I am the ant: Part II

This is my Dad, doing one of his favourite things.

Having fun.

Here he is, with our first sheep, known as Frisky. Frisky was a good sheep, who came running across the fields with thundering hoofs whenever we called him. He was gigantic, being bottle-fed for some weeks past the point we should have cut him off. Dad, and we, loved this lamb.

Dad was on a Scout camp when he rescued this orphaned goat. We called her Whiskey, for some strange reason. Dad loved Whiskey too and built her a little house where she lived in our back garden.

Dad worked at Church College of New Zealand as the plumber. He started work at 7:30am but usually went in an hour or two early to work on his private projects. He worked hard and whenever he sat for very long he fell asleep. Sometimes it was at the dinner table, after a nice meal cooked by my Mum, and sometimes it was sitting against a wall on a sunny day.

Dad loved to go camping. Mum always said this photo made them look like diddicoys, or gypsies.

I come by my stockpiling instincts honourably. When we moved to New Zealand in 1967, my Dad, for the first time since we joined the Mormon church five years earlier, was surrounded by members of the church.  Most of us are fiercely independent and believe in being self-sufficient. He embraced the lifestyle with enthusiasm.
Nay.
He owned it.
He became that guy, the one who built wheat grinders and researched the best way to store wheat. He was the guy who found the suppliers for bulk food and got frustrated when people weren't as enthused as he was over buying 40lb buckets of honey. Dad was a force of nature when it came to getting things done and his old friends still remember all of the work he did to help them get their food storage items.

After our new house was built, Dad enclosed the area under the stairs in the basement and disguised the door that led into it. He lined the walls with shelves and bought himself a shotgun. His philosophy was that he had done everything he could to persuade his neighbours of the importance of being prepared and now they were on their own.

My sister read Part I and was teasing me about revealing my stockpiles to the world. I reassured her that I would tell the rest of the story.

My Dad was good to the bone, but he did not suffer fools lightly.

I am my father's daughter.

Right down to the shotgun.

Just me and the chickens. And a couple of goats. And wall-sitting Haitians.

Some mornings, Dolly helped in the clinic. She was a labour and delivery nurse for many years and so she tolerates the sight of yukky things much better than I. So she weighed and measured babies and took blood pressures of mamas. 

I was banished to the road to help on a painting project. 

The road outside the clinic looks like this to the east...

...and this to the west.

Mamas knocking at the gate, rat-tat-tatting to be let in by Jason, the guard, is a common sight. 

There is a rooster, of uncertain ownership, that pecks around in the dirt outside the gate.

I am not clear on the attraction of roosters for the Haitian people. They are raucous at all hours of the day, but particularly at 4 o'clock in the morning, when the roosters perform their own version of the "twilight bark" from 101 Dalmations.

Segue please.

Haitian roosters make me grumpy.

In fact, I was asking Santo (resident translator and general go-to guy at the clinic) why we owned a rooster, he informed me that it was so that the hens would lay eggs.

But Santo, I said patiently, you don't need a rooster to get eggs.

Yes, you do, he replied, with a barely disguised pity in his eyes.

No, you don't, I insisted.

Yes, you do.

Oookay. I gave up. Sometimes, you just have to know when to concede defeat. This was one of them. There is also the matter of the lone egg that sits on the roosting shelf in the hen coop that supposedly incites the Dominican hens to lay eggs. Not working so far, people! I just hope that it never falls on the ground and breaks, or it will surely asphyxiate the chickens.

Aaand, there are the two pregnant mama goats, who belong to Jason, the afore-mentioned guard. I got a kick out of the number of times per hour that Jason peeks his head around the gate to check on his babies. He does love his goats!

Walls in Haiti are canvasses for art. 

Sometimes it is utilitarian, like this...

...and sometimes it is much more decorative.

I confessed to being slightly artistic, so Sarah asked me to help Wilfred, the brother of one of our translators, whom she had hired to paint a mural about healthy water practices. 

