The Market, Continued . . .

   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!