There is a goat. On the bus.

Greetings from a lazy Sunday in Haiti. For the first time since I have been here, the day is overcast, cool, and drizzly... I didn't think we could get weather like that here! Reveling in it but it is not helping my cravings for my fall time favorites of pumpkin spice coffee and fresh apples!

This weekend was quite an adventure! Friday morning, we left at 9:00 Haitian Standard Time (read 10:15) to head up to Cap Haitian to pick up the nursing students. The Dean thought that it would be a good chance for us to get to see some of the country, which it certainly was!

Here is a map to give you an idea. Bear in mind that Haiti is the size of Maryland. The trip took 10 hours.  

 Banana soda. Really just sugar in the bottle but it was fantastic!

 This is A PAVED ROAD. A beautiful paved road with no potholes, no speed bumps to veer around, lines, no puddles, a consistent speed, AND it was along the ocean. It was stunning. The major highways we were on between the outside of PaP and Cap were actually all pretty well maintained, though traffic patterns are very interesting here... I certainly will not be driving. 

The beautifully blue ocean.

 Driving through a town on the West coast.

 Rice fields in the north, as seen from the window the of the bus. A lot of rice now gets imported from the USA because it is less expensive, but Haitians maintain that Haitian rice is much more delicious... I need to do a side-by-side taste test!

 Rice fields leading into the mountains. You can see a little bit here how intense the deforestation is : the mountains were once covered in trees but were chopped down for the rich mahogany/fire wood. Now landslides are a very real problem in many places because there are not roots holding the soil down anywhere.

 But then sometimes it was so green!

 Dèyè mon gen mon: Beyond the mountains, there are mountains. It was a stunning part of the country to drive though as we turned east from Gonaives. 

 The mountains were really pretty.

 If you look very carefully, you can see a rainbow over the mountains!

 Cap is the historical center of Haiti, as it was the birthplace of the slave revolt. This is a statue memorializing the leaders.

And the Ferris wheel in front of the statue... 

No trip north would be complete without the great pleasure of visiting with these two! Kyle Evans is my old Youth Director from Trinity and is on a three year appointment in Haiti as a special assistant to the Suffragan Bishop of the North. Dan is here for 7 months, helping to come up with a strategic plan for schools in the north. It was so wonderful to catch up with them! 

We spent the night at a beautiful hotel in Cap. Those are the faces of two girls that slept in air conditioning!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is a picture of more of the mountains/a little bit of the hospital at Milot. The nursing students spend two months up there at what is considered one of the best hospitals in Haiti to learn some more advanced practices and techniques that they cannot learn at Sainte-Croix. The hospital was very nice and the students enjoyed their time there!

 Palais San Souci: The main tourist attraction in Haiti, we only got a passing glance, but I will certainly head up there again to get a tour!

Meet Kelly! Kelly is a recent University of Michigan Nursing School graduate and my roommate for the next 2 months. FSIL video conferences with University of Michigan for a community nursing class and Kelly is here to facilitate the process/learn more about nursing in Haiti/join me on my adventures!

The ride back south was nothing short of an adventure: the bus was full to bursting with people and things and every time the bus would stop, peddlers of any variety of goods would come shoving at the windows, trying to sell us whatever they had, including this awesome cassava bread of the north, 12 bananas for 50 cents, and any variety of fried food you could desire. Most notably, we wound up with both a live chicken and a dead goat in a bag on the bus with 6 hours left in the drive. Glad we had air conditioning!

Overall, it was a long trip but absolutely fantastic to get an overview of the country and to better be able to compare my regions to others!

Taking a nod from Heidi Galligan in Tanzania, my next blog post is going to be "Frequently Asked Questions," so leave a comment or send me an e-mail if you have any questions about my first 6 weeks in Haiti! As always, thank you to everyone for your love and support. 

Photo/Video Update

This is a casual afternoon rainstorm and a fairly light one at that. This is the view from my window.

During the Festival de Sainte-Croix last Sunday, 5 priests, including my priest, Pere Kerawin, were named archdeacons of different regions of the Diocese of Haiti. 

