Feast of Saint John the Baptist/Ti Jean

Last week, Haitian Catholics celebrated the feast of Saint John the Baptist. After work on Monday, Father Gaby took us to a town called Trou de Nord, to the Church of Saint John the Baptist, where they were having a big multi-day celebration.

This is Haiti though, so a major Catholic saint's day has a decent chance of also being a major voodoo holiday. Many of the voodoo lwa, or spirits, are identified with Catholic saints--in this case, the lwa is called Ti Jean. Voodoo and Catholicism have co-evolved in Haiti for hundreds of years. French plantation owners baptized their slaves but spent no energy on their religious education. The slaves kept their own beliefs and practices from their home countries in Africa, appropriating Catholic saints and images as a cover. For example, the symbol of the lwa Damballa is a snake, so he is often represented as Saint Patrick. My guess is that the slaves matched up the snake symbol on the saint's icon without knowing--or perhaps just not caring--about the whole banishing thing.

Today, from what I can tell, voodoo and Catholicism live comfortably side by side, with most Haitians practicing both. In the past, the Church has taken the "devil worship" stance on voodoo and attempted to do what it can to stamp it out. The State has vacillated back and forth--sometimes it courts the Church's favor (and power) by outlawing voodoo and destroying temples, and sometimes it courts the people by celebrating voodoo as an official religion. Today, Church, State and voodoo seem to have agreed to live and let live (although evangelical churches have taken up the voodoo-is-satanic mantle, forcing their members to renounce the lwa and even attacking voodoo ceremonies). Perhaps the clearest evidence of this is the fact that we were being escorted to a voodoo festival by a Catholic priest. Father Gaby is always happy to answer our questions about voodoo or explain the voodoo-y reasons why Haitians do some of the things they do, though he maintains a respectable ignorance about many of the details (like, for instance, the name of the lwa that was being celebrated at the feast of Saint John. I had to Google that).

So yeah, about this festival. While there are many Churches of Saint John the Baptist in Haiti, the one in Trou de Nord is situated on the bank of a river, making it a prime convergence of Holy Spirit and holy spirit. The holiday is celebrated in every parish that carries the name, but people come from all over to celebrate the feats of Saint Jean and Ti Jean in this particular site.

As we drove to the town, the only crowds we saw were clustered around radios and TVs, hanging on to every play of a World Cup match. I was sort of concerned that no one would at the festival, since the green-and-yellow-decked fanatiks would all be exhausted after a day of prayer and worship at the altar of Brésil.*

But no, once we made it into town, the crowds had indeed turned out (perhaps to thank the saint/lwa for a Brazil victory). Father Gaby nudged the pick up through a human sea, jostling to bust its way into the courtyard of the church. In the sanctuary, people (in Catholic mode) were praying and singing worship songs. Outside the gate, many many more people (in voodoo mode), were pressed up against the locked gates, trying to get as close as possible to the church, where the spirit of the lwa also resides. A woman who slipped inside with the truck furtively lit a candle in a corner, conducting her own private ritual instead of joining in the Mass. The priest of the church said that last year, they left the gates open and the voodoo worshipers had come right up to the steps of the sanctuary. This year, they were trying to keep at least a little breathing room between the two Jeans. 

The real action was happening outside the church, on the river. Father Gaby led us down the street past vendors selling food, rum, and trinkets, some related to the festival (candles, icons of the saints/lwas) and some not (knitted rasta caps, used clothing). He took us to a bridge where we could look down and see what was going on. There were crowds of people clustered all up and down both banks, and sometimes right in the water. Many people had yellow scarves tied around their heads, yellow being Ti Jean's emblematic color (and one of Brazil's too, incidentally). At the center of each cluster was a voodoo priest, man or woman, conducting the rituals of the day. Each lwa has specific food that it likes to receive during ceremonies, so you could see dishes of roasted corn and several types of liquor placed on the ground. The worshipers, women mostly, stripped down and bathed themselves in the water, or let themselves be dunked and splashed by the priests. Libations were poured, cigarettes were smoked, ceremonial garments were donned. From up on the bridge we were too far away to hear anything the priests or the initiates were saying, but even up close their words would likely have been downed out by the sounds of loud drumming, music, and excited crowds.

We didn't see either of the two splashy things commonly associated with Haitian voodoo--possessions and animal sacrifices--but I felt lucky to see even this much. In my experience, when Haitians talk to you about voodoo, they phrase it as something that other people do. Few are willing to talk to blans about their personal non-Catholic beliefs and practices (the Catholicism they'll talk about no problem). It seems that much of the voodoo practice that gets shown to foreigners is in the form of shows put on for the benefit of tourists, trading spirituality for spectacle. Maybe we didn't get to see all the inner workings of "authentic" voodoo, but we did see actual people celebrating in a way that was real to them, which is good enough for me.

