structure – a wall is usually built FIRST. This new orphanage was a replacement building for a very old and unsafe prior orphanage building, and the decision was made to build the structure first, to get the kids into a structurally-sound building and THEN worry about the security provided by a wall.
My brother and his 4 teams had built the foundation and wall prior to our arrival; the final week of volunteers was to install the razorwire atop the walls, as you can see here
This was the first time I got to visit with the orphans myself, and they were all VERY excited at an American who could speak French. They also insisted on asking (as almost all the orphans did of me the next morning) relatively similar questions: if my mom and my dad are alive, what their names and ages are; if I have siblings and their ages; and how many kids I have (!).
The orphans in Beaudouin were SUPER excited that I could speak French with them, and were all the more insistent on a photo of themselves by their beloved blue homeThe kitchen and main dining area within the orphanageThe Gals’ Room in the orphanage; the director of the orphanage is on the right in purple, she was proud to show off the operation (and also excited that I spoke French!)
It was great to visit the orphanage and meet several of the orphans; it was really uplifting to see the presence of a Haitian social safety net being supported by a combination of local people and funding with external funding and volunteers from abroad. Given the lackluster performance of the Haitian national government when it comes to the provision of ANY service regardless of how much funding comes in from abroad, it is my contention that this hybrid model of local initiative and staffing with external expertise, funding, and volunteering will be the only successful path forward in many aspects of the slow improvement of the Haitian quality of life.
The orphanage is a handsome shade of blue, and the crisp lines of the wall really makes it look like a great compound from afar. The two entrances to the new walls will eventually get lockable rolling metal gates, to ensure the safety of the orphans
In short: a very emotionally-charged day, and a tiring day, but another edifying day trying to help those around us better help themselves.
Preface from the night before: Unfortunately, I apparently picked up an abrasion on my left foot climbing onto or off of the rocks in Bassins Bleu… and then put that abrasion into a wet sock, into a wet shoe… and proceeded to hike back to the dump truck. As a result, I got myself a genuine infected blister on the side of my left foot, which became increasingly more inflamed and painful to walk on.
Not everyone does well with medical anomalies in photographic form, so here is an externally hosted photo of the “Surgery Room” (the porch) whereat my brother Steven and Andrea (a registered nurse from the IL group) used a alcohol-sterilized pocket knife to excise the infected pus and clean the wound. You can see the inflamed red circle with the white pus in the middle on the side of my foot in the photo, just prior to its cleansing. It wasn’t pleasant, that I can guarantee. But it needed to be done the night of Day 3, to let it air out and be able to start to heal… on Day 4, as I made sure to not walk a lot or put weight on it. As such: expect a much shorter and less photo-laden post for today!
The local (Internet) radio station
So I spent most of my day working on laptops brought to the guest house for me, after sneaking over to take a closer look at the Radio Concordia International setup, the third of three portions to the church compound (alongside the church and computer school). This station has been in the works for a while now, and is still not up and running. It costs something like $800 per month to run this station (though it was not made clear to me how that cost breaks down into fees versus power consumption or the like), and it was my understanding that the radio is just starting to run. That said, at the same time as the main radio antenna, I believe that the back room of the computer school is the mixing booth for the associated Internet radio station. I headed back there to ask for a couple of power cables for the laptops I was taking to work on; you can imagine my delight at seeing that guys and girls both were contributing to the radio show at the time!! It is my understanding that this radio station is predominantly for spreading the Christian gospels, in the Lutheran/Haitian mode, which is a noble cause by itself for the growing church there. It is my contention that once better established, the radio station could take on the additional responsibility of sending out public health missives to the listeners, many of whom have no source whatsoever for good health practices. Diabetes and high blood pressure are the two of the biggest health concerns in Haiti, and those problems are firmly in the realm of “could be prevented by habit and diet change” whereas a disease like cholera requires medicine to cure, and cannot simply be removed from the local water supply. Perhaps one day, I’d like to think, the radio station could pair the good news of the Gospel with the good advice of healthier living for the body.
Some of the helpers and students at the computer school, running a segment on the Internet radio station in the room at the back of the computer classroom
Teaching Haitians about computer repair and administration
So, armed with laptops and their associated power cords, I limped my way back over to the guest house, whereat I found the remainder of the team making a PILE of PB&J to take to a feeding program:
The team preparing some PB&J sandwiches as part of a local feeding program
I didn’t want to push them out of the way, but I also wanted to both get started with the repairs for the day, and also to get the chance to teach my local Haitian friend Williamson about computer administration as much as I could in French. With Williamson and other Haitians, I did my best to not only do the work of fixing software, adjusting hardware, and generally trying to set their machines up for long term success – I wanted to try, in the limited way that I could given the language barrier (my technical French is, frankly, non-existent), to teach the how and why of the computers at hand. It is only part of the problem, that the computers stop working. In my eyes, entrusting the care of the computers to their owners requires the key to true ownership: understanding how to fix what you’ve got. I was genuinely touched by how much the trust I was investing in my impromptu students seemed to really make them glow with a certain pride. In my own small way with the computers, I was emulating the pattern that Steven took with ESL and other programs, in which outsiders came to teach and help but MOSTLY to help Haitians become able to teach and help themselves and their fellows. In doing this repair project, I feel that I managed to escape the thousands of pages of international development criticism and pitfalls I learned about in my first master’s degree – I created no local dependencies, and instead created the core of some local experts. It is my hope, however, to go back next year better armed with specific gear and some lesson plans to set up a genuine core of educated computer gurus – this is very exciting to me!!
