Liz goes to Haiti

It's All in the Circuitry

2009-06-18T22:34:00.000-07:00

Here you see our last science lab in physics: Parallel circuits. The tiny bulbs shine more brightly when they're wired parallel. Widlyne and I usually let the kids do their own setups in little groups, but this day we wanted to use a 9 volt battery and see how many flashlight bulbs they could light up. We pictured a whole bunch of burned out flashlight bulbs if we let them work individually, so we did one group project. It was like Christmas, but 90 degrees out. They lit 12 bulbs, and we had to quit because time ran out.

This was a wonderful series of labs that were donated by Jeff Remington, my course advisor at Lebanon Valley College. The students don't get to do many experiments in Haitian schools, and they got a lot out of the experience. It was a pleasure to see them get involved in their learning.

The Itsy Bitsy Spider

2009-06-18T20:49:00.000-07:00

If you have never taught a kindergarten group to do the Itsy Bitsy Spider, you owe it to yourself to try some day. What a triumph when they finally coordinate their pinky fingers and thumbs and make their hands 'walk' up that rainspout. How many little Bons Samaritains have greeted me out and about in the market, by showing me their spiderwalk!

Of course this video represents even more of a triumph, since they sing it in English. Their favorite line- watch for it- is when the spider gets washed out.

High Up in the Mountains

2009-06-17T17:34:00.000-07:00

I've just come back from a small town high in the mountains. Kenscoff is east of Port au Prince, and up a lot of switchbacks from Petionville, which is already up above Port au Prince. It is just beautiful: Cool, green, rainy. Not what I've become used to! The mountains are so high that the clouds can surround you when you walk.

On the way uphill, during a walk yesterday, I had the pleasure of talking with 4 little kindergarten boys on their way to school. We begin in French "Are you kindergarteners? Are you guys brothers or friends? Do you go to school together every day? Are the little girls (coming up the path) your sisters?" They are not used to being interrogated like this on a Tuesday morning commute, so they are kind of shy. Stick with the video, and you will see them run down the hill. And I do mean down.

More Rain Than They Can Use at One Time

2009-06-04T15:17:00.000-07:00

The last week or so it has been really nice, although quite hot. But back in the middle of May (while I was apparently on a writer's strike) it stormed. And stormed and stormed. We seemed to have a bad one every night for nearly a week.

On Wednesday May 13 in the afternoon I went south of town on the tap tap, and when it came time to come home, thank goodness, I got a ride in a car. On the way back it started to rain so intensely that the streets filled with over a foot of water, rushing and brown with the mud. There were people walking beside our car in a strong current, up to their calves. In front of me through the driving rain I could see a tap tap that had 5 guys hanging onto the tailgate; they were standing on the bumper. Every time they went through a dip, their feet were in the water. There had to be almost 30 people loaded on there, and remember a tap tap is a small pickup truck. All I could think was, I was going to go on that tap tap.

On the south side of town, there are lots of houses that are built going right up a steep hill. When it rains, mud flows down, between the houses and the alleyways, so fast that it drags big stones with it. The following Sunday I went to Amani Beach with some friends, and the road to the south was tan with dried mud, and there were still big rocks laying everywhere, also wheelbarrow loads of mud that had been shoveled from the road and put in piles alongside. That was the morning.

Then that Sunday night it stormed again. And Monday I got a letter from a pastor here in St.-Marc, Gary Walker, in which he said there were dozens of people in his congregation and among his acquaintance who had lost everything. The homes of some were no longer liveable. Others still had their rooms, but the mud ran through them and took everything. Another local pastor called him to say that he had a group of people who had to stay in his church overnight because their homes filled with mud. The Walkers gave him a 100-lb. bag of rice and another one of beans to feed them.

On Tuesday the 19th about 1/4 of our kids did not show up for school on account of cleaning up the mud. Some of the teachers were late. A few were not wearing their uniform; I wondered about how much mud they had in their homes.

Above is a picture that Reverend Walker sent out, of a road after the water goes down, to show you the kind of stuff that gets dragged. You can just imagine if your doorsill opens onto a road like that, what the inside of your home will look like if there is a storm.

President Preval even paid a visit to St-Marc to see the damage. Things seem to have calmed down since that week, storm-wise, but everyone is indeed wondering what will happen next, when hurricane season begins in earnest.

B List in the Market

2009-05-30T08:14:00.000-07:00

Every time I pass through the market, which is to say every day I leave the school, I am always amazed by the variety of what you can buy there. Everything and anything is found in the market.

It struck me that the letter B alone stands for a huge number of items:

Blue jeans, belts, belt buckles, batteries, battery chargers, baking soda and baking powder, buttons, blouses, Barbie dolls, teddy bears, bras, barrettes, blenders, bicycles, baskets, buckets, basins, brooms and brushes, all their school books (bootleg photocopies) and the bookbags to carry them, soccer balls, glass balls for Christmas trees, boots, beans, bran, bread, bananas, beds, bedding, bath towels and all bath products, bakeware, bowls, and my all-time favorite: Bread machines, a popular item in a land with intermittent electricity coupled with low bread consumption.

Walking along and looking at the astounding variety, I have to wonder at the provenance of all this stuff. Some of it is made here (the beds, for example), and some of the things are new, made in China- plastics, some clothing, baby items. But most of the non-food items are clearly the detritus of hundreds of thousands of North American yard sales and second-hand stores. How does it get here? I have heard all kinds of prices on shipping cargo containers, upwards to $6,000 for just one container. How does that figure into me buying the complete, hardback compendium of all the Curious George books for one dollar? John Berendt's book on Venice? Sets of Pfaltzgraff, cellophane packages of faux hair for hair extensions, big rolls of wiring (only slightly used) for your new home?

In the morning men with wheelbarrows are everywhere, trucking the stuff out for the day. Sometimes there are groups of vendors, mostly women, gathered around the backs of tractor-trailers. I can't tell if they already know which stuff is theirs, or if they are waiting to bid on merchandise, like some kind of a wholesale auction. All through the market, around 6 AM, ladies will be putting their sheets out on the ground and opening up their boxes, getting out their particular specialty, housewares, tools, clothing items, plastics, tschotskes, baby things.

It appears to be the most popular industry/business of the town. Where does it come from? And who pays to bring it here?

An Unexpected Visitor

2009-05-21T15:23:00.000-07:00

The other night about 10PM I wanted a drink of water. As there was no electricity, I decided to go downstairs in the dark by using the handrail. (I know, I know. Well, it won't happen again.) When I went to open the iron gate I keep closed at the top of the stairs, Something in the dark hopped up and scrabbled all around my ankle, I jumped and yelped and then It flew into my room, where I could hear it banging around in the dark.

I decided it must be a bat; it was probably exhausted from trying to get out of the stairwell, and was just laying there catching its breath and making a getaway plan. Now, what to do? I had left my flashlights in my room, where the "bat" was now residing.

Wilson to the rescue. God love that man. This is not the first time that I got him out of bed at night with a problem real or imagined. And he has always been very phlegmatic and kind, even though we do not speak each others' language.

So Wilson came upstairs to the apartment, we went into my room and got two flashlights and we looked all over for a bat. Nothing. I decided I was safe under my mosquito netting, and Wilson went back to his place. In the night, I was awakened by the sound of it flinging itself against the windowscreen. It did sound large for a bat, but I couldn't imagine what else could be bouncing off the walls like it seemed to be doing. After I heard it trying to escape, once everything was silent, I got up and took down one of the screens in the hopes it would fly away.

In the morning we joked about it, and I told Wilson and Meritesse I thought it must have gotten away. Then, in the afternoon, I went into the back of my closet for something- and here was this little cat sitting on a shelf!

Was he ever happy to get outside again. And was I ever glad that I was not going to be surprised by finding a bat hiding inside one of my shirts.

A Visit: Going for Some Gâteau and Cremasse

2009-05-19T19:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Monday May 18, was important for 2 reasons. First, May 18 is flag day here in Haiti, a national holiday. Second, it was the day following First Holy Communion in the parish. 224 kids made their communion, and I did not know it when I went to mass, but it is tradition that the day after First Communion, they all come together again, in all their finery, and receive communion again. This time, a lot of them come alone, since it is Monday and many parents are back at work.

This particular Monday, a lot of them arrived late. The rain here has been brutal, and a lot of these kids clambered through some incredibly muddy streets and alleys to arrive at church, every one of them still looking beautiful, perfectly white and lovely in their gown or white shirt.

After mass I was talking to Sister Mary and a girl came up and said Liz! to me. I thought at first she was Philomène, a little girl I met in the market, who had appendicitis last summer when I did. Her face fell a second, and she said, no! I am from Bons Samaritains!

Bons Samaritains is having their own separate communion at the end of this month, when Dr. Mortel comes to town, and I had not realized that some of our kids had gone through the church program. I commented on how lovely she looked. They wear long dresses, as though for a wedding, and headpieces, too.

I talked some more with Sister, and then as I was walking out, here she was, the little Communicant, waiting for me at the gates. She took my hand and we started to walk up the street together, and she said, “I’ll walk you home.”

I asked about her big day yesterday. She was so happy. She had a cake. I asked, “And a special dinner, too?” Oh, yes, they had meat (a little sigh and a smile.)

Having a conversation like this is very humbling indeed; she was walking along with me, holding my hand, and I felt unworthy. Compared to hers, my life is so effortless and easy. I felt bad that she would go out of her way, since she was wearing a long white dress, with lace at the sleeves and hem, and we were walking around a lot of mud puddles. One of the motorcycle guys was eventually going to fly by and splatter her with mud. I said, look, you shouldn’t walk me home! Don’t walk further than you have to!

Then, did I want to walk with her? Well, sure, I could walk with her! So we turned the other way, toward the market. Then she said, I know! Would you like to come to my house? And have some cake and Cremasse? I said, “Real Cremasse, with the cream(and the rum)?” “ Yes!” “O-kay!” I said. “I would love to share a little bit of your Cremasse.”

So hand in hand we walked through the market, taking care to avoid all the low spots. After awhile we turned back an alley, perhaps 4 or 5 feet wide. It was concave and muddier than the street, and the houses were very poor. Then after 50 yards we turned off again into a smaller alleyway, between houses and fences. We were getting into desperate territory. A mix of rusty corrugated iron, boards, wire, chicken wire, broken stuff, people standing around staring. Very rough. At one point my little friend slid between a concrete wall and a gatepost, an opening maybe 6” wide, and kept going, (dress still white) and I had to call out, “I am too fat for that!” I had to take a long way around which involved a gate and a puddle. I skirted the edge as best I could. More mud, another turn and another, the way getting narrower and narrower, and then we were walking around a hole that someone had dug in the middle of all this mud as a kind of neighborhood landfill.

Then we entered her family’s compound. It was an open courtyard at the center, maybe 15 feet by 20 feet. Her extended family was all there; I met her grandmother, grandfather, aunts, uncles, mom and dad. There were a lot of little cousins, and her little sister- I think. It is hard not knowing créole at a time like this.

They had so little. The families each had a room or two, which opened onto the yard. Everything was dirt, the yard and the floors to the houses, which you could see through the doorway. And of course, it was all wet, having rained buckets the night before. I was given a chair, so I sat down, under a little roof, and they all stood, except for the 3 or 4 that sat in the remaining chairs. There were about 10 or 12 people standing around, all looking at me. I noticed guys up on the neighboring roofs looking down at us.

My student brought out a piece of cake and a cup of cremasse. The cremasse was really good and I asked if they had made it. Her grandmother said yes! So I asked what was in it. As she was telling me, I was trying to repeat what she said. She told me coco-eh, (cocoanut) and I said, “coco?” without the “-eh.” Ah, apparently an obscenity, as 15 people promptly burst out laughing. I said “Oops! I’m sorry!” but no one offered to enlighten me. I will have to ask around.

The cake was good, too. It occurred to me that the kids must have only had a little taste of the cake, for there to be any left over like this, and I started to break off little pieces and offer them to the kids standing around. Some of the little kids had clothing on, some only had shirts on. I think one or two might have been naked. They were very dirty from the mud, and very grateful for the cake. One little girl snatched her piece away and ran into her house, as if she were afraid I might change my mind. We all laughed at that.

How was her communion dress so white? Where on earth did she keep it? It was still white after walking around and serving me the cake. I would have had 20 spots on it by then, after all we’d come through to get there. When I was done I thanked them, and she walked me back out to the market. She was going to walk me home, but I assured her I knew the way from there.

It rained really hard again last night. Tuesday morning about 1/4 of our kids were not at school, on account of the mud coming into their homes. I thought sure she would be among those missing, but there she was, as beautiful and as kempt as ever, down to the earrings in her ears. She thanked me for visiting. Absolutely humbling.

Flag Day is Monday May 18!

2009-05-15T19:53:00.000-07:00

And it's a national holiday in Haiti. Here is Jean Rony's class, Troisième Année A, singing their little hearts out. It is adorable. They just made those flags, too.

They have several popular anthems. This one is like "My Country 'Tis of Thee"- not the official one, but one of the most popular. The last lines are something like,

. . .the joyous hearts, . . .les cœurs joyeux,

the fervent soul, l'âme fervente

Forward, always, we will go Toujours en avant nous irons

Our heads held high. La tête altière et

haut les fronts.

Sondi Fait Une Annonce Publique

2009-05-15T07:19:00.000-07:00

Here is one of the third grade teachers at Bons Samaritains. When I found out he was a part-time radio DJ at a station in St-Marc, I asked him if I could film him saying a little something. His radio name is Sondi. So he made a very nice announcement for me, "in honor of Sister Liz, who teaches English at Bons Samaritains."