*A footnote on football in Haiti--Haiti does indeed have it's own national team, but it is so woefully bad that soccer fans cheer for Brazil or Argentina instead. Some say they would even cheer for Brazil against Haiti if Haiti ever made it to the World Cup, but pretty much no one thinks it would ever come to that. When asked which would happen first, the Haitian national team winning the World Cup or the election of a Haitian Pope, my coworkers barely missed a beat before saying "Pope."

C.P.A. 18

About two weeks ago, I started noticing red spray paint appearing on the sides of many houses on my way to work or on the road to get out of town. They all said “C.P.A.” and then a number. Even the wall around the paroisse had it—“C.P.A. 18.” I asked Father Gaby what this was all about and made an unexpected discovery. 

North of the plain is Cap-Haïtien, the old colonial capital. Around the corner from Cap is Labadee, Haiti’s only cruise resort. Royal Caribbean cruise ships pull up here and let the tourists off to enjoy the beaches and buy souvenirs. The resort is a closed campus—no one from outside is allowed in, and none of the cruisers are allowed to leave. Back in the day, the cruise itineraries didn’t even tell people they were going to Haiti, preferring to tell them that they would be enjoying the tropical island of Hispaniola rather than risk too many passengers realizing they were on their way to a land of violent devil-worshipping zombies.

The fear and racism seems to have relaxed a bit, since Royal Caribbean and the Haitian government are teaming up to link the island’s two biggest tourist attractions—Labadee and the Citadelle la Ferrière, a 17^th century fort built by Henri Christophe, the North’s revolutionary hero (more on the citadel later, when I have had the chance to visit it). The cruise line will offer their passengers the opportunity to take a day trip to the Citadelle, and the Haitian government is hoping that they will leave a lot of their money behind on the way.

In order to make this happen, someone needs to build a good road from Labadee to Milot. The shortest route between the two follows dirt roads across the plain, passing through the villages where I am now living and working. The “C.P.A” marking indicates a building or structure that is going to be demolished in order to widen and pave the road.

This whole area is going to be transformed. In the 5-mile stretch between my office and the Route National 3—one fifth of the total distance between Labadee and Milot—more than 80 structures are marked with a C.P.A. A lot of families are going to lose their homes. A lot will lose the businesses they operate on their property, like bakeries and mechanic shops. A lot will lose their fruit trees, sources of food and shade. Water pumps will have to be relocated. Churches and community buildings will be destroyed, or lose entire sections. Instead of their quiet lakou courtyards, with their mango trees and cactus fences, families will have a highway, with all its noise and snot-blackening mixture of dust and diesel exhaust, in their front yards.

The families are supposed to be compensated for their lost homes, but they need to travel to an administrative center and show papers to prove they own the land the house is on, which many of them do not have. They also have to trust the government to make an honest appraisal of their property and then actually follow through with transferring the money, which the Haitian government does not have a great track record at doing. As far as long-term benefits are concerned, the tourist dollars will be concentrated squarely in the endpoints, Milot and Labadee. The peasants in this area might get temporary construction jobs building the road and rebuilding the houses, but there is nothing permanent for them specified in the plan.

Certainly, the road is not an unmitigated disaster. The directors of the foundation explained to me that when they first started here, not a single kilometer of the 20km between here and Cap-Haïtien was paved. The roads were so rough and bumpy that a round trip to, say, the bank would take all day. Now, about 65% of that route is paved. It only takes about half an hour to get there. You could go three times in one day if you had to. The road has increased the efficiency of much of the foundation’s business, and the new stretch will only help—our route to Cap will be about 99% paved.

Having better access to towns and cities will make travel easier for everyone from farmers taking crops to market to pregnant women trying to get to a hospital. It may encourage other businesses and organizations to open up in the area, and it might even encourage rural people who have moved to the cities to move back to the farms. It may also speed the process of bringing electricity and other modern amenities to the area. These are all good things—in fact, these are things that we development people are specifically trying to make happen.

I’m glad I heard the directors’ opinions about the road. The fact that, in the short term, a lot of rural people are going to face hardship and displacement so that business can boom in the towns is undoubtedly true, but there may be more to the story than I had first imagined. Perhaps the real reason I have bad feelings about this road is that a sentimental, colonial-minded part of me is sad that this little bit of Haiti that I have gotten to know—shady, quiet, isolated—may be unrecognizable if I ever come back to it.

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.