Hey folks, I’m back from Haiti. Ain’t that crazy?
So much happened, so much to tell, and I’m just so lazy :) You should all come to the high school on sunday at 11. The whole haiti team will be sharing about the trip, it’ll be really interesting.
I’m basing this off ToD’s Haiti Log, because I attempted to keep a log similar to it, but feel behind and eventually dropped my palm in the ocean, and now it’s gone missing, along with some other stuff. (hello haitian baggage handlers).
Saturday was departure. We were supposed to be at church by 6:15, so that meant getting up at like, 5:30. I had stayed up late the night before packing, so I relished my sleep. I took a shower and put the rest of my toiletries in my bag. I was going to shave, but I had to wait for my face to fully dry (it works best that way). But i ran out of time and had to get to church, so I left home, unshaven.
We threw our suitcases in the trailer, put our carry on bags in one of the vans (my carry on is actually bigger than my suitcase, which sucks). Vans were pretty crowded, I started out between Tod and Marv Fischer (mike’s dad). Pretty cramped, but things got better as we figured out what was comfortable, and people switched seats and stuff like that.
The drive was pretty boring until you get to at least Kentucky. Mountains and stuff to look at, because Michigan is already familiar, and Ohio is just flatland. Boring.
On Sunday is when we start to lose track of time, because all the days are just travel, nothing is ordinary. For example, this was Sunday, yet we didn’t go to church. We just drove the rest of the way to miami, from Georgia. Two very long states. People passed the time by one-upping each other’s high scores in DopeWars on my palm. Great stuff. The highest on the van ride down was about 1 million, by Poplawski. Bebe (PJ’s [youth pastor] fiance, actual name ‘Beth’) slightly objected to our buying and selling drugs, so we started calling it StockWars, whereby the drugs were just acronyms of stocks, and you bought and sold them on several different markets. “WEED” was Wesylyan Extrordinary Extranet Developers or something, and I don’t remember any of the others. It was funny.
We drove around Miami International Airport, and in the our excitement, tried to run over a chicken that was running around outside the airport. PJ didn’t really want to get blood and feathers all over the rented van, so we barely missed it. Drove around Miami Beach looking for a hotel and settled on a Days Inn, but it was full and pretty far from the airport, so we went further in land and found a really nice posh one that was cheap.
Our flight left Miami for Port Au Prince at 8:30am, so that means we had to get up at 4am and get out of the hotel and to the Airport by 5, to check in, check the luggage, and get to the gate. Airlines always book more seats than the flight can handle, because they know some people won’t show up. So if you’re not there on time, then you might get bumped, even though you bought a ticket. So we got all that taken care of and then sat around the gate for about an hour. We all got on the plane, no problem. I sat next to V (Virginia) with shelly across the aisle. It was a small DC9, and the flight was only an hour and a half. I checked both bags so I had no carry on luggage to deal with. I brought my palm, but didn’t use it. The flight was great, I love flying. I hadn’t done in in like 10 years. We flew over the ocean for awhile (of course), passing over tons of little islands (it’s the carribean) and over the domican republic to circle around and land on Haiti, in the capital of Port-Au-Prince. Here’s a map.
Stepping off the rear of the plane onto the tarmac at the airport was interesting. Usually you get on to the jet way, the covered walkway from the plane to the gate, but in haiti, you just walk down the steps and walk across the tarmac to the doorway. It was pretty hot, but not unbereable. There was a breeze, as there was all week, but the sun was bright since we’re a couple hundred miles closer to it, and nearer the equator. We went through immagration and then got our bags. We all put red tape on them, then just pulled any bags off the carosel that had red tape on them. Nobody lost anything and we rented some carts and went outside. There was a long covered pavillion jam packed with haitians, waiting for their people. We felt like celebrities, there were so many people watching us. I felt nervous at the airport because the night before, PJ had talked to us about it and what to expect, and it was a lot to remember. Lots of people milling about, tons of guys outside who want to help us carry our luggage and then expect payment for it. We had to fend them off and had several of our own people covering our baggage so they couldn’t pull it off and try to carry for it us. They’re just so nice, heh.