I filmed it, but I said, you know what, I am not a Sister, could we film another one?

So this is the second one, and he starts out by making a formal retraction of his previous announcement. He said it so seriously, as though it were breaking world news or something, ("I must make a correction"-) that it surprised me and I burst out laughing.

I thought maybe I would send you this so you can see I get to laugh a lot even though there are a lot of serious things going on here.

To the French students who are following my blog: See if you can hear the times and the call numbers of his station. I posted this (just the annonce, not me laughing) on Teacher Tube for first year French classes to listen to. I want to post a few more little "interviews" there for beginning classes to hear.

Rose and Her Pretty Blue Dress

2009-05-15T06:56:00.000-07:00

Here is a very short clip of me with Rose. Rose is one of the lunch ladies, and to give you an idea of how they dress up, she wears this beautiful blue dress to work in the kitchen and serve lunches. As I've repeated so often: Haitians are elegant.

I kept telling Rose that I had a dress like hers, and that I would show it to her sometime. You can't really see it here, but our dresses are almost alike, (same flouncy skirt and sleeves, same sheer material) and when some friends came to St-Marc this spring, my sister Lucy packed my dress and sent it along with them.

So here we are in our similar dresses, only the necklines and the color are so different that you can't really tell in this picture. I am letting you hear my French here, so you can see it has not improved very much. I keep messing up gender and verbs, and switching over to English or just repeating myself, since I am at such a loss for words. I can usually get my point across. And from time to time, if it's a good day and I am on my toes, I am even OK. Or, as Guerald the computer guy said, when pressed for his opinion, "not bad."

Sixth Grade Checks Out the Oxford Picture Dictionary

2009-05-14T19:15:00.000-07:00

Here is a clip of the 6th grade. I have them an hour once a week, and last week I let them peruse the Oxford English Picture Dictionary (which also gives all the meanings in Créole) for the last part of their class. It is huge, and has great illustrations.

What you see them doing here (other than the silliness when I first got out the camera) was what they did for an entire half hour, and then they begged to stay later. I hope to leave them a small set to use, in their library.

The REAL Thing

2009-05-11T14:45:00.000-07:00

Hi! I should really not be writing here, because I must get some work done for my college courses, but I ran down to the kitchen for something to drink and decided to have a Coke, and just couldn't resist.

I am not a soda drinker, ordinarily, but Coke in Haiti is really good, I am told, because it is made with honest to goodness sugar, none of that corn syrup solids stuff, and lots of it. So, OK, anybody notice something unusual here? Since I am studying electrons at the moment, the utter randomness of the bottles above just caught my eye, as it did yours, I am sure!

This is rather typical processing procedure here- randomness. One night at Foun's the waiter came and people were ordering a second drink, and someone said, they'd better not, you just never know about the beers here! Not being a beer drinker, I said, what do you mean? Apparently, sometimes one Haitian beer can have the alcohol of two. And you don't know till it's too late, I guess.

Here is another thing I have never seen at home, which I plan to look for when I get back:

"Lait entier en poudre." In Pennsylvania where I'm from, the words "nonfatdrymilk" all fit together in a neat little sandwich, preceeded by Carnationinstant. Lait entier means the whole thing, the real deal, the entire milk. This means it has that 4% milkfat that whole milk has. Believe me, it tastes MUCH better than the nonfatdry that I remember. Also, and this is really important: If you sprinkle it delicately enough into your hot coffee or tea- it melts before it turns into that disgusting lump of stuff that nonfatdry does! In other words, it behaves a whole lot like non-dairy creamers, except I get to drink the calcium and skip the corn syrup solids AND support the dairy industry! Is that a win-win situation or what?

Now skip this last part, if you are a little faint of heart. This is something I just noticed today. Dr. Mortel always says, in Haiti you should never ask what it is you are eating. If you like it, eat. If you do not, stop. Fair enough. Whenever I eat some meat that I do not recognize, I have been assuming it was goat meat. I mean, I knew it was not beef, or turkey, and after all there are hundreds of goats walking around here.

About a month ago I learned the alarming news that cat is considered fair game here. Some friends told me of a husband and wife they know who have an ongoing argument at their house: She gets a housecat, with the intention of keeping it as a pet, a couple weeks go by, she maybe steps out to go visit friends for the day, and he eats it. They have not worked this out yet, apparently.

I knew that I saw dogs everywhere, but that I rarely saw cats. So the clue phone was ringing, I just did not want to pick it up, as my friend Karen has told me often enough.

Today I was eating lunch and it occurred to me that the ribs I was looking at were way too tiny for a goat. I mean, really-- if the goat were that young, the bones would just be cartilage, and not hard like these were.

I hope I am wrong about this. I also hope I have not been too indelicate for the general readership, and that some wise soul writes to tell me that goat ribs are, after all, scaled much smaller than I think. And that if it were a cat, it would have to be a panther or something like that to have ribs the size I am looking at here. The photograph did not get clear, but it's probably better that way. For the record, it was brown and tender, and tasted like beef, which was what made me think- well, goat! It's just- those goats are so husky and sturdy looking.

Can vegetarianism be far behind?

Note! It is Thursday and I did look up the cat skeleton: Cat ribs are much smaller than these. What a sigh of relief. It had to be a little goat, though.

Has "The Rainy Season" Arrived?

2009-05-09T19:37:00.000-07:00

The weather has been nothing but sunny and gorgeous since I arrived here in January. The past few days we have had some rain, however.

This afternoon I went to visit some new friends on Florenceau Street, a little less than a mile from me, and around 6 o'clock the sky started to cloud up and darken. They told me that the rainy season is beginning. It turns out it did not rain tonight; they offered to drive me home, but gave me an umbrella instead when I insisted there was time to walk. "Here: If you take this with you, it won't rain!" they said, and they were right.

It did rain on Friday night, though, and here is a video I made while it was still light, about 6 o'clock, after a heavy downpour.

Another Surprised Gecko

2009-05-09T10:33:00.000-07:00

A quick note: I went to put my wash away this morning; it had been sitting, folded, in a pile on my bed from yesterday afternoon. I picked up the sheets, and out jumped A Thing which ran across the bed into a straw hat that was laying there. Oh yuck, I thought. I hoped it was a cricket, but I suspected worse.

Here it was a baby gecko. (Sigh of relief!) It was only 2 inches long and his tail half of that. Poor little guy, sunning himself on my sheet one minute, then folded up in a nightmare the second.

In my hurry to show him the crack at the window I neglected to get a photograph of him, but he was really cute. Just like those car insurance commercials, only this one was 1/4 of an inch wide. But he cocked his head and looked at me just like that one does.

Planting Baby Trees in Haiti

2009-05-09T08:06:00.000-07:00

About a month ago, 4 of the girls, who happen to be foster-sisters, and I went and planted 4 baby trees in honor of their baptism. Maurice, Dr. Mortel's brother-in-law, very kindly went with us and dug the holes, no small feat. Planting a tree as part of their baptism celebration is something that the pastor at St.-Marc's has suggested to the congregation as a symbolic thing to do for Haiti, and a good thing for each child to learn to do. The foundation plans to build a high school on a big tract of ground about a mile from the elementary school, and that is where we went to plant the trees.

This was my first experience with the kids' mania for mangoes and below you see a video of the girls, and little Maxi (I believe his name is Joseph-Bernard, he is the driver's son) in the vicinity of fresh mangoes for the first time in the season. We came home with an entire bushelful and as many as they could carry loose. Note the arms on these girls. The softball teams at home would be recruiting them!

It actually wound up taking two separate visits to get all 4 baby trees planted, even with someone else digging the holes, it was that hard to get their attention away from the fresh fruit. Nonetheless, I persevered and one by one, the trees did get planted.

There is a tropical fruit called a quenep, I am sure that is a wrong spelling, but it is something I am totally unfamiliar with, anyway, the quenep was the tree Océanie chose to plant, she said it was her favorite. I was joking with her, that thirty years from now, when she is a grown woman and successful in her career, she will come back to the school for a reunion of the graduates, and she will bring her little girl and show her this great, big quenep tree and tell her that she planted it. I hope it happens!!

Here you see Adeline putting the fence around her tree, a baby almond. Dieula planted a cherry tree, and Vanessa planted a lemon tree. And the great news is, when we came back to look at them a month later, all 4 trees were still alive and pushing new leaves. We could see where the goats had pushed against the fencing we installed, but they did not break through. Today, May 9, Adeline has just asked me if we can go make another visit, so tomorrow we are going out to water and check on them again, although I do not kid myself that they are preoccupied by the welfare of the trees-- it's about the mangoes. But I am willing to compromise!

(Hard) Manual Labor; It's Mango Season!

2009-05-02T05:58:00.000-07:00

In the U.S. when we talk about manual labor, it usually has something to do with a machine: The sewing machine operator, the dish washer, the person mowing the lawn. It does involve sweat and muscles, but with a mechanical assist. In Haiti there is a lot of manual labor that is totally manual.

Take these demolition workers in front of the school. It's Saturday morning and they are out working at 6AM. Bons Samaritains has grown a lot in the last few years, and there is no longer enough space for the students to play during recess. So the Foundation has bought some adjacent property, two empty homes on the Boulevard. These men demolished the homes with sledgehammers, and now they are loading the debris, one shovelful at a time, into a high dump truck. I cannot imagine the conditioning it takes to do this all day.

In one of my early posts I wrote about a woman who was smaller than I am, who was carrying a bag of charcoal on her head. It had to weigh at least 40 pounds. I was on a long, uphill walk, looking for an address of some people I wanted to meet. I kept running across this woman and her young daughter, who was also carrying a bag on her head, a sack about half as large as her mother's. It was a hot, sunny, exhausting walk over rough terrain, lots of mud and potholes- and did I mention a lot of it uphill? She was selling door-to-door, and the bags looked just as full when I saw them after an hour of trying to sell. Olympic level stamina. There is not money, training space or time for sports training here- and especially not for women- but I think Haiti would surprise the world if someone came here and started some training clubs!

On a more pleasant note, the end of April and beginning of May signal the beginning of mango season. You may be able to pick out patches of yellow in the marketplace in the video. There are probably tens of thousands of mangoes for sale in the market. Even in a land of perpetual summer, it seems that there are some fruits that people crave when they first ripen. For us in the north, think of those first local tomatoes or strawberries. Here in St.-Marc, think mangoes.

P.S.: Here is the work site at 5PM, the same day. They have about half of it cleared off. Amazing.

But it's So Salty!

2009-04-27T08:17:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Sister Mary and I went to the beach at Paradise for the morning. She got to walk up and down and get her feet wet, for the first time in forever. She is Irish and loves the sea, but here in St.-Marc going to the beach is just not very popular. So while she was walking, I was swimming and thinking to myself how, last Sunday at this time, I was swimming up north at Labadie.

There was an American voice I kept hearing, who kept repeating, "It's salty! Why is it so salty?" Then I heard him say something about Labadie. So I swam over to his group to say hi, and asked him if he had been there. "I want to go there. I've heard it's nice. -- But is it salty like this?"

He was serious! I said, "Where are you from, anyway?" Turns out he grew up in Colorado and this was his first time swimming in the ocean! He was probably 30 years old. He was Haitian American, and his parents immigrated to the U.S. when he was young.

Intellectually, he had to have known it, don't you think? But until he tasted it himself he never actually realized what it meant. He truly was amazed.

A Ride to Remember

2009-04-23T18:15:00.000-07:00

It is about 90 miles from St.-Marc to Cap Haitien, where I went last weekend. On Friday I had the great good luck to get a direct schoolbus. There were 3 people in my seat, but one of us was a 4-year-old girl (very polite and quiet, I might add) so all in all, the trip was a dream at 6 hours and only 300 Gd., about $7.50.

I returned to St.-Marc yesterday; what a difference! I began my journey by going to the bus stop about 5AM. They call it the station, but there is no station, it is a huge business conducted in the street. I arrived home here in St.-Marc around 2:30 and breathed such a sigh of relief. It was only 90 miles, and I was actually on a moving vehicle for 6 hours of that, so that's 15 miles an hour we went, on average. Both going and coming back.

Travel is problematic for the average Haitian. The tap taps are uncomfortable, crowded,dusty, and badly sprung, and often on their last legs engine-wise, so they break down a lot. You see them with broken axles, maybe a wheel spun off, all manner of catastrophes by the side of the road. And if the tap tap coming along already has 20 people in it, it's not like they are going to take all 20 of you with them. But Haitians, being generous, would be sure to pile at least a few more on top.

Since things are expensive here, bus travel is something of a luxury. They don't run a bus unless it is full. (See above, re 3 to a seat in a schoolbus. That's usually 3 adults to a seat.) Last Friday, even though the bus left at 10, I went at 8 so that I could get a window seat. You never know when it will fill up, and then suddenly, they're off. Haitians are very good at waiting.

Wednesday's journey began on a hopeful note on Tuesday night when Tony, the houseman and jack-of-all-trades for Sasha Kramer and Sarah Brownell, went out and bought my ticket in advance. A ticket is just a photocopied slip of paper, maybe 2 inches by 4 inches, that has scribbled on it the destination and time, and that you've paid. There is no Cap Haitien to St.-Marc bus, so I had to buy a through ticket for Port au Prince. It cost 400 Gd., $10 even. The ticket said 5:30.

Sarah, bless her heart, got up early and took me to the bus herself. She wanted to be sure I got on the right one. She went up to the door and asked if it was the bus for Port au Prince. It was, so we said goodbye and I waved my ticket at the driver and got on. It was pretty nearly empty, even though it was 5 o'clock, so I grabbed a seat by a window. I even got to put my suitcase up in the rack. The racks fill up quickly. About 5:20, someone came up to me and said, excuse me, you're in my seat. I hadn't noticed, on the back of each seat was written 3 numbers in black magic marker. I had grabbed seat 18. Uh oh, will I get a window? Yes! Seat 25, my real seat, is a window. Thank you, Tony!

