It's All in the Circuitry

     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

     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

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 on Kenscoff later.

More Rain Than They Can Use at One Time

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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!

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!

  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

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

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

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

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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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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.