On Haiti - Part Two

That first night in Dal, we got under our mosquito net and went to bed, drifting off to the sounds of singing in the distance. I asked Cara what it was, and she said, “probably voodoo.” It went on throughout the night, and seemed to move around the valley, although that was probably an illusion. We asked at breakfast (hot chocolate and bread, which was, I’m told, for my benefit and not a normal thing. It was my breakfast every morning I was in Dal though, so they must have liked me at least a little) what the singing was about, and Madanm smiled and said, “They were praying.” And that’s all that was said about it until later on in the day, when Madanm said to us, “They weren’t really praying. They were praying to Satan. Ti Pay got possessed and climbed a tree and fell out of it. HAHHAHAHAHAHAHA!” See, Madanm really disagrees with voodoo. The family is Catholic, and Madanm especially thinks voodoo is the work of the devil. But the interesting thing is that later on in the day, Madanm said, “Anchelo is going to take you over to see the ceremony.” The ceremony had been going on since the night before, and the singing had only paused here and there in all that time. Madanm told us that they were holding the ceremony for a boy who was sick. They were trying to get the lwa (spirit) to leave him alone. And we were going to go see this. Cara was incredulous. “I can’t believe it! They’ve never let me go to a ceremony. This is all because you’re here.”

So we went. Anchelo took us over, and it seemed half the valley was in the front yard of the sick boy’s house. Gabo was there, and he motioned for us to join him where he was standing and watching. He explained things as they happened. “That woman has the spirit on her.” The woman he was pointing to was yelling over and over, “umwe! Umwe!!” (help me!) in a deep voice that was obviously making her hoarse. In kreyol she shouted, “Help me! Rum! Give me Rum!!” and when a woman threw water at her, I assumed in an attempt to rid her of the spirit, she laughed in the woman’s face and yelled, “Do you think I’m a spirit that is satisfied with water?” and walked away, still yelling, “Umwe!!” Finally, she came back and hollering all the while sat down in a chair and then fell back onto the ground. She got up, soaked with water and with sweat, and rubbed her eyes. She was helped away, and eventually came back changed into different clothes. “She won’t remember anything she did.” Gabo said.

The ceremony continued, as the small group of ceremony participants danced around the circle and sang. In the center was a plate filled with rum and bread, soda and rice and beans. Gabo told us that if the spirit, Congo, didn’t come to separate the food, that it would have to be hung in the tree for Job. Job is the head spirit of voodoo, and as such, the Christian missionaries labeled him Satan. I found myself wondering how Gabo handled the paradox of being a Catholic and a Haitian, given all that I’d been told about Haiti’s origins.

On Voodoo-

Please don’t think this is anything but a few bits I was told about voodoo. It’s not complete, or even necessarily true. It’s just what I was told while I was there. Voodoo is a religion that was brought with the slaves from Africa. As such it was very much a part of who the slave population of Haiti believed themselves to be. So it’s not surprising that when they planned their revolution (creating the first ever black nation in the process) the Haitian people had a voodoo ceremony to make sure it was started off right. This seems to have built in an additional element to the self-loathing that was inherent because of their status as slaves. Not only were they told that they were less than human, because they were slaves, but they were told that their religion was Satanic, and against God. As a result, you have a country of people destined to be, at the absolute minimum, conflicted, and likely more along the lines of fractured. One of the acts most closely associated with the creation of their nation is an act that they’re told is against God and should be shunned. What would you do? I’d go mad I think. More history later, along with some more reasons to consider why the first black nation might have some strikes against it from powerful people who wanted to keep a lid on such things.

For the next couple days we did a lot of visiting in Cara’s community. We would go and “chita” on the porches of her neighbors, and she would introduce me to people whose names I would have very little hope of remembering seeing as how there were so many of them. She said, “Don’t worry, I don’t know everybody’s name either. The only reason I know as many as I do is that I’ve been here for seven months.” So we would sit, and Cara would translate, and very often we would be offered some food as we sat. Keep in mind that these people are not well off. They generally eat one bigger meal a day and perhaps an ear of corn or a mango otherwise. So, in being offered an ear of roasted corn, you feel very welcomed and taken care of, even if the corn itself doesn’t really appeal to you.

We went to the “marche” (market) and I saw a goat being skinned, corn pudding being wrapped in banana leaves, and pieces of pork, fish, and plantain being battered and deep fried. Anchelo bought us a watermelon to take home, and I got to meet a number of Cara’s friends. She often goes to sit with them while they sell their wares at marche.

On Watermelon in Haiti-

It’s vaguely pink. Not red. Kinda like when you were a kid, and your grandpa would throw you the rind of his watermelon after he was mostly done, so you could suck on it. Kinda like that. I’d recommend the mangos instead

One of my favorite times of day in the countryside was dusk. The sun is down and less blazing hot, and it’s starting to get to the point where you can no longer see people’s faces. The family sits around outside the house and just chats. Sometimes, as in the picture above, Linda or one of the other younger girls would do hair. Beatrice is getting hers done in this shot. Cara was so exhausted from translating all day that she would sometimes kinda give up at this point. Sometimes not, and I’d get a good bit of conversation from Madanm or Margalie, or Beatrice. But I found that even when I wasn’t getting the play by play from Cara, I just liked sitting there with them. It’s something that’s often missing here, as we get together to watch movies, or see a band. It was something that I just really loved, soaking in the laughter and the obvious love the family had for each other, even if they were constantly teasing one another.

