Give Us This Day Our Daily Rice and Beans...

When people ask me what I will miss most about Haiti, the first thing that jumps to my mind is the food! It is so fantastic. Let me give you a little taste. 

Sunday lunch: rice, bean sauce, and some kind of fried meat. This week it was chicken, but often it is Grilot, which is fried pork. 

My favorite day of the week is Saturday because Madame Dominique, our wonderful cook/mom, makes me Fritay---an amazing spread of fried deliciousness. In the front, on the right, are fried plantains that you eat with Pickleys, a kind of spicy coleslaw. On the left is acra, which is made by grating a root vegetable, adding a bunch of spices and some dried fish, and frying it until it tastes like a gift from the gods. In the back are french fries! Don't worry, I was sharing with friends :) 

Mme Dominique, frying away! 

Breakfast and dinner aren't much to write home about--lunch is our big meal-- but I'll write home anyway. We have 2 of those rolls for each meal with margarine. At breakfast they'll throw in a banana, at dinner a bowl of porridge. 

Rice and beans with beef. It has an awesome, spicy sauce, so you cut up that sweet potato in the lower left corner (yes, a purple sweet potato) and eat it together---so good! 

This is one of my favorite dishes --- Mais with sauce pwa et legume. The yellow stuff is corn meal grits, which you load down with bean sauce. The stuff on top, though not the most visually pleasing, is a mixture of vegetables and meat with the most pleasing spice combination. It is super good.

Other foods we eat each week include Friday fish, Sunday Pumpkin soup, and Saturday dumpling soup! As far as fruits, we see bananas, tangerines, and mango on a regular basis. We also occasionally get a treat of sugar cane, which you chew to suck out the juice and then spit out the fibrous parts (shhhh don't tell my dentist!) Dessert is not a big thing here --- I've only seen it a handful of times, and usually it is cake with a delicious meringue icing or this boiled potato cake. 

I am certainly going to miss this cuisine--- if anyone knows of a Haitian restaurant in Central NJ, let's go!

Happy 4th of July!

I will admit something to you, my loyal blog readers: my patriotism is at an all time high. This has something to do with whoever changed the name of the US Secretary of Defense on Wikipedia to Tim Howard after his stellar performance as goalie on Tuesday (thanks for the terrible present the week of our birthday, Belgium.) But it also has a lot to do with everything I have experienced this year.  

We take many, many things for granted in America. Anyone who has ever traveled to any 3^rd world country will be quick to tell you that. But despite the occasional pork barrel project or Christmas tree bill, let’s go over some things that we (or at least I) take for granted that our government does for us.

1) Roads. In the USA, I can get to point A to point B on a paved road. If there is a pothole, I complain about it because it is an abnormality. In Port-au-Prince, there is a car-sized pothole on one road. Most roads aren’t paved. And those that are are not maintained.

2) Not only can I read, but almost everyone around me in the USA can. There are a few tragic exceptions to this in America, but I never quite realized how much I took for granted that everyone I associated with could read the words in front of them. This has provided difficulties for me in my work. Moreover, someone once posed me the question, can a true democracy exist if citizens cannot read? It is a question worth thinking about in a country where 53% of people are illiterate.  

3) Emergency services. Fire departments don’t exist in most of Haiti: if you have a fire, you better hope you have some good friends with some big buckets. The only functional ambulance I’ve seen in Leogane is owned by the mortuary, which seems like a definite conflict of interest to me. My personal favorite is a song from Karnaval that reminds us all that if you go to report a crime to the police, they will take care of it, as long as you give them “gas money.”

4) Social Safety Net. Say what you will about Obamacare or Welfare or Food Stamps or any other creation of the nanny state: it is terrifying to live in a country without a safety net. If you arrive at a hospital and are unconscious and alone, you might not be treated because they don’t know if you can pay. It is terrible to see severely malnourished children. It is trying to watch parents give their children up as orphans because they cannot feed them.

5) Effective courts. I have a friend here who is on his third try at trying to build a house because he has had two different contractors run away with over a thousand dollars each. And he has no way to prosecute them. 6) Staying out of electricity. I guess this one goes moreso to private industry for not letting the government handle it. But the State Electricity Company of Haiti can make electricity for about half of its paying customers at a time.

All in all, I am thankful to be an American, thankful to all of the people who helped us to establish and protect our freedom, and praying for everyone to someday know all of these freedoms.

I’ll see you in 10 days, America. Until then, there is quite a bit of adventure left to be had! 

Darbonne

I was asked to spend a few days out in Darbonne at a Women’s and Children’s health clinic that is a satellite of Sainte Croix. To get there, it is a 20-minute drive down a road that looks like this. Thank goodness for good trucks and strong vertebrae.

The clinic is really phenomenal and serves around 125 people every day with two physicians and a handful of nurses. These pictures are from the afternoon, because in the morning there is no space for picture taking! 

They have a maternity building for women who are giving birth. Women are allowed to stay for twelve hours after their babies are born but many choose to leave sooner, either so that they can fulfill household responsibilities or engage in traditional post-birth practices. One of these involves sitting over a bucket full of some hot water and some herbs to return everything to its rightful way.

There is also a clinic that sees sick kids and adults.

 And finally they offer family planning services.

I was there to check out how they do their inventory and give it a little modern twist. The staff was fabulous, welcoming, and hard working and it was an exciting couple of days.