A wash

The other day, we found a legit tarantula lurking in a corner of our office.

To be fair, we also found these two kittens asleep in an organizer tray. So I guess we'll call that day a wash.

Houses

Rarely do I have the opportunity to go inside a house here, so this post is all about exteriors. The rectory is very different than the typical house—it’s MUCH larger, and was built with the purpose of hosting visitors. It has 2 stories, 6 or so bedrooms for guests and Father Gaby, three full bathrooms, a big hall with a sitting area and a dining table that can seat 20, a kitchen, and an office. Apart from some schools, it’s the biggest building in the area.

The rectory

Local houses are much smaller. They are rectangles divided into probably 2 to 4 rooms, depending on how big they are. No kitchens, no bathrooms—all that happens outside, as does most of the living based on what I’ve seen from walking and driving around.

I think just about every house has a tin roof, but the walls can be made of many different things. Newer houses seem to be made of concrete, with sculpted concrete grates for windows and ventilation. A few of the fancier ones have curved facades with ironwork, or porches with columns. The newer houses are a naked grey, waiting until the family has enough money for paint. More established ones are painted bright tropical colors, like teal accented with coral pink. Sometimes you see a house with just the street-facing wall painted, showing its good side to the world.

The next step down from the sturdiness of concrete is sticks, rocks and clay mud. Many of these can look the same as concrete, because the mud has been smoothed and painted, but they don’t have either the rigid squareness of cinderblocks or the sculpted curves of the window grates. In some places where the mud is starting to crumble away, you can see the sticks underneath woven together to make walls, or bits of stone or brick showing through. Most have at least two skinny doors in the front, each entering a different room, and a couple of windows. The doors and windows both have shutters made of wooden boards, to keep out storms—and, it seems, light and air too, since they’re almost always closed. No matter, I guess, since everyone lives outside anyway. These houses have the most style and character and Haitian-ness—so obviously I have no pictures of them, because of my hang-ups about taking pictures of people and their stuff.

You’ll see some houses that are just the wooden slats with no mud covering them. I wonder if these are waiting to be finished, or if they are as far along as they are going to get. Other are even less sturdy, made of palm branches woven together into mats and attached to wooden frames. I’m sure these houses are much breezier and pleasant to be inside on a hot day, but I don’t think they’d stand a chance against a hurricane. Big storms like that tend to come up form the south, doing a lot of damage to Haiti’s southern finger and losing strength as they reach the north. Still, judging just by the thunderstorms we’ve had since I’ve been here, the families in these houses are getting wet on a fairly regular basis.

Within the last month, about a half dozen families with these palm frond houses on my way to work have built shiny new concrete ones, courtesy of the NGO World Vision. Many of the schools around here have the World Vision logo attached to them, indicating that WV helped pay to build the school or is supporting it in some way. They do a lot of projects related to children’s welfare, and it seems that the new houses are a part of that. Somehow they determined that certain kids in their program lacked an adequate shelter, and so they got a new one.

A new concrete house awaiting its roof, plus a kid dashing to get into the photo.

There is one other house I drive by every day that cracks me up because it is such a weird outlier. It’s covered in pink stucco with a tile roof, gutters, and plastic shutter-blinds on all the windows. It’s decorated on the outside with garlands of tacky fake flowers. Stick a flamingo lawn ornament in the yard and it would not be out of place in a short of shabby Florida neighborhood. Here, it might technically be the “nicest” house in the village, but its desirability is tempered by the fact that it is completely incongruous with every other house for miles in every direction.

Tacky porch flowers not really visible in their full glory, but you get the idea.

Bassin Diamant

To get to my office, you make a left turn off the road. When you make that turn, you cross a little stream of water, no more than what you would see if someone was washing his car in his driveway up the road from your house in the US. But this water is always there, always running, every day. There is definitely no one up the road washing a car 24/7.

            Turns out that water is running down the mountain from the Bassin Diamant—the Diamond Basin. It’s a clear pond in the middle of the woods where a voodoo spirit is supposed to live. The water is said to have special properties, and it’s a popular place for ceremonies.