When the bus did not leave at 5:30 I was not shocked, as very little happens in Haiti on time. I was shocked at 5:40 when someone came up waving their ticket at me that also said '25' on it. We all gathered around and then someone observed that my ticket was for the other bus to Port au Prince. The one, the only one in Haiti, apparently, that actually leaves on time and was even now on its way up the highway. At that point I should have hired a motorcycle and chased it down, but little did I know.

I went to the bus driver. He was a very nice guy and felt a little bad about this. He took me by the hand and we went out to the street where a lot of men proceeded to have a very loud, animated discussion about what was going to happen about this. We walked hand in hand up the street to the spot where the other buses leave from. I was definitely the little lost girl. The go-to man was taking a break, having successfully gotten his bus to Port out the gates. Loud discussion. Shrugs. I could tell: No money back. Not my problem if the Blanc missed her bus!

We walk back to our bus, 50 yards away. More discussion. He gets the OK from his boss to take me to St.-Marc without buying a ticket, so I give him my ticket. He will try to get the money for the unused trip from the other driver if he is lucky. I realize about this time that there really is no way they will let me sit in a seat for free-- when he shows me my "seat." It is a little table, between his seat and the left side of the bus. I will be able to sit there. Very cosy, no? he empties it off, smiles, and taps it for me to sit down.

Now it is 6:00. There is a little streetside vendor beside the bus, right in the middle of the usual wet and dirty, garbage-strewn gutters. As I am looking out the window I realize that underneath a rickety table with pots of food on it, a street kid is sleeping curled in a ball. He is laying on a piece of filthy cardboard and you know he's been there all night. A few minutes later another guy stumbles up the street. He is maybe 10 or 12. He crawls under the table and curls up next to the first one. Now the vendors are ticked. When they go past they keep nudging him and giving him little kicks. A lady sprinkles him with some water, but he's fast asleep by now, his face and hands pressed into the dirt. The cardboard doesn't reach that far. He is maybe 8 feet from me. I think I don't have it so bad.

At 8:00 there are only 20 or 30 people who bought tickets, and the owners abandon the notion of sending their bus to Port au Prince today. You would have thought there was a fire on board. I don't realize what is going on until the second last person getting off explains it to me. I get up and go back and wrangle my suitcase off the overhead rack. I think it must have been at this point that I lost my cell phone. There is a huge frenzy of returning all the passengers' money.

There are some tap taps there. Someone grabs my suitcase and tosses it up on top, between two bags of flour. They just kind of stuff it in between them. The ride will be unbelievably jarring; I worry it may fall off. The price to sit in the front (an honor; it is assumed that a Blanc is only going to want to ride in front!) in the middle spot of a two-seater Toyota pickup that will only take me as far as Gonaïves? 400 Gd. I get out of the truck to go get my suitcase down from the rack. When I come back dragging my suitcase the driver starts yelling at me to take it out of the cab (in fact there really is not room in the cab for the three of us and our little backpacks which we do bring with us into the cab.) He settles down when he realizes my extra money is inside it. I didn't think I'd be needing extra money this morning and packed it away.

He said we would get to Gonaïves, site of all that death and devastation last autumn, in 3 1/2 hours, and he hit it pretty much on the button. We stopped at the same mountaintop rest stop that we stopped at on Friday on our way north. It is evidently a tradition. The same old lady came up to me begging for coins, and I gave her the same thing I did on Friday: A peanut butter sandwich. She smiled and thanked me graciously. Women surround us and try to sell us avocados and figs and chadèques. I try to tell them we have not any room, for nothing. They persist. I say, "Désolée, but I just can't." I am so sorry, desolated, in fact. I think I am demonstrating typical Haitian effusiveness, but they think it is over the top and laugh at me.

We finally reach Gonaïves, and our tap tap driver drops us off where there is a bus loading for Port au Prince. It costs about 150 Gd. to go as far as St.-Marc. There is a lot of line jumping. As soon as a couple dozen of us get situated on the bus, someone announces they will not be running it, better get in the bus behind, instead. By this time we are snapping like sharks. I start to wonder about those tragic crushings at the soccer matches; the bus doors on Haitian buses seldom open up all the way. Eventually we all mob onto the new bus, kind of like an octopus pressing itself through a very small opening. By now no one is taking any chances. We know the drill.

I do get a window seat. The women seated with me have chickens in a box. This is lots better than goats, much quieter. The husband of one of them, up the aisle from us, holds a chicken in his hand. It is a well-behaved chicken. I see one of our chickens' feet sticking out of a hole in the box and gently push it back inside. No use he should be uncomfortable. The women smile at me.

More teeth-rattling bouncing and banging down the road for another two hours. A brave but crazy vendor is hanging onto the back corner of the bus, screaming "Sodas! Water!" The driver yells to him to be quiet. How can he hold on out there, with such a rough ride? How can he breathe, in all the dust? It is 90 degrees in the bus and he keeps selling, passing drinks in though the window, a helpful passenger passing money back out the window to him.

Then they stop for me! St.-Marc! There is my market, there are my little Bons Samaritains students coming home from school at 2:30 in their dear little uniforms. I yank and pull my suitcase from between my chin, my legs, and the seat in front of me. It's wedged tightly in there with the 3 of us and our box of chickens. We send it off and I watch as it surfs up the aisle. 6 adults across, lots of them men, and all those bags and boxes really fill up a school bus. Next, I surf up the aisle. I get to the front and the whole area beside the driver is full. Nobody moves. Then a couple of guys jump off the steps. I see my bag out on the sidewalk. Almost there. I perform a gymnastics move of grabbing the bar in front of the seat by the door. Mrs. Ebling would be so proud! I swing underneath like a very clumsy monkey, over the people who are seated there, make it down the steps and I am home.

As I come through the market my little students call out "Lees! Lees!" and rush up to me for kisses and hugs. I don't know their names, but they missed me and I've missed them, too. It's great to be back.

The view from the rest stop at the top of the mountain. You see one of those no-railing switchbacks up ahead. I'm sure you noticed it's on the way to Cap Haitien, since I am taking the pictures from a schoolbus. The sweet old lady that I mention in this post makes a brief appearance as well.

A Very Surprised Gecko

2009-04-21T06:57:00.000-07:00

I just spent the weekend at a little hotel in the village of Labadie on the north coast of Haiti. It is a small place, just a couple hundred people. Sunday was election day, and they were having the polling in the schoolhouse. To keep the peace, the U.N. sent soldiers out to all the highways and byways of Haiti. I saw a half dozen soldiers walking around the village. It is so remote that you must get there by a 10 minute boat-taxi. There are no cars there. So the soldiers came from all over the world-- Brazil, Chile, El Salvador-- to their barracks in places like St.-Marc, to be trucked or flown to another city, then to be ferried by boat to a village like Labadie.
The hotel is called Norm's Place. It is a set of beautiful little guest houses set in a tropical garden with lots of chairs and hammocks. Right by the beach, so you hear waves shushing on the shore the whole time you are there. A guaranteed stress-free vacation.
The bathroom in the room I had has a stone wall with ferns growing out of the cracks in the wall. It was so gorgeous, so tropical. I was brushing my teeth one morning, when I realized that a gecko tail was sticking out the overflow drain in the sink. As I watched it, I could see it was getting longer. He was backing out. So I watched as his hind legs, then his forelegs, then his head backed out of the hole. When he finally turned around and looked at me looking at him, he jumped! And took off running. I laughed and laughed.
The walls were stone, 10 or 12 feet high. The fourth wall, instead of stone, had woven cane for the top 4 or 5 feet. It was pleasant and open to the garden. I could hear the frogs singing all night long. And those waves.
On Sunday afternoon we took a boat to a nearby cove where there is a white sand beach and also, further out, a coral reef with lots of nice coral. I saw fan corals 3 or 4 feet high. I know there are bigger ones than that, but they are the biggest I ever saw. Also, I saw 2 big spiny lobsters, and I saw squids swimming for the first time. So fascinating.
On Monday morning I went to the Labadee resort run by the Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines. I was admitted as a guest and got to visit my friends from Pennsylvania, Terry and Becky Lawhead, who had come to Haiti on their first stop on a cruise that left Miami on Saturday. We spent the day together. What a great time.

Paradise

2009-04-15T09:41:00.000-07:00

Words can't describe it as well as this clip! I must add one note: I say in the video that I thought the sand was trucked in- a local person assured me it was natural.

Good Friday Procession

2009-04-10T19:03:00.000-07:00

View looking down the driveway from the hilltop site of new church, Notre Dame de Perpetuel Sécours

Today I walked in the Good Friday Procession through the town. The church was packed at the end, so there were probably over a thousand in the procession; I am not good at counting. However many the church can seat, were seated in it, and the courtyard outside was full as well.

There are two Catholic churches in the town, the original parish of St. Marc, and a new parish they made by dividing in half, giving the original parish the church and the new parish the school, located a couple miles away on the south side of town. The second parish is called Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Notre Dame de Secours Perpetuel. (My own parish of St. Paul's in Annville is sending a committee to visit this new parish and their pastor, Father Antoine, on Monday the 13th. I am looking forward to their visit.)

Not knowing where the other church was, I took a chance on going to St. Marc's, which is only 3 blocks from my apartment. When I got there, there were maybe a half dozen people there, and Father Evance was just leaving to go over to Notre Dame. He said he was going over by taxi (sitting on the back of a motor scooter). There was a tap tap there, that was taking the crosses over for the procession. He ran over and asked, and said we could ride in that.

This turned out to be a great thing for me, because I rode over with a nice lady named Carol. These Haitian ladies are so graceful: They can stand in the tap tap, just stand there, as though they are standing on the ground, and balance with one hand on the railing. As we go over potholes and bumps. Carol noticed that I was having a hard time managing myself and my hat, and she kindly reached over and took it, which left me with two hands to cling to the railing. Even using two hands, though, I still cannot stand in a moving vehicle on these roads as nicely as they can. But thanks to Carol I arrived with my hat, which I badly needed. There is not much shade here, and the sun can be brutal.

By the time we got to the other side of town, there were about 15 of us in the tap tap, after starting out with 6 or 7. Every couple of blocks someone on his way to the procession saw us and yelled for the driver to stop. Several men stood on the bumper; our muffler scraped on every dip. Plus I am sure they got splashed by some of the puddles we went through.

I did see several people I knew in the course of the morning, and a couple of my students.

We began to walk around 7, and finished at 11 AM. I wound up spending the morning with Carol and a couple of her friends, and they were all very nice to talk to.

About halfway through the walk we had to cross the National Highway, Route 1. I tried to get a picture to show you what the highway is like; sometimes there is a lot of traffic and then next time you see it, it's empty. While not all of it is paved, this piece here in town is paved, but you can see the potholes. There are not a lot of rules on the highway; faster things like motorbikes go out and pass the slower things like the tap taps full of people. All the traffic stopped for us both times we crossed over the highway, which was nice.

The twelfth station of the cross is the one in which Jesus dies. For that one, the Bible reading and prayers were at the Place in front of the Mairie, or Town Hall. The woman directing the stations said "Everybody kneel! Kneel down, everybody!" and we pretty much all did, right there on the stones in the street. We finished up inside St.-Marc's church with the fourteenth station, Jesus is buried in the tomb.

Here is a video clip from the final station. It shows what a cross-section of people attended the walk, and also gives you a picture of what the inside of St.-Marc's looks like:

Foun's at 8AM

2009-04-09T21:00:00.000-07:00

The balcony in front of Foun's and the view on Pivert Street

I finally got some good pictures of Foun's, in the daytime with nobody around. This is such a nice place. Nice atmosphere, wonderful hosts who make you feel so welcome. Foun and his wife Maggie lived in New Jersey for twenty years. Foun has a Joisey accent, even.

Here you can see the main dining area; the taller, white building in the back, upper right, is the

Bons Samaritains. I could get here by zipline if there were one. It's a walk of maybe 100 yards.

Maggie heard of a good dancing instructor who would come to her place to teach Salsa dancing, and she invited me to come. So this picture was taken this morning at 8AM at Foun's while I was waiting for the others to come. The instructor's name is Herbie, I think, and he really was very good, so I may try to keep doing this if time permits. I am not a coordinated person, but I guess I did OK. He does recommend dancing shoes; the other ladies all wore heeled evening shoes. I could not walk in them, much less dance, so we may have to compromise on the shoes. I can see that rubber-soled Tevas will keep me from improving, though.

Here is a little video so you can see how pretty the place is. They have a gas fired rotisserie out front where they do whole chickens basted with a little bit of sauce. Mmmm. They also do wings, which is an idea they brought back with them from the U.S.

Test Time: Do You Have the Right Stuff?

2009-04-08T10:33:00.004-07:00

Hello! Step into my office. I understand that you are thinking of going to work for a little while in a developing country, and you wonder if it's for you. I am sure every experience is different, and I don't know myself how well I would be doing minus the internet, (Back home- maybe. Here, no way!) but at any rate, I have prepared a little test for you. Take it and see how you do. Remember, there are no right or wrong answers.

Question 1: You are working at your desk, and you see a large spider. You . . .

(1 point) think to yourself, "Whoa, look at the size of him. He must eat a lot of bugs, good thing he's living here," and go on writing.

(2 points) jump up and smack him quick with the sole of your sandal.

(3 points) run out of the room and wait somewhere else till your friend gets home so s/he can kill it for you.

Question 2: It's 9PM. You're in the shower and suddenly all the lights in the house go out. You . . .

