On Haiti - Part 4

This is my first blog post on Haiti in a while, and so I'm going to dive right back in and just give a little more of Lazil accounts.

Upon coming home from our visit on the front porch, singing and dancing, we were met with Bemarie's clinic in action. Not sure if I said this, but she's the only health care worker for miles in any direction, and so people with wounds or maladies will come in the middle of the night to get help from her. When we came home, soaked and happy from the company we'd been keeping, we walked in to find Bemarie talking with a skinny man holding one of the tiniest babies I'd ever seen. This little boy was three weeks old, but looked brand new and not well. The problem, we were told, was that he wasn't eating. They couldn't get him to take his mother's nipple. There wasn't a whole lot that Bemarie could do, but she did give the baby a dropper or two filled with sugar water, which is supposed to stimulate the process. The problem then became how to get this man home with his child so that the baby could eat. He'd walked 45 minutes over the mountain ridge in order to get here, but it hadn't been raining then. So they were waiting to send him on his way, hoping the rain would subside. It didn't. And it was quickly getting dark. Finally around 8, it was almost completely pitch dark, but the rain was just a drizzle and they decided to get him on his trek home. They wrapped the baby in a plastic sheet and made sure his face was uncovered, and then the man put his windbreaker on backwards with the baby under that. There was really nothing else to be done about it. The baby had to get back to his mother, because he had to try to eat, and there was no mother's milk for him here. So in the end, we just had to wish the man well, and hope that years of living on a mountain would keep his footing sure as he traversed what would have to be a washed out and muddy path over the mountain-top to get home. I went to bed thinking of my friend Maria's baby and how lucky he was in so many ways, and wishing there were more niceties for the babies here in this sad mountain community.

We left the next morning after much fanfare and a full belly (but not too full, because I didn't want to be sick on the tap-tap on the way down the mountain). The hike back to Tom Gato was uneventful, except for a short stretch where Kim illustrated a bit of how to handle requests for gifts with equanimity. A girl on the road (who was traveling the walk to school with a hundred of her friends from the area) kept asking in many different ways what Kim had to give her. Kim deflected the questions with jokes because it would be a lie to say that we had nothing to give this girl, but would open a big bag of worms if we gave something to her and nothing to the twenty other girls who were walking with us at the time. So in response, Kim would say things like, "I have encouragement for you." with a smile. Or she might commiserate with the story the girl was telling her about how little her family had. I was left alone for the most part because I played up my ignorance of Kreyol a little more than was absolutely truthful. At this point in the trip I was catching quite a bit. I couldn't have put much together in sentences, but I was catching snatches of words and could get the gist of a surprising number of conversations even without Cara translating constantly. She did a lot, but not all the time, and when she wasn't I was startled by how much I was catching.

So we arrived in Tom Gato and made a taptap to Dabon without incident. Upon reaching Dabon I realized that this is what I was expecting Haiti to be like. Nothing in the trip so far had really fit into the picture of what Haiti was in my head. I'd seen a bustling city on the ocean, with highs and lows, and I'd seen a lovely village in a valley with some people doing better and some doing worse in terms of living conditions. But in my head this was the place I was expecting. Which is kinda sad, because this wasn't good. It was sweltering, and dusty, and it had all of the bad things about Jacmel with none of the good. Now, understand also, I'd just come from Lazil which, while probably poorer than most of Dabon, was cool-ish and had a crazy beautiful view to distract you from the sadness of the quality of life. Here, for a pair of eyes seeing things for the first time, but had sweat dripping into them, there was overwhelming sadness. No trees to speak of except dotted here and there, and no green really either. Just dust and houses/businesses crammed all together. Also keep in mind that this is just the downtown I'm talking about. In the surrounding neighborhoods, as I would see, there was more vegetation and things looked a little less bleak. This was my first meeting with Dabon however, and it set the tone for our visit in some aspects.

One aspect with which I was extremely happy was our visit with my friend Maxandre. A year ago I would have called him Cara's friend, but he's become my friend as well as he's visited the U.S. since Cara's been gone. We walked through the sad bustle of Dabon to get to Maxandre's library, Rasin Lespwa. He wanted to show us the library that he'd helped create out of nothing. Here are a few pictures of Rasin Lespwa.

Maxandre told us that Rasin Lespwa is the only library in the zone, and it has the only photocopier for three hours drive, so people come from far off to use it. The photocopier is a main source of revenue for the library, which survives also on donations. The schools in the area send their kids there after school on allotted days and you could see the excitement on their faces at being there. Most of the books were in French, but Maxandre proudly showed us a few shelves of books that he'd gathered for their collection that were in Kreyol. It's incredibly hard to find books in Kreyol because it is an oral tradition mostly, and because the French set up the education system in Haiti, and of course they set it up so that everything is taught in French, even though it's not a language that anyone in a rural setting ever hears much until they get to school. Imagine that you go to school for the first time as an American and all the books are written using cockney British slang. Sure you'd get the odd word here and there, because it's English-based, but you'd be hard pressed to understand much for the first year or so, when you're supposed to be learning the basics. That's a poor analogy, because Kreyol is much farther removed from French than just a dialect, but it's the best I can come up with at the moment. It's just a ludicrous thing to ask of a youngster, in my book. "Here you go. Off to school with you. Soak in all you can. I know you don't understand, but that's the way it's always been done here, so suck it up. Oh, by the way, the teacher's going to beat you with a stick if you can't keep up."