My Haitian friend Williamson as I taught him about administering laptops in a way to prevent viruses and ensure system stability. Another dusting-off of my French language skills (and integrated use of Google Translate)
The following rant is based on being a computer science minor/almost-major and generally from having worked on computers for a very long time: Windows and Mac operating systems are generally incompatible with developing countries if you want to run them in a safe sort of way. Their software updates in general are wastefully gigantic – if you’re in a place like the guest house, you’ll have intermittent electricity and Internet connectivity that maxes out at 300 kb/sec… and isn’t always running even if the electrical grid is working. So, as you can imagine, a culture which is all about sharing data and software and doesn’t entirely understand the best practices for preventing computer viruses… is in the weird situation whereby viruses are less prevalent due to lower Internet connectivity… but are also more easily able to spread as infected files are shared. You can understand my frustration, then, being faced with 15 laptops in need of reformatting and generally being updated… and struggling to even download a single antivirus update on a single machine, much less the whole set of 15. This is one of the core reasons why I brought down one of my own laptops to donate and some CDs to install the Lubuntu flavor of Linux. Lubuntu is designed to run on very old computer hardware and thus it is a very lightweight operating system; as a Linux OS, it also doesn’t find itself susceptible to the viruses which have long plagued Windows and are beginning to plague Mac. Perhaps equally importantly: it is 100% free and legal to use by all interested parties, which is an important standard to begin to set as the Haitian people grind their way to a better economy and a better life.
That said… the Lubuntu option was appealing to a couple of local pastors whose machines I fixed (“faster and virus-free? Why don’t we all have this!??”); but not to the teacher of the computer school, who rightly insisted on having a Windows environment to teach Microsoft Office. I am just glad that I was able to teach the teacher about the importance of careful administration of all the laptops in the classroom. Just like the other sustainable programs my brother sought to set up over time to keep running long after our teams had departed… by setting the laptops up freshly and safely, and teaching the local teaching how to maintain the laptops software and hardware alike, it is my hope that my volunteered time will help dozens, and then hundreds, and perhaps one day thousands of Haitians in that area of Jacmel learn the computer skills which could get them a job and change their lives. One of my followup projects after getting home is getting a set of 15 laptop cooling pads donated and brought down to the computer school, as it is FAR too hot and humid for those laptops to last a long time without some extra active cooling. More on THIS as it develops!
So: a short blog post for what was a single-task sort of day (namely, healing… with any spare time spent working on those laptops in the heat). The day which followed… was one of the busiest and most emotionally-draining of the week. Keep an eye out for the next post.
Attending a French/Creole Lutheran Haitian church service (a mouthful!)
On the beginning of our second full day in Haiti, we got up really early and got into our dress clothes (which meant that the ~~SWEATING~~ factor was cranked on up for the morning). We walked down the road to the temporary church structure (the original church was destroyed in the 2010 earthquake) and got some seats in and amongst the Haitian congregation.
Steven introducing the week’s team at the front of the gathered congregation
The service was done in French, with a local pastor’s friend translating some portions into English for our benefit. I didn’t catch everything being said but I was able to follow a good portion of the service!
Mannu (short for Emmanuel), the assistant pastor of the church
After a series of Haitian songs (their harmonies were beautiful, to be honest the presence of the electric piano almost took away from the high quality of the singing), a subset of the IL group did their own musical contribution to the service; that was the other portion of English to the service.
(left to right) Rebecca, Matt, Bendita, and Amy from the IL team, singing “you life me up” during the church service
Our friend Nathan was the preacher for the day, and he spoke about the importance of loving one another, how it takes time and isn’t always easy (in French) – he certainly had an excellent preaching presence!
Nathan, our friend and translator and driver… and the preacher for that Sunday morning!The Haitian Red Cross did an inaugural talk to do blood drives through the church, at the end of the service
After the church service and the following presentation by the Haitian Red Cross, we walked back over to the guest house and changed into swimsuits for the remainder of the day’s activities.
Visiting the urban hospital of St. Michel’s, still being rebuilt after the 2010 earthquake
After another delicious meal at the guest house…
A delicious Haitian lunch based on their understanding of American-preferred foods
… we departed for the next portion of the day, a visit to the St. Michel’s Hospital in Jacmel. We were riding in the bed of a dump truck (see below for pictures and details) so I had an excellent vantage point for grabbing photos along the way:
One of the VERY few Subarus I saw in Haiti. Every local person I spoke to about “which car is most reliable here” gave me a shining recommendation of how well the Subaru lasts and stays completely reliable. Bodes well for MY Outback wagon at home!!The Haitian military was disbanded about a decade ago, in favor of a semi-militarized national police force (with pickup trucks, machine guns, and a LOT of steroid use)
The hospital, like so much else in Haiti, was gravely damaged by the earthquake in 2010 – I was surprised at the sheer scale of reconstruction going on at the site!!
MASSIVE construction remains under way at St Michel’s, which is hope-giving to me
The hospital was not all open to us, but we did get to drive through and then partially around the site, which gave us a gorgeous view of the surrounding area:
The view from the hospital of the mountains was just gorgeous
Our main area of visitation at the St Michel’s hospital was the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit), where the infants in most dire need of care are sent to try and heal. As with many parts of Haiti, even this critical medical centre was not free from power outages. As you might imagine, this could have disastrous, even deadly, consequences for the infants receiving care here. Even as we were visiting, the main power for the NICU was down, and only a few emergency lights were running (presumably off of generator power):
The team inside the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit).
We were, as ever, separated by a spoken language barrier – but perhaps more than usual, united by a common language of care and love as we handed out donations (child hygiene kits) and waved and in a few cases, briefly played with the infants around us.
The OSU Wondertwins (Erin, left and Kristy) with a very small infant in the NICU…… the infant is smaller than my hand, basically.
The toughest part of the visit, as seems to be the case with all the hospitals we visited, was knowing JUST how much more and better quality of care COULD be provided… provided a lot of “ifs” were true. If only more people donated; if only the Haitian government didn’t corrupt away major swathes of aid before it got to its recipients; if only more money was put into the electrical grid as to ensure continuity of service for the NICU and hospital at large; and more. For perspective – in the 4 weeks my brother was in Haiti, “only” 9 infants died in the maternity ward and NICU, which is considerably fewer than the average there… and that is a big and good hospital.
I do not have photos of the general hospital wing we visited, as the fact is: it felt more like a macabre tourism than a goodwill visit with sick adults who didn’t speak English. Besides my brother and Andrea (an EMT and a registered nurse, respectively), no one present could offer medical assistance… so we left feeling uncomfortable with having just come into look and perhaps smile, but not be able to offer anything directly. While I do not myself have any interest in learning medical skills, I must say that this uncomfortable experience served to strongly reinforce my years-long path towards “competence in as many fields as possible, just in case.” I encourage anyone, whether you go to help people in Haiti or anywhere else or just stay at home, to try and learn to fix or build or heal or whatever other skills appeal to you. You never know when you or people around you might need those skills.