(1 point) are really glad you thought to light that candle and set it on the sink before you got started.

(2 points) calmly finish up in the dark.

(3 points) start screaming, "Lights! Where are the lights!"

Question 3: You are walking down the street and motor scooters and motorcycles blaring Beep! Beep! Beep! keep buzzing past you, sometimes, it seems, from only inches away. You . . .

(1 point) try not to jump or move from your intended path, and trust they are not going to swerve, either.

(2 points) reflexively jump back and say "Oops! Sorry!" to the fellow pedestrian you just knocked over.

(3 points) press yourself against the nearest building and continue on to your destination sideways, walking like a crab.

Question 4: You begin to eat some stew. You find a fish scale and a fish bone in the first couple of mouthfuls. The stew tastes fishy. You . . .

(1 point) take them out of your mouth, lay them aside, and keep eating.

(2 points) think, "Well, I wasn't that hungry anyway," try a few more bites and then lay down your spoon.

(3 points) immediately stop eating and say out loud, "Yuck! Gross!" and make a big deal out of it.

Question 5: You see a Hershey's chocolate bar (can of Diet Coke, pack of Doritos) in the store. It's not very large, and you notice it costs $2.50. You . . .

(1 point) think to yourself, "That's the price of a whole 19-ounce bottle of dish soap! No way am I paying that much for Doritos!"

(2 points) squirm a little and fork over the money. You really need some chocolate. Now.

(3 points) buy 8 of them with your last $20 bill, because this is the first time you have ever seen them and you know they will not be here when you come back next week.

Question 6: You wake up in the morning covered with mosquito bites. You . . .

(1 point) thank your lucky stars that you are on a malaria medication, and you coat yourself with DEET from now on before you go to bed at night.

(2 points) go to the store and buy yourself a mosquito net which you jury-rig over your bed.

(3 points) change your return plane ticket from next year to tomorrow.

Okay! Time to add up your scores. Note: If you have had an appendectomy, you may deduct 2 points from your score.

up to 9 points You could think about joining the Peace Corps.

10 to 12 points This kind of work might be a problem for you.

13 to 18 points You should stay home and watch the movie.

Grosse Roche Beach

2009-04-06T21:10:00.000-07:00

Today I finally got to swim at Grosse Roche Beach. This is the beach at the north end of town. I went with some teachers from the school, actually the third grade staff: JeanRony and Blemur, two great guys who are also good teachers. I can always count on having a fun class on Wednesdays, when I go into the third grades. I can tell when kids are thinking, and their kids are. If you see that more than just a couple of the kids in a class are trying to puzzle out answers, it's always a sign that they have a good teacher.

Grosse Roche is beautiful! Dinah, who says she is my mother here in Haiti, was worried about me going there, because of the high contamination in the bay. They understandably do not want me to get sick. I promised her I would not put my head in the water, and wore my glasses and hat to remind myself. The water in the Caribbean is so warm and so heavy with salt that a person my size floats like a cork. JeanRony does not swim, unfortunately, so he swam by hugging onto a beach ball. I told him I have an old waterskiing life vest at home I wish I could give him. I think he could swim around better if he had something like that. Blemur is a good swimmer and told me about snorkeling at Labadie, where I hope to go after Easter. He said he saw some nice coral and fish there.

The beach was covered with large round rocks. Some of them were pebbles, but a lot of them were broken up coral that had washed ashore. There were pieces of staghorn coral, and we saw a piece of brain coral that actually looked like one of the lobes of a brain.

Loud Speakers with Loudspeakers

2009-04-03T08:54:00.001-07:00

This morning I was awakened early- at 4AM!- by the sound of singing and chanting out in the Market. There was a religious rally going on. I lay there for an hour and then I went out onto the balcony and made a few minutes of tape. I thought that, since I could not see anything, there would not be many megabytes. But there were; which make it too many to post from St-Marc. So I prepared just a minute of the rally and offer it to you here.

And after I up load this I might try taking a short nap. For some reason I feel sleepy.

Fatima

2009-03-30T08:51:00.001-07:00

On Saturday morning Widlyne took me to Fatima. Fatima is a pilgrimage site south of St. Marc, just off Highway 1, that a priest has been working on for years, it looks like.

The location is breathtaking. It is on a hilltop wedged between the Caribbean Sea and high mountains to the east which are surrounded by clouds. As you enter the grounds you must walk up a steep hill where they have a series of crosses for people to stop and say the prayers of the Way of the Cross. This photograph was taken at the end of the day as we were leaving. As I was coming up the hill in the morning, I did not notice the statue of Jesus overlooking the sea. Widlyne said it is a miniature of the huge one in Rio de Janeiro.

There is a large roofed area where they say mass and have singing. A lot of people gathered and prayed there until the mass began in the late afternoon. There are several bunkhouse type places for people to stay. There are lots of little altars and mini chapels. We walked to a steep hillside where there is a little grotto with a statue. We stopped nearby without descending to it, and sat down. Instead of sitting down, some of the oldest people went down the tiny path alongside the grotto to say a prayer in front of it. At the summit of one of the hills there is a foundation for a big church. I hope that when it is built it will be left open and the magnificent mountains will be totally open to view.

Widlyne said that some day the priest would like to have a hotel and conference center, and a system in place for people to come and stay there on retreats. It was a peaceful and contemplative place, and I would like to go back some day.

Marie Lourdes

2009-03-29T07:53:00.000-07:00

This is dedicated to Marie Lourdes. If I talk her into a picture this week, I will move the mashed potatoes and gravy to the end of this post. Marie Lourdes is the cook at the school up the street from me. It's run by an order of Catholic brothers and is the same school Dr. Mortel attended as a boy. There is usually a lot of activity there, kids after school, soccer tournaments, and so on. Also, if I want to print something from my computer I take it up there on my thumbdrive and they are very helpful with that (15 Gde a page). From time to time I go there to see Jean-Rony (who took me on his motor scooter to see the hospital that Sunday?).

The night I met Marie Lourdes, I had a bad cough and had lost my voice. To show you what kind of a person she is, she asked me if I liked chadèques, the sweet grapefruits they grow here, and I said yes. She hustled me into her kitchen, carefully washed one, cut the core out of it with a paring knife, and gave me a spoon to eat it with. You cannot believe how much better my throat felt after eating that chadèque. That night might be when I developed such a taste for them.

After that I stopped in to visit her from time to time, and the night I attended Carnaval on the balcony at their school, Marie Lourdes was part of the group. About two weeks ago I made bread and took a loaf to Marie Lourdes. She had given me a jar of really good jam that she makes out of the rind of chadèque. Kind of like orange marmelade but spicier.
The next time I saw her, I asked how she liked the bread. She said she never got to eat any; she sent it up with the dinner that night, thinking they would send down the leftovers- and they didn't. So last week I took her another loaf and said this one is for you, don't share it! She liked it and asked me if I would show her how I make it.

Last Sunday afternoon I went to Marie Lourdes' kitchen and we made bread. Also, I took her some of Aunt Clare's chocolate-peanutbutter oatmeal cookies, adapted for Haiti, and they were a big hit. Brother Elward, who is the principal of the school, stopped in a couple of times and even went and fixed the gas line to the stove, when he heard we were going to be using it. They have three built-in charcoal burners on a big ceramic counter that she often cooks with instead of the stove. We had a great time and the bread turned out fantastic. Brother Elward invited me to have supper with them and say the evening prayers, too, so it was a wonderful day.

I need to mention next that when we were in the kitchen, making the bread, I could not help but notice that they had butchered. I am guessing it was the previous day. There were two big basins of pig quarters on a table in the corner, its trotters pointing here and there, skinned tail draped over the edge, and on the counter behind me was a big pan covered by a lid, from under which the poor guy's snout was poking. I did not lift the lid to check out the rest of his face. We had pasta for supper that night; it was mostly veggies and Marie Lourdes grated a little bit of (already prepared) salami into it. I was glad it was nothing fresh, not liking to be acquainted with my dinner.

The next day, Jean-Rony came to me and said that Marie Lourdes wanted to give me some meat. Gulp! All I could think about was that snout. Also, my American fetish for refrigerating everything. Then I remembered! My pressure cooker! I brought my pressure cooker with me to Haiti, thinking I was going to be cooking a lot of beans, but this was precisely the sort of situation where a pressure cooker will take care of any minute (i.e. microscopic) details. ¡Viva los Pressure Cooker!

I went to see Marie Lourdes on the way back from the grocery store. (5 pound bag of sugar; going to make more chocolate cookies) She gave me probably a pound and half or two pounds of what look like shoulder chunks. She also had some parsley and a little onion and sprigs of other stuff with it.

I browned the chunks in oil, added about a half a cup of water and set it on low for a half an hour. When almost all the water was gone (when it started to get quiet- so imagine the tsk!tsk! stopping) I took out my pieces of pork and they really were lovely: All brown and carmelized, and falling apart. Since I am a mashed potatoes and gravy person, I put in about two cups of water with all that brown, caramelized broth, and cooked that a little bit more. Also, I went to the market where I was once again robbed over 6 or 7 small, white potatoes. -But at least I got the lady to go halves, from $1.25 US to $.65, so I am improving. Also, I was able to just laugh, because I knew that I was going to have mashed potatoes and gravy no matter what!

On Friday night I went to Foun's to have dinner with my friend Jennifer and two engineers from an organization (I think it is French) called ACTED. They do municipal improvements like roads and water and sanitation systems, etc. Sitting around the table was a crew with at least ten years of active work experience in Haiti, not counting my humble two months. Gerard, who also makes his own bread, by the way, just arrived from France after a one-year hiatus. He had spent the previous two years in Haiti high in the mountains in the border country next to the Dominican Republic. "No electric, no water, no telephone. After two years I went home exhausted and 20 kilos lighter. But now I am better and glad to be back."

I was telling them about the pig parts on the kitchen counter and we were all smiling about my squeamishness, when I went on to say that Marie Lourdes then gave me some of the meat. Jennifer, a Peace Corps veteran, said, "You do realize what a big deal that is? Giving you meat?" Gerard nodded. "That's huge." Wow. I did not realize.

So today I plan on dining on mashed potatoes and gravy and chunks of pork roast. Thanks to my friend Marie Lourdes.

Riding on a Tap Tap

2009-03-28T22:48:00.000-07:00

On Saturday Widlyne asked me if I wanted to go see Fatima, a religious shrine by the sea. I told her I did, and I got to go on a tap tap for the first time. If you come to Haiti you cannot help but be intrigued by the tap taps. I will try to get a picture the next time I go on one. Tap taps are old Toyota pickup trucks that are fitted out with two narrow benches, 6" planks, and iron railings, on either side of the bed. Some of them have a metal rack up in the front of the bed, above the cab, to hold large objects, packages or more people. I have seen little signs, "Passengers look out for your things!" just like we have in our buses and subways back home. There are often around twenty people in the back of a tap tap, and if space exists, more will hop on and stand on the bumper or sit up on the roof of the cab.

As we walked through the market to go out to Highway 1 where the southbound tap taps load, Widlyne said, first we must buy handkerchiefs. We stopped at a stall and each got one; they were only 20 Gourdes. What relief to be with a Haitian and just pay the normal price!

The tap taps are famous for carrying severe overloads. I am so glad I got to go on one with Widlyne; I got to check out the protocol. Here are some do's and don'ts:

Have a handkerchief handy to cover up your mouth and nose for when the road is unpaved or nearby vehicles are spewing excessive fumes. Also remember to cover your hair, if that is a priority for you.
If the tap tap is almost full, don't get on it. (Here's where I would have been really stupid and figured that was just my lot in life that day.) You'll be standing in the middle, bouncing off the others with nowhere to hold on, if you take a middle spot.
Try to be one of the first ones on and get a seat. Even if it means you don't get to leave for another 20 minutes. There's always another tap tap.
Sit in the middle of the bench; let others sit on either side of you. You're going to be tight on that bench, at least six of you side by side, more likely seven. Best not to be on the end.
You pay when you get there, but check out the price before you get in.
Hang on tight; springs and shocks are on their last legs on a tap tap.
There are no age limits! You should see some of the elderly people getting on and off the tap taps.

Culligan Water

2009-03-24T19:58:00.000-07:00

Here is a bottle of drinking water. It costs 25 gourdes or 65 cents U.S., per five-gallon bottle. Some people call it "ionized water" and it usually goes by the brand name Culligan.

When I hear the word Culligan I think water softeners, but here it means water purifiers. Most of the people who live here are used to the local water, and I am guessing many drink it from the tap. There are at the same time dozens of these businesses; every other block you see a little storefront or tiny building offering purified water.

SNEP, le Système National d'Eau Potable, has been busy in St.-Marc both laying new water lines here in the town and hooking up to new wells and springs in the mountains to the east of us. I saw some of their aqueducts the Sunday I went out to the little chapels. It was very pretty up there in the mountains, and there seemed to be a lot of activity- recreation, clothes-washing, etc.- in the vicinity of these waterways. So we hope a little chlorine gets added between there and here!

Back to my Culligan water. I think the water is distilled. Claire, a Belgian lady who is working with the engineers to modernize the town water system, calls the bottled water "dead water," because all the minerals have been removed by the process, in addition to the bacteria. The thing that gets me about the bottled water, though, is that I think they just take your used bottle, refill it, and hand it back to you. I don't know this for sure, as I have only looked in the door of the water stores and checked out the big distilling tank. Meritesse always goes for me and hauls home the new bottles, and, while they are always capped with a new plastic seal, they seem suspiciously dusty to me. I don't think I want to know.