            When the vets were still here we hiked up there one day. They invited me and the other recently arrived foundation interns to come, while conveniently failing to mention exactly how long and vertical this hike was going to be. One of the other interns asked me where we were going exactly, and I said I wasn’t sure, but “we’re probably not climbing a mountain or anything.”

            We then proceeded to climb a mountain. I guess the spirits tend not to live in just any old pond on flat land.

            It was steep and hot and sweaty, but it was one of the few things resembling exercise that I’ve done since I’ve been here. On the way up, we passed a friendly group of farmers chopping down a tree to make charcoal. I’m sure the caravan of panting blans made their day—they certainly found something about us hilarious. We also passed a big cow chowing down on a felled plantain tree. I have no idea how a cow could possibly have made it up there. I could barely do it, and there’s a lot less of me than there is of a big lumbering livestock animal.

The work to get up there was worth it though. From a clearing on the mountain you could see a great view of the whole plain of farms below.

Not a great picture, but past the trees is the plain, and past the plain is the coastal mountain ridge.

            The bassin itself was pretty too. We reached it around 5:30, when the sun is beginning to set, and beautiful golden light was streaming through the trees. The water was clear and still—like a diamond—and the way the trees grew around it made it feel secret. You can tell why people think it’s enchanted. The trees of red and blue patches painted on them (important voodoo colors, and probably-not-entirely-coincidentally the colors of the Haitian flag), and there are drips of wax on the rocks where people have lit candles. Here is a picture, but it does not do it justice:

            On the path to get back down, you can hear a stream babbling down from the bassin. The people have built a channel to guide the water down to their homes so they can use the enchanted water, mostly, it seems, for mundane purposes. The channel passes some houses that no doubt use it for cooking and washing, then bends off towards the fields to be used for irrigation. One kid figured out how to do this surfing-sliding thing in the channel, which has slimy algae or something growing on the inside. He had his own little water park going on there.

Outings

With the vets in town, there’s finally been enough people around to justify putting together some entertainment. After three weeks as the lone guest of the rectory, I was surely ready for it.

            Last Saturday, Father Gaby piled us all into his old pickup and took us to the beach. “Piled” is exactly the right word—there were 5 people in cab with Father Gaby, and 7 of us crammed in the truck bed with a cooler and a spare tire. It was not a particularly comfortable ride, but the manpower came in handy when we forded (or Toyota-ed, I guess) a small river and couldn’t quite make it up the bank on the opposite side.

            The beach we went to was about an hour drive north of the rectory. We pulled up to a small beach club, a cluster of empty buildings along a crumbly concrete promenade on the water. No one else was there—the place is in a town too small to attract any tourists, and despite living on a tropical island, Haitians are not big beach-goers.

            To us, though, it was awesome. The water was perfect, and an attendant found us some beach chairs to set out under the palm trees on the promenade. Late in the afternoon, the owner of the place, a friend of Father Gaby’s, made us fish and fried plantains for lunch. Just about everyone got sunburned, but it was generally regarded as worth it.

            The next day, we checked out a very popular form of local entertainment—primary school soccer matches. We saw the championship game between Holy Cross, a nun-run school around the corner from the rectory, and another local primary school.

            This game was clearly a big deal. There were hundreds of people there to watch, crowding thickly around every inch of the field. The field is located about midway between the two schools, and both sides were equally well supported. Before the game, there was a performance by a marching band and a dance squad, (both making up in enthusiasm what they lacked in precision). A famous announcer had come down to do the commentary, and there were all kinds of speeches and recognitions before the game began. It was weird and delightful to see all this pomp and circumstance for teams of 6^th graders. Youth soccer must be the high school football of Haiti.