The construction site/St Michel’s hospital as viewed from the river valley (as we drove towards Bassins Bleu in the mountains)
BRIEF HISTORICAL INTERLUDE: THE SEVERITY OF THE 2010 EARTHQUAKE
So in order to fully grasp the backdrop of earthquake recovery for much of the island nation 5 years later, allow me to quickly go into some key details about the seismic event. Unfortunately, the island of Hispanola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic share this island) has a long history of seismic activity… but the earthquake of 2010 was a massive 7.0 magnitude quake, with multiple aftershocks for days afterwards, was particularly catastrophic. As I mentioned in an earlier post for this trip, concrete structures (that is to say: nearly 100% of the buildings within Haiti) are wildly susceptible to earthquake damage… and one can begin to read through some of the day-by-day updates from different sources and quickly realize that things went to hell in a handbasket quickly… and then stayed that way for a LONG time. The control tower at the sole international airport, damaged and unsafe. The main port’s container crane in Port-au-Prince… functionally destroyed. Two of the main (and really, only) inlets for aid and disaster relief… was suddenly gone or entirely unsafe for future use. On the ground within the country, as well, multiple hospitals and other aid-based organizations experienced building collapse and destruction, rendering the efforts of those already in place on the ground less capable of helping anyone, including themselves. The main arterial road between Port-au-Prince and Jacmel was 1) rendered extremely rough by shifting terrain but 2) rendered unusable in several places by the sheer amount of debris and detritus… and stayed that was for 10 days as local authorities proved uncapable of clearing it, further reducing city to city communications and aid-sharing alike. Hundreds of thousands of homes, and tens of thousands of commercial structures all collapsed or were rendered unsafe for further use. It was, in the definitional sense of the word, “pandemonium” (demons of all sorts, from hunger and death to building collapses to water shortages, everywhere).
This is a yet-undemolished building rendered completely unsafe by the 2010 earthquake (note the red color of the circular painted marking), on the St Michel hospital property
So even with that very short introduction above, I suspect you have a much better idea of JUST how devastating this earthquake was for Haiti. The immediate emergency response was a confusing and complicated mixture of heroic and quagmire. The US federal government was given control of the sole international airport and sent in a team of Air Force and FAA specialists to try and figure out how to prioritize incoming flights… and then deal with the problem of insufficient local fuel reserves to even get the landed planes back off the ground. Local mortuary services promptly and totally collapsed in the face of such sizable casualties… and so bodies were bulldozed and taken by dump trucks into mass graves as decomposition quickly set in amidst the tropical heat and humidity. The fact that an Israeli Jewish aid worker compared the situation around the number of dead bodies to the Holocaust ought to serve as another stark indicator of JUST how terrible conditions were, as aid workers of all sorts struggled to restart basic vital services. Looting started and was put down in some kind of combination of draconian and mob “justice” within the overburdened Port-au-Prince, as stores of food and water dwindled.
In many ways, the prevalence of outdoor venues for many of the tasks of daily life… likely saved many from a worse fate during the earthquake of 2010
I will not deal with the long rebuilding and disaster relief process which followed, as that has gone for 5 years to varying degrees of success and continues to this day. I just wanted to put a brief section of this early trip blog post to call out EXACTLY what sort of odds faced Haiti a mere 5 years prior to our arrival.
“A Dump Truck to Paradise”: the long haul up to Bassin-Bleu, some of Haiti’s most beautiful natural spaces
The final task for that Sunday, then, was to climb back into our dump truck and drive out to Bassin-Bleu (French for Blue Basin, referring to a series of mountaintop water-filled swimming holes with vibrant blue water).
Our noble Daihatsu Delta dump truck steedThe view from the dump truck bucket as we drove along the roads (and hills and valleys and rivers!)
The dump truck actually provided one of the least stable but best-situated vantage points for photography I had yet found over the week. I got an absence of both car windshields and walled compounds and could capture even more of the character of the streets of Jacmel and out towards the mountains!
One of the VERY few traffic lights I saw in HaitiA dry riverbed through the center of Jacmel, currently only host to a river of trash
I got to know a few landmarks after repeated driving, though by no means was I an expert of the topography of Jacmel on Day 3 (or even, to be honest, by the end of the week).
The brand new gym in Jacmel where Steven and Nathan did a LOT of weight-lifting over the month my brother was there
Given that I have been toying with the notion of putting a snorkel on my Subaru anyways, as I want to be ready for anything up to and including having to ford a river in my vehicle… you can imagine my delight at the wide prevalence of snorkels on Toyota Land Cruisers and the like. In the case of our dump truck, however, the air intake like the rest of the truck was already high enough off the ground to enable easy fording of low rivers with no worries about hydrolocking the engine:
The team a dump truck en route to a better crossing point…… being photographed by me and videotaped by Matt from their team…… and successfully riding the Daihatsu Express across the river! We sort of interrupted a local car- and motorcycle-washing party as a result. As well as some bathing.
We drove up some SEVERE inclines and rough roads to get to Bassin-Bleu, so severe that I was unable and/or unwilling to risk my camera for photos… but we didn’t ever come to a stop anyways, so the photos were simply not viable on the way up. Do not fear – on a later day that week, I went on a special photography excursion with Nathan and got some GREAT views from that mountain.
We arrived at the parking area and then began the hike in and up to the lowest basin at the Bassin-Bleu park:
First view of the first basin
The basins got progressively bigger and cleaner and *bluer* as we got further up the mountains:
The water coloration in each basin as we gained altitude… was more of a vibrant blue… even more blue…
The safety of the hike and rock-climbing to the topmost basin (the actual Bassin-Bleu) was not ideal, perhaps, but we all made it up with only a few small scratches to show for our trek. And wow, let me tell you – it was worth the hike.
… our hike and climb down sheer and wet rock faces was firmly in line with our unofficial “Safety Second” motto!!