When I first heard the price, I remember thinking, how on earth can they sterilize a 5-gallon bottle, assure sanitary conditions in the distilling room, fill it and cap it and give it back to you for 65 cents?! Jeff, my science advisor, put my mind at ease with his comment on the system: "Oh, Liz! I'm sure the Haitian department of health and sanitation is all over that!" So with that cheerful thought I've been drinking plenty of it, and so far so good.

5 Little Monkeys, Jumping on the Bed!

2009-03-20T21:44:00.000-07:00

I am trying to do two different strands of teaching here in Haiti. Widlyne, their Haitian science teacher, and I want to do more experimental science wherever possible with the seventh grade, since they are upper level now. After the Easter break we will begin the electricity section of their physical science book. We are planning to do a series of experiments in the laboratory that should be a lot of fun for the kids, and we'll try having them write lab reports, which will be new for them.

My other assignment here is to teach introduction to English. Up to fifth grade the classes are short and held just once a week. With the younger kids I am teaching the little poems and motions. Check out "Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed" at the end of this post. Also we're talking about animals and their colors, the sounds they make, what they eat, and so on. In the upper classes we add a little lesson, such as liking something. "What does a cat like? Does a cat like fish?" "Do you like fish?" "Does the monkey like fish or bananas?" "Do you like bananas?" "And the tiger-- what does the tiger like? Does he like bananas?"

In the picture above, I am in the third grade. I look pretty serious, I hope nobody thinks I'm mad. This picture gives you a good idea of the bench-type desks the younger kids have. In the kindergarten they are so small there are some who fit four to a desk! (Also, note the lovely hair ribbons. These are all kinds of real ribbon from the fabric shop. Navy blue ribbons for school, and on Sundays, they must be white. All different kinds, lacy, solid, and striped, but you see this sea of white ribbons when you look out through the church at the children's mass on Sunday morning. Forgive me for digressing, but I love this.)

Getting the kids to make choices and decisions took a few classes. At first, they would not question anything I said- "The cat says 'woof-woof', right?" ("Yes, the cat says 'woof.' ") Then I'd act surprised and glance back at the picture of the cat. "A cat? A cat says 'woof'?"

After a little bit of tricking them and joking with them, they have started to really listen to me. Now even the kindergarteners catch me at it, and they love to disagree and say "No!" Also, they can tell me the fish and the turtle are "quiet." It's really enjoyable to see them thinking and deciding, and it is sweet to see how delighted it makes them feel. They are not usually taught using an inquiry method; I find even some of the older kids do poorly when I ask them simple 'true or false' type questions. The teaching style is didactic; perhaps due to limited resources, the teacher presents the lesson and there is not much time given to investigation or questioning. What the teacher presents is so, and the learning tends to be passive. So when presented with true/false questions, their initial reaction is, everything my teacher says is true. Which makes it psychologically hard for some of them to go back and really look at the statement.

Here is a kindergarten class, the Hibiscus class. There are just a few less than 50 in this classroom, and they are so much fun. They really liked 5 Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed, and they got the fact that it was a no-no. Watch some of the kids waving their fingers. Also, note the little hanky pinned to the dress, I mentioned that in an earlier post. That identifies them as a "kindergartener." I didn't realize I was talking into my camera, so I apologize for covering them up, but you can hear them really chanting it. After our vacation we're doing "The Itsy Bitsy Spider."

Baptism in the Courtyard

2009-03-14T21:13:00.000-07:00

Today at 4PM a group of students who had been preparing for months was baptized in a very moving ceremony in the courtyard of the school. Dr. Mortel, who is a deacon in the Catholic church, officiated at the service. Haitians love celebrating their Christianity and this was a beautiful example. Here is a video I made of the opening procession. The choir is singing, "Je choisis de suivre tes pas, Jésus," I choose to follow you, Jesus. I love the last line of the chorus, "You loved me first." I know there are some French students reading this. The music is very clear, and if you would like the words to follow along, please write to me and I will be happy to send them to you. (Do not think for a minute that my French has become so good that I can just jot them down as I listen. I have them in the program that was handed out.)

One of the seventh grade girls, Dieula, asked me to be her godmother, and I was happy to be able to say yes. Her name, by the way, means "God is there." I just love her name. What a beautiful, overwhelming thought to have, the moment you see your newborn baby: Look- This proves it! God is here.

Here is a picture of Dieula, beside me, and her foster sisters, Océanie, in the middle, and Adeline. This is just after the baptism.

The Lear Brothers

2009-03-12T20:32:00.000-07:00

Here is a picture of John and Tim Lear, two brothers from Lebanon who have been coming to Bons Samaritains for over ten years. There is nothing they can't fix, and if they don't quite understand it, they look it up on the internet and get the latest word.

There are many days here in St.-Marc when the public electricity does not function. At all. Or perhaps it might be turned on for just a few hours.

I was having longer and longer stretches of time with no electricity and didn't really understand much about it other than how uncomfortable that was. After Tim and John arrived, they told me that nine of our solar collectors had been stolen from the roof! Mind you, it happened one night and I was laying in my bed thinking, I wish those people would quit banging around up there. At first I had convinced myself it was cats, but after the noise got louder I realized it was definitely footsteps. I mentioned it to Meritesse in the morning, but apparently nobody thought to go look until one of the teachers who lives within view of the roof came to school one day and said, did they know that the solar collectors had been stolen? Either they told me and I did not understand them, or they decided it would be better for me not to worry- for one reason or another, I never knew it until they arrived to fix them. They walked in March 6, met the engineer who built the school on Saturday morning, reassembled the remaining 4 collectors, redid the inverter and had it all set up by Saturday night. And we have had electricity pretty much nonstop since then!

It seems the thieves cut the wires and left them lay touching the roof which shorted out the inverter. (I wondered why it was making those cranky beep! beep! noises all the time.) In fact, Tim was wondering if maybe the loose wires charged the roof and deterred them from coming back for the other four.

Lest you worry about me, I need to tell you that I lock two iron gates every night, before I go to bed. There is one to the stairs and one to the balcony. The building is made of concrete block, with all concrete and ceramic tile floors, so there is minimal danger of fire here (which is a good thing, considering all the open fires they have for cooking, and lighting the streets at night.) I do feel pretty safe, even knowing they were on the roof above me, doing that. Tim and John were philosophical about it, and said they hoped that the thieves at least used the money to buy food for people or something like that. And at the same time they were planning how they would secure a new set so that it would not happen again. And I won't mention where the little array is, that they made out of the remaining four panels, just in case the crooks are into reading blogs about St.-Marc, Haiti.

In addition to coming to Haiti on a busman's holiday for a week or two each year, they spend the year helping Dr. Mortel to collect supplies and donations for the school. While they were here, a container that arrived at the port in Gonaives was unloaded, and they spent two of their days unloading everything and getting it here to the school. And they had stored much of the stuff, and loaded the container up in Lebanon County over the winter.

They are incredible. They say they just love working vacations, and helping people. They went around on the slow days and repaired desks, made screens, and unstuck window cranks. The kids all know them and look forward to their visits.

Thank you, guys! I can't say enough about how nice these two men are. Plus they make very good coffee and brought chocolate chip cookies with them.

I Finally Get to Go to the Beach

2009-03-08T21:48:00.000-07:00

On Sunday March 8, I finally got to visit the Caribbean. Yes, my apartment is three blocks from it. Yes, I go up to the port when I have a few minutes and sneak back into a patio where a Tai Kwon Do class is practicing, so I can sit on the seawall and gaze at it. Yes, it is visible from my balcony. But that's it. There does not seem to be a great attraction for the beach on the part of Haitians. When I tell my students that North Americans all wish they could come to the Caribbean, and that you are lucky because you get to live here, they really can't see what the fuss is about. Also, I understand they don't swim in it, as a rule. It has something to do with the bogeyman living there, I think.
It was a beautiful day and I got to swim and enjoy the sunshine. There was, however, one fly in my soup bowl of happiness. I took my Flip video camera, which I have been using for all the pictures that you see here, under the water, snorkeling on Sunday. I bought a box for which I paid, evidently, $50 too much, and put the camera in it without testing it camera-less in the sink. I am ashamed to admit this to you. I went into the water with it and when I pressed the "on" button, air bubbles popped up out of my camera box. When I surfaced there was an inch of water in the box.

It did not leak at the silicon gaskets; it leaked at the buttons. I drained it and laid it in the sun to dry and now it only runs intermittently. I hope that I can get a replacement. Sunday night I looked up the camera case ratings. A perfect 3: People either gave it a 5, because they loved it, and had the videos posted to prove how wonderful it was, or people gave it a 1, because they hated it, and told the sad tale of their once-in-a-lifetime trip to swim with the dolphins and how it was ruined by this box. I was just mad, not devastated, so I felt lucky.

Do NOT BUY this camera case!

The Market, Continued . . .

2009-03-06T20:59:00.000-08:00

I know, you are thinking, what a glutton for punishment I must be. But in Saint Marc (Sen Mak in Créole) everything is for sale in the market. If you want a mattress, you buy it in the market. Tools, wiring, shoes, shoe repairs, a baby bathtub or baby walker, all your clothing, a cooking pot, a lamp, a plastic lawnchair, canned milk, powdered milk, padlocks, schoolbooks. There are vendors everywhere selling schoolbooks. Schoolbooks in Haiti follow a national curriculum. Everyone does the same thing, as near as I can tell. I only realized last week that all their books were on sale in the market, and I bought the seventh grade science books. So this week I decided to buy the third and fourth grade science book, as well as the fifth/sixth grade one. And I also bought the beginning reader series, called "The Joy of Reading."

I had such a nice conversation with the guys from whom I bought the science books last week, that I decided to go back to them. On the way there, as I passed some other book sellers, I asked about the Joy of Reading. One guy quoted me 75 Gdes, like $1.90US, until his boss came back and said, "Oh, no! 100 Gdes!" I put it down and kept walking.

In the end I probably paid a little too much, but my guys were very helpful and explained some things. When they gave me my change, I received a 5 Gd piece that was also burnished, almost flat, like the other one. I said, "Is that any good? Someone told me they weren't any good." "Oh, sure, it's good. See, it's still yellow."

I had the bad one in my purse and got it out to show them. I told them my story about the market ladies and they laughed. Turns out it's the color that is bad. The government used inferior metal to make them and they did not keep the yellow color, and now some people refuse to accept them. I said, "But a coin is a coin. It's not your fault if you got it in change. What do you do with it?" They said a bank would exchange it for me. "And would they also change those nasty bills that are so brown you can't see if they are 20 or 50 Gdes?" They told me a bank would exchange those, too.

This is good to know, because I am sure you gather by now that the money that is on its last legs is still good enough to be handed out one, more, time, to me, but not quite good enough to be accepted from me for the next purchase. I am waiting for the day one of my cruddy brown paper Gourde notes gets turned down. The ones in the picture in the previous post are worn, but you can read them. When I think one is so filthy and illegible that I don't even want to touch it, I ask them for a different one. But the answer is always, "Ce n'est pas possible," because the cash register, malheureusment, is already shut!

Widlyn's Fifth Grade

2009-03-05T13:04:00.000-08:00

Widlyn, besides being the seventh grade science teacher, teaches fifth grade. She knows that I am into plants and trees, and today she asked me if I wanted to see her class do brouturage.
Of course I had to say, "Quoi?" So she showed me her science textbook: Cutting and rooting tree and bush stems. Here you see some of her students getting the cuttings ready, while Widlyn explains how to prepare the stems. They planted their stems in tin can pots.

Then later in the morning the fifth grade was one of the classes to come to the group instruction room for English class. Today we worked on animal names, I like, and asking and answering questions. You can see by the end of the video below that they were calling out the question and the answer themselves.
I wrote a limerick for them about some of the animals that they learned. I wrote 3 more verses to do in the coming weeks. I think they liked it. It goes like this:

I went to the Animal Fair,
The cats and the monkeys were there!
The flamingoes were tall
And the frogs were so small
And a mouse wore a bow in her hair!

So we recited the limerick a little bit, and then got up and started walking in a circle to play a game I called the "Animal Fair." They asked and answered a question until I said "I see a tiger!" and then they ran to the far wall to touch it before the tiger "caught" them.
Here is the video on Teacher Tube:

An Author in Church

2009-03-04T19:58:00.000-08:00

Here is a picture of St. Marc's that I love. On Saturday mornings after mass they have benediction. It's about 7:30 in the morning. The sun is still low in the sky and the rays are catching the incense in the air.

This morning I went to church and saw something assez rare, pretty unusual, I thought. When I go to church I have taken to sitting in the side aisle, since I make a lot of faux pas. For example, I forget where I was sitting when I come back from communion. Without any coat and gloves in the pew to catch my eye, I walk right past. Then I realize I missed it, and I'll finally notice that a couple of people are nodding and pointing back to my pew. They don't go to communion in any order, which makes it tricky for me to remember where I was.

This morning a grey-haired man wearing a cornflakes box on his back came up the side aisle before the service began. It was tucked into the top of his pants right inside his belt. He walked up to the front pew like it wasn't even there, and sat down. I thought at first it was Maxi, the little old guy I mentioned in a previous post, the one who hangs around the church. But I realized this guy was wearing a FIFA soccer shirt, (International Soccer Association) not a black jacket like Maxi does. So then I decided maybe it was a back brace. But after a couple of minutes he reached around and got it out. From inside it he took a notebook and a pen and very industriously began writing.

He was in the front pew and kept looking up toward the altar while he wrote. The priests must all be away, because instead of mass a seminarian conducted a communion service. I was not the only one intrigued by The Writer. Halfway through the gospel the seminarian stopped reading mid-sentence. I think he lost his place, because he didn't start again for the longest time. The author was sitting in front of him, just a little to the right. I guess the sight of all that industry at 6:30 in the morning caught him off guard.