All of that is to illustrate what might lead someone like Maxandre to start his own school, even without means or much in the way of support. That's a story for later on, since we're going chronologically, but for now I'll say that Rasin Lespwa is an amazing place run on a shoestring, and if you'd like to donate to a worthy cause, I can think of few better than this.

After meeting the staff of the library, and seeing a class full of kids come in to have a reading (I think it was a TinTin book that was being read) we went to the house where we'd be staying. This was the house of Madanm Djo, Cara's host mother from her first trip to Haiti. Here, I have to be a little careful, because I don't want to sound too harsh. Our reception was chilly. For the heat my body felt, I was feeling like there was a draft when I met Madanm Djo. For the first day and a half, it felt like there was a private joke that the entire community surrounding the house was in on, except for Cara and me. Cara seemed to think it was because of the last time she'd been here. It was the beginning of her apprenticeship, and her Kreyol was extremely limited, so I think they may have expected her to be no better, and that having us stay with them was a burden that they didn't want. Eventually, a few members of the community showed a good example and really engaged Cara in conversation, and seemed to shame Madanm Djo into doing so as well. By the end of our trip, it seemed there was a different lady who was our host. She was attentive and kind, and she seemed genuinely sad to see us go. Perhaps she was just having a bad day that first day. I think the other thing that may have clouded my perception is the two previous receptions from the two previous households. In Dal and in Lazil we were treated as family, and here it just felt like we were family that nobody wanted around.

Looking back on it, I think it rather telling that the only pictures I took in Darbonne were of Rasin Lespwa. Subconciously I don't think I really wanted any mementos of my time here. Sad, now that I'm thinking about it, because I would like to have a few snaps to keep the memories fresh, but not really all that surprising.

A couple other tidbits from our time in that community: We saw a demonstration of martial arts lead by a man who was trying to teach a group of young people inside a fenced in makeshift dojo. We took several walks along the canal which brought water to fields, and was flush with running water due to the rains we'd seen in Lazil. We were accosted several times by a teen on a bike that would yell out, "Blan! Blan! Coman Ou Ye!!" ('Whitey! Whitey! How are you?!' This yelled in a less than friendly way) I had the fun of having something large and crawly traverse my back in the night, probably a cockroach, but my jumping caused Cara to hurl herself from the bed, and the resultant ruckus woke the household who thought it was a rat, not a bug. (small consolation for me, though I guess a rat would have been worse) We actually did see one member of the family do a running jump-kick to stamp a rat that was climbing the wall of their house. I couldn't believe he actually hit the thing. His foot must have been six feet up the wall when he kicked that rat square in the middle of it and then chased it down to crush it in the grass nearby. Made me wonder how much practice he'd had with that pasttime.

The one thing that I really wish I had gotten pictures of is Maxandre's school. He took us for a visit while classes were going on, and we were able to see what a beautiful thing he's trying to create. His school has 3 grades so far, and they're building new rooms onto the building to house a new grade every year. They hope to go all the way through high school eventually, but they have to retain students, and they have to get more funds. The amazing thing about this school, and sad that it's so unique, is that they are teaching without the stick. That is, they are not using corporal punishment as a tool to get kids to learn. They are also teaching the kids using Kreyol texts, and using Kreyol as the mode of communication instead of the traditional French. This is something of a problem, because it makes it hard to get parents to send their children here. French is the standard, and yet Kreyol is the main language spoken by the people. I've said this before, but it's important to understand. So Maxandre has a hard road ahead, trying to keep kids coming back despite their school being different. The good thing is that his methods are working, and the kids are learning. His contention is that they're learning better than they would being beaten and learning in a secondary language. I tend to think he's right.

The last thing I'd like to relate about our trip to Darbonne was actually a side trip that Maxandre took us on one evening. We traveled about twenty minutes by motorcycle out into the countryside where Maxandre told us there was a literacy center that was having a meeting. We walked in on a group of about fifteen villagers of varying ages making tissue paper flowers. We watched as they folded the tissue, following the directions of the group leader. Sometimes they had a hard time understanding what they were supposed to do, but they soldiered on and created some art to take home with them. When they were finished, we all gathered in a circle on benches and they started their ending ceremony. They had games where they each picked a person and told them a letter to write, and then passed the duty to another friend. They had another game where the person chosen had to relate something that they'd learned in their time with the group. Finally, we went around the circle and each person had to say their name, and tell of something that they wanted to share about their experience. There were young people in their teens, and there were older people up to about the age of 70 in the circle. Overwhelming was the evidence that this organization had touched their lives, and a number of times I found myself moved to tears. The one woman that I remember most fondly had bad teeth and a wandering eye, and she welled up with tears of her own as she said, "For all my life I've had to make a cross on the paper if I was asked to sign my name. Because of this group, I am now able to sign my own name on official documents, and I will never again sign a cross on a piece of paper. I will sign my name." As we drove away that night, I thought about how absolutely incredible it must feel for someone after decades of adult living to be able to say that. "I will sign my name." You and I take it for granted, but for that lady, this was a club she'd never thought she'd be asked to join.

Sorry about how long this has taken me to get up on the site. Things have been kinda crazy lately, and I just haven't felt like writing. I'm hoping that's past for a while, and I can get a little more regularity here.