Brian Shipley, the missionary our chruch sponsors, wasn’t there immediately to pick us up, so we waited around for 45 minutes in the sun, drinking in the sites, the sounds (Creole), and everything. Brian eventually showed up in this great air conditioned bus that some guy and given them 40,000 to buy. It was a real blessing to have it, and the trailer attached to it. We got it packed up, picked a seat, and then drove to a Shell (!) station where we got “Cokes”. Brian was real big on buying us “Cokes”, trying to make us feel at home. To them, I think everything is a Coke. It was really nice of him, plus we got to use the bathroom as we didn’t really want to on the plane or at the airport. The coke cans were old style cans, wider and shorter. Mine was bottled in Puerto Rico and shipped to Haiti. Copyright 1997.
The drive to St. Marc (see the map) was
about 2 hours. It’s that thin red line on the map. We drove through several villages, and the road was even paved for a good bit of time. Brian told us that it got paved when he was gone for a year back in the states (he just got back to haiti as well), so it was a decent road. In some places it was still dirt, and pretty bumpy. In Haiti, there aren’t too many cops around, so the drivers regulate themselves. If you, the driver, hit a pedestrian, you can be killed. So when driving through villages where there are always people milling about, if you honk your horn, you warn the people that you’re coming. They expect it, and every driver honks at you on the road and in the car. If they honk and you get hit, then it’s your fault. There are no speed limits, but people can’t go very fast (the bus couldn’t go over 50), since the roads aren’t that great.
Lots of great scenery. The road follows the coast for awhile so on the left is the cean and that great big island, Ile de la Gonave, and on the right are some low mountains covered in scrub and bare in lots of places. They used to be covered in rees, but 95% of the forest has been cut down to make charcol, which is what everybody cooks with. Also, they make cement and concrete blocks from the stone in the mountains, so large swaths of quary are visible. All the houses are made out of cinder blocks and concrete. Really sturdy stuff. Only the most poorest housing is made of wood and palm branches.
Anyway, we got to the base sometime in the afternoon, like around 1 or something. Haiti isn’t on Daylight Savings like Michigan is, they’re an hour behind our time when we’re on EDT.
We unloaded our stuff and moved into the dorms. It’s really just one big building, with the front door opening up into the side of a hall. Go across the hall and you enter the “porch” area, which wide steps that go upstairs, the office on the right, and the porch on the left where we ate meals. Down off the porch and further to the left is the long low building that housed the kitchen, dining room, storage room, living quarters for one of the haitian families that works there, and then the school office, and like, 4 or 5 classrooms. Upstairs in the main building are the dorms. The stairs split off and go back over the main stairs to the “living room”, which is just a room with couches and two doors on either side, one to the girls on the right, and guys on the left. In the dorms it’s pretty open, a short wall down the middle divides the bunk beds (3 beds to a bunk) from the “living room” which opens up onto a porch which lets you look out over the neighbors. The rest of the haitian staff members live there, most of them. There is a low building in the back of the base, at the end of the soccer field where some of the more senior staff life, like Luniz (Loo-nees). Roberteu and Evans and Ralph and the rest of them live in the dorm. But they sort of have their own “rooms” which are partitioned off by sheets, so they have some privacy. It must be kind of annoying for them to have a bunch of strangers invade their space every once in a while, stop up their toilets and make a mess :P
The “facilities” aren’t too shabby. As you enter the door, to your immediate left is a bunch of 4 sinks, and then a row of some random shower/toilet combinations, with curtains. The whole building is open to the air, there are no windows, just slits in the wall, and the roof is a couple feet above the walls. Rain doesn’t come in, so things don’t get wet. It’s very very nice to sleep in, there’s always a constant breeze. The plumbing there was old and water was supplied by a pair of 50 gallon tanks on the roof, one for the guys and one for the girls. Showers are best taken in the evening because the sun has warmed the water all day, so the shower isn’t too cold. In the morning, it’s had all night to cool, so it’s pretty cold. The pressure in the toilets it’s very good, and they don’t want to waste water, so they say “If it’s Yellow, let it Mellow. If it’s Brown, flush it Down”. We added our 2nd verse and turned it into a song, “If it’s Green, that’s Obscene, if it’s Black, send it Back”. They thought that was pretty funny. Basically, if you urinate, let it sit until it smells, if you poop, flush it, but throw the toilet paper away, don’t flush it. If you clog the toilet, work at it until it goes down, or get Roberteau to help you.