At the end of the service he stopped writing and put everything away inside the cornflakes box. He tucked it into his belt again, but this time he wore his shirt out over it.

Sister Mary Hardiwin just returned from a visit to Gonaïves. I mentioned the cornflakes box and she knew exactly who he was. "Fou," she said.

"For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?"

2009-03-03T21:04:00.000-08:00

I have always liked this Jane Austen quotation, and lately I know just how Mr. Bennet felt when he said it. The alternative title for this post should be, "They don't take any wooden nickels here!"

After school today I went to the market for eggs. If I have one successful transaction in the market, I should head straight home, but I never know when to quit. As I was heading back to the school with my bag of eggs, a pile of dried corn caught my eye. The vendors of dried beans, peas, and things rice have them in tubs or drywall buckets, or sometimes they make little piles of them on mats spread on the ground.

The corn looked more orange that John Cope's corn, the kernels a little bigger, the color of popcorn. I paused and said, "How much?" Thirty Gourdes for a two-cup container. How much for half the container? Fifteen Gourdes. I knew I had three 5-Gourde coins in my pocket, so I said I would take half a container's worth of her dried corn.

So while the vendor measured out a little bag of corn for me, I got out my three coins. I think of them as "nickels" but forty gourdes equal one U.S. dollar, so three 5 Gde. pieces equal about 40¢. I had them in my hand, but before I could give them to her, another woman a foot or two to the left of me started screaming and snatched that brown coin you see in the picture right out of my hand and threw it in the dirt. Actually, in the mud. And kept on screaming.

Ah, evidently not a good coin. But to me it looks like the others, what do I know? Her screeching got the other vendor in the spirit and the pair of them proceeded to tell me off for having the nerve to fob off my fake coins on honest Haitian market vendors like them! And of course a little crowd immediately huddled around, breathless for action.

I leaned down and picked up my nickel. That's a pretty good snapshot of it. I thought that one of the men behind me said something like, "It doesn't have a face." I looked at it and indeed it was smooth as glass. You could read all the inscriptions but only because they were a different color, and that, too, was wearing off. So I guessed that was the problem. The people gathering around kept saying, "It's no good."

So now we have an audience and Mrs. Vendor has her palm out for her other nickel. The problem is, all I have is a 50 Gourde note. So I hand her the note, (I know, you're all thinking, "Without getting your other coins back?! What were you thinking?") She takes my 50 and gives me a 20 and a 10. "Excuse me, I gave you 60 and you told me the corn was 15."

"Twenty Gourdes for the corn! You gave me 50, there's your 30." Something like that and a shrug. "You told me 15, and I gave you 60. You never gave me back my 2 coins." She pretended not to hear me.

That would probably have been the end of the story, but a nice man leaned in at this point and said, "What's the problem here?" in an authoritative tone. The vendor said, "She bought 20 Gourdes worth of corn." He turned to me, "How much did she tell you it was?" "15 Gourdes." "How much did you give her?" "Sixty- a 50 and 10 in change."

He said something to her and she grabbed back the 10 and gave me a 25 Gourde note in its place. I quickly walked away.

How much do you want to bet it's a fake?

My 45 Gourdes in change

A Muddy Day

2009-03-03T15:38:00.000-08:00

The town has been working on the Boulevard, the street where the school is located. First they dug up the roadbeds, then they dropped off a lot of stone, and then it seemed things ground to a halt. This may have been due to Carnaval. Or not. Anyway, starting last week and yesterday SNEP, le Système National d'Eau Potable, ran new waterlines in the street, (at least I am assuming it was them) and last night I think one of them burst.

I'd decided to splurge and went to Foun's for dinner, and when I came home- in the dark, no electricity, down the street full of ditches and stone piles, I realized there was moving water. Lots of it. When I finally picked my way down to the school, I stood facing the gates and the driveway and realized I was actually going to have to walk straight through it. Yeccch.

Fortunately Wilson opened the gates the second I knocked, plus he turned on the generator for me so I was able to see to get ready for bed- and scrub my feet and sandals! I am happy to report that the water pressure was much improved, in spite of the leaking pipe.

Then as I lay in bed reading, what did I hear but a rainstorm. It poured for a little while. So things went from bad to worse out on the Boulevard.

I know that today some of you had school delays on account of the snow. We did not have a delay, but several teachers and kids were late on account of the mud. And there were a lot of dirty shoes. It was actually worse in some of the other areas. The patch in front of the school was pretty well dried off till school let out this afternoon, but I went to the market right across the street, and there were blocks over there that were still a foot deep, that no one walked through all day. Meritesse got some stones from the construction site and made a path for the kids to walk in. If you want to see the rest of the street, here is a little video that I posted on the internet. Elisa, whom some of you know, is the little girl in the middle.

http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=347af553e5910b3024c0

A Visit by the Sea

2009-02-28T17:33:00.001-08:00

Today I decided to go for a visit down by the beach. Some of you may remember that two weeks ago while driving us back from mass at the outlying chapels, Father Alcide stopped off at a parish family who lives a little bit north of town along the beach. So today I walked and walked, and there was the gate, and I went in, and the oldest daugher, Linda, remembered me and I asked her if I could visit a little bit, and she said yes.

There is a seawall now, about 8 feet high, and Sister Mary said that it was built 3 or 4 years ago to protect the coast after some bad storms destroyed houses. At the time she told me this, she looked down from the top of the wall and said, "We're miles from the sea, here!" I said I thought I might be able to climb down someplace. Sister said she thought her climbing days were over. I asked the girls if we could go down onto the beach. (There was a big black pig down there, by the way, poking in the debris. I thought the children were a lot more photogenic and fun.) They said "Sure!" and just like that they all three scampered down. Like little mountain goats. I went down very gingerly and I thought there might be problems getting back up, but I decided to worry about that later.

At first it was just Linda and her little sisters, then about a half hour later their big brother Jeff came home. He is 13 and attends school up the street from me, at the school facing the Place where I watched Carnaval one night. Everyone refers to this school as "The Brothers." It is run by the Order of Cluny, I believe, and there are some Brothers who teach or administer in the school.

I don't know if it is the excellent teaching he gets at his school, or his innate intelligence and curiosity, but I was blown away by Jeff today. His real name, he told me, is Jefferson, because his father loves history, and that is the name of the President who wrote the Declaration of Independence. Then we had a talk about presidents, and he asked me what I thought of President Obama. I said we are all hopeful that he will be a good president. "But what about that cartoon this week, of the policeman shooting the monkey, and saying it was Obama?"

Wow. I said I could not account for it at all, I thought it was terrible. Then I explained to him the original story behind the cartoon, about the pet monkey that went crazy. "Oh, I know," he said. "In Connecticut." I almost fell over. I had forgotten it was Connecticut where that happened. He said, "Connecticut is an indigenous name." And it went like that all afternoon. I can't say I understood everything he said, but I think he must be brilliant. How many American 13-year-olds followed the news that closely this week? (Or could tell you the origin of the name Connecticut?)

We talked about the environment here in Haiti. He agreed that many things needed improvement. I asked him what he thought the problem was, and I think he said it was that too many Haitians want stuff. I forget the word he used for it, but it implied consumerism, the hankering after better things, like so many of us do sometimes, and ignoring the things closer to home that need to get done.

There is a town beach, it turns out, another mile north of them, called Gros Roche, big Rock. It costs money to go, but Jeff thought it might be better to go up there if I wanted to swim. So he walked me to the beach and we checked it out. 50 Gourdes, $1.25 a person.

So I invited Jeff and his sisters to go to the beach tomorrow with me. Their mother was a little suspicious when I asked, I think, but she gave her permission. So that's the plan, and maybe tomorrow at this time I will be sending you a picture of my first swim in the Caribbean Sea.

Oh, and I did climb back up the seawall from the beach, with a little help from my friends.

Charcoal Sellers in the Market

2009-02-24T12:11:00.000-08:00

Here is a short video of the marketplace directly in front of the school gates. There are charcoal sellers here. Every day they come in from the country, sometimes with the charcoal loaded on little pack horses or a donkey. More often you'll see someone with one of those big plastic feed-store 100 pound grain bags, only filled with charcoal and balanced sideways on their head.

One day I took a long walk and saw a woman and her daughter walking ahead of me. It was during school hours, so the daughter was obviously unable to go to school. They were charcoal sellers, hoping to sell door to door, instead of sitting in the market. The competition for this has to be ferocious. I walked all the way up a long hill, at least a quarter of a mile, maybe longer, and they did, too. When I arrived back on Pivert, the main street I had started on, there they were, mother and daughter. The mother's bag of charcoal was about 4 feet wide and 2 feet high, packed solid. The daughter's was about half that. The daughter was about 10 years old and it made me feel sad to know that she was out working that hard at such a young age. I thought about my little girls at that age and the things we did together. And I don't believe they had sold any at all, judging by the look of their bags.

I am experimenting with video. I have lots of it, but I can't upload a very high quality. Dave, our school's technology coordinator, kindly gave me some suggestions when we talked last Friday. I know the video on this is a little blurry, but the audio is pretty good, and if you only knew what a triumph and how many hours of experimentation it represents. I promise I will find that tipping point, a file that is small enough to send to you but large enough to be seen!

If my Mom Can Skype, You Can Skype

2009-02-23T22:16:00.000-08:00

Here is a picture of my mom I took this weekend while we were talking on Skype. When she heard about it she went out and got a new computer so she could keep in touch. Every so often I've been able to introduce some of my students- and one day the principal- to family members when they've been available. One of my projects is to help the students learn to use more of the fantastic technology they have at their disposal. Last week I ran into a technical difficulty; my audio was completely gone. Thursday was the students' big Mardi Gras celebration- called Carnaval in Haiti-- and when I went to put the festivities on Skype so that students in Pennsylvania could join in, they weren't able to hear a thing. Fortunately, on Friday my tech coordinator back in Pennsylvania was able to help me fix it. He walked me through all the sound settings on my laptop, and nothing seemed amiss, so he had me turn everything off and reset it, and Voilà! Sound! And we did it via Skype, since I could still hear him and follow all his directions.

When I explained about the stadium speakers down in the school courtyard and the deafening noise coming out of them, Dave surmised that my system probably shut down due to the overload. Speaking of which, I went out to the town Carnaval last night in the plaza (Place, en français) at the end of my street, where there are 4 or 5 stages, each with DJs and stadium-sized speakers, pretty nearly all of them amped up and going continuously. Twice, at the start of the evening, the transformers blew out and the Place was black- except for one stage at the far end. Those guys had their act together and had generators for their electricity. Not only did workmen have to fix the transformers, the streetlights were blown as well, and a truck inched around through the crowd (think Times Square, New Year's Eve) and - no cleats on boots- at each light a guy put up a huge extension ladder and climbed up, right over the crowd. For some reason he not only changed the bulb each time, but the entire arm and light fixture as well. Which had to be a good 3 or 4 feet long and be fairly heavy. OSHA would have been, as the saying goes, all over them.

A few notes here about Carnaval in Haiti. St Marc's version is not quite as colorful as pictures I've seen of Port au Prince's Carnaval. (Think Brazil) There are people who dress up here, but the most colorful costumes you see are the "island girl" Indian native outfits, or the groups of people who dress up in the same color Tshirt and parade together. The groups seem to be social groups and school groups, things like that. Some just get together with a few musicians and they dance. The dancing and parading is slow, it's more about the dancing than going the distance. The music is not fancy, drums and Caribbean instruments, and maybe some saxophones and a trombone or two-- but nothing very musical. It's mostly a beat and a rhythm, and they march around town, filling the streets as they go. Some are fancier and have floats. Businesses sponsor them and some of these are quite large and have big sound systems on them. Sometimes it is just a sound system that the dancers pull along as they go.

Something really funny last night in the Place was that all these people, I am guessing at least a few thousand, were crammed in there and I thought they were really packed as tightly as they could be. Then from down in the corner I'd see movement, and all of a sudden there would be this huge float inching into the Place. Pulled by a tractor-trailer. With dancers behind it. And darned if the crowd didn't part like the Red Sea, and this parade would inch its way through and go off into a side street. And several times it happened that there were two parades at once, heading right towards each other. Then there would be a huge laying on of horns (Haitian drivers are big on laying on the horn) until one would inch aside, and they somehow would miraculously pass each other and go off in their opposite directions.

Food, Redux

2009-02-23T06:02:00.000-08:00

Food here in St. Marc seems plentiful. On nearly every street corner and all through the blocks in between here in the market district, people have kettles simmering and you smell things cooking. Chickens run everywhere, so I guess it is quite fresh. I have seen larger chicken legs for sale at the butchers' in the market, but what I have eaten that has been prepared for me here has always been very athletic, streetside chicken, I am pretty sure. I am basing this on the conditioning that the muscles have obviously had; none of your flabby, indolent chickens such as I am used to back home. The exception to this is the rotisserie chicken at Foun's. That chicken falls apart in your mouth.

I've been having a little difficulty managing in the marketplace. The supermarket is all fixed prices, so no problem there, but the market has just been a quagmire for me. My son Isaac has advised me that one of my problems is 'cutting to the chase.' (He is a movie director.) They sense my desperation. Isaac says, "Mom, you don't go right to the thing you want. They know that you must need it, and mean to buy it, and of course they're going to raise the price." Add this to the fact that I am obviously a foreigner and that word got around that I paid triple for a grapefruit the day before, you can see that it has been getting harder and harder for me to go in there and come out with anything unless I wanted to pay the equivalent of $2.00 for a tomato.

