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.