Two years ago today

Two years ago today, about 4:30 p.m., I was headed home to my campo house in El Limon, when I got a text from David. It said something like, “If I’m not mistaken, that was an earthquake.” His house in San Francisco de Macoris was shaking, so much that he went to stand in a doorway. In the hours that followed, I learned from my mom that it was the worst case scenario. It wasn’t  a small earthquake in San Francisco de Macoris, in the heart of the DR, but rather, an enormous quake a few miles from Port-au-Prince, a seismically vulnerable, teeming city in an already struggling country.

That moment sent off a chain of events that ended with me taking a bus with Mittens to Port-au-Prince on a day in May 2011 when most of my Peace Corps friends took planes home. I arrived after a nearly 12-hour bus ride in downtown Port-au-Prince, right next to the still-collapsed presidential palace, where a lone blan was waiting for me.

In the weeks after the earthquake, Peace Corps DR volunteers festered under the ban against traveling to Haiti imposed by Peace Corps headquarters. Being there for supposedly humanitarian reasons and so close to the disaster, we couldn’t understand why we were doing nothing to respond. We wondered why Peace Corps administration didn’t react more quickly and find ways for us to contribute. David ended up working with Plan International, which was coordinating a huge shipment of emergency supplies, and he coordinated hundreds of volunteers for a week to send kits with food and other necessities like soap and tarps across the border. Peace Corps finally sent waves of volunteers with Creole training to translate and handle logistics at a hospital in Jimani, the Dominican border town closest to Port-au-Prince, which was flooded with earthquake victims in need of emergency medical care such as amputations.

Now, after about seven months in Haiti, the earthquake looms even larger with the stories of people I’ve met. Reflecting on today, I think of my friends who have shared their earthquake experiences with me. A friend who was trapped in rubble for hours with colleagues digging her out while her husband rushed to find her. A couple who held each other to stay upright as they staggered out of their house, then stayed in Port-au-Prince to help in the relief effort. My boss at the nonprofit I work for, who fell out of a second story building and broke her back. A reporter friend who flew into Santo Domingo, crossed the border in northern Haiti, and then hired a school bus to drive him directly to Port-au-Prince. The bus driver refused to take him all the way to Petionville, he was so afraid to be in the city. The most haunting image that comes to mind thinking about this day is our friends Ben and Alexis’s description of the mass migration of people after the earthquake. Fearing a tsunami, hundreds of people walked on foot away from the slums of Port-au-Prince’s waterfront downtown up toward the mountains and Petionville, the hub of the elite. Now that I live in the city, I can picture it – total blackness, masses of people, stunned but survivors.

Anniversaries cause us to look back, but in this case the just thing to do is to look at where we are today. The aid response, judging by the 500,000 people still living in tents and others who have been forced out through government evictions, has been a failure. I believe some organizations, including the microfinance institution David and I work for and Partners in Health, are doing good work. It’s still wholly inadequate. One of the biggest consequences of the international intervention in Haiti has been the outbreak of cholera, brought here by UN Peacekeepers. Any of the progress made through international organizations pales in comparison to the death of more than 6,000 Haitians and a disease that will become endemic to a country with no water and sanitation system to speak of. The vast majority of aid has circumvented the Haitian government, which does nothing to strengthen the government and provide better public services.

What to do? I believe a good place to start is to be informed. I suggest you check out Ben and Alexis’s blog, which has a good summary of articles about the anniversary, and if you read nothing else, this op-ed about how Haiti “can be rich again.”

The fe bagey mystery

We live in a simple flat in a middle to upper class neighborhood in Port-au-Prince. It’s not Petionville, where all the aid workers and rich Haitians live. It’s Delmas 65, in the middle of the city, where dust makes a thin crust on allour belongings and it’s blazing hot in the summer. These days there a little coolness to the air when we wake up, usually pretty early.

One reason for that is the early morning ruckus. People always say Haitians get up early, but the reality is the sun rises early in Haiti. We’re on central time, for some odd reason, despite being east of Florida. Our street is a lively one, with an open market where we buy our vegetables, eggs, and non-perishables like tomato paste and spaghetti noodles. People sell on foot, too, carrying their goods on their heads and calling out what they’re selling in a loud, weird voice. I have to think it’s a way of marketing, that each seller has their own distinctive megaphone, so that we residents of the houses grow used to their promotions and are ready to buy when our favorite merchant comes by. A lot of what they’re selling we still haven’t figured out. We’re pretty sure there are lots of folks selling lottery tickets, but I couldn’t tell you what they yell in Creole. Charcoal, or “chabon” is a popular one, so much so that we can’t say the word “chabon” without wanting to yell it out in the style of the women selling it. 