The view of the topmost Bassin-Bleu, with team members climbing up the rocks near the topmost waterfall to be able to jump down in the basin:
The waterfall from the mountains above, at the topmost basin at Bassins Bleu. Now featuring Safety Second rock climbing and cliff divingThis is one of the last-known photos of my old eyeglasses… before they sank with all hands lost, into the ~unknown abyss~ at the bottom of Bassins Bleu due to an enemy waterfall. Gone but not forgotten.Heather taking the plunge from On High
The remainder of the day saw a few noteworthy details:
1) my normal glasses sank into the depths of the next basin down after Bassin-Bleu, due to the power of the waterfall there. No bueno, but that means I got to wear my shades for the remainder of the week:
I’m a cybernetic organism, living flesh over metal endoskeleton…
2) it rained over the course of the hike back to the truck, and then nearly the entire truck ride down to the river – we had to rush down the huge hill to try to ford the river quickly, in case the volume of rain caused it to overflow and thus force us to take an hour+ detour to the nearest bridge. I am not sure what this means, but over the 4 weeks my brother was in Haiti, it rained 3 times… and 2 of them were while I was there
3) a rainbow in the evening:
Perhaps difficult to see, there is a slight rainbow in the center of the frame
In short: day 3 was a pretty nice day, a sort of preemptive day of rest before diving into the grueling pace of the weekdays ahead!!
Getting to know the John 3:15 Guest House and its immediate surround
After sleeping rather heavily and also doing a fair amount of sweating, even in the air conditioned room… I awoke and began to explore my base of operations for the week ahead – the guest house:
‘Guest house au soleil’ (prints available to interested parties)
The walled-in nature of the property renders it more of a compound, one which is surprisingly (and to my thinking, delightfully!) self-sufficient. The city power grid, as mentioned in the preceding post here, is terribly unreliable – and so the compound features the below diesel backup generator (and behind it is a well, while in front of it is a water tank)…
Rainwater is collected next to the diesel backup generator within the guest house walled compound. The parking lot held all manner of bikes, trucks, and vans as the week went on. The well is visible in the background; but we only used it for showering. All water we drank had to be bottled, to avoid severe gastrointestinal problems!!
… and while I never got up on the roof to get photos, the guest house also features solar panels and a large series of car batteries, so it will at the very least have lights and electric fans 24/7 (the bedrooms’ AC uses more power than the current solar array can provide). The exterior of the house is very neat and clean, but pales in comparison to the gorgeous interior of the building, with its fun use of bright colors and my personal favorite – wooden paneled ceiling tiles:
View from the front door of the living room and dining area within the guest house. A gorgeous building, with 3 square meals per day at only $55 per night.
Walking upstairs from the dining/living room area on the first floor you will find the two main bedrooms and associated bathrooms, all of which can get PRETTY warm on even a nice day (as I mentioned in the first post, concrete architecture doesn’t lend itself to weeping heat or humidity):
View of the second floor balcony (two sets each of bedrooms and bathrooms); the opening in the center left of the frame is to the roofed porchTemperature and humidity within the second floor bathrooms… was a bad match for me, but I survived
The kitchen features some new appliances but the core cooking implement used is very forward-thinking for a Haitian kitchen – a propane stove (off to the right in the below picture, not visible unfortunately) rather than a charcoal grill as is the national tendency. More efficient, cooks faster, burns cleaner, it is the hope of our teams and our local partners to help encourage the expansion of propane use for cooking over time!
The kitchen!
The bedrooms are eerily reminiscent of those I encountered in Zambia back in 2008 (featuring some mosquito netting, bunk beds, and the camaraderie born of close quarters and shared sweat), and were yet another bit of evidence in my life that “electric fans are one of the best things ever invented”:
The guys room for the week, complete with some long-expired treated mosquito nets for that Genuine Malarial Flavoring!
The view from our back porch was of one of Haiti’s gorgeous mountains and then a mixture of some sort of feeding program warehouse (mid distance in the frame); agricultural fields (foreground of frame); and humidity (all of frame):
The mountain and some sort of feeding program warehouse, visible from the second floor porch at the back of the guesthouse. What a view.The first of MANY skinny livestock we encountered while in Haiti
Stepping outside the large rolling gate of the compound and turning left towards the main road on which we drove into town, one gets a quick sense of the uniformity of concrete as building material; the roughness of many roads off the main road; and the creeping desertification of the island in the absence of sufficient tree cover:
Our side street was a VERY rough road (some hybrid of cobblestone and rough dirt). Ubiquitous walled compounds all the way down, so we were in a relatively well-off part of town.
Walls are always topped with the cheaper option (broken glass bottles and shards into dried cement) or the more expensive option (razor wire) for added protection… but sometimes, our walls can’t keep everyone out of the compound:
One of our scaly roommates, running away from our team across some of the razorwire atop the compound wall. Perhaps a cousin to Ike?
Pausing from the current week of work to consider potential future projects: a vocational and technical school
One of the first tasks of the day was to jump onto the back of a dirtbike driven by my brother to go down the road to an unfinished building site to get the following photos. There is the future possibility that we will try and create a vocational school teaching something between 9 and 12 different trades on this very site (the abandoned foundation of the replacement church building – the original church was destroyed in the earthquake, and this site was abandoned in favor of moving closer to the main road to attract more visitors). Haiti has something like an 80% unemployment rate (which is INSANE), and this is exacerbated greatly because the easiest and most important subsistence jobs (farming, and to a lesser degree, gardening) are looked down upon as being the lowest of the low (Haiti doesn’t have a caste system, but if they did, farmers would be something like the Untouchables of India). This is so sad to me, as the environment here is perfectly suited to grow many sorts of foods very easily – but our job is not to change the culture as outsiders, but instead to work with local people to help them decide how they’d like to proceed in bettering themselves and their neighbors.
The front view of the unfinished foundation and walls to the replacement church building; our trusty dirt bike steed
Therefore, given that this building is partially done, and that offering a variety of skillsets will enable the graduating students of this eventual school will go on to hopefully get jobs in their local economy but more importantly be able to help themselves and their neighbors over the length of their life… this is FAR more important than the “weekend warrior” mentality of many groups of people who go abroad to try and help others. Playing with orphans = very important in the short term for those kids. That pales in comparison to building structures and programs which continue to help locals far after the team of volunteers depart… so it is Steven and my hope that this vocational school might one day become an exemplar of this sort of project in Haiti.