Anyways, I don’t remember exactly what we ate, you can check on
HREF=”http://foxxo.net/news-haiti.htm”>Tod’s trip log for that. But meal time was always fun. It’s served buffet style, where you get a plate and utensils and a cup and stand in line, then you get your food. They always had popcorn at every meal (they must think americans are psycho about popcorn or something, but heck, it was good), and usually we had rice with some chicken chunk stew. It was always good, but you had to be careful about the random bone shard in the meat, because they just hack the chicken up, bones and all, and throw it in the pot. The only really good thing i remember having was this bread that was like, deep fried. It was the night we had fried chicken, and it looked like fried chicken but it was bread. Oh man, it was so good. Felt like I was gonna have a heartattack right then and there. Cleaning up after dinner was easy as heck. You had to do your own dishes, but they had 3 sinks of water. You scraped off your scraps into the trash, then rinsed the dishes in one sink, washed them in the next, and just dipped them in water with bleach to sanitize them, in the last sink, then put them up to dry. Easy as pie.
So, after we got unpacked in the dorms, they immediately put us to work. The “base” (and it really isn’t a base, just 3 or so acres with a wall around it) hosts a soccer tournament which is pretty important to the community, and Monday (when we arrived) was the first day of it. We hauled 6 platforms out of storage and around the main building to the soccer field, which took up the majority of the 3 acres. We put ‘em down two on each end, and two in the middle, and tied rope between them, then hauled another one across the field to the center, for the announcer. Then i got to work on setting up the sound system. The base had everything we needed, but we had to do it in a sort of round about way, because of some crucial adapters that we didn’t have. But we got it up and running, and Ralph, the haitian who was announcing, started kicking out the old school Kirk Franklin on cassette. The musical selection was pretty 80s, but we did catch some Nelly and Destiny’s Child being played during the games, throughout the week.
After we got that set up, the game was starting and it was getting crowded. The winning team from last year was playing, and there was only one game that day. Every other day there were two. The thing that surprised me most about the haitian people that came to the games, was how well they dressed. They must have thought the game was some big social event, because everybody was out in force sporting Tommy Hilfiger, FUBU, stuff like that. You don’t see them wearing that along the streets, they really value their social gatherings. The girls want a guy really bad, so they’re always dressed to kill, and the guys match them. It’s just wierd. But, just as wierd again, is that the father doesn’t stay around, and it’s really rare for people to get married. Just in, out, make the kid, go find somebody else. The mom raises the kid and then lets ‘em go. They get lots of affection at a young age, and then just completely turn around and ignore the kids.
My job during most of the games, being a buy, was to wear the “Securite” badge and keep people out of a certain area. Like, they weren’t allowed back behind the trailer where the work area was, and they weren’t allowed up on the porch area and couldn’t pass the line that sepertated the crowd from the field. It was kind of funny. In a country of all black people, 19 white people show up and the puniest of them all (me) is assigned to work security and keep them in line. They don’t listen too much. They knew where they weren’t supposed to go and most stayed out, but some tried to run through the work area, and what are we gonna do? We learned a few phrases in creole like, “Stop”, and “Don’t do that” and “Don’t go there”, but they ignored us and just ran through. And when the nice wind storm came later in the week, I was assigned to keep them off the porch, but they all took shelter from the rain there. Lotta help I am, for sure.
Anyways, after that first game of the week, we picked up trash and stuff cleaned up the field. We (the girls) sold concessions during the game, so tehre were bags of water (as opposed to juice boxes and stuff) and styrofoam cups to pick up and throw away. As i was bending down by one of the platforms to pick up some trash, a kid leaned down by my hear and whispered “Blanc”, then he and all his friends died laughing. I thought it was pretty funny, because it was just like PJ said, they would call us Blanc (white), as a racial slur. I mean heck, I’m white, yeah, I’m not offended, so I was laughing along with ‘em. Anyways, after we cleaned up, it was time for dinner, and then we had orientation where we were told what to expect, how to behave, and what work was gonna be coming our way. For example, we
were introduced to how haitians act towards foriegners. Like, you have to make the first move in establishing a relationship. Otherwise, they just give you a blank stare, really makes you feel like an outsider. But if you smile, they’ll smile back, and if you wave, they’ll wave back. They’re really very friendly people once you get past that initial unfriendlyness. And, like, how americans wave, by flapping their hand from left to right and stuff, that’s haitian from “I don’t need/want you”, like your waving them away. We did that at the airport to
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