The festival was quite an affair! There were two times the number of people the church could hold for a 4 hour long service! I met the President of the Haitian Senate too!

Sainte-Croix used this day as a goal for fundraising. They had been promised many things by many groups after the earthquake that destroyed their school and church, but these promised donations have not come through. They desperately want a church and have been holding fundraisers and a special collection every week for the rebuilding fund. Their goal for the festival was to raise about $11,000 USD to start the construction. They exceeded that goal by a few hundred dollars and were very proud to lay the first stone of the new construction!

Bishop Duracin during the Festival de Sainte-Croix 

This week was the festival at an Episcopal church a few towns over. I went with students from the school, it was a lovely service full of music and dancing. Right before communion, they have representatives from the congregation dance forward goods from the field, to give thanks for the goodness of the earth. I was especially impressed with the woman that danced with the live chicken on her head and the man who had the honor of dancing with the goat on a leash! 

During the priests stay at the school two weeks ago, there was plenty of work to do in the kitchen and most of the staff got recruited. It was great bonding time and also a great introduction to Haitian cooking! Here, Alex demonstrates effective juicing techniques. I must have juiced close to 200 citrus fruits in those 4 days! 

 Have I mentioned that we get a beautiful sunset basically every night? There are no tall buildings here so the sky is just huge and on fire! Not pictured, I saw an incredibly bright shooting star last week: it was beautiful and I was so excited, I ran to tell someone! They were very confused why I was so excited: in Haiti, seeing a shooting star is a bad sign. Oops!

We have a lot of poultry that wanders the grounds. Occasionally they walk around the kitchen, I guess to understand their fate. I propose that we eat the large one on the corner next because he has a habit of hissing and chasing after people. 

Portrait: Pere Fernande

About once a month, in an attempt to offer you all an insight into some of the incredible people that I am meeting, I am trying to put together a portrait of a character: a revolutionary, a student, a thinker, a dreamer, one who is defeated, one who is loved. This first portrait comes as a result of a conversation I had with Reverend Fernande during the clergy meeting of mid-September.

She is one of those people whose energy you sense the moment she walks into a room. Not because of her clothes (standard issue lady-priest button down) or her looks (slightly gray, medium height Haitian) but because of the way her face moves. Her eyes are alight with ideas and her mouth is always curled up at the edge, seeming to understand a secret unknown to the rest of us.

Pere Fernande,  (yes they call her Father) was the first woman welcomed into the Episcopal Priesthood in Haiti. Her calling came when she was 12. Her father, also a priest, was shocked when this girl he knew to be quiet and timid was suddenly asking why the church was denying her her calling just because she wore skirts instead of pants.

She lived her life unafraid to be the only woman in the room. She studied law and economics, married, and had a family. She worked for the government and traveled to Germany.

The day of Bishop Duracin’s ordination as Bishop, she went to him and said, the Bible says men and women are both made in God’s image:  why can’t I do this. He said maybe. She waited 3 years for a response to her letter of intent. They asked her husband’s permission. He, an ardent supporter of her ministry, thought that this was silly.

After five years of seminary and until this day, she has been one of the priests at the Episcopal Cathedral in Port au Prince. She pushes the standards higher and higher at the Cathedral School, opening new grade levels and new opportunities for students. Her students are her pride and joy: she clearly takes delight in the men and women that they become. She celebrates mass in the Cathedral** and is often invited out to the countryside to journey by car, horse, and foot to reach distant parishes.

She does not sit still very well: her hands fly, she is up and down out of her seat, but you know that she is present: she is in that moment with you. She is a priest for the people.

She remained the only female priest at this meeting of the clergy, though there are two female deacons who should be ordained in the next few months and more women working their way through the seminary now. As she puts it: What is the center of Christianity? The resurrection. Without the resurrection, we have nothing. We have only normalcy. And who did God choose to carry the message that Jesus had left his tomb to his people? Two women.”