A typical Steven for scale of the current building height (Haitians are to scale)
Diving into my main project for the week: computer repairs at the local computer skills classroom, called the “Cinfora Ecole Informatique”
Back at the guest house, the team departed for their first shift working on the razor wire to be installed atop the new wall built by previous teams, around the orphanage in Beaudouin (pictures and full story of that project will be in a later blog post). I, however, walked down the street to the Lutheran church compound, which includes a local computer school for teaching typing and Internet skills to all ages:
The radio station (trailer on right of frame) and associated computer school (situated on the second floor of the building to the left of frame). At present, this new radio station is only an internet radio station, until funding can be secured (it costs upwards of $800 per month to operate a radio station in Haiti)
Haiti, as my first post indicated, DOES have some extremely rich folks; what I didn’t mention is that there is also a swathe of people who are doing pretty OK, not starving but certainly not flourishing. It is my understanding that that “middle class” (which is really not a good term, as most of those folks do not have permanent work) is the people who mostly attend the classes offered in Microsoft Word and Excel, and Internet skills. And that might seem odd, to support that sort of project a few miles down the road from where people are starving… but only by offering programs and efforts to help all people in Haiti to improve themselves and therefore their quality of life can things grind their way to being better. I have a lot of building and fixing skillsets, but computer work is something that not many people can easily dive into doing… so this computer classroom, with its virus-ridden machines, was to be the core project ahead of me personally for the week.
The process was an interesting one – I used English and French, to explain to a NON-technical person, who then used French and mostly Creole to explain my suggestions, intended tasks, and questions to Alex, the teacher of the classes. The computer classroom is the second floor of the building in the photo above; as you can imagine, with no computers running it was *hot* in there. With laptops running and my running audience of 5-15 onlookers… it was **HOT**. Nevertheless, I dove into the project. To put it mildly, Haitian culture doesn’t understand (or possibly doesn’t care, I suspect the former) the notion of software licenses and the costs involved. It comes down to “well I have this program/file, my friend needs it, so I will share it.” This means two important things: 1) people use the bricolage sort of mindset to make their machines work with whatever software is passed to them, even if it is an illegal copy… and 2) therefore, computer viruses are passed around like wildfire. As with everything else down there, my job was not to judge, but to help – so the machines were reformatted and wiped clean in most cases, after which I ensured that the correct anti-virus software and the like was installed. Most importantly (and requiring the most strenuous of my French speaking the week long), I made SURE that Alex understood two key points about making the computer classroom hardware last long (at the very least they needed to prop up the laptops to improve cooling underneath; I will be sending 15 cooling pads with the soon-to-depart team of people going down next week) and the software to stay virus-free (by creating user accounts for students which disallow them from installing ANY programs, intentionally or otherwise).
The delightful little computer classroom where I spent a good portion of my week in Haiti. Note the projector screen (importan to show the students what is being taught, a great innovation on behalf of any visual learners in the group). As you might imagine – it was VERY hot in there WITHOUT the computers running. Then we also added in the body heat of all my fascinated onlookers… and it was *hot*
Traveling to and visiting a rural Haitian outpatient hospital
Later that afternoon, we departed to do a couple of hospital visits. Our group steed was this really new Nissan mini-bus, with some AWESOME (in my humble but correct opinion) steel push bumpers on front and rear. As a general point, Haitians seem to have a national talent for welding (more on this later).
Piling the team into the Nissan van which served as our steed for the week
The diesel stick shift bus ( ❤ ) didn’t quite fit all of us, so Steven again took the motto “Safety Second” to heart and traveled the Haitian way – on the back of a little bike across some ROUGH roads:
Steven modeling the unofficial Haitian motto “Safety Second” on the way to the rural hospital
As per ever, the trip itself was very interesting and again showcased aspects vital to Haitian culture, not least of all… talented local artwork…
Beautiful local artwork on a random set of walls
… but also gorgeous natural scenery featuring lush vegetation and mountains alike.
Mountains and wilderness to the left; a symbol of the very real patriotism across Haiti reflecting on the windshield of our van. Haiti is a beautiful country in its own way.
We even got a relatively rare glimpse of the beach (Jacmel is a town on the coast, but many properties on the beach have the typical high walls and therefore block our view of the ocean):
The ocean immediately to our right, not typically visible during our time in Jacmel but often making itself blessedly felt for the breeze it createsAnnoying that the photo came out a bit blurry, but Haitian vehicles consistently continue to explore new vehicular frontiers of what is denoted by “overloaded”
Arriving at this rural Haitian hospital, we soon learned that it was actually an outpatient hospital and therefore didn’t have many patients. At the time, this made some members of the team feel disappointed as they wanted to visit and show those patients that we care for and about them. Interestingly, the hospital visit we did the next day caused many of us to feel like some sort of sick tourists, as we wanted to wish well and chat but the language barrier prevented us from doing more than viewing the conditions and then departing the room.
The Team at the rural hospitalA beautiful flowering tree…… and the gorgeous yellow-and-black birds therein, which I managed to capture with my telephoto lens. I *love* my Pentax camera.
The very first room we saw was indicative of the remainder of the hospital visit – a small cubbyhole of a room with “Laboratoire” (Laboratory) handwritten above it, we walked in to find a neatly painted but far from sterile area with a small table and a meagre handful of supplies needed to do blood testing and the like. As I have said before and will likely say again though: this is fully in line in doing the best they can with what they have.
The “laboratory” for blood tests, which was neither climate controlled nor sterile so far as I could tell. As per many of the comments I am making along the way on this blog, I am not judging, merely reporting aspects of my experience which fell short of being the best they could be. In short: doing the best they can with what they havea Creole health poster advocating for covering your mouth and nose when coughing or sneezing
Far more staccato in both its concerning but hope-giving elements was finding the below 1950’s era X-ray machine. On the one hand, this means that broken bones and other diagnostic procedures are actually possible in an area where people don’t even have enough to eat… on the other hand, aside from the pair of protective lead vests in the corner, the room and door appears to feature zero (0) lead armor to protect the surrounding area from all the excess radiation given off in the process. On the whole, a net medical gain for the patients here… and bad news for staff consistently working around the X-ray room.