There’s a man who comes by our house around 6 a.m. with a particularly booming call. We can hear him getting close, and then we get a full blast right by our window, and then he fades away. It sounds like he yells “fe bagey” in Creole. Because his voice is so clear, we’ve been wondering for weeks what he’s selling. We’ve been thinking of asking a Haitian, but were a little afraid they would think we were saying “fe bagay,” which means, “do it.” This weekend, we even asked our friend Ira, an anthropologist who’s been in Haiti since 1972 and hasn’t not known an answer to our questions yet. Even he was stumped. He said something like, “I’ve been here for forty years, I’m a ph.D. trained anthropologist, and I still don’t know all of what they’re selling. You’ve got to just ask somebody in the neighborhood.”

So yesterday we heard the voice again. We were up super early. David ran to the window and looked out.

“It’s pen (bread) baguette! Pen baguette!” he repeated, in the robotic monotone of the merchant. I couldn’t believe it. We’d heard it so many times and repeated it so many times as “fe bagey” that I couldn’t imagine it as pen baguette, especially because I was so astounded and delighted that there would be a man selling baguette on our street every morning. As we were stuck in two hours of traffic last night, the thought was still with me. “I can’t believe it’s been baguette this whole time. We could have been eating baguette every morning.”

This morning I was in bed, pretending like I had a chance of going back to sleep after Mittens woke us up with her naughty head stuck in a plastic grocery bag, when I heard the voice. I ran to the window and over our front wall saw just the top of a man with a stuffed rice sack on his head. I hollered “Misye, n ap prann yon pen!” (mister, we’ll take a bread!). He didn’t hear me. I was so disheartened. Then about five minutes later, we heard it again. He was coming back down the street! I ran again to the top of our stairwell and yelled out the same thing through the bars. This time he heard me.

“Où es-tu?” That’s French for “Where are you?” I don’t know if he spoke French because he could tell by my voice I was a foreigner, and I assumed I’m a French speaker as many people do, or if that would be his response to anyone.

“Ou ka tann nou?” I responded. Wait for us?

I grabbed money from David and hustled down the stairs. There he was, standing outside our gate. “Ou gen pen, pa vre?” I said. (You have bread, right?) It was true. He said, “wi, pen baguette, 25 gourdes.” That’s how we bought a fresh baguette for about 50 cents this morning. And solved a mystery.

 

Nouvel pa nou (our news)

Prof. Muhammad Yunus, David and I at the Mirebalais Partners in Health hospital

I can’t believe it’s been five months since I packed Mittens and all my belongings onto an overloaded bus to Port-au-Prince, arriving 10 hours later next to the collapsed presidential palace in a hubbub of vehicles and pedestrians where a lone blan was waiting for me.

I’ve been bad about blogging, and the excuse I’ve given myself, at least, is that I feel like Haiti is a harder place to write about than the DR, because the story is always more complicated and so many people so often get it wrong. On the other hand, it’s much more interesting than the DR and the last five months have been no exception. So for my return to blogging, I’d like to offer you a Haiti news roundup that I hope will help you understand a little bit of what’s going on in the place I’m calling home, for now.

