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.