A different part of the city

My mom is visiting! Well, technically, right now I'm visiting my mom. She is working at Kay St. Germaine, a treatment centre for kids with disabilities. It's been really interesting to live on the opposite side of the city for a few days, and notice how different it is. The most noticeable difference is that it's quiet here. In Bolosse, where I live, it is always noisy. The noise starts at 5:30 in the morning when it starts getting light. A steady stream of people with empty buckets and other water containers treks down the hill, and people carrying full buckets on their heads coming back up. Street vendors play music from their radios if they stay in one place, or shout out their wares if they're walking. The water vendor's truck has a horn that sounds vaguely like an ice-cream truck, but plays the titanic theme song. And the sound of motorcycles blaring their horns as they round the corner is constant from sunrise to long after sunset. Basically there are a ridiculous amount of people crammed into a relatively tiny space, and it is impossible that our neighborhood would be anything other than noisy. The one or two nights that the streets have been dead quiet at night were because there were gunshots and a gang in the area, so instead of being peaceful, the quiet was just eerie.

In contrast, Kay St. Germaine is on the opposite side of the city, tucked between the sprawling compound of the UN forces (from our porch you can see the flags of the Israeli and Italian regiments across the street), and the US Embassy. On the weekend when there are no kids at the center, there aren't many people around. We're surrounded by warehouses and lots of green space, actually, and it's hard to believe I'm still in the same city. It's been a really nice change of pace (and volume) and it's been fun to meet all of the people my mom has been working with, including a canadian nun, an argentinian physical therapist, an irish occupational therapist, and bunches of other interesting people.

The big topic of discussion here this weekend has been the cholera outbreak in St. Marks, and what's going to happen if it reaches Port-au-Prince. I spent my afternoon of internet access on the WHO (World Health Organization) website researching cholera treatment and prevention, so I have all the information I can gather, and I've been relieved to discover that cholera is a completely treatable illness. The reason it is so fatal is that it moves incredibly quickly, so if you aren't diagnosed and treated quickly (the treatment is simply rehydration, combined with simple antibiotics for more severe cases) the dehydration can cause death in a matter of hours. Thankfully there has been a rapid and fairly comprehensive response to the outbreak, and it will hopefully be contained soon.  Please know that you don't need to worry about me. Cholera spreads through contaminated water, and we have a very good water filtration system within our orphanage. If I still manage to become sick somehow, we have a large stockpile of oral rehydration salts that were left by some medical teams a few months ago, which I will be force-feeding to anyone who shows so much as a hint of cholera symptoms during the next few weeks.

Keep Haiti, and especially the town of St. Marks, in your prayers.

Love, Cecelia

More pictures

This little boy is from the infants orphanage up at Dr. Bernard's house. He was very suspicious of my camera and what I was doing pointing it at him. 

Until I showed him the picture, and then he was all smiles.

In the centre of the city, as you're driving along,  you suddenly pop out of slums and tent cities and pitted streets onto a grand boulevard lined with columns and statues and monuments. It's like a little piece of a grand european city was plopped down in the middle of crazy disorganized Port-au-Prince. But now the palace is in ruins, same as it was the day after the earthquake, and is a little bit of a symbol for how little has really been rebuilt since January. 

Some pictures, because I am visiting mom and have internet.

This is me with Christie, the daughter of one of our laundresses. 

As promised, pictures of baby chickens. They're quite a bit bigger now, and just getting into the sort of ugly half-grown stage. 

And this is the view from our roof. One of these days I'll remember to bring my camera up to catch the sunset. 

Bieber Fever

Dear friends and family, it is with a heavy heart that I relate this terrible news. After a mere three weeks in Haiti, I've cracked. I now like music by Justin Bieber.

I didn't go down without a fight, mind you. When I first got here and the kids asked me if I liked songs by Justin Bieber I said no, because a) I didn't actually recognize any of his songs, and b) I felt like I shouldn't be liking them on principle, kind of like Miley Cyrus. I don't think they believed me. Then when they borrowed my ipod and were looking through the music, they came to me and asked where the Justin Bieber music was, thinking they just couldn't find it, and I said I didn't have any. They asked why, I said I didn't like Justin Bieber, they looked at me like I had just said I enjoy drowning puppies in my spare time.