I love Haitian art. It is primitive and colourful and depicts ordinary, yet idealistic, aspects of everyday life in Haiti. It has an optimism that I like to think will be rewarded some day with bliss.

Wilfred has lofty goals. He told me that he wants to be a great person some day. I think he already is a great person, but I hope he also figures out how he can become successful, which is what I think he meant.

Wilfred used a pencil and an oft-abused level to rough out the rectangle that would contain the mural. 

No, he did not entrust me with any of this task.

But he did allow me to help paint the white background.

This is Jude, another brother, who is a happy fellow and liked to make fun of me, especially when I made strange noises because I was so hot. As in "elevated temperature", not "degree of coolness".

The wall on this side of the street was in direct sunlight all of the day, so the general strategy was to paint until you couldn't stand it any more, then go sit on the shady side of the street to recover.

Whereupon, I (and Dolly, when she was helping) learned the fine art of wall-sitting, one of my favourite aspects of Haitian culture.

Don't we do it well?

I had retired to the house one day and when I came outside again, Jude and another friend and helper (wall-sitter) Black Yves were snoring loudly next to the wall.

For a second, I believed them, but then they both burst out laughing.

Funny, guys!

It soon became apparent that I was not to be allowed to tarnish Wilfred's masterpiece with my amateur strokes, so I made this large painted space for notices. The usual practice is for people to slap notices randomly on walls, so Sarah decided to supply a delineated space and ask people to get permission from MBH before they posted their papers. 

I also made this tree for some of the local children to decorate with their hand-prints.

One day, it rained as we were working on our separate walls, and the boys rigged up this ingenious way of protecting their work.

It took them all week to complete the project.

Wilfred stopped by the night before we left. I had asked him to make a painting for me, but he had forgotten that I was leaving so soon. He told me that Jude had asked him to tell me that he thought of me as his friend.

Sweet Jude.

I left some money with Sarah, so I may yet get that painting.

The location

I thought you would better understand my experience here if I first showed you my surroundings.
This is the house in which MamaBabyHaiti resides. It's a rather grand afffair, by Haitian standards, and is surrounded by similar houses, only most of them stand uninhabited and in various states of construction. One gets the feeling that they have been that way for some time and will remain so for some time to come. This house is not owned by MBH, but was renovated by them to its present state.
Remember, you can always click on the photos to enlarge.

This is the post-partum recovery room on the ground floor.  

Our drinking water. We have been without a car all week (one of those long, frustrating yet hilarious Haitian stories) so collecting new bottles involves a motorbike and good balance.

The swimming pool.
Don't ask.
But remember this for later.

Banana trees in the garden. Haitian bananas are quite delicious, even when they are in a state of what I would normally consider over-ripeness.

Bins of supplies, some of which were donated by you, my lovely readers.

Shelves filled with natural and pharmaceutical remedies.

A corner of the garden and the big old wall that separates us from the rest of the world. We have been outside a couple of times this week, but our experience has been mostly inside this compound.

We are surrounded by concrete. This wall around one of the upstairs patios cracks me up, because it looks like nicely turned wood. It is, in fact, concrete. We see the vertical supports for sale along the roads. They are sold in two sections and then cemented together on site.

Ah yes.

This is the room where we lie awake at night, listening to cows mooing, dogs barking, roosters crowing, and the frog in the pool bellowing.

Yes.

I said bellowing.

I have named him "Satan" for good reason.

The sitting room, where we talk at night by the light of a flashlight or hit the computers every time the power comes on.

Like now.

It's 2:30 a.m. and I'm going to bed.

Lisa and I are heading to the Dominican Republic (henceforth refered to as "the DR") in the morning. Hopefully we can find wi-fi when we get to Santa Domingo and the story will continue.

The beginning

Can I just say that the internet in Haiti is an interesting experience?

First, you have to catch it when the electricity is on, which is only at random times each day.

