A Thousand Little Tragedies

I was looking out over the gorgeous mountains on a pleasant day, surrounded by the singing of my coworkers and suddenly these words popped into my mind. A thousand little tragedies. Babies were dying because mom couldn’t make the eight hour trek to the nearest hospital. Women were being abused and had no recourse to do anything about it. Hundreds of thousands of children with no money for school would never know the joy of getting lost in a book or the satisfaction of putting pen to paper.

And yet, there is dancing and singing and laughing and praying. There is love and marriage and parents cooing over first steps. There are games of soccer, girls doing their hair to impress that boy they like, women who will cook for days to prepare for guests. There are mountains that approach the sea, sunsets that will take your breath away, and more stars than I have ever seen in my life.

Yes, there are a thousand little tragedies in Haiti and they are easy to identify and focus on. But there are people who endure them with joy and hope because there are also the thousand little miracles of life. Haitians certainly know how to celebrate life… stay tuned to hear about Carnival!

Sunrise on the beach during the nursing school staff retreat this weekend in Port Salut. Three days full of strategic planning, brainstorming, and great team building! It is truly a pleasure to work for FSIL because of the ownership that the staff and students feel for the school. All but a handful of the staff are FSIL graduates and they are willing to work very hard to make sure that the next generation succeeds.

We had dinner on the beach the last night and drank from coconuts to the music of a traditional band. The Dean made sure everyone was up and dancing by the end! 

How does that work?

How does your Cell Phone Work?

Almost no one in Haiti has a credit card, but almost everyone has a cell phone. So how do you create this system?

There are two rival cell phone companies in Haiti, Digicell and Natcom (think AT&T and Verizon). It is incredibly inexpensive to text/call within your own network, but the prices are much higher to call someone on a different network. Therefore, you will often see people with two cell phones, one Natcom and one Digicell.

Picture of a PapadapI took from the Internet :) 

When you want to add money to your cell phone, you walk out on street and look for a person with a red vest that say “Papadap” on it. Here in Leogane, you can’t throw a stone without hitting one of these guys. You hand him however much money you want to put on your phone + 10% and he sends you minutes from his phone. It has not caught on as much here in Haiti yet, but in other developing countries, cell phone credit is increasingly being used as an almost credit card: you buy a goat by sending minutes to the vendor.

Cell phone coverage is incredibly inexpensive and on a pay-per-use basis. I probably pay about $8 a month for hours of air time and nearly unlimited texting.

How does electricity work?

The Haitian power company cannot make enough electricity for its customers, and that is before you take into account the plentiful illegal wire splitting. The result is frequent, many hour long power outages. This changes life significantly. I remember explaining the idea of “Leftovers Night” to someone. They were very confused because you certainly wouldn't trust a fridge to keep food here for multiple days!

We are spoiled at the school with a generator that we can run a couple of hours a day and an inverter, which is basically a large battery pack, that we can use to keep a limited number of devices operating when the power goes out.

How does food shopping work?

The market, again taken from Google Images 

 Again, I am spoiled that most of my meals are made for me in the cafeteria and the extent of my shopping is for snacks. There are no grocery stores outside of the well-to-do portions of major cities. Instead, you do all of your shopping in the market, meaning you are hauling your chickens and skinned goats around a hot, buggy area without the wheelie carts (or space to wheel anything) that I would take to a farmers market back home. When you buy things like oil or flour, they will be poured from a large container into a smaller plastic bottle (usually a recycled water of Coke bottle) or a pink-striped plastic bag. Markets are largely dominated by women, who do both the buying and the selling. While the big market days in Leogane are Wednesday and Saturday, you can buy stuff there any day. 

I Interrupt Your Normal Sunday Programming...

...to bring you two great pictures.

Yes, those are chickens. 

How many Haitians does it take to braid all of this hair? 3. 

A Day in the Life

In Celebration of my student's homework assignment this week (they are practicing present tense vs. present progressive [I sing vs. I am singing]) and as a reason for me to take more pictures, I present to you a Day in the Life of Julie Burd from Tuesday, February 4!  

 I awaken to see the sun just peeking through my mosquito net, listening to the cows mooing and birds squawking.  You have to get up pretty early to fit a run in before the sun gets too hot! 

The sunrise is without fail cool every morning. See those mountains? Aren't they gorgeous? 

Tuesday breakfast is peanut butter and banana sandwiches and fresh juice. Today's extra special treat was clementines! 

I head to my desk at FSIL at 8:00 and have about 45 minutes to kill before heading off to teach my first class, so I usually use this time to get caught up on grading. Love me some red pen! 

On Tuesday mornings, I teach my once a week high school English class at the Episcopal High School in town. You can see how thrilled the students were here... probably should not have taken pictures during a quiz! 

The school, like almost all high schools in Haiti, does not have a copier, so everything has to be written on the board and copied. This causes exactly as many disciplinary problems during a quiz as you imagine. 

The high school is on the same campus as my church and when I first got here, I could not understand why there were plastic water bottles EVERYWHERE. The explanation comes during one of my favorite parts of my days at Sainte Croix, which is the 10 minute break between 2 classes. The elementary school boys come out and play a version of soccer with empty bottles all over the field. I forgot to snap a picture of this, but here are the remnants! So much fun to watch all of their energy! 

The view leaving the school. As you can see, the classrooms (on right) are all temporary structures. It is definitely a challenge teaching (and I would imagine learning) with no dividers/noise barriers between rooms and I imagine it is going to be pretty toasty come spring. But they have a school and are able to get an education, so it is all good. 

Oops... the small car went to Port-au-Prince for the day so I got a bus to myself for the 5 minute ride back to FSIL for lunch! 

It is off to the hospital in the afternoon, where I am trying to get the stock into something that resembles an order. Need a face mask? I think I have one for every resident of the greater Leogane area. 

I BUILT THIS. And by build this, I mean I constructed it IKEA style from pre-assembled parts and with clear photo instructions. But it was still cool. We were sent 12 of these "Personal Energy Transporters" and no one had any idea what they were. I discovered it is a device with substantial wheels that you power with your hands. Quality control needed to test it up and down an abandoned hall... a shame no one walked in on me doing this since I build the child's size and looked pretty silly, but I had a good time! 

I did not think that we would make the best use of them in Leogane so we made contact with the team at Saint Vincent's, the Episcopal School and Orphanage for the Blind and Handicapped in Port-au-Prince (the only school for the blind in the country!). Their kids will love flying around on these! 

At the end of the work day, waiting for the bus home with the nursing students returning from clinicals. 

In the evening, it was time for a little tutoring...

Plus some time on the internet and a little bit of table tennis! 

As the day wrapped up, it was time for shower number 2. Shower number 1 is your traditional morning shower, shower number 2 is the Haitian specialty to remove the grime of the day and the bug spray, and to cool you down before bed! 

I realized circa November that I was not being a faithful journaler. So I took on the Happiness Project, which was started by someone to make people happy or something like that. For me, it means write down 3 good things that happen every day before I get into bed.   

Bedtime reading! Thank goodness for Kindles! I have read through my book collection and am happily taking suggestions for new ones... here is Katie Webb's choice! 

And there you have it, a day in my life! Thanks for reading!