Haiti, sometimes you shine up real nice.

We lucked out and were able to spend last weekend in a pine forest about a three-hour drive from Port-au-Prince.

It was magical - a green and misty wonderland where we were able to wander the woods for hours, soaking up the beauty of it all:


We waded in streams, collecting watercress and wild mint...


We stayed in an enchanting little cabin, one of about 20 scattered throughout the woods:

Bryan spent time lounging around with Ben and his still-busted knee:

- except when they tried to get the perfect hammock shot. I do believe this is the one photo the dignified Mr. Depp couldn't take himself:

And Kurt even showed us where to find wild strawberries and raspberries!


Rave reviews. I can't believe we didn't discover this place until our last weekend in Haiti.

What's normal?

Both Kurt and Alexis have commented on their blogs about how after you live in Haiti (or any new place) for a little while, the things that at first blew your mind and inspired blog posts are now totally normal. I started thinking about what I've gotten used to so far, the things that don't surprise me at all:

1. Kids/adults shouting "BLAN!" I still get annoyed, but now I can ignore it 95% of the time.

2. Naked people - they're everywhere. They're not always 100% nude, but they're pretty close.

3. People on horseback, just like the wild west. Almost.

4. Farm animals: goats, pigs, chickens, turkeys, cows, donkeys. They roam freely: you name it; they're walking around.

5. Trash. Plastic bottles, bags, etc. There is nobody here to take it "away" so it stays on the ground or is burnt.

6. Fires. These are usually for cooking, but people also burn trash, leaves, farm fields, and tires. Sometimes at night we can see fires on the sides of the mountains surrounding Desarmes, and sometimes we get a nice chemically whiff of burning plastic. Ah, fresh air.

7. Toyota trucks. If Toyota ever thought their trucks were not invincible, they should look at the trucks here. If you remember commercials from a long time ago, they showed odometers of 200/300/400/500,000 miles and still running. Now, imagine these same trucks being shipped to Haiti, where almost every aspect of preventative maintenance is ignored, they get overloaded so that their bumpers are almost dragging on the ground, and they drive over roads that should be called trails. These trucks are unstoppable. (Toyota, you can send a check for this ad to MCC Akron.)

8. Stars. No infrastructure means no lights, and no lights means no light pollution, which means STARS!!! everywhere! We've seen a few spectacular meteor showers - but really, most nights are spectacular.

9. Vodou drumming at 2am, almost every night.

10. Home church services at 3am, not every night but often. These are louder than the drumming.

11. People walking through the streets shouting news through a megaphone. They usually start between 4-5am.

12. Little animals. Lizards, inside and outside. Tree frogs in the house, hiding in hats, behind curtains, or wherever it is dark.

13. People everywhere (really, everywhere). It is impossible to do anything without being watched. Who needs Big Brother when you have 8 million of his younger siblings?

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.

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.

Looking around

Okay, in response to those who want more pictures, here are a few. (As a side note, loading these photos reminds me of my childhood when my brother and I would saddle up to the Commodore 64, throw in the 5" floppy disk of our favorite game, and hit the LOAD key. The gears would start grinding and we would usually play a game outside while we waiting for the computer game to load. Today, I hit "Upload Photos" and walked away, checking in every 5 minutes to see how it was progressing; after 20 or 30 minutes it finally succeeded in this gargantuan task. So, be thankful for your DSL or other high-speed connection.) Enjoy!


These little guys come hopping in whenever there is a lot of rain -- apparently, we've been getting too much rain for them.


This sleepy-eyed frog was napping in the clothespin bag when he was disturbed by me and my laundry duties.


If you remember the tank of a truck I get to drive, this is our loaner as the other truck gets fixed (it's apparently not a flawless tank). I have yet to bathe with this truck. ;-)


Sharon spotted this moth last night when she was on the computer. (Get it?)


These are the shoes that everyone here wears when they know they will be walking in mud, puddles, etc. One guy calls them doublè, which is the word for 4x4s: very fitting. They are completely rubber/plastic except for the laces.

Animals

Okay, I like animals, so being here is one big search for wildlife for me. I've seen Red-tailed Hawks, American Kestrels, Black Vultures, Cattle Egrets, Snowy Egrets, Antillean mango and Hispaniolan Emerald hummingbirds, Hispaniolan woodpeckers, and a little bird called a Kolobri (pictured above) which is thought to be the prettiest of birds in Haiti.

Birding is somewhat difficult. When you ask someone the name of a bird they say "zwazo" which means "bird." On top of that, our bird guide for Haiti--unlike every other field guide in the world--is alphabetical. If I see a hawk, I need to already know the name of the bird or I have to page through the whole book looking for the correct picture. It's somewhat frustrating, but at least there is a guide.

Little-known fact: John James Audubon was born in Haiti.

Other animals I've seen but don't know species names for yet are:
lizards, snakes, spiders (including tarantulas), starfish, sea urchins, and lots of insects, including fireflies, dragonflies, mosquitoes, and--Sharon's favorite--ants. I have yet to be bitten and she, on the other hand, knows their bite all too well.

On the lookout--




Posted by Bryan, from Joy's account

Robot spaghetti vs. river

When you were younger, did you love going through the car wash? I did. I loved the spraying of water, the huge "spaghetti" slapping the windows, more spraying of water and the huge blower, and a huge robot eye that looks at you and apparently drives your car for you. Pretty cool.

Well, Haiti tops that by a mile. Today after hiking, working, and attending a funeral I was asked to drive down a little road next to the nearby river. We pulled alongside it, and I was then directed to drive into the river. We parked in about two feet of flowing water. We all hopped out of the truck, my co-workers and I stripped down to our skivvies, and we washed the truck in the river. We washed all the mud off, and when finished someone produced a bar of soap--we lathered ourselves up, scrubbed up a bit, and jumped in to rinse off. We put our clothes back on, drove out of the river and back to the office clean as a whistle.

I think any kid would enjoy this car wash a bit more than the dancing spaghetti robot. I did.

Cloudlessness:

the missing ingredient in uploading photos. Phew.

A few highlights from last week:















Kay Henri Christophe ("House of Henri Christophe"), the palace that the second leader of Haiti built for himself. It was destroyed by an earthquake and is now in the process of being restored.
















A very fishing place, as someone described it the other day. These guys were using a home-stitched sail in a bay just north of Ft. Liberte.















The Citadel, also built by Christophe. It was meant to be a refuge for Haitians should the enslaving French ever invade again. Built with conscripted labor and mortared together with gelatin, animal blood, and sand, this monumental structure was never finished or used.




















Orchid, found along the path to the citadel. Picked by our guide, much to our chagrin.
















Starfish menace. Bryan is not usually such a threat to wildlife. Can't take him anywhere.

(published by Sharon, through Bryan's account)