Last week I sent two little girls to get me six eggs and I was so pleased with the results that I was getting ready to send them again this weekend, and Elizabeth, the school secretary, said the school would really rather one of the adults go. So I gave Elizabeth my list, bless her!, and 100 gourdes. This is $2.50. She and Sister Marie, the principal, checked my list over, and Elizabeth wasn't sure she could buy the things on my list for 100 gourdes. But Sister Marie thought she could. The picture you see at the top of this post is a still life of all the things Elizabeth bought for me last Saturday with 100 gourdes. She bought much more than I expected.

I have a shopping postscript to add to this. On Monday I was out for a walk and passed through the market on the way back to the school. It was 5 o'clock and most of the people were packing to go home and enjoy Carnaval, but there was a woman still sitting by her produce. She had stacks of 4 grapefruits, called a chadèk in créole. She nodded to me and I paused. Elizabeth had told me once, never pay more than 5 gourdes for a grapefruit. One Haitian dollar. I put up both index fingers. "One dollar? For one?" She nodded and smiled. I could not believe it! My first grapefruit at a normal market price; what an accomplishment! And now the power has JUST gone out and I want to try to post this before going to bed.

"Derirye mon gen mon," Beyond mountains are mountains.

2009-02-17T17:48:00.000-08:00

Mountains Beyond Mountains is the biography of Dr. Paul Farmer, who is a Harvard-trained epidemiologist famous all over the world for his work to combat diseases like tuberculosis and AIDS. He and some friends co-founded Partners in Health, an organization that helps to train local workers as teachers, medical aides and social workers. Because of their strong policy of collaboration with the people they serve, their hospitals are said to be among the best in Haiti. The title of the book is from a Haitian saying, as in, 'There's always one more hill to climb.' On Sunday afternoon I was a few miles north of Saint Marc and was able to take this picture of the mountains just north and south of the town. In the foreground you see Jean Rony, one of my friends here and a teacher at Bons Samaritains. Saint Marc is behind the first mountain you see, and before the blue one in back of it. The Caribbean Sea is off to our right.

The piece of land that I mentioned in an earlier post is directly to the right of Jean Rony. I did not intend to ride a motorscooter here in Haiti, but Jean Rony was curious to see the piece of land and offered to take us there on his Honda. Fortunately he is a careful driver and I did not fall off.

As we were driving north out of town he asked me if I would like to see the hospital, so I said sure. We walked in and out of all the small buildings on the campus, right through emergency and all the inpatient wards, which were full.

Going to the hospital in Haiti is more of a family affair than it is in the U.S. It is your family who brings you food and cares for your general needs, so you can imagine the wards are a lot more filled with people than they are in the hospitals back home. Also, privacy is a lot less of an issue. When I asked about labor and delivery, Jean Rony and I were led back a hallway, through a room where one woman was just about imminent, then through a doorway right into the next- which was accouchements, the delivery room itself! The midwives were on duty at the foot of the bed, again, family members were there to hold hands, and two women were about to give birth. I thanked them for the tour and left before the blessed events took place. I told Jean Rony that was the first time I had ever seen that; the other three times I was in that room I was the woman on the table!

Shortly after I arrived here in Saint Marc, I had heard that Partners in Health was helping them to enlarge and improve their hospital. I had forgotten all about that, but I could see there was a lot of construction going on around the hospital. I'm sure they will be glad for the space and the improvements, it was a very busy place!

Li li li: "She's reading the book."

2009-02-16T06:19:00.000-08:00

This morning I sat down with some little ones who were reading their readers. A little first grade girl read to me from her reader. So sweet to hear. I can't wait till my grandson Ethan starts reading to me next year! They were too young to actually have stories yet, so I asked if anyone had a story in his reader. A boy about 4th grade handed me his, and I opened it to a page where a boy wakes up grouchy because it's Monday. He has too much to do in school and he's mad the weekend is over and he decides he's sick. I said, "Does that happen to any of you?" and the 4th graders all nodded yes!
These are pictures from videos I shot this morning. I have the nicest videos that I've taken and I can't seem to upload them anywhere. It goes slowly and times out or I get the 'error' message. I can only send 10 MB in my email and that pretty much precludes anything longer than about 25 seconds. I am sure I will figure something out. This weekend I thought to try my college student account, and this is a possibility because it is definitely made for larger uploads, but Jeff, who is my advisor, said all he got this time was the sound. In March the Lear brothers are coming for their annual visit, and they are computer experts! If they can't figure it out, I am sure they will take my videos home in their computer and send them to you when they get a chance.

Here you see a little kindergarten student. You can tell she is a kindergarten girl, because she wears a plaid dress, instead of the blue jumper and shirt all the other girls wear. Also, the kindergarteners have a 'mouchoir,' a hanky, pinned to their shirts. Even the little boys. I noticed the first day of school they were all starched and pretty, and now some of them aren't. I don't know if it's for identification purposes or to be handy (which doesn't seem like a bad idea for a little one.)

Finally, one of the last scenes of the video: In the morning, the students all come in and are supposed to get out their books and read while they wait for the bell to ring. The inner courtyard is very pretty and shaded. There is a huge palm tree in the center called a "Traveler's Palm." I believe it has to do with a traveler being able to get a drink out of it. Also, Agnes told me that since it has been planted it changed its growing orientation toward the sun. So here is a miraculous shot of some of the kids surrounding the courtyard in the morning, about 7:30 at Les Bons Samaritains, Haiti. I say 'miraculous' because by the time I shot this picture I had had the camera out for two or three minutes, and by that time the mob is usually so thick, and there are so many hands reaching up to say hi, that I can no longer take a picture!

The Caribbean, Take 2.

2009-02-16T06:04:00.000-08:00

On Sunday after he took us to see the land where he hopes to build a high school, Father Alcide stopped at this spot on the Caribbean. A woman named Roselande lives there with her family, and I asked if I could come again sometime and she said yes, so I'm going to try!

You can see in the lower right, we are up on a seawall. Sister Mary said that after the hurricanes (I don't know if it was this past year or previous ones) they built this seawall to protect the houses here. So I checked it out, and I am pretty sure that I will be able to get down there and wet my toes in the Caribbean one of these days. Sister, on the other hand, felt that her climbing days were over and she remarked, "We're miles from the beach, here!"

In this picture of Sister Mary, you can see the port of Saint Marc in the background. That is where Sister and I were last Sunday. And now, back at the port, here is a picture of the huge patio behind the old hotel. Can you see why I think Digicell needs to fix this up and open it to the townspeople? Maybe since they don't use it they could lease it to a business person who could open it up as a café. Couldn't you see yourself here, sipping a glass of tea? And it is behind a building that faces the Place, the one-block park that is the center of town. So it is centrally located and has all that going for it, too.

Sunday Morning February 15: Two Chapels, a Dream and the Sea

2009-02-15T16:02:00.000-08:00

Sunday has been an absolute smorgasbord of events here in Haiti. But first of all, before any of them, today and last night are the Silent Auction for Haiti, our biggest annual fundraiser at St. Paul's in Annville, my home church. So last evening, after they had put everything away for the night, they called me from Annville. I got to talk -and wave-to Dr. Mortel and Father Peck and all the wonderful people who work hard all year in our parish to raise money and awareness for the people here in Haiti. It was great talking to you, and isn't Skype just wonderful?

Last week Father Alcide at St. Marc's said that I could ride along with him this weekend to two of the chapels that Saint Marc's serves. These are not very far as the miles go, but require a long time and a good four wheel drive vehicle to get there.

The first mass was at La Louwère. I hope I have the spelling right. This is a beautiful chapel, in the foothills of the mountains, I would guess not more than six or seven miles from town. It has trees around it and is in a pleasant setting. The dirt road was washed out in many places, and we crossed a stream where the bridge had been destroyed in a storm some time earlier. Several times we were in mud up to our axles, but Father persevered up and down and sliding sideways until we got there. On the higher parts, instead of the mud there are often clouds of dust. Above you see two pictures of the front and the back of the chapel. That's Father Alcide in the blue shirt on the back porch waving it's time to go.

The second chapel was Barbe. Barbe is an open church, a pavillion, really, wood frame with a corrugated tin roof and woven palm fronds for walls. The floor is dirt and during mass a few geckos ran up the center aisle. The music in Haitian churches is always spiritual - lots of a capella singing and always some drums. This service was especially beautiful because they had a group of eight girls dance. It was a very moving service in many ways; I noticed, on all the open beams, all around the chapel, were verses and sayings: Be not afraid, I come that you can have life, Welcome, Peace. It was humbling to see so much devotion, hard work and faith all in one small place.

After mass, Father took us to see a plot of ground he has received as a gift from a parishoner. He hopes to build a high school for St. Marc on this land. Here he points out the site.

For family members, Father Alcide reminds me very much of Father Canal, an old family friend from Spain whom we all met through Aunt Clare. He is very personable, dynamic, and can work a room. And he is also a scholar like Father Canal, having studied at the college in Rome. Of the five languages he speaks, I think English might be his weakest, so I usually talk to him in French. He and Sister Mary have great conversations in Créole which include a lot of laughing; I think they talk about some of the humorous situations that exist here in Haiti.

Today in the car, coming down off the mountain after the mass at Barbe, we went over a bridge and on the other side was seated an elderly white-haired man, dressed in a black suit. They waved and exclaimed over seeing him there. I asked, "Is he someone who sits around the church?" Yes, he is. It was probably one or two miles away from Saint Marc's. And the street leading into town, Pivert, is very busy with very few sidewalks. After seeing him, Father showed us the high school land, and then he stopped at a parishoner's house and we got to walk out back and look at the Caribbean (Sister must have told him we were dying to see it again after our walk last Sunday.) Then we went to the rectory and had dinner. After dinner, as Sister walked me out through the churchyard, there was the man, in his black suit, sitting in the shade on the church steps! Out and back was sure a long way to walk for a person his age.

A Remarkable Woman

2009-02-12T09:19:00.005-08:00

On Sunday I had dinner at the rectory of St. Marc's Church with the priests who live there and Sister Mary Hardawin. Sister Mary is an incredible Irish lady who has been in Haiti for 15 years. She was already in her 60's when she came here for the first time. She was telling funny stories at dinner about learning Créole, and how she would make public and embarrassing errors when she was first getting started.

She and Father Alcide have just returned from Kentucky where they visited their sister parish of Saint James. Father Alcide told us at dinner that he was asked to speak during mass and he didn't trust his English. So he asked Sister Mary, if he would speak in Créole, would she translate into English for him. She said she would. He told us, instead of speaking in English, she repeated everything he said to the congregation- in Créole.

She is tireless and gutsy. She has two artificial hips and walks everywhere to visit the sick and people in prison. I asked her if she ever takes the motorscooters that buzz everywhere like bees. Occasionally, she told me. Just the day before, she had walked very far and as she came back into town, decided she would take one. They cost 10 Gourdes, about 25 cents. So she said to the driver, if you go slow, I will pay you. But if you go fast, I won't. I have bad hips and must watch out!

I have watched Haitian women perched sidesaddle on these things. They sit there elegantly, maybe holding their purse in their lap, with that great posture, maybe even the ankles crossed, just as though they're sitting on a chair in somebody's living room. Only, they're on the back of a motorscooter bouncing down a rutted street with maybe a dog or two chasing them. It looks to me like it requires athletic ability if you're going to go in a dress. I would not care to try it. If I do, I'm going to be in my jeans and not sit sidesaddle.

Sister said, everything was going well until they got to the last turn, he took it too fast, they went over a bump and she almost fell off. She didn't say if he got the 10 gourdes or not.

After dinner we took a walk, because I asked Sister if there were any good places in St. Marc to see the Caribbean. So she walked with me, and when we walked behind one of the buildings lining the beach, we found a group of boys hanging out. She spoke to them in Créole. They each got a blank look on their face when she addressed them and answered, "I don't speak English." Then she'd try again. Apparently they just aren't used to hearing Créole with an Irish accent! After a couple of tries they realized what she was saying and answered her.

She wondered who owned the building now. She said that it used to be the back porch of a nice hotel, and you could come there and sit and have tea, and look at the Caribbean. It's still a nice setting, but all broken and messed up, like so many other things here, and completely littered with trash. Digicell owns the building out front that faces the street. If they own the back, too, they should make it nice so people could come sit there again.

Harsh Realities

2009-02-11T10:01:00.000-08:00

I have mentioned how out front is a big bus stop, essentially. 'Tap taps' are pickup trucks- often Toyotas- with a narrow benches on either side for those lucky enough to board early enough to get a seat. After that, it's SRO as they fill in the middle and sometimes you will see people and things on the roof of the cab. The notion of a small pickup being a half ton truck is an absurdity.

So there is a continual coming and going in front of school. Just moments ago, I heard a pig squealing and screaming. Those of you who know me know I could very easily turn vegetarian, especially if I had to have anything to do with the killing end of the meat preparation. I really thought this hog was being butchered right there by the charcoal sellers. I went reluctantly over to the window and looked out and realized the guy was tying the hog up to take it home on the tap tap. Either he bought it at the market, or he brought it to town and didn't get the price he was hoping for.

So. I am so glad he didn't butcher the hog before the gates of the school. AND I am also glad that I am not riding home in a tap tap with an unhappy pig screaming at my feet. And since this particular pig has caught my interest, I will send up a wish that it's a she, going home to her new home in the mountains, to live a long and happy life as a mommy pig.

Dust, or, Why They Don't Just Slide Over in the Pew in Church

2009-02-09T11:44:00.000-08:00

The first time I went to church I noticed that it is not the custom here to just move over when someone wants to sit in your pew. If you want to sit in a pew that is already occupied, you might have to crawl over 6 or 7 people. No one minds, but at the same time they do not move down. This morning it finally dawned on me: Everyone, man or woman, as they enter the pew, pulls out a hanky or cloth and wipes off the spot where they are about to sit. You want to wipe off the kneeler, too. And once you've gone to the trouble, you're loath to move and give up this nice clean seat.