**Note: The Cathedral building fell in the 2010 earthquake and the reconstruction has yet to begin. The parishioners of the Cathedral continue to gather in a temporary structure. 

Old People Butt in Line and Other Musings

One of the things that surprises me most about Haiti are the similarities in silly little things between our culture and theirs: the last child, the baby, is spoiled rotten (thanks Mom!). Moms call to check and make sure that you are eating enough. Babies get cooed at with the same words in a different language. Students try to get out of taking exams.  People love their music and dancing.

And then there are some distinct differences:

Things happen in different places. We had a visitor from University of Michigan who wanted to buy some souvenirs, so I went along. FSIL staff took us to… someone’s house. The artist spread out her impressive display of wares on her bed. Their version of “fast food” is a “Friture,” where people flock to this woman’s stand full of all kinds of delicious fried things, from chicken to plantains. Some people wash clothing, dishes, and themselves at water pumps right next to the road.

There is no order to receiving communion. You go up when you feel like it in this hodge-podge mess that makes me pretty anxious. Old people butt right to the front of the line.

“Haiti time” means that 6 o’clock means 6… maybe 7… probably by 8. Really whenever you get around to it.

Haitians don’t go in the sun. Granted it is really hot but it is hilarious to see the lengths they will go to to stay under cover.

Everyone has prepaid cell phones. To recharge, you walk up to a man on the street wearing a red vest, hand him cash, and he texts you to add time. There are also booths with generators where you can charge your electronics if your power is out. 

Me, my carving, and the artist. One day I will learn how to hold things correctly in photos. I love the stone---it sort of looks like wood but is very heavy.

 Alex, the head of maintenance at the school, poses with the selection of carvings and paintings. Aren’t they gorgeous?
 

 I took a walk out to the ocean on Saturday. Check out those sailboats! They take quite a while to build but bring in some delicious fish. This is not one of the swimming beaches. I asked someone why not and they said “can’t you see how dirty the water is.” They forgot that I am from New Jersey J To get to the sea you walk through the sugar cane fields and life just gets a lot quieter. It was a definite contrast to the city of Léogâne.

 

I feel like I am getting into the groove of things here. I figured out how to go running which has been a definite improvement in my quality of life (and how much of this awesome food I am able to eat!) There are also gorgeous sunsets every night when it cools down enough to run… there is a whole lot of sky here. 

A Weekend in Port au Prince

I was invited by one of the staff at FSIL (Faculté Science Infirmier de Leogane,  the nursing school) to spend the weekend with her and her family in Port au Prince. It was a lovely weekend full of awesome food, nice people, and beautiful thunderstorms.

Port au Prince in general is full of life, with people everywhere and song and music streaming in the windows at all hours of the night. The government buildings, razed in the earthquake of 2010, are being rebuilt. People live incredibly close together and every inch of flat space is taken up by someone’s abode. Moving my luggage inside, I got caught in a soaking rainstorm. In a ten minute rainstorm, the streets became streams that people used to send garbage downhill. It is easy to see why a rainstorm of any length can cause massive destruction and sweep people away in a city with limited drainage. People sell everything on the sidewalks and in between cars from twine to baggies of water to fully cooked meals to shoes.

I have really enjoyed Haitian food so far (the Dean swears I must have some Haitian in me because of the amount that I can eat!) and I will be doing a detailed post about Haitian food in the near future. But my special treat this weekend was to go to the suburb of Port au Prince called Petionville where most of the Ex-Pats live. Here you can find restaurants that serve things like pizza, burgers and fries, and mozzarella sticks. I enjoyed chicken fingers, French fries, and Coke… tasted like home J Also around Petionville are a number of artisans selling traditional Haitian crafts like metalwork and straw weavings. I did not make any purchases this time around but enjoyed perusing!

Port au Prince at Sunset, looking out over the ocean 

French colonization left some great treats behind... like crepes. This one had ham and this awesome sauce that tasted strangely similar to Taco Bell's quesadilla sauce

Port au Prince by Day!