Oh...the places you will go.

- or the places you will have been. We just wrapped up a whopping 10 days away from "home" with Kànaval celebrations, a 5-day trip to the D.R. with our team, and a few days lounging at the beach in Labadee/Cap Haitien in the north.

Kànaval

Nothing but the biggest celebration to hit the Catholic world each year, Kànaval is the last great splash before Lent begins. In Haiti it's a break from daily routine, a chance to fe dezòd (go a little crazy), and an amazing marketing opportunity for Haitian companies. Since this is our first year, we decided to head south to the annual parade in Jacmel (usually a week earlier than the rest), a town known for elaborate papier-mâche costumery:

Our working hypothesis is that things creative in Haiti are usually
political or religious. Yes, that is a MINUSTAH man getting mauled by a tiger.

The team's excursion
The morning after we returned from Jacmel, we loaded our team into the "bus," as Sharon likes to call it (our Toyota Landcruiser; it seats 12 Americans or about 20 Haitians) and set out on the much-anticipated trip to the D.R. For 4 of our teammates, this would be the first time they left Haiti. (Last minute maneuverings: we still didn't have Fritzner's visa – it was dropped off at the Dominican embassy for processing, and was supposed to be ready the morning of our trip. Luckily for him, it was.) Our frontier crossing went off without a hitch, even though we were stopped at SEVEN police checkpoints after we entered the country. Does the same thing happens in the U.S. along the Mexico border, or is this just really over the top? A lot of Haitians do cross the border illegally to find work, so I guess this is the Dominican way to catch them. Still. Some of these checkpoints were only a mile apart from each other.

11 hours after leaving Desarmes we arrived in Piedra Blanca, home base of Floresta, a reforestation program actually working on both halves of the island. They have had amazing success working with the Dominican government, which has made reforestation a national priority. (Tourism is booming, and tourists would much rather see trees than bare burnt earth and some cacti.) We toured eucalyptus and cacao forests, and also checked out Floresta’s agricultural work: oregano, cilantro, and pineapple fields.

Pineapple.

Jean, looking both studious and majestic.

Chocolate in the wild.

Learning about organic fertilizer with Rafael, a Floresta agriculturalist.

Our last day was spent taking in the sights of Santo Domingo. The best part for us was listening to the reactions of our Haitian co-workers:

Fritzner screaming to Frantzo, “Look! a road over our heads!” as we went under an overpass.

Nahomie whispering, Mezanmi! (“Oh my gosh!”) as the gate lifted after we dropped in our toll. (Tolls!)

Total silence as we drove past a big TV billboard; they sat enraptured.

It was a little sad for us that things that are so routine for us (and are actually nearly outmoded – who doesn’t have EZ-Pass?) were so remarkable to them. We so admire the bravery and persistence of Haitians in just living, but feel frustrated that it has to be that way – but we’ll leave the complexities of development for another post.

Labadee/Cap Haitian (Okap)

We decided to hop off the bus in Port, as we had decided to use the 5-day Kànaval weekend to take the bus south to Les Cayes to visit a friend. At the last minute, we were made an offer we couldn't refuse. Kurt (our new Country Representative – hooray!) and his girlfriend Hillary were headed north to the beach at Labadee and to check out Kànaval in Okap. The huge advantages for us: we wouldn’t have to sit on buses for hours, we could check out a place we’ve heard is unmissably great, and they could drop us off at our doorstep afterwards. We're in.

The town of Labadee is pretty much owned by Royal Caribbean; they’ve fenced off a section of the beach as a huge tropical tourist playground. Since we were not guests of Royal Caribbean (we stayed at a beautiful fort-turned-hotel with a little beach) we were not able to access this wonderland, but gawked Haitian-style at the cruise ships that arrived in the bay each day. They’re huge!

The ethereal mosquito net in our hotel room. See the greenery
outside? And the fan in the corner? That's a little slice of heaven.

Our "roommate": an intrepid hermit crab.