Everything is always coated with a fine layer of dust, every day. After just 3 or 4 days, the dust is thick. As soon as mass is finished in church, the sacristan covers the altar with a plastic tablecloth that he does not remove until a few minutes before the next mass.

Meritesse and Wilson

2009-02-09T11:32:00.000-08:00

Here is a picture of Meritesse and Wilson, the caretakers at the school. They rely on these two, especially on Meritesse, for pretty much everything. If I ask him for something and he doesn't know what I mean, he runs up the street and gets Dr. Mortel's sister, Dinah, to come over.

Meritesse only speaks Creole, but if I speak French slowly we can usually get along pretty well. For example, when I asked him to get the ladder to help me put up the mosquito net, he went over to the closet and got it right out, no problem.

There are big iron gates in front of the school, and one of the guys is usually always there on duty, or else they have it locked. One of the first nights, when Jeff was still here, we met so many nice people at Foun's around the corner, and talked and talked. We forgot to say we would be late. We had to bang and bang on the gate to wake Wilson up and let us in. So now I try to tell them what time I am coming back if I go out at night.

On Friday morning I went to the market and I bought two carnival masks. "How much were they?" Elizabeth, the secretary, wanted to know. They were 250 Gourdes each. Her eyebrows went up and she shook her head. "Maybe for both of them, but not for one! You must get Meritesse to go buy things for you." I had a fruit in the bag, too, something like a grapefruit. They call it 'chaday' or something like that. I had to admit that I gave 10 gourdes for the chaday. Elizabeth looked at me and I could see the disappointment on her face. "You should never pay more than 5 gourdes for one." (Which equals what they call 1 Haitian dollar.)

A little bit later Meritesse brought me a glass of juice that Sister Marie Bernard, the principal, had sent up for me. It was yellow, and I asked him if it was juice from the chaday. "Yes," he said, and could not resist raising a finger and adding, "One dollar!"-- so I knew that Elizabeth had been filling him in about my shopping excursion.

Saturday Market

2009-02-07T10:30:00.000-08:00

The market directly in front of the school is open every single day, but it's busier on the weekend. The people can buy everything here, all their food, and household goods and even little furniture, clothes, shoes, everything. Even charcoal stoves and charcoal to cook with. Across the street from the school, behind where the charcoal sellers sit, is the mechanics' shop. I believe they store their tools in the house behind them, and they work on the cars and the tap taps and motorcycles right there in the street.

I went out on Saturday to buy a few vegetables. They are often arranged in little pyramids, little piles, on the ground. I tried to buy only three tomatoes out of a pile, and was not getting anywhere with that. I think if I had known some creole I might have been able to speak a little more. Eventually I did get a lady to let me buy two little eggplants, instead of five, but I did wind up buying more tomatoes than I wanted. Plus, I am sure I paid too much; Jeff said the ladies were winking and smiling at each other. As we walked away, he said that tomorrow there might be a crowd of women waiting at the gates to sell me tomatoes. I may ask a student to do my shopping from now on.
A note about the ladies, carrying everything on their heads. Just this morning I passed a

woman on the street carrying a basket of green beans on her head. It was loaded up so heavy, the beans were piled high and hanging over the sides; it was probably two feet tall and two fe

et wide. And she was walking so elegantly and smoothly not one bean fell off. No hands. I just read a post by an American woman who is a mother of a one year old. They live near St. Marc and build clean water systems in the mountain areas. She said her daughter is beginning to walk- and she is trying to carry things on her head. How cute is that? Her mom wrote that she never does it; her daughter must be watching the women she sees around town. The men all use wheelbarrows to carry their stuff. You never see a man balancing anything on his head.

Ma Moustiquaire

2009-02-04T12:44:00.001-08:00

Here is my moustiquaire, or, as they say in Créole, mustiké. Créole is totally phonetic, like Spanish, and sounds a little choppier to me than French. On Saturday night there was a storm, into Sunday morning, and this awakened lots of mosquitoes. In addition, I would leave my bedroom door open. As there are doors left open downstairs during the day, a lot of flying bugs can come in. At any rate, Saturday and Sunday night were big mosquito nights. Think Canada on our summer fishing vacation. So Monday I went out looking for a mosquito net. They were right on the shelf in the grocery store. This is actually a really big one, for a whole family to sleep under, I guess. I think I could put the other twin bed in my room under it as well.

Meritesse, who is one of the caretakers here at the school, and practically lives here, installed it for me. Just as he was bringing the ladder up the stairs (I'm on the third floor) Dinah and her cousin Nancy came up to say hi. So you can picture poor Meritesse high on a ladder, and three women directing him, a little to the left, make the string looser, not near the fan. He was cheerful through it all, however, and the result got pretty nice, don't you think?

The Kindergarten

2009-02-03T19:27:00.000-08:00

In my first kindergarten class this morning, the teacher was saying prayers with the kids as I entered. They had their heads down on the desk and they were reciting and answering. At the end she said something like, thanks be to God who is so good to us. And they said some response like, yes, thanks be to God. And the little charismatics in the class raised their hands up and waved them. There are a lot of evangelical churches here in Haiti. I noticed people in the Catholic church, too, raising their hands in prayer during mass.
It really gave me pause to hear and see that. Our students might not feel as though God had smiled on them. In the kindergarten there are 49 children in one classroom no bigger than 25 feet square. They fit three or four to a bench that two sit at in the upper grades. They get breakfast and lunch here, and an education to be envied, even among kids who do get to go to school. And especially envied by those kids I see walking around in the street during the day who do not get to go.
Today I taught the colors. I only had 15 minutes, so I made flash cards of the crayola 8 plus grey, pink, and white. We sang, to the tune of London Bridges Falling Down,
I know all my colors,
Red, purple, orange, brown.
White, grey, black, blue,
Green, pink, yellow.
They were able to sing along by the end of the 15 minute class; we will see if any sticks till next week. I need to go out into the schoolyard during recess, maybe some of us can sing it there. It is daunting for me to go out during recess; the kindergarten and first grade (96 students and 87 students respectively) are in the inner courtyard during recess so they don’t get mowed down by the older ones. They do not get out the jumpropes and balls and things like we did this summer during the camp I attended. I think there might be a theory that it is not good to get them too wound up if you are going to expect them to be orderly 10 minutes later. So they pretty much stand around. When I come out they surround me. Truly mob me, I mean like 10 or 20 all very close. I remember Jeff saying, tiny and well-meaning as they are, they can pretty well knock you over if you lose your balance. They are very fascinated by my skin, and will touch my arms.
Yesterday I went out and suggested to a teacher that we play the circle game, “Here we Go ‘Round the Mulberry Bush.” Without even knowing what I wanted, she very kindly offered to help me. I was thinking we could mime the ‘brush teeth’ and ‘comb hair.’ I thought maybe 10 or 20 could participate, but of course all 90 were interested. If you have ever tried to get ninety 5-year-olds to form a circle in another language (I don’t think their French is very good yet at this stage; they are mostly thinking in Créole) then you can imagine the mess. I am sure it looked exactly the same to an onlooker as when they simply mobbed me and we stood and smiled at each other.

New Life Village

2009-02-03T18:33:00.000-08:00

This is a little group of houses that you pass out in the country just before you come into St. Marc. Someone told me that about five years ago, during the flooding season, the river here in St. Marc backed up and made a deadly flood that killed a lot of people and destroyed a lot of homes. Nothing like what happened in Gonaives last summer and fall, but terrible nonetheless.
Food for the Poor collaborated with Broetje Orchards (I have no idea if that company operates here or just overseas. There are a lot of European Union countries that run projects here.) and they built this little development of houses. I know a couple who gave money to build one of them, and I wanted them to see it.
It looks like a nice place.

Too Much Food

2009-02-03T18:14:00.000-08:00

It is a sin to say it, here in Haiti, but I have way too much food. First of all, Dinah, Dr. Mortel's sister, is a fabulous cook. So she sends food. On Sunday, when Jeff was leaving, she made a special soup and sent it for breakfast. We were at church a long time (services are usually at least two hours long; Dr. Mortel says a Haitian feels cheated if he gets any less) and the ride to the airport came before he could eat very much. So I have some very good soup in the fridge, in addition to some of the other meals she made for us in the past 5 days. Pasta and rice and meat with sauces, especially bean sauce, all a little spicy with clove and other things- but not too spicy. It's very good.

Then there are the lunch ladies. They come Monday to Friday and make huge vats of soup or rice and beans, or maize, like yesterday. Really good, stew-type things I happen to like. So I give them a saucepan and say, "un petit peu, s'il vous plait," and they send that up, full. So now I have around ten containers full of meals in my refrigerator.

Meritesse, the caretaker here, just came up and asked me for a plate so he could bring me some lunch. I showed him my collection in the fridge and told him to tell them thanks, but not for a couple of days at least.

Jeff said, "Every time I come to Haiti I think I am going to lose weight, but I never do." I can easily see why.

Mornings at les Bons Samaritains

2009-02-01T17:36:00.000-08:00

Every morning the students line up by grade and slowly raise the flag as they sing the national anthem. After that they say prayers and then walk into school. It's solemn and serious. The school has gotten so big now that they don't all fit in the courtyard; the little ones in kindergarten and first grade are in the courtyard behind me.
They all wear uniforms; the boys have blue plaid shirts and navy pants, and the girls wear blue plaid blouses and navy jumpers and blue hair ribbons. The kindergarten girls wear a plaid dress- and a starched handkerchief is often pinned to the front.
The Mortel Foundation has just bought some adjacent properties and they are going to increase the size of this courtyard so the kids will have more space for activities.

Outside the School Gates

2009-01-31T19:44:00.000-08:00

This is the entrance to the school, which faces the market. Every morning, as it is getting light, people descend on the market with their things to sell. This area seems to be more about produce. Lots and lots of people with a few mangoes or oranges arranged on a blanket in front of them, for sale. Today I saw watermelons, tomatoes, and eggplants. A block over there are household goods like soap and dishes for sale, too. There is a little section just for charcoal. The white truck you see here in front of the school is being repaired; this is a streetside mechanic who works right in front of the school every day. Today I took a long nap. I was so tired I must have really been sleeping deeply. Jeff was talking to his family on Skype, he told me at supper, when there was an explosion from the mechanic's place in front of school. He said they must have been filling a tire that blew. His family thought it was a bomb. I never even woke up, and my room faces the street.
It is pretty safe here, except for the crazy motorcycle drivers. I will try to take a video of them sometime to show you. People tell us they are the most dangerous thing here. Last night at Foun's we were talking to different NGO workers who are here building things and trying to get community involvement and participation going. One of them said that Haiti is in the same level (of dangerous foreign places to be) as Iraq. She thought the danger was way overstated. "I mean, where are the IED's? Where are the landmines?" I had no idea Haiti was rated that low for safety. People everywhere have been so nice and welcoming.
We finally got to the grocery store today. I wanted to get coffee and milk, and oil and vinegar. Tomorrow I'll go to the market for a few fruits and vegetables. The common people buy almost everything in the market-- even staples like I bought today. On the way home, a woman passed me on the way to her market stand. She was carrying a big bucket, and in the bucket were 1 or 2-quart jars of all the kinds of things like I bought today- the oil, vinegar, vanilla, and so on. I guess if you want to buy that, rather than spend a lot of money on a quart, you would only buy a half cup or so-- just as much as you need. There are lots of stalls that have little piles of even something as small as boullion cubes, that you can pick up and buy one at a time.

First Day of Class

2009-01-29T21:51:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone!
We are getting ready to go meet some friends, after a very busy day. This morning I met Sister Marie, the principal, and got my schedule of classes to teach. I am to teach ESL on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. And they wanted me to start today!
So Jeff and I taught together. We did numbers with 4th, 5th, and 6th grade. We played ‘More or Less?’ the numbers guessing game. It was a nice start. The fourth grade has over 50 kids in it; the sixth and 7th grades are much smaller.
Then from 2:00 to 3:00 we had science class. This class I will teach every day with Wyteline, their Haitian science teacher. They are learning about the properties of water right now. So we talked about ice, liquid and gas. We pretended to be water molecules and stood close to each other for ice and moved apart for liquid, and then further apart for the gas. It was fun.
Tonight we went to the Foun’s. Foun and his wife Maggie are Haitians who came home after living in the U.S. for several years. They have a beautiful restaurant around the corner from the school. I did not have coffee since Wednesday morning in the airport- and when I asked about it, Mrs. Foun sent up a pot of Haitian coffee, and milk, and raw Haitian sugar (the tan, crunchy kind). In her silver coffee pot and cream and sugar bowl from her house. It was sooo good. We still have not been to the store to buy groceries for the kitchen, so there won’t be coffee again tomorrow morning.
It is midnight now, and the dogs are barking again. They get very active at night. The electricity is off- it went off about 10PM tonight, and at Foun’s it was off maybe a minute and they started their generator, so it was on again and I forgot about it being off in the town. When we walked home (it’s only a block away from the school) the street was pitch black and quiet for once. Not one motor scooter to be seen or heard. Normally, all day long there is a buzz, like bees, and these scooters are everywhere zinging up and down the street, their drivers looking for riders, like taxi cabs. It was so nice to be out walking and not see any of them. The town goes to bed earlier if the electricity goes off.
It was so dark I went onto the balcony to look at the stars. The Milky Way is visible, and the stars all seem to glimmer.
I’ll try to post this before I go to bed.