If you're lucky.

It is also very slow.

So here we go!

The trip to Haiti is convoluted and full of opportunities for error. I spent Friday on planes and in airports. My life that day seemed to run in three-hour increments. It started with an early rising, 4am, and meeting my fellow traveler, Ashlin, at PDX. The first leg, to Chicago, I was squished between an elderly couple. His wife spent some time running through the litany of dear husband's ailments and surgeries. I can't recall all of them, but there were four hip replacements, five hernias, cancer, Coumadin and Crestor and so many others that I was surprised he was still kicking. I almost forgave him for the coffee breath he wafted in my face every time he turned to look out the window.

The flight from Chicago to Long Island was delayed. When we finally boarded, I sank into the front window seat with relief. Handsome young thing in the aisle seat and I exchanged triumphant sidelong glances as the last passenger boarded without usurping our middle seat. Too soon, it turned out. A chic young lady dashed on at the last minute and asked, Is it okay if I sit there? Our sidelong glance was disappointed. CYT proceeded to fall asleep on my shoulder. When she awoke, very embarrassed, she confessed that she had imbibed a couple of beers while waiting for the flight. She then plugged in her iPod and sang out loud for the rest of the flight.

Which was kind of like sitting next to myself.

Only more annoying.

The rest of the trip to Fort Lauderdale was fairly uneventful. We found a nice Haitian porter to load up our six humongous bags and bins and caught the shuttle to our hotel. Our driver was also Haitian. Apparently, there is no lack of Haitians in Florida. We did our fair share in supporting Haiti's economy right there in FL. Tips rule! Lisa was waiting for us at the hotel. By the time we arrived it was 11pm and we had to be up again at 3am.

Good times.

After about one hour of sleep (note to Lisa: I do not snore. You heard yourself, ina dream!) and a nice hot shower, we went back to the airport with our (now) seven humongous bags and bins and various carry-ons and accoutrements. Check-in was very unique. No security on this one. Baggage overages cost around $500. MamaBabyHaiti sent lots of supplies with us, as it is the most efficient way of getting them there.

So, here we are.

Me, looking decidedly worse for wear.

And feeling it, let me tell you.

Lisa, my intrepid world traveler friend. 

Ashlin, a young thing with a big vision. 

And the mighty propeller, of which there were two. And I'm happy to report that they kept spinning all the way to Haiti! 

The airport at Cap Haitien is not a place that I would recommend arriving alone, or without people to meet you. The porters are crazily aggressive and demand their five pounds of flesh. Our people shepherded us to the waiting car and we got out of there without too much damage. Driving through the city was an adventure in itself. Roads are full of potholes, often just mud and rocks. People just hang out on the sides of the roads, watching as you drive past. Motorbikes, spewing fumes, and taptaps, the ubiquitous pickups crammed full of people, are the main sources of transportation.

I cannot say that Haiti is a joyful place. The glances that followed us were not friendly or even curious. I sense a lack of purpose, of any kind of thought for what happens beyond this moment in time. Cap Haitien itself is dirty and smelly and I can't imagine living in such a place. It is the second largest city in Haiti, but does not look very big from the air. There are no street signs and every road looks the same, differing only in the degradation of the surface.

We are in the village of Morne Rouge, which is green and tropical and has a certain beauty, if you can get past the cement and trash and the knowledge of the poverty and lack of enlightenment that hides behind every wall. The problems on this island are so immense and so ingrained into the psyche of its people that it boggles the mind. I've been reading everything I can get my hands on about Haiti. Knowing the history does lend some measure of understanding of the Haitians' plight, but it does not offer an easy solution.

I need to go to bed. Hopefully, tomorrow we will have electricity again and I can introduce you to the amazingly wonderful people who are manning this birth centre. Till then, nighty night, and say a "thank you" tonight for your clean water and your 24-hour-a-day electricity and all of the other trappings of civilization.