            Eventually the game began. We could see pretty well over the crowd from our perch in Father Gaby’s truck, but despite the excited atmosphere I could not really get into the game. I spent most of the time watching what was going on in the crowd---Women setting up stands to sell bits of fritay, or walking through the sidelines selling lollipops and bottles of liquor from the same basket. Guys in their twenties arriving 3 at a time on the backs of motorcycles. Teenage girls standing with their arms around each other, surveying the scene imperiously. Young people dressed to the nines, guys and girls both, ready to flirt. Kids everywhere, sucking on sweets, playing with hula hoops, and shouting and laughing at the blans in the truck.

            In the end, the hometown team did not do so well, though I admit to losing track of the final score. The winning team had a massive on-field celebration, but the trickle of fans leading back in the direction of Holy Cross was noticeably subdued. Still, it was nice to see such a strong showing of community support, and I bet playing in that game has been the highlight of those kids’ young lives.

Sosia

            There is a woman who comes to the parish every day, strolling up the driveways with a box of odds and ends on her head, looking for a place to be. She’s old, the oldest person I’ve seen here, and probably not even four and a half feet tall. Her feet look like a child’s, except for the stiffness in her ankles. She’s chatty and animated, with an urgent, assertive tone. And she loves music and dancing. She'll bounce her shoulders and wiggle her hips when the kids play music in the rec center next door, and she frequently sings little wordless songs to herself.

In an American city, she would read as a homeless person--elderly, barefoot, in a well-worn dress, and conversing loudly and incomprehensibly with anyone or no one. For this reason she can be be disconcerting when you first meet her, coming up the stairs of the rectory porch talking at an almost-shout. But after a beat of awkward eye contact, she'll flash you a toothless smile and put you at ease.

She’ll come up when I’m reading a book on the porch and try to talk me. “Blan!” she calls me, using the Creole word for foreigner (technically it means “white,” but in this context it covers all non-Haitians. Asians are blans, Latinos are blans, African-Americans are ­blans…though I’m guessing the latter get called out on their blanness less frequently). “Blan…” and then she’ll start asking me questions or rattle off a whole spiel. The best I can do is smile and shake my head and tell her I don’t understand Creole. It will usually stop her for a minute or two before she tries again.  It doesn’t seem to bother her that I can’t respond. She still laughs and smiles and gives me playful chucks on the arm, and keeps talking.

The closest I’ve come to understanding her was on a particularly mango-y day. She bustled around the churchyard collecting the fruit and bringing it up to a bag on the porch. Before she put them away she would hold them out to me, three or four at a time in her tiny hands, and say something that clearly meant, “Blan, look at these mangoes. These are beautiful mangoes.”

She does a very old-school thing when she comes up to the yard—she calls out “Oné! Oné!” which means “honor.” Traditionally, someone would say this as they approached a house or a lakou (a courtyard shared by a cluster of houses and families). Someone inside the house or lakou would respond with “Respé!” meaning “respect,” to let them know they were welcome to enter.  The “honor-respect” salutation is very uncommon now, used only by older rural people who remember different days.

One day Father Gaby and I could hear her in the yard one day while we were having lunch and he started telling me about her. Her name is Sosia, a beautiful and, I think, uncommon name for Haiti. She’s in her mid-80s. She had eight children, all of whom have died, which Father Gaby says is the reason that she's a bit unhinged. She blames their deaths on voodoo practices. This has given her a bad feeling about her neighbors, though she seems to be generally well treated. The people joke that she must have an office here at the rectory, since she’s here every day.

She lives now with a few cousins in the area, but she has apparently set her sights on New York. Gaby says that is mostly what she talks about—that the people here are not good or nice, and this is her last day in Haiti before she leaves for New York, where the people are nicer (I’m not sure she knows the New Yorker stereotypes all that well).

These past two weeks, the rectory has been full of blans. A group of veterinary students from the US are here doing clinics for the livestock. I came home from work one day to find her holding court on the rectory porch with the vets all around her. She was laughing and dancing and keeping everyone entertained, most of all herself. Gaby says this is why she thinks she loves New York—because she has it in her head that white visitors are all from there, and we are friendly to her.

