On Haiti – Part Three

We started out on our trip to Lazil later than Madanm and Beatrice had suggested. When we told them we were going to take a machin up into the mountains they were vehemently against it. They said, “No, the best way to go is to wake up at 4 in the morning and go in one of the (Kreyol word escapes me) air-conditioned busses. The driver isn’t separated from the passengers and the only way to get in one of them is to go really early, around 4 a.m.”

Funny enough, that idea didn’t really appeal to us.

So we left around 8 and we got into a machin complete with chicken and blaring Haitian pop music. People kept piling in over the course of the 45 minute trip up the mountain and, as must happen, there was bickering and refusal to pay. The drive up into the mountains was pretty if you could see out through the welded sides of the machin, which I could every now and again. At several points you're convinced that the drivers must have ESP, or just guardian angels, because they drive about 55 mph around blind curves, and if you’re lucky they lay on the horn. The thing is, if anyone else was coming around in the opposite direction, they would also be laying on the horn, and it’s likely neither would hear. So, I’m not really sure how there aren’t more accidents than there are. The roads are certainly not wide enough to be called two lane roads. I just kinda hung out with my water bottle and my Rika, and a slightly blue looking Cara and said to myself, “Well, if you’re gonna go, there’s really not a whole lot you can do about it at this point. You’re not driving, so just enjoy the rush of possibly being flung to your death down the side of a mountain. It’s kinda like a rollercoaster, only less harness-y and more chicken-y.

We pulled into Tom Gato around 9, and had a snack of Rika (think Ritz cracker shaped lemony graham cookies) while we waited for Kim. She was hiking from Lazil to meet us so we could hike back together. Lazil is about a two hour hike from Tom Gato over the mountain ridge. After waiting about twenty minutes, we decided to head down and meet her along the way, figuring that she might appreciate not having to walk the last quarter mile which is all steep uphill. We met her and started on our way. Kim is a lovely woman in her mid-forties who used to be a lawyer, but found she wasn’t fulfilled by that, and decided to change directions. She entered the apprenticeship program around the same time as Cara, and came to Haiti about a week after Cara did. She’s funny, and has a great rapport with all the kids in Lazil. Along the road we saw some evidence of this as the children we passed all knew her by name and played word games with her as she passed.

On Saying Hello-

I’ve talked a bit about the generous spirit of Haiti. But I think it’s rather important to talk more about saying hello. One of the reasons why it takes two hours to get to Lazil is because along the way you will be greeted by every person who catches your eye along the road, whether they’re walking toward you, or sitting on their front porch, or working in the fields. It’s something that I really missed upon coming back to the states. I know part of the reason for this is that we were white, and we automatically draw stares, but it’s not just that. There’s a culture of visiting in Haiti that doesn’t exist here. The visits can range from long with not a whole lot said to short and sweet. On our trip walking to Lazil, Kim introduced us to at least seven different families, and one “fried stuff” vendor, as Cara calls them, who decided we needed fried dumplings for our journey over the mountains and wouldn’t take any money for them. This is contrasted with the visits you’ll have with people who want to talk (and talk and talk) and then finally they get around to asking you for something when you’ve decided that you’re talked out.

*tangent within a tangent* On our way back to the apartment one night on a walk through downtown Jacmel, Cara and I were approached by a man who spoke very good English. He was carrying a gigantic painting wrapped in tissue paper. He insisted on showing it to us, which led me to think that he was trying to get us to buy it. But no, he just wanted to show it to us, and to get our opinion on what it meant to us. “Where do you see yourself in my painting?” he asked. And after about ten minutes of talking with him we excused ourselves. He wouldn’t hear of it, and asked us to wait for him to wrap his painting back up so that he could walk with us, as he thought he knew which way we were going (Cara is somewhat of a celebrity in Jacmel because she’s one of the few blancs, and people she’s never met will yell out her name, “Kara!!” or sometimes “Farah!!” because Farah is a more common name and Kara actually means “carat” as in 24 carat gold, so why would you name your kid carat?). Turned out he was mistaking Cara for a different blanc and when we got to the top of the hill, he said, “I thought you were going to take a taxi with me. Can’t give me some money for a taxi to get home?” At which point it became clearer why he had insisted on following us.