The next day we took the boat taxi back to Cap Haitian for Kànaval. To give you a sense of what this is like in Port-au-Prince, thousands of glitter-covered Okappers dancing in the streets to the loudest music ever is considered pretty tame. It was fun to see everyone enjoying themselves, taking one day to dance away sorrows.

Returning home was bittersweet: we love to travel, but living out of a bag gets old after a week or so. Hello, garden! Hello, home cooking! We missed you.

Score one for hummus

We've been trying to cook as much as possible with food from the market here in Dezam, but this week we used four imported ingredients (tahini, olive oil, cracked wheat, and celery) to make a Middle Eastern feast. Hummus! Tabbouleh! Baba ghanoush! Yum.

The next evening, we took the leftovers from the MCC fridge for round two of deliciousness. Jean was still in the office, so we offered him a taste. "Sure, I'm used to foreign food." Brave man.

Halfway through his plate, we checked in. "What do you think?"

He pointed to the hummus. "This is really good. This is the first time I have ever understood how you could have tasty food without meat. These other things are good, but this is amazing."

Now if we can just get a crop of olives, sesame, celery, and wheat to thrive on our roof...

Rats!

Okay, I know you all would never admit to having rats/mice in your homes in the U.S., but I know you do, and so do we here in Haiti.

You may have seen Ben's post on the rat they had in Port-au-Prince and his semi-automatic- sniper-rifle-filled dreams to take that sucka out. We too have a rat. Instead of dreams, though, the rats themselves wake me up in the middle of the night as they find some scrap of food that interests them.

Our first clue that we may have rodents were those little black grains of rice that aren't actually grains of rice. Shoot! We have mice! -but it gets more complicated than that, because we also have lizards everywhere that eat bugs and don't bother anyone or anything, so we ignore them. These lizards also poop, and it's very close to mouse poo, so I told myself that we don't have mice, it's just the lizards. That was a few weeks ago.

This thought lasted until we found a tomato on our counter with little teeth marks in it. Not a lizard for sure; they don't eat tomatoes and they don't have teeth. So we have mice for sure, ick. We then obtained every lidded and lockable container we could to store our food in and became totally anal about keeping all food under lock and key. Well, they kept on coming, or so we heard in the middle of the night. Our search continued for how they were getting in the house, and eventually I found a hole in a window screen on a window that is fairly high off the ground (it's in our "bathroom") . So I sewed it up and figured that was the end of it. Next night the patch job was chewed out again! ick! We were headed to Port-au-Prince that day so I stopped worrying about it, packed my bags and left the rodents to our house.

The first day in Port I went to the grocery store, and saw a new rat/mouse shelf in the aisles. I stopped to look at every type of poison, sticky trap, snap trap, poison blocks, poison pellets, and poison that smells like peanut butter. This was like a sign from God that I should buy some supplies to get rid of these little buggers. I start looking at everything and putting things in my basket, reconsidering and putting them back on the shelf and trying to calculate how many, how big, and how vicious are my rats. I spy a trap called the Tomcat on the shelf; this thing has serrated edges, it's all black and truly menacing, and as I fondle the cool black trap of destruction and figure out how it works........SNAP!!!...... the thing springs on my thumb, a squeak comes out of me and I try to look like it doesn't hurt. A little stream of blood appears as I pry the trap off of my thumb. A man is watching me from the next aisle over and I whimper Li fo which means "It's powerful." Who leaves a set trap among grocery store merchandise? I gather my sticky traps, other means of mouse destruction, and aim for the checkout. Maybe God is telling me to leave them alone - ick, but they're so gross! Can't they just frolic in the fields outside with the bunnies or something?! Why do they have to put their gross little disease-infested bodies near our food?

So I get home and set the sticky trap on the window ledge under the hole that has been chewed and think, "this is it, tonight it's all over!" In the middle of the night I hear something hit the floor and the sound of a rodent struggling to get out of a sticky trap. I get up turn on the lights and search everywhere. The trap is gone, the mouse is gone, it's all gone. Where the heck did it go? So I get out another trap for the next night and put it in the window.