The 1950’s era X-ray machine in the hospital (good) with some lead protective vests (great)… but the door to this room was normal and I couldn’t detect any lead shielding in the walls… so I worry about the health of those working adjacent to this room
The main surgery room was in really good shape, although one can definitely see a mosaic of different time periods from which the different donated equipment here was brought in.
The primary surgery (in French, “Chirurgie”) room at this outpatient hospital
Another one of the portions of the visit which was very depressing but “best that can be done given the circumstances” was the sterilization station for the surgical implements. A hospital really ought to have and make consistent use of an autoclave, a tool which is able to quickly, efficiently, and thoroughly clean implements before they can (or ought to) be used on the next patient. Below you see a manual cleaning station, which means that 1) implements stay in the open air and thus accumulate dirt and worse over time; 2) the cleaning by hand means it will be unevenly cleaned at best; and therefore 3) at least some of the people who come in for one surgical procedure… will end up coming back for the follow-up amputation required to purge infections from their body.
Attempted sterilization of tools (as this involves scrubbing by hand and then hanging to air-dry… the majority of these surgical implements are FAR from sterile)…… and here is the sink with local water also used in an attempt to sterilize implements. This likely makes infection rates climb even higher, which is heartbreaking. After all: amputation is the #1 most common surgery in Haiti, required after a wound is badly infected.
Walking outside again we were an odd combination of impressed with what had been built in this backwater rural hospital; but also saddened that so many amputations and infections could be prevented if it were just possible to get the donated goods to the outlying areas of Haiti (see here: rampant corruption in the capital as primary blocking factor).
The Brothers Repas, outside the surgery wing of the hospital. That black bandolier camera strap I bought was worth every penny of $60, as it made carrying it at my side but swinging it up quickly and effortlessly to get a photo… was golden
Visiting a Cuban goodwill hospital (and its integral classroom for teaching Fidel’s Life Essentials™)
Our next trip took us to a Cuban goodwill hospital in the same relative area of Haiti.
An older-style Haitian license plate. Newer ones show a silhouette of the island and in French “La Perle des Antilles” (The Pearl of the Antilles)Our security guard Peterson, about to demonstrate some Haitian fording as part of normal driving conditons
This Cuban (and apparently Venezuelan) hospital was very well-kept and meant to be welcoming, with artwork on the front and a Haitian flag featured prominently between the flags of those who pay for this service.
The artwork at the entrance to the Cuban goodwill hospital (featuring the flags of Cuba, Haiti, and Venezuela)
The building may also be an outpatient hospital as there was NO ONE there aside from 2 seldom-seen Cuban staff members. This meant we got to see very closely the sort of conditions available to local Haitians – and everything we saw seemed to be very clean and well-kept, albeit not especially new.
The back courtyard of the Cuban hospital, which featured a basketball hoop (NOT what I was expecting from a Cuban cultural outpost)
Obligatory diesel Toyota truck with a snorkel. Need one of these, one day….
A *gorgeous* Toyota Land Cruiser with a snorkel, hot damn I need to get one of these diesel 4×4 stick shift monsters here at home… one day. One day.
The top floor of the hospital building apparently moonlights as a cultural education center, with a classroom featuring all manner of educational/propaganda about the benefits of the Cuban way of doing things:
One of the informative Cuban propaganda pieces in the “Klasroom” as it was labeled…… Steven entertained himself (and me) thoroughly by saying thank you and goodbye to the Cuban staff in his most AMURKAN possible cowboy accent
On the drive back, we saw a couple of the ultra-rich mansions on the side of the mountain, which really evoke a certain sort of “amidst the wilderness” that is lost in the hustle and bustle of typical Haitian town living. But to be sure: between pockets of towns and handfuls of houses, Haiti definitely has some areas of untamed nature.
A VERY wealthy person’s mountain-affixed mansion
Of interesting note, especially at the tail end of a visit to a Cuban institution, was that I saw 2 openly-identified American institutional donations over the entirety of my time in Haiti – in both cases, including the below truck, I saw a reused USAID tarp. I am curious as to whether this means more US donations were food or other immediate-use items, or if Jacmel doesn’t feature much US-origin assistance.
The very few indications of direct American aid I saw in Jacmel was reused USAID tarps (in this case for a truck bed; in other cases for a porch off a shanty)
Summarizing Day 2
As I commented on Facebook that day,
Day 2: my developing country Spidey senses are miscalibrated. “Wear a long sleeve collared shirt to really stay out of the sun, it is worth the extra bit of sweat” is genuinely valid advice in Zambia and the Middle East… turning out to be not as valid in 90%+ humidity Haiti.
Additionally, it is fun listening to Creole and picking up plenty of French or derivatives in between other incomprehensible words. Especially satisfying to speak some rusty French to folks here and watch their eyes go VERY wide at an American who can speak more than American English.
Looking back on that experience, I stand by that appraisal as my general summary for Day 2. It was a real pleasure to get to use some rusty French and be able to start a week-long process of making a HUGE difference for that local computer school; I also really enjoyed the visits we did to the rural hospitals and getting to see some excellent indications of the weird way in which most formal intergovernmental aid flows into Haiti and is either corrupted to the point of not reaching end users; or is not implemented entirely rightly. I don’t have a good enough handle on the general effect of individuals and groups providing aid into Haiti, but I believe our experience was a good case study (bolstered by my brother doing 4 back to back weeks): you need to know local Haitian people and work with them to create longer term programs to have anything succeed. Just giving items out might be a necessary stopgap in some cases, but doesn’t do anything to create lasting local improvement over time. In short, good intentions are FAR from sufficient to effect good outcomes.
That said: it was even more enjoyable to be a part of my brother’s efforts in Haiti, aimed at creating programs and classes for local folks over the long term.
It rained 3 times in the month my brother was in Jacmel; 2 of them happened during the week I was there. I am not sure what this means or signifies.