But he’s the exception. For the most part, people just want to talk to you and find out how your family is, or where you’re coming from, or how long you’re going to be in town. On one hand it’s very friendly and warm, and you always feel so welcome. On the other, if you’re trying to get somewhere and it’s blazing hot, you begin to tire of the welcome because you just want to sit down somewhere and die. But the thing that I noticed is that if you’re going to go visiting, you end up being very tired afterwards, and it’s not like you did much of anything. The only explanation for the immense fatigue I felt was a combination of the heat and the fact that I was listening so intently trying to pick up as much Kreyol as I could. Attentive listening is actually a hard thing to maintain over the course of a day, and at some point you just get psychically drained. After the sixth house, I was just kind of smiling and nodding because often I’d reached my limits of answering, “When are you coming back to Haiti?” with, “M pa konne.”

~~~

We made it to Lazil, and to Kim’s host family’s house. Belange and Bemarie are kind of the heads of the community in Lazil (Lazil itself is rather small, and I gather it’s actually only about fifteen houses tops before you are in a community with a different name). Belange is the spiritual leader of the community, and he also founded a school that sits next door to his house. Bemarie is the only person with medical training for hours in any direction so the front room of their house doubles as a clinic for the area. As I was putting my pack down on what would be my bed, Kim said, “Just to warn you a little, there may be some kind of emergency in the night, and your bedroom may become a hospital. If someone has a machete wound or some other accident, this is where they’ll come.” My eyes just kinda widened at the thought of that, and the thought of what might happen if I should have an accident while I was here. I generally don’t think about stuff like that, but this brought those thoughts into sharper focus.

I’ll do an aside on food later, because food in Haiti is worth taking some time on, but I’ll just say that while I was staying with Belange and Bemarie I ate like a king. Kim had given them money for our stay, which Cara later reimbursed her for. So for the first time since I’d been in Haiti I ate three squares. In Dal, the norm was hot chocolate and bread for breakfast, and then one big meal in the middle of the day, with leftovers for dinner if you had them leftover to eat. You appreciate that because it’s all done over a wood fire with three stones to balance your pot on, and about four more people to feed. But in Lazil, I think Bemarie took great pride in being able to feed us a big breakfast both mornings, and both a dinner and a desert. Dinner was likely leftovers, but they were done with a little extra something. I also think that this was a big deal to her, because we weren’t really allowed to come help in the cooking. This was her love, this preparation and this presentation of meals. The table was set with panache, and when she joined us for the evening meal (she never ate lunch or breakfast with us I don’t think) she just smiled and seemed radiant with our yummy noises and full bellies.

Belange’s house is an amazing thing. In a community where most of the houses are at most three rooms, this house is a crazy mansion. I say crazy because it’s built on the side of a hill, and it was built as most houses in Haiti are, as the money comes in to build it. So while you can tell that rooms were added on at different times, and sometimes with different materials (some rooms were cement and others were made of palm trunks) you can also tell that there was some thought behind it, and that there were walls cut down in order to put up different ones. The main house consists of the front room or clinic, and the living/dining rooms, and it looks like the clinic was added on much later. The kitchen has three sections to it, and exists on three different levels of hillside, so you have to go down a step to get into the cooking room from the washing room. The main bedroom is on a step lower from the dining room, and is connected to Kim’s room (Kim’s room is also connected to the clinic by a different door). The other funny thing is that to get from the living room to the bathroom (and the latrine and back bedrooms, which are all one step again lower) you have to go through the main bedroom. I know this is confusing, and that’s okay because it was confusing to navigate in the dark so you get a bit of what that was like (oh, did I mention that if you have to pee in the night you gotta use a pail that you keep under your bed? No? Well, there it is). The point is that this place is not your typical Haitian house. They have electric light at night because of a solar panel that was sent to them by a daughter in Canada, and they are also the place where the community charges their cell phones. (no reliable phone service in Haiti, so the cell phone technology was a welcome thing when it came to this place)