She's an enlivening presence to have around the rectory, and I'm glad she has somewhere to come and keep her "office hours" every day. I don't know if she'll ever get to New York, but I hope she finds some peace.

Lawn Mower

Remember when I went on that day trip to the DR to buy a lawn mower? One of the nursery guys took it out for a spin the following week. The compound is pretty big, so it took a while to mow. It was kind of nice, working by the window, listening to the drone of the mower, smelling the freshly cut grass. Took me back home to the suburbs in the summer.

                The Haitians, however, hated it. They couldn’t stand the noise and complained about it all morning. When the nursery guy finally turned it off, one of the agronomists who I share an office with muttered the Haitian equivalent of “Thank you, sweet baby Jesus.” (And yet, no one here seems to mind the noise from electrical generators or pressure washers (gotta keep those motorcycles gleaming). They both sound basically the same as a lawn mower and at least one of them if not both runs for hours every day. Zero complaints.)

                It’s been a couple of weeks now and the grass is starting to get a bit scraggly again. So far, it seems that looking at messy grass is preferable to listening to a lawn mower. We’ll see if they ever end up getting their money’s worth out of that machine.

Food

On the whole, I’m liking Haitian food. Octavie, the housekeeper at the rectory, keeps us all well fed, and the office has a cook who makes lunch for all of us every day. Most dishes are a variation on the rice + sauce formula, which is not all that different from Senegal. Whereas the Senegalese often changed up the rice with couscous, millet, vermicelli, and even French fries, Haitians tend to stick with the rice, but add in beans in most cases. The one deviation I’ve seen is a kind of corn mush, though this is far less popular. Sauces are usually oily and tomato-y, with onions, potatoes and small bits of meat, including chicken, beef, goat, or fish. Soups and stews are also common, containing most of the same meat-and-root veggie ingredients along with a prodigious quantity of thyme.

Haiti is also known for its fritay and pate, fried street foods, but I almost never get an opportunity to eat them (street food requires a bustling street full of customers, which we don’t really have here). Now and then Octavie will make fried plantains, which are starchy and potato-y when new, and sweeter and softer when fully ripe (fried sweet plantains are extra tasty). I also liked lam veritab, or breadfruit, which is a pulpy white tree fruit that is mashed up and made in to bready fried dumplings.

Like Senegal, Haiti grows a lot of peanuts. Unlike Senegal, they know how to make good peanut butter with it. While thinner than your standard Jiff or Skippy, it’s ground to a more appealing smoothness than your grind-in-store natural Whole Foods nut butters. Haitians eat it as a spread on bread, like Americans. I’ve yet to come across a dish like Senegalese mafe, with sticky too-rich peanut sauce, which I can’t say I find disappointing.

One thing I’ve never had before is lambi, or conch, a large mollusk with those impressive curly pinkish seashells (great for household decorations and ruling islands of increasing barbaric English schoolboys). It’s a delicious Haitian specialty, meaty and lobstery-tasting. I had assumed I wouldn’t get to try it, since lambi are nearly endangered, having been pretty well devastated by overfishing. Knowing that, I would be unlikely to order it at a restaurant, but there it was for lunch one Sunday, cooked in oil, damage done. I’m glad I got to try it, since it was delicious and opportunities are rare (as they probably should be).

The only thing I have deeply not enjoyed so far is boiled cows feet. I would happily never eat that again in my life. Also okra, though that was a known commodity and it’s sort of more tolerable if you mash it into the rice and do your best to pretend it’s not there. It’s a bit harder to fool yourself as you’re spitting out unidentifiable cow foot bone chunks.

Cows feet aside, it’s been an enjoyable culinary landscape so far, though I will admit the day-in-day-out rice-and-beans routine is becoming a little redundant. An important saving grace is that Haitians eat off individual plates. Guys in particular will help themselves to gut-bustingly large portions, but they won’t push a heaping rice mound on you they way the Senegalese are fond of doing when you’re all sharing one dish together. Still, despite the ability to control my own rice intake, there are a few American foods that I find myself missing.