• Cholera spiked again this summer with the rainy season, and the death toll in a year is now more than 6,000. If you hadn’t heard, it’s been pretty well confirmed that UN peacekeeping troops from Nepal brought the deadly disease to Haiti, which hadn’t seen the deadly disease in a century. The source was apparently a leaky septic tank on the UN base that infected Haiti’s main river system.
• Deeping Haitian resentment of the so-called peacekeepers were the accusations that Uruguayan troops in the southwest coastal city of Port Salut raped a young Haitian man.
• These two outrages, coupled with Haitians’ existing belief that the UN presence violates the sovereignty of their country, led to demonstrations against Minustah, as the UN peacekeepers are known in Haiti. Some of these protests took place right outside the office where we work – David was out of town but my work day was interrupted by the sound of tear gas bombs, the smoke of burning tires, and people running down the street in front of the office to get away from the Haitian National Police.
• Meanwhile, in his third try, President Martelly finally nominated a prime minister that was approved by Haiti’s Parliament. This was a big step forward for the government because now all the other officials can be named, allowing projects and policies to get moving again. Keep in mind, Martelly’s election was now a full year ago and Haiti’s just now getting a government in place.
• Journalist and Haiti circles went wild after a magazine published a controversial piece by Mother Jones reporter Mac McClelland, in which she used Haiti for a backdrop for her diagnosis of PTSD and, she says, recovery through enacting a rape fantasy. A group of women, including some friends of ours, wrote a letter objecting to the article’s portrayal of Haiti. Things only got worse for Mac when a lawyer for the rape victim she uses in the story revealed that Mac didn’t have permission to use the rape victim’s information the way she did.
• There has been some good journalism published about Haiti, including in Rolling Stone and by Pooja Bhatia.
• Most recently, Muhammad Yunus made his first trip to Haiti. I was lucky enough to attend a conference where he spoke on social business and then ride along for his foray into the Central Plateau, where he visited clients in the program David directs. Overall, we were really impressed by his story and his personality, which was friendly, humble, and funny. We also got to tour Partners in Health, which is ever-growing in the Central Plateau, with a fishery project to fight malnutrition and a huge teaching hospital that’s still under construction in Mirebalais.

Personally, life has gotten busy for me because of my now full-time communications work at the MFI where David works and my courseload of two classes that I have to work on in between blackouts at our apartment. We’re still hoping to get our fixed inverter back any day now! My Creole has improved enough for me to feel more confident talking to people, though our lifestyle still doesn’t allow for much Creole practice beyond chatting with the timachann (women merchants) we buy our vegetables from and the occasional chat at our office. Mittens is enjoying the freedom of being an indoor/outdoor cat, although a menacing boy kitty has lately been invading and eating her food. I think that’s about it for our news roundup. Thanks for reading!

The USA

On my first trip back to the United States in December of 2009, I had been in the Peace Corps for more than nine months. I wrote a blog post about America’s Top 10. Now that I’m on my fourth trip back, I thought I’d do another list, with a different 10 things. Here goes.

10. Prices – Somehow a lot of essentials are actually cheaper in the USA, at least relative to income.

9. Music – You hang out somewhere and you might hear a wide variety of music, much of it good.

8. Exercise space – I can jog without spraining an ankle.

7. Security – From the security of not living on a fault line to the security of knowing your government (or a foreign force) isn’t going to murder you, America feels like a safe place.

6. Being the center of attention. Something even moderately scandalous, like a congressman sexting, gets tons of media coverage and is immediately put to an end. Not the case in a country of little national interest to any other country, like Haiti, where scandalous things like camp evictions, fraudulent elections, the spread of cholera from negligent UN Peacekeepers, and the US-forced killing of the entire pork population happen with impunity.

5. Quiet – Sounds I don’t hear in America include roosters crowing, dogs barking, enormous trucks passing on tiny streets, people selling things outside our gate, and the hum of generators.

4. Sanitation systems – including potable water that doesn’t carry disease and a clean place to go to the bathroom.

3. The middle class – You don’t even notice how the vast majority of people in America are middle class until you see other places where the vast majority are poor or ultra poor.

2. Trees – There are lots of them in America, something I didn’t appreciate until I lived in a country that is something like 98 percent deforested.

1. Education – Everyone gets to go to school for free!

 

Independence Day at the ambassador’s

I thought the Fourth of July was going to pass with little or no recognition on our part. We knew of no Fourth of July parties – the closest we heard of was a celebration for Canada Day. But then, because we recently signed up to be wardens for the U.S. Embassy (an emergency notification system for American citizens) we were invited to the ambassador’s Independence Day celebration on July 8th. To say the least, it wasn’t our usual scene. We had to dust off the formal wear.