The full day that we were in Lazil was spent visiting. While we were there I got to see how, for many people here, life is much harder than it seemed to be in Dal. We met Belange’s brother Castelle, who is in his mid-sixties and still works a mountaintop farm every day of his life. This is true of Cara’s host father Gabo as well, but for Castelle it’s a bit different. My first impression of the man was that of a kindly oak. His handshake reminded me of my friend Brendan’s father who would never mean to, but might just crack your bones with a friendly greeting. He’s just that strong. Castelle was like that, and his smile was so warm and inviting despite its missing front teeth. His machete hung on his belt, and his wife hovered off to the side with a quiet grace as he held court. We chita-ed with him and he told us what his life was like. His wife is ill with rheumatoid arthritis, and there will come a time when he won’t be able to work the fields because he’ll eventually become too old and fall ill himself but, “What can I do? There is no one else to work my fields for me. My daughters are in Canada and France…” and as he was talking, only then did I notice his left arm. He must have caught my gaze, and he lifted up his left sleeve. Under the sleeve of his shirt was a tiny shriveled wisp of an arm. “I was climbing a coconut tree when I was twelve. I fell and broke my arm in seven different places, and there was no doctor here then. There was no care. All that could be said of me was that I would be useless. My life was over. But every day I work that field. Every day I plant seeds and reap the harvest when it is time. And I will do that until I can no longer walk, because there is no one else to do it but me. My wife is sick. So it must be me to do it.” I had tears in my eyes as we said goodbye to him, because I knew that he wasn’t the first, nor would he be the last to live this way with no help to come.

Indeed, he wasn’t the last person I would meet in my time in Lazil with a limb that didn’t work. We sat with a family outside shelling beans one afternoon while we were there, and a woman came by and showed us her daughter’s feet. Curled up like fists they were. I wondered what this girl’s future would look like. Would she be ridiculed, told that she was useless? That seemed to be how it worked here, but something I saw later that day gave me hope.

We were sitting at the home of another friend of Kim’s, whose name escapes me at the moment. She was a lovely young woman of about 18(??? You never know in Haiti, as people look so much younger than they are sometimes, especially young people. Older people often look much older than they are as well, so it’s really deceptive) who was trying desperately to get Kim and Cara to sing. Neither would be budged, so this little lady took it on herself to sing and dance the songs that she knew as a way of connecting with us. Her tiny sister sat close by but also wouldn’t sing. After a few songs, I felt like she needed to be repaid for her kindness, so I sang a song for her. “Moody’s Mood,” I think, was what I chose. She clapped and asked me if I danced salsa. She had asked Cara to dance salsa with her, but Cara’s easily embarrassed and wouldn’t, so I obliged her with some very VERY rudimentary moves and finished it with a dip, which elicited peals of laughter. “That’s what she wanted!” Cara laughed.

We exchanged a few more songs together and then the rain, which had started slowly when we were at a different house, decided it wanted to be more of a real rain. So we moved out to the front porch to really appreciate it. The rest of the children in the family had come home by now, and they were all gathered around laughing and playing on the porch just out of reach of the big drops. Here is where I got my ray of hope for disabled folks in this village. I don’t pretend that this is proof that that little girl with the fist-like foot will be okay. But it made me think that there might be hope for her. One of the young people in this crew of about ten that were gathered on the porch was mentally disabled. He had the look of someone who had a birth defect, with a crooked mouth, and a squinty face, and he walked with a listing to starboard. But here was the ray of hope. In this place where I’d seen animals kicked and had rocks thrown at them, this boy was getting cheered on. He had decided to make good use of the rain, and for a few minutes he disappeared. I wondered where he’d gone, and then he reappeared running through the rain in his underwear with a head full of soap suds. He was grinning, and the other children were cheering his ingenuity. When he made his way back to the porch, a few of them scrubbed his back for him and helped him wash. It was such a nice thing to see, because I’d seen this kid before in our trip, and I’d silently worried that he hadn’t a friend in the world. In a place where “you’re on your own” takes a new meaning, I thought this kid might really be on his own. But here was proof that in some way he was loved and accepted. Even if I was wrong, and he really was shunned, as I know some mentally challenged people are even in our culture, at least here at this house he had some friends who had his back, if only to wash it for him.