Since then, I have listened to a LOT of his music. Actually, I've listened to just 3 of his songs approximately 12 billion times. There is always music playing from the computers in the library, and it's quite an interesting mix of Miley Cyrus, Beyonce, 50 Cent, SouljaBoy, Kanye, Justin Bieber, Christian Worship Music, Enrique Iglesias, and the dreaded High School Musical soundtracks. When I first got here I was highly amused by the transitions between wildly different genres, and kept cracking up at the ridiculousness of trying to have a serious conversation with Jamie while songs that I associate with Paces are playing. But after a few days I stopped noticing. And after a few more days I started catching myself singing Miley songs while I was painting classrooms. A few more days and I started debating whether it would be wrong to delete my least favorite High School Musical songs from the library computers so I wouldn't have to hear them anymore. And then yesterday I was singing along, realized that I actually liked the song, realized it was a Justin Bieber song, realized I still liked the song, and just gave up. In my defense, when you've been subjected to "Kiss Me Through the Phone" on repeat several nights in a row, just about anything sounds good.

Also, this strange mash-up of teen music, r&b, rap, and american worship music isn't just unique to the kids here. Lots of times when I pay attention to the music that's playing on the street or in the houses around us, I hear pretty much the same thing (minus the Enrique, I think that's just us).

Playing Librarian

On Tuesday, Marsha and I began to organize all the books in the orphanage library. There are a lot of books, and whatever organization they were originally in has been rearranged and shifted out of recognition, so there really wasn't any kind of order at all, which drove me crazy. So I was more than happy to start by taking all the books off the shelves (and wiping down each one with a dust-rag while I was at it). We started by separating the French and English books into two sections, which took most of yesterday. Then today I got the English side sorted into basic categories, and arranged all the childrens books in a rough order from easiest to hardest, and tried to sort all the educational books by subject. The French side was a bit harder to organize, because neither Marsha nor I know French. This makes figuring out the content of the books a little difficult, and we didn't get much farther than "Well, this looks one has numbers on the front, we'll put it in the math pile. This one has pictures, it goes in the kids pile..." After school was done for the day one of our girls came in and helped us out by translating the titles of the teaching materials for us, and sorting the novels by reading level.

We came across several French books that had naked women on the cover. We decided those were probably not appropriate for a Christian school's library, but I can't help wondering if somebody was just really careless when choosing the books to send, or if French people just don't bat an eyelash over naked women and it didn't occur to someone that it would be considered inappropriate here.

Some other rather strange features of our collection are a sort of homeopathic cookbook, the 2003 report on infections diseases published by the American Pediatrics association, and my personal favorite, a book in French that I think roughly translates to "A Name to Live By" which tells you all about your personality based on your name. In addition to a lot of complicated graphs and charts that I didn't bother decipthering with the French/English dictionary, I discovered that my color is Blue, my vegetable is Carrot, my animal is the Squirrel, and my electrical resonance is 34,000 v/s. Who knew? Apparently I also share these characteristics with people named Edith and Marguerite.

Despite the oddballs, there are a lot of really good books here, and I found a lot of old friends that I am eager to reread. I've already finished The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle and The Wind in the Willows; up next are Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The kids here don't like reading very much, and can't figure out why I do. I think I wouldn't like reading much either if the only books I had to read were in my second or third language. I haven't found a single book written in Creole in our library, which is really sad, but I suppose there isn't exactly a market for Creole publishing. I've also been steaming through the books I brought with me - so far I've read The New Friars, Simple Spirituality, and I'm half done with The Good News about Injustice - all of them really good,  thought-provoking, and incredibly relevant to my experiences here. I'll probably write more of my thoughts about those here when I've had time to think about them a little bit.

First day of School

Today was the first day of school, and it was just about as chaotic as I expected. After breakfast I sat in the courtyard and watched as students trickled in; some with parents in tow, some being towed by parents, and some confidently on their own. With the preschool kids, it was pretty much like any first day of school. Some kids impatiently dismissed their anxious parent, others had to be pried out of their parents' arms, screaming and flailing. Mark and Marsha and I spent the first hour or so helping the two Pre-K teachers to calm down all the crying kids. (At one point, all but 2 of the 16  three and four year olds were wailing, those two just rolled their eyes, put their heads down on their desks and went to sleep.) The principal even came in with a bag of candy and each kid got a lollipop, which I thought was a great idea, but somehow they managed to cry around those too. Eventually they all wore themselves out though, and realized that mommy was not being mean and hiding on the other side of the classroom door.

I went up to check on the 3rd floor classrooms, and discovered that no classes were actually being held. Apparently the high school teachers are all part-time, and teach at several different schools. So they spend the first few days going to each school and trying to figure out a schedule. This would sort of explain why our school secretary told me that there would be lots more kids  in class next week, because lots of parents don' bother sending their kids for the first week of school.