Because there were probably 500 or more people there, the embassy had set up a shuttle system. So we parked our car at a nearby American school, showed our invitations and passports, and climbed into a luxury SUV that “shuttled” us to the ambassador’s home. It was amazing to feel the difference between a vehicle built for Haiti’s roads and David’s little (but trustworthy!) Nissan Sentra! It was much smoother. We arrived and were greeted, given pins with the American and Haitian flags intertwined, and ushered onto a vast lawn with a full bar. We wandered around stalking hors d’oeuvres, talking to people (amazing how many I know in such a short time) and checking out the booths where different organizations and businesses were promoting their work. We talked to some folks from PSI, where I’m volunteering, Partners In Health and HELP, a cool organization that funds scholarships and guidance for Haitian students to go the university. We also said hello to the ambassador’s dog, Sophie, a beagle wearing a red-white-and-blue handkerchief for the occasion.

At 7 p.m. the Marines presented the flags and we listened to the Star Spangled Banner and the Haitian national anthem. The ambassador, who is said to have amazing Creole, gave a speech in French, followed by comments by the outgoing Haitian prime minister, who made a crack about the ambassador throwing a Fourth of July party on Haitian time (late). We toasted with champagne and watched an incredible fireworks display over our heads.

On Saturday, we went with about 20 people to camp on the beach in Petit Goave, a peninsula on the southern peninsula of Haiti. We ate seafood, drank Prestige, and camped on the beach. Not a bad Haitian time Fourth of July weekend.

Teaching, not copying

David sent me this interesting essay about teaching an illiterate Haitian woman the very first steps of learning to sign her name. It’s written by one of the case managers in Fonkoze’s program for the ultra-poor. Worth a read.

 

To the central plateau

View Larger Map

Yesterday I finished up meeting with PSI about volunteering for them and called David, who was in the Central Plateau for work. He suggested I take a tap-tap there, as he did, and hang out. It seemed unlikely. But then I thought, why not?

I packed my stuff up and went with my trusty mototaxi driver to Bel Air, a poor area of Port-Au-Prince that seemed to me particularly hard-hit by the earthquake. Historical looking buildings had half shed their concrete, but women selling goods were everywhere. I saw one particularly damaged building where the corner was sagging down, with loose concrete blocks looking like they would tumble onto the merchants below with the slightest shake (writing this makes me wonder whether this actually happened the other week when we had a tremor).

The mototaxi asked around until we figured out where to find the tap-tap for Mirebalais (smack center of the map). Manno (our motorcycle chofer) pulled me right up next to the tap-tap, not a colorful one like around Port-au-Prince but a comfortable minibus (until you pack it 140% capacity). While the bus filled with passengers, merchants came around the windows trying to sell water, candy, etc. Manno called to make sure I was OK. I assured him I was. It was just like the DR, and I thought how funny it was that I would be out of my comfort zone to take public transportation. As we got going, the other passengers started talking to the weird blan who was traveling with them. Of course a couple guys knew some English, so between my beginning Creole and their English, we managed to answer some key questions. Yes, I am American. I have not dated a Haitian. Why? Because I’ve been with my (American) boyfriend for almost two years and have been in Haiti less than two months. What do I think of security? It’s fine, for me. The Haitian man asking me this then scoffed at my answer.

Leaving Port-au-Prince for the Central Plateau is an illustration of Haiti’s devastated landscape. The valley of Port-au-Prince is empty on the north side before the mountains begin. On the edge is the government camp, Corrail, and its sprawling add-ons, that has turned out to be a disaster. Tents and improved tents dot the hillside as the mountains ascend. The area is totally deforested, and there are white streaks where the stone is revealed under the topsoil, I assume from extreme erosion. The road winds up the mountain with an impressive view of Port-au-Prince and the two lakes in the valley toward the border with the Dominican Republic. Then, once you’re into the mountains, the trees and green of the mountains appear. I passed two UN peacekeeping camps, one of which I’m pretty sure was the now-confirmed source of cholera in Haiti.

We stayed in a cultural center/hotel. It reminded me of another place we stayed in Beladere, on the border with Elias Piña in the DR. A hotel, in the middle of Haiti, where there are no tourists and precious few domestic travelers. The small city is dark at night, with few lights, and gives the feel of a ghost town. At our hotel, there were dozens of empty chairs lined in the hallway and, miraculously and mysteriously, hot water in the shower.

It was a short trip, but a great one. It felt good just to get around on my own again, through the same efficient public transportation system the locals use. I hope to do more of it as my Creole and my geography improve.