Departing the United States for a (far) warmer clime
Having packed and prepped, I woke up early with my dad and departed for the Cleveland airport. Loaded down with a backpack and a carry-on suitcase and a checked large suitcase full of donations (thanks to my awesome McMaster-Carr coworkers who contributed to this effect!!!) AND a gigantic overloaded rolling luggage bag of donations, I limped my way to the ticketing desk and checked in as much as I could. I also found an unexpected simulacrum of some 10-ft tall Fender guitar artwork from my office, in the airport:
I wasn’t expecting to see matching artistic guitars in the Cleveland airport, to those guitars at McMaster-Carr
I haven’t flown in a bunch of years now, particularly not abroad – I had forgotten how offensively ineffective AND rights-denying the Transport Security Administration was. Once beyond their security theater, I began a long day of boarding flights, arriving, and waiting for the next leg of the journey. It is noteworthy that Haiti is VERY close to the continental United States – approximately a 2 hour flight from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The day was long, therefore, as I did the stupid dance required by the airlines to get the cheapest tickets (I don’t understand how they can charge less by putting me on 3 planes instead of 1, forcing them to pay 2 additional sets of salaries for all associated tasks needed along the way… but whatever!):
Jetway to the sky, 1 of 3 flights for the day
A delicious lunch in the Charlotte NC airport later, I was ready to sleep pretty soundly for the last 2 legs of the flight down to the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince.
Arriving in Port-au-Prince, driving towards the mountains
On the subject of the Haitian capital: Port-Au-Prince is a very peculiar place in a wide variety of ways. Haiti is an island nation of ~10 million souls, and the sprawling capital and its slums adds up to a good 2.3 million of those people. The fact that I mention “slums” is no accident, as before and then especially after the devastation of the 2010 earthquake (in which the Haitian government estimates between 230,000 and 316,000 people died… but this is widely disputed, and could possibly be as low as 45,000), the core of the capital’s commercial districts near the waterfront is surrounded by slums into the overlooking hills on all sides. The climate was: VERY HOT and VERY HUMID (something like 95 Fahrenheit and 87% humidity as I arrived). My very first view of the nation from the ground confirmed one of my suspicions about the trip, that I would be sweating…
My first view of Haiti, the barren grass adjacent to the tarmac
… sweating a lot.
The interior of the airport was a chaotic mass of Haitians and mission/volunteerism teams in general. I walked towards the single luggage carousel (which, my brother Steven later told me, is a VAST improvement over his first visit, when there was a hole in the wall that luggage was through through) and kept an eye out for Steven, eventually finding him therein (which is a function of his knowing guys at the airport who knew he was leading back to back mission trips, and thus would let him in against the rules… and possibly involving a small monetary donation to their interests). Insofar as I could tell over my stay and discussions with local folks, this culture of corruption and nepotism is EXTREMELY strong in the Haitian capital and within its government; it was my general experience that the corruption piece diminished the further away we got from Port-au-Prince, and the nepotism turned into more of a social network which didn’t offer rewards based on loyalty, but rather help based on shared ties.
(Given the number of noteworthy photos from the trip to Jacmel on the first day, each photo below has its own caption and may or may not relate to my interspersed textual musings and findings)
Our primary Haitian driver and friend Nathan, and Steven in the front of the car on the way out of the worst traffic in Port-au-Prince
Going from the capital to Jacmel is only 60 miles difference but involved a PILE of horrible and unsafe traffic; followed by harrowing mountain driving.
As part of the Haitian goverment’s efforts to make Port-au-Prince SEEM nice (and not fraught with corruption), they beautify the area with things like this iconic globe and hands statue. Not much comfort to those starving and dying from disease
First, allow me to explain in a concise way the generally-prevalent Haitian waltz between jury rigging and bricolage. I use these terms as follows – jury (sometimes given as “jerry”) rigging means that Haitian repairs are often temporary at best, and certainly do not follow any sort of suggested maintenance best practices; this is in NO way pejorative, they simply do the best they can, with what they have. For example – I saw the driver of a tap tap (a colorful Haitian taxi, see below for examples and details) jump out of the car during a bad patch of non-moving traffic, fight to pop the crumpled hood of his old Toyota pickup truck; and use a crescent wrench to tighten the alternator belt (which I could hear was definitely ailing) even more than it already was… which got him a little bit more electricity out of the engine of the car and kept it running, but in no way solved the alternator issue or the fact that the belt had been way overtightened and was not safe for continued use. But what else could he do? Bricolage, on the other hand, is starting a new project and using whatever materials are available. The primary example of this in Haiti – the construction of nearly all buildings from concrete and cement. This is in spite of the fact that these buildings are HORRIBLE at shedding heat or humidity; that cement buildings are MOST prone of any building materials to earthquake damage (this multiplied the effects of the 2010 earthquake more than any shoddy building codes); and that the high cost of fuel and heavy weight of concrete will drive up transportation costs for all construction. But the island has less than 2% of its landmass with tree cover; and the primary source of cooking fuel is charcoal while gardening AND farming are regarded as the lowest of the low when it comes to jobs… so as you can imagine, the deforestation issue is not going away, and thus concrete buildings shall continue to be The Only Option. Bricolage enables Haitians to roll with those sorts of punches in creative (albeit often unsafe) ways.
The first of MANY concrete walls with hand-painted artwork and advertisements (as it is FAR cheaper to paint than buying posters or the like for ads)
Haitian driving culture was something I quickly learned about, even as a passenger, on our drive through Port-au-Prince. I don’t even know where to start, so I will dive in to trying to explain it. The Haitian cultural practice of tossing trash into the streets causes lane sizes to at times shrink; jerry rigged car repairs are done in situ where the car… or commercial truck and trailer… broke down, so the lane it was driving in means lanes can AND DO get shut down at random and with no pattern. Take those two things and then multiply them by “and then people will drive on sidewalks… or even into oncoming traffic… if it looks like that will get them to their destination faster.” Oy vey, it made for an interesting experience as a passenger, if not a stressful one. Yet somehow, it seemed to work, as we didn’t see a single accident. This is aided by the Haitian variations on the themes of car horns, turn signals/emergency flashers, and flashing one’s high beams. No one uses the horn to show anger; the horn is always (and constantly) used to say “here I am/I am coming” to warn people what they will be doing momentarily. Turn signals and emergency flashers are left running constantly by some as a visual indicator of “here I am” and never used for turning (though sometimes for people stopped in a lane, which is thoughtful I suppose). High beams are used, particularly by motorcycles, as a sort of high power/last ditch effort to make sure oncoming traffic sees you. All of the above is mediated in what I want to call a shoulder-shrugging acceptance – people don’t get mad at left turning-vehicles which simply jut into traffic; they understand that they will only be able to turn if they start to turn and force people to stop.