The next evening we walk into the house around 10pm and there it is a medium-sized brown devil on the floor. Sharon screams, it runs for cover, and then we corner it and set up a series of traps in all of its escape routes. I grab one of those hippie juggling sticks (the things you find when you move into a house in Haiti) and tear off its tassled ends and turn it into a rat whacker. The rat is scared and Sharon is still screaming each time it moves. And here I am, a 15-year vegetarian ready to whack the life out of an animal. It's cornered and it knows it, so it climbs up a wire (for our solar panel) that gives it access to a curtain string and WHACK! I swing at it, it falls and runs for the bedroom where a door is normally open. It gets to the door, find it closed, freaks out, runs up onto the dresser....."no, not on our dresser!" I go over to it and scare it out, and WHACK! again, and this time a screech comes out of the little bugger so I know it's injured, and it runs back into the kitchen and under a counter. I'm ready for it to come out again and block off its escape routes again. As I sit there poised with a flip-stick in my hand, the rat lays on its side and....dies. In the meantime, our neighbors come over in their jammies to ask why Sharon is screaming and we now have a dead rat in our house...is that worse? So I collect it and throw it outside as Sharon immediately grabs the bleach bottle and starts disinfecting the entire house.

We are freaked out and happy all at the same time; we go to bed happy because the walking disease in our home is now dead. We're also happy because we have house guests coming the next night that just might sleep on the living room floor (gross, I know).

Ben and Alexis arrive the next day and when its bedtime they decide to sleep on the roof under the stars. Awesome! No rats there. All is good until the middle of the night, when it starts raining. What?! Rain? it hasn't rained in 3 months and we have another 3 months to go until rainy season, but here is rain, real rain falling down and not stopping. Down they come, bedding in hand and slightly wet; we turn on the light to get them set up in the living room and there it is...another freaking rat. I grab the stick, it's cornered, and Sharon stands by the door to block its path. A few seconds goes by and somehow it manages to go just past Sharon's legs and just past Ben's foot as he tries to stomp on it (that would have been gross 'eh?) and out the door.

We all calm down and try to go bed. After a few hours we fall back asleep and pray that more little devils don't come into our house.

So here we are, house sealed up, window patched, and an order in for screen doors so we can still sleep with a door open to let cool air in. Good times, good times.

Sorry for everyone out there that loves rats, but really...I don't eat meat. So every animal saved can advocate for me when I kill a rodent.

Ick.

Munching munchkins

Many of our friends know that Bryan and I have been vegetarians for years and years, which makes the following phenomenon especially weird.

A few months ago, I started noticing that little kids were running away from me as I walked around. They'd dash into their yards, or try to dart behind an older brother. (If they were lucky enough to not have an older brother who would hold them out toward me while they quivered and cried, terrified.) I figured that these kids were just shy.

However, Bryan told me that many children in Haiti believe that white people will eat them (!). What?! I've been trying to investigate since then:

Me: So did you believe that white people would eat you when you were little?
Frantzo: Oh, yes. I finally stopped thinking that when I was 9 or so. Fritzner when he was 12.
Me: Why then? Why at that point?
Frantzo: I realized I was big enough to protect myself if someone tried to eat me.

Me (joking): I think that woman didn't get in the front of the truck with us because I'm a blan. Maybe she's afraid of me.
Old guy (also getting a lift in the MCC truck): Because you're a blan?
Me: Yeah, you know, like how little kids think that white folks will eat them.
Old guy: Hahaha...but do you? Do you eat them?

I've found that my efforts to reassure kids hasn't gone over very well. When the lady doth protest too much, when I try to anticipate and address their fears, it can be even more worrying: "Don't be afraid, I won't eat you."

Sarcasm doesn't work very well either: "Don't worry, I already ate today." "Oh, I'm not hungry now."

But what I'd really like to know is how this idea took such root among the elementary school set. Marketing genius.