Back on the first floor, the preK and Kindergarten kids were having recess, which for the preK kids involved sulking at the fact that mom or dad still hadn't come to rescue them, and for the Kindergarteners (who dealt with all that crying stuff last year and are so over it) this involved using us blans (white people) as a jungle gym. When they saw me, they all disassociated from the pile they were in - it turned out Mark was underneath the pile holding two of the sulking three-year olds - and flying over to pile on me. I told them I only speak a tiny bit of Creole, but that didn't stop them from peppering me with questions. One of the questions I managed to pick out, strangely enough, was "Do you eat goat? (Ou mange cabrit?)"  and I replied yes simply because I had understood the question. (Technically I'm not sure if I've ever eaten goat, the meat here tends to be mystery meat and we usually just don't ask). This prompted a hundred questions about what other things I eat..."Mange pul (chicken)? Mange bef (beef)?" and lots of other foods I didn't know the words for, so I just said yes to everything, and then said that I eat little children and chased them all around the courtyard some more. Considering my generally pathetic levels of Creole language skills, I considered this to be a highly successful conversation.

Schools in Haiti, and Toddlers as a substitute for the gym

(Written October 2nd)

We have had much cooler weather the past few days. As in, I have actually been able to wear pants without overheating. Once I even thought I should wear a long-sleeved shirt, but that lasted for 10 minute and then I was too hot. I'm not sure if this is "fall" weather, or simply a cold spell that will vanish in a few days.

The big news here is that school starts on Monday, This means that things will be calmer, because I will have a little more free time during the day while the kids are in school. It will also mean things are crazier because we will have 150-200 extra kids in our building every monday-friday. I have been learning lots of things about running a school in Haiti. Rule #1, abandon the idea that it will be run like an American school. Rule #2, try not to panic when, on the Thursday before school starts, the principal still doesn't know whether or not there will be a twelfth grade, which classes are assigned to which classrooms, whether arrangements have been made to have the generator on during the day so the classrooms have light, whether another pre-K teacher needs to be hired to handle the 36 three-year-olds who are registered in our youngest classes, and the list goes on.

Luckily, I am not personally responsible for anything to do with the school, so I just get to observe the chaos (well, it seems like chaos to me, I'm well aware that all the Haitians find it perfectly normal) and get comfortable with it. Given that just a week ago there was still doubt as to whether the school would even be open this year, I suppose we're in pretty good shape. And I am kind of ridiculously excited about all the 3, 4, and 5-year olds who will soon take over our courtyard. Part of the reason our school has SO many kids registered for kindergarten and pre-k is because we have those classes outside in the courtyard instead of inside the building. Most Haitians are still very afraid, understandably, of buildings collapsing. Parents don't want their small children (who can't run fast enough to escape a building) inside a classroom.

Friday and most of Saturday I went with the kids to Dr. Bernard's house up in the mountains above Port-au-Prince. It was really nice to be out of the city for a bit; to see trees, breathe clean air, and just relax. In addition to Dr. B's house, there is also the Bethel Guest House, which provides housing to short-term mission teams, as well as New Life Link, another orphanage for kids age 1-5ish. So as you may expect, every moment that I wasn't eating, sleeping, or swimming, I was holding at least two kids. Holding one is simply impossible, they know that you have two perfectly good arms, and get mad if you don't use both of them. And if you try to get out of it by standing up, they drag a chair next to you, and then push you until you sit down and two or three more can climb up onto your lap. So I spent the weekend quite literally covered in babies. It was great, except I felt like I needed more arms. And the arms I do have are really reall tired. Apparently I need to work out more, but I'll just have to substitute toddlers for weights. Marsha and I discussed sewing a sort of apron/vest with child-sized pockets for our next visit. So many wonderful kids, I wish I could describe them all! I think I spent the most time holding the two-month old twins just to give them some time outside of their crib. I know that the orphanage cribs are practical, they're made of rebar and are both indestructable and inescapable, but when I look at them all I see are cages and it breaks my heart to see all the babies just lying there, some quiet, some crying, all of them just staring listlessly. Again, I have never wished so desperately for more arms! But finally coaxing a smile out of a solemn big-eyed baby after 45 minutes of determined tickling and teasing and kissing and cooing...there just aren't words.

Lastly, I'm sorry I haven't been able to reply to all the emails you've sent me! Please know that even though I don't always have time (or internet) to respond to them, it is so so good to hear from you, and it does more than you know to encourage me.

Love, Cecelia

WE HAVE BABY CHICKENS!!!

(september 27th)

Yes, eight of them, and they are super-adorable.
Previously, the only three animals here were the cat in the pantry, and one hen and one rooster who live in the yard of the boys' house. The hen has ben nesting for quite a while, and Marsha and I had given up on anything hatching, and were talking about taking the eggs away so she could try again. And then today we found eight little fuzzballs with beaks tumbling after proud mama hen around the courtyard. Seven are black and one is brown, and they really are ridiculously cute. No one else here seems to be as excited though; the boys mostly seemed to think I was crazy for following them around and taking pictures. They may be right, but I don't care, I will never pass up an opportunity to appreciate baby animals. I'll put up pictures when I can.