Detail shot of some of the ubiquitous wall art
Artwork is very important to many people in Haiti, from walls to advertisements to tap taps; keep an eye out for it in this and future blog posts from the trip!
A mid-sized Haitian tap tap (a painted and WAY overburdened old vehicle used as a taxi). The different drivers almost seem to compete for the best artwork! Christian religious artwork featured heavily on many of these vehicles.One of the small scale tap taps, all of which seemed to be Toyota light duty pickup trucks from the early 1980’s with an extended truck bed cap to allow 14+ people to cram themselves on… or to grab onto the side… or to clamber up atop the bed… or whatever other sort of unsafe method of riding they can think of!! Additionally: look at the placement of cars and their direction of travel in this picture, and try to determine how many lanes there are on the road here (I have no idea, and I was there!!!)
As a general point: there was a DELIGHTFUL number of diesel and stick shift vehicles in Haiti, as most of their cars are European or Asian spec. The number of turbodiesel pickup trucks and iconic (and stupidly effective/reliable) Toyota Land Cruisers with snorkels… I want one so, so very badly.
A mountain of trash right next to the food for sale in the marketplace; Haitian culture RELIGIOUSLY recycles glass beer and soda bottles and **ALL** other trash is thrown onto the street and burned. It is not ideal in any way, but it is the culture.The majestic mountains of Haiti are ever more visible, the further you escape from the INSANE traffic of Port-au-PrinceIn this one shot, I managed to capture the motorcycle-specific Haitian cultural attitude towards driving. You use your blinker and horn to announce “I am here, I am coming” and then ignore any traffic signs, lanes, or lights in favor of driving however you’d like, weaving through traffic in any lane. Safety second, as Steven and I summarized the motto of Haiti. Additionally; there were only 2 lanes here – so you’re seeing 3 cars across and 5 motorcycles in a 2 lane span.From what I could tell, these are fairly affluent non-governmental Haitian citizens – clean and painted homes, all of concrete but without a wall or razor wire (ruling out foreigners or rich Haitians as living there)A spot of hope – street lights (MASSIVELY important in increasing nighttime safety in any urban setting) but specifically powered by dedicate solar panels (an attempt at sustainable governance)
Passing though Léogâne
Eventually, we got out of Port-au-Prince (though there was no clean break) and into the contiguous city of Léogâne. As reported by Haitian natives, this was the center of the earthquake, which isn’t exactly correct (see a future blog post here for a closer examination of the earthquake, the background for much of Haitian life and change in the past 5 years). For the duration of my trip through, however, I merely noted fewer buildings with wider spacing between them; piles of dirt/debris/rubble; and the very arresting fact of desertification of Haiti due to no trees, much less the lack of good forest and soil management practices.
A few of the now-standing buildings in LéogâneA car with non-functioning lighting; an overloaded tap tap crawling along; significant vegetation with VERY few trees and visible desertification of the soil as a result; and the trash on the side of the road. Many Haitian facts of life, in one photoMoonrise and sunset on our first night in Haiti. The blue words spraypainted on the second floor of the building at the left of the frame is actually NOT graffiti – all locals paint their political campaigning onto walls and buildings
Into and through the mountains of Haiti – a harrowing nighttime ride!
Thusly the day of traveling took to its next form, a fast and furious ride through some twisting switchbacks with no streetlights; Haitian driving habits (especially a lack of using lights at dusk, only waiting to ignite headlamps until AFTER it is officially dark… yikes!); and having to be very careful to avoid hitting Haitian pedestrians walking up or down the mountain on the road itself (as all too often, the road ended with a guardrail and then a SHEER drop down to… very far down below). “Harrowing” is how I described it at night intentionally – certainly woke me up pretty good from my travel exhaustion!!
The final view through the omnipresent fog of humidity, before we started driving VERY vertical, VERY fast.The was one of the best photos I managed to get in the falling darkness of the VERY sharp curves on this 2 lane mountain road; the Haitian cultural tendency to use the car horn as a “here I am/I am coming” was used QUITE liberally around these no-visibilty turns.Forgive the fall of night leading to a blurry photo… but 1) realize our HIGH speed through these treacherous mountain passes caused the blurring as well; and 2) it is a SHEER drop immediately beyond the guardrail here, all the way down to the town visibility below. Harrowing indeed.
Arrival in Jacmel
We were expecting to see Jacmel alight, but the 1980’s-era power grid was doing its usual “lack of functioning right now” black-out… so I couldn’t see much of anything of the city. No street lights meant I didn’t get a very good sense of the buildings on the way to and within the town; at this point, though, I was merely ready to get out of the bouncy car (Haitian roads are intermittently non-existent or HIGHLY rough, so the ride was putting the suspension of that car to the test) and onto my feet.
And also to get some food at the Jacmel guest house where I was staying, which was delicious:
The first of many delicious Haitian meals – heavy on potatoes, fried and sugary food, but also delicious spicing (not too hot, very flavorful). Plus, calories were MUCH appreciated after a LENGTHY day of traveling.
Unloading the car was followed by meeting and greeting some of the folks on the teams Steven had to work for him that week (a pair of girls from Ohio State; and a large team from a Lutheran church near Chicago IL)… and then passing out.
My first view of the lovely guest house in Jacmel – my home and base of operations for the week to come
All told: a busy day of travel but an excellent introduction to many of the realities shaping my week spent in Jacmel, Haiti.
![Steven, Nathan, and I. Friends [Romans? Countrymen??]](https://exploratoriushaiti.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/imgp3027.jpg)
A Jaunt Around the World - Haiti 