At this point I’ll say something that I’ll only come at obliquely, because to really talk about it, I’d have to start a new thread and it’s still rather raw and pointy, so I can’t really go into it all that deeply. The details are a bit too personal to share with the world on a blog, but during this time in the country, Cara and I split. We love each other very much, and she was a wonderful host to me, but she feels that she needs to continue her journey alone, and while it hurts rather intensely to let her go, it’s what has to happen. We gave it a real solid addressing later in the trip, but here is where it came up in the timeline.

Another favorite moment of my trip was the brief time that I got to spend with Cara’s host-cousin, Linda. As I said before, Linda slept in the room next to ours, in the little house, and at night, when she was done with her chores, we would hear (if we were awake still) a whispered, “Ka?” Cara would talk a little with Linda and then they would say the lord’s prayer in kreyol and I’d join them in English (with me about dying from the cuteness of “Au vada, ou aht in evan…”) and Linda saying, “Good night, I love you, good job.” “good job,” is something that Linda says a lot. It’s one of the most adorable thing’s I’ve ever heard, and her English is really good. Makes you cringe every time Beatrice or Madanm would say, “She won’t pass her examinations.” I wanted to yell at them, “Don’t tell her what she can’t do!!” But it’s not your place, you know? Anyway, one other thing that we did at night with Linda, was that I was able to give her another gift. See, Cara had told me before I came that the harmonica would likely get taken from Linda, just because everything that Linda has gets taken by somebody sooner or later. So, I planned on that, and I wrote her a song. My thinking was that I wanted to give her something that no one could take away from her. And so for a couple nights I taught her the song, and then I wrote it down for Cara, so that she could continue singing it with Linda until it was truly hers. I also asked Cara to make a project of translating the tune into Kreyol, so that she could sing it both ways. I won’t share the song with you, because I really do want it to remain hers, but I wanted to share the sense of gratification of being able to give her something that no one could steal.

After a few days, we went back to Jacmel to stay the night, so that we could leave for Lazil the following morning to visit Cara’s friend Kim, another apprentice, and her host family. Cara’s host family was not happy that I was leaving them. We told them that we’d be back in eight days, as we were going to spend a few days in Lazil, and then go visit Dabon, where our friend Maxandre lives, and then we were going to spend a couple days in Jacmel going to the music festival. Every time they told someone new the sad news that Chanm and Ka were leaving, the amount of time got longer. About ten minutes after we had breakfast, Gabo walked up and said, “So you’re leaving for a month.” HA! The nice part of that, is that it was a beautiful way of saying, “We’re going to miss you, and we wish you weren’t leaving for so long.”

We had dinner in Jacmel with Coleen, and her daughter Marika, who is only four, but has the beanpole legs of a nine-year-old. She’s adorable, and soaks up affection, and Coleen’s house is so nice. They’d just finished some landscaping, and Marika was anxiously awaiting the delivery of her swingset for the backyard. We had wonderful conversation with Coleen, and it was kind of a strange, lovely shift to be having a conversation in English again, with someone other than Cara. It made me glad that Cara has her around. After coming back to the apartment in Jacmel, we had showers and slept next to the fan. A welcome thing after several sweaty nights in the country, where you close up all the doors and windows tight, and where there is no electricity for a fan.

On Utilities-

In the country, you may have to walk for your water. Families send children with jugs several times a day to fetch water from a pipe, or directly from the spring when the pipe is broken. And the pipe may often be broken. If the water flow is weak down in the valley, someone may walk up closer to the source and break the main pipeline with a rock. The reasoning goes, “The people in charge of fixing the pipes won’t come to fix them if my house is the only house that hasn’t got any water but a trickle. The only way they’ll come to fix it is if everybody in the valley is hurting, so I’ll break the pipe further up.” Not sure what the bottom line ends up being, but you’ve got to think that they’d go through less pipe if you could count on the help coming when it’s needed. The pipe in Cara’s house empties right on their front yard, so normally they don’t have to walk for it. But eventually it did get broken while I was there, and we had to go hiking for our shower water. And sure enough, on the way there, we saw a gaping hole in a PVC pipe that could only have come from a hard blow from a giant rock.

No electricity in the country, unless your family has help from relatives abroad. In Lazil, which I’ll talk about next time, the family we stayed with had a solar panel on the roof, which they used to charge cell phones and to power electric lights after dark. In the city, and this is my understanding of the situation, power gets turned on for several hours every night, but it sometimes gets sent only on alternating nights to alternating neighborhoods. Which is a long way of saying, if you have power tonight, you probably won’t have it tomorrow. Beyond Borders has an inverter, which allows them to store energy when it’s on at night, for use during business hours.

In the city, we had showers, sometimes with running water (no hot, only cold) and sometimes not. In the country, a shower will likely always consist of a basin filled with water and a cup to pour it over your head. Cara’s family constructed a shelter for her made out of banana branches, so that she could have some privacy in her washing. And of course, in the country you have a cement latrine with tin walls. In the city, you may or may not have a flushing toilet. It’s a toilet as we are used to, but you may have to pour a bucket of water into it in order to flush. Luckily the shower generally has a big bucket in it which you can dip your smaller bucket into to flush.

The other thing I thought about only after I came home was that while the latrine situation and basin at Cara’s house in the country weren't hotel accomodations, they are likely still a lot better than some other families have in that same area. Cara’s family for the most part don’t use her shower structure, I think mostly because they never needed it before Cara got there, so they just leave it to her. They will often stand near the water source and wash just off to the side of the house, out of the way, but not hidden by any means. I found this out, when I was trying to get a look at a bird that was making a ruckus, and Anchelo pulled me over to get a better view. He didn’t pause or think twice about the fact that he was pulling me right past his very pregnant and very naked sister Maraglie who was just lathering up for a shower. I blushed, and she just smiled and pointed to the noisy bird. “Caw,” (crow) she said.

When in Dal…