Like pasta, which only ever appears here in spaghetti form with the faintest hint of tomato not-really-a-sauce. On one miraculous occasion, Fr Gaby managed to produce one or two ounces of grated Parmesan, the only cheese I’ve seen here (not counting the Bongú brand “fromage fondue,” packaged in a wheel of individually wrapped wedges, no refrigeration necessary. I suspect that this is a “cheese product” rather than actual cheese.)

And hamburgers, which are conspicuously absent while their usual all-American cookout sidekick, hot dogs, are ubiquitous. Marchands sell hot dogs on skewers as street food, and they often appear at meals at the rectory with their ends sliced in to little fleurs-de-lys. Served with ketchup and frequently mayo as well. But yeah, no hamburgers. C’est dommage—Senegal had killer hamburgers.

And salad. Travelers with delicate blan constitutions are advised not to eat uncooked vegetables, but this has turned out not to be such an onerous limitation, since they are hardly ever served. Every now and then Octavie will garnish a serving dish with a few leaves of iceberg lettuce, but that’s the closest thing I’ve seen to a leafy green. The only other whole vegetables are roots, and tomatoes and peppers occasionally appear in sauces.

And fruits from temperate zones. In my inevitable reckoning with tropical fruits, I have actually fared pretty well. We had excellent bananas, picked right in the back yard of the rectory, but they all ripened at the same time and the season was over in the blink of an eye. Such is life when you get your food from nature and not from Chiquita. Watermelon is fairly common (did you know watermelon actually has big black seeds in it, you guys??), and I’ve had a come-to-Jesus moment with pineapple (it’s not so bad after all!). I’ve learned to appreciate the flavor of papaya while tolerating its texture. Octavie makes this weird papaya milkshake/smoothie thing that is actually really good.

But then there are the mangoes. Haiti is the largest exporter of mangoes to the US (a drop in the bucket compared to the food the US exports to Haiti), and over 200 different varieties grow here. There are six varieties at the parish compound alone. It’s also the peak of the season right now. Thousands of perfectly ripe, beautiful mangoes are falling to the ground like manna. Even with people basically chain-eating them all day, it is impossible to keep up with what seems like an endless supply.

  I regret to say that I am not doing my part. I tried, but it seems that mangoes and me are destined to be forever at odds. If they can’t win me over at the peak of the season in the mango capital of the world, then I don’t think there’s much hope. All I can do while my co-workers bury their faces in yet another mango is think wistfully about how I am missing the peak of strawberry season back home. Le sigh.

And lastly, I miss added sugar. Haitians know how to add salt and fat, as evidenced by the significant quantity of fried food, but no one has perfected the art of added sugar like the American agro-industrial complex. Despite the abundance of sugar cane still grown here in the north, nearly all of it is processed into klerin, (raw rum). Haiti imports nearly all of its granulated sugar. Candy, cookies and sodas are easily available in cities and towns here, but not so much out in the boonies where I am. Haitians don’t do much baking, and dessert is not really a thing here. Ice cream is a fantasy. The one thing they do add a killer amount of sugar to is coffee, and so far I’m not that desperate.

Though I may be getting close. We did have a birthday celebration for a couple of people in the office the other day, complete with cake. No idea where they managed to find full-on bakery cake, complete with frosting florets, around here, but then again, I was not thinking much beyond “CAKEOMGCAKE!!” The time between when I realized there was cake and when it was time to actually eat it was agonizing. They actually cut the cake and gave everyone their piece before serving lunch, though we were clearly still expected to observe the dominant dessert-last paradigm. I am not sure where I got the strength, but I managed to eat my rice and chicken with an admirable amount of composure, and when it was finally cake time, I kept myself from shoving the whole piece in my mouth at once. Self-control FTW.

Heads up to friends and family, though: upon my return, I expect to eat only the worst the American food system has to offer. Plan accordingly.