A picture's worth a thousand words...

I was going to try to describe a recent attempt at leading yoga...but I think this picture pretty much sums up the hilarity:

 And this picture holds several hundred thousand words. This is a pile of all the books I read between September 15th and January 5th. Some I brought with me, some my mom brought for me, and some are in the library here.

 

And for my fellow bookworms...titles, authors, and comments...

Kittens and Clouds

This light and fluffy blog post brought to you by Mother Nature.

We have a very sweet cat here who lives in the kitchen and pantry and does wonders for our mice problem. Or at least she did until she learned to beg from the table. But I don't see mice anymore, so I think she's still doing her job. Last week she had 3 kittens! I had somehow failed to notice that she was pregnant (?? I don't pick her up very much, and she's so skinny to begin with. I guess I'm used to fat American cats and just thought she was finally approaching normal cat weight.) So now there are three white and black kittens living in a box in the back of the dining room. They mostly just look like blind rats at the moment, but they're still pretty cute, and we're very excited for when their eyes open in another week and we can start playing with them.  

Mimi and her 3 kittens

The other big event of the past week is that dry season is officially over. Hallelujah! It has rained several nights in a row this week, after nearly two months of no rain at all, and it is such a welcome relief. Thursday night a huge storm came through, and Friday morning we woke up to clear blue skies and amazing clouds! I had forgotten what it was like to be able to see the mountains on the other side of the city, or the island (Île de la Gonâve) out in the bay. Sometimes the mountains here remind me of Ireland, because they are green, but covered in brush, not trees. The first thing I noticed when I woke up and looked out the window was how vibrant all the colors were when not seen through a thick film of dust hanging on the air and coating every object. "Oh right, this is a Caribbean island! It's gorgeous here!"

After breakfast I went up on the roof to take pictures of the incredible clouds. I've always been a fan of clouds, but thanks to my friend Maria's amazing cloud blog (The Accidental Naturalist) I've started noticing them a lot more on a day-to-day basis and I have quite a collection of cloud pictures from our roof. But these clouds were making everybody do a double take and say "woah, awesome!" I know because the girls asked to borrow my camera, and when I looked later to see what they'd been taking pictures of, I found nearly 30 pictures of the clouds. Not the bay and the clouds, not the mountains and the clouds, just the clouds, they were that captivating.

I think part of what made them spectacular was that they were very close.

Clouds hovering just overheard, and churning above the opposite mountains.

Clouds over the bay, this is so delicate it looks like a painting!

Urban Fabric

A friend of mine in architecture school is participating in a capstone seminar that is focused on rebuilding Haiti. I’ve been sharing a lot of descriptions about the neighborhood I live in to help him get a sense of what life is like in this city. I decided to post here the notes I wrote up for him.  They’re not particularly riveting, but they do give a pretty detailed picture of the neighborhood around me, and I thought some of you might be interested. 

One thing to keep in mind - this is just one a description of our particular bit of hillside. There are parts of the city with really nice houses. There are parts of the city that are business districts. There are parts of the city that are just tin and cardboard shacks sitting on a mound of trash extending out into the bay. So this is only one cross-section of the city, but hopefully an eye-opening one.

Streets: Our street is recently paved so it’s fairly smooth and actually has curbs to define its edges. All the other roads are in pretty bad shape. Huuuge potholes, cars get stuck in them all the time. In addition there’s a permanently compacted layer of rubble and trash on most roads, especially intersections. Also any roads in our neighborhood are lined on both sides by vendors, carts, stalls, baskets, etc. There may or may not be room for 2 trucks to pass each other. Houses go up right to he roadside, no yards to speak of. Doors exit right onto the street. In some places the road has risen up faster than the houses, so a doorway contains a few steps down into a house below the level of the road. This is bad for a lot of reasons. Gutters overflow down into house, and sunlight never gets in to dry things up, or kill germs and mold. As far as traffic, not a lot of cars/trucks on our hill. Maybe one ever 30 minutes? There’s a constant stream of motorcycles, probably about 10 per minute. And pedestrian traffic. No sidewalks, so they’re just on either side of the road. Greatest volume between 5:30-7:30 am, with water fetching, people going to school/work.

Silent Night - the third verse is actually the most important

The most exciting thing that happened to me over Christmas break was that I started speaking Creole. Yes! Me! Creole! I still can’t quite believe it. Granted I am using the term “speaking” very loosely here; something along the lines of “I understand more than 50% of what people are saying to me, and occasionally I can respond in complete, vaguely grammatical sentences.” Doesn’t sound so impressive, but really this is huge, as anyone who’s ever tried living in the midst of a totally foreign language can attest. At one point in late December I noticed that I had started to make jokes with a few of the nannies. This is significant because jokes generally rely on comedic timing; a quick response that doesn’t allow for slow English to Creole mental translation or consulting a dictionary. So this was a much needed confidence boost. Another key factor in kicking my language butt into gear was that I was the only American here over the Christmas holidays. So it was either have conversations in Creole, or not have any conversations more significant than “Hi, how are you?” for two weeks. And you know what I realized once I started trying? That the girls had been using less and less English in conversations with me for quite a while already, and for the most part were speaking to me totally in Creole. It had been such a gradual transition I hadn’t realized how well I understood the language!

Moving right along...

It’s been quite a while since I posted here. Our internet was permanently down after a 3-year old tripped into the satellite dish on the roof and broke a part. The internet is still down, but thanks to my Dad who did all the research, I was able to go to the Digicell headquarters (which is easily the biggest, fanciest building in Port-au-Prince, and the only one with an elevator, I’m told) and get a USB modem that gets us broadband wireless internet. Not super-fast, but so much more reliable.

This morning the government finally announced the long-awaited election results. This is what I wrote yesterday about waiting for them.

"Everybody is edgy and anxious. Rafael is walking around with his little radio glued to his ear. Rumors are flying around about what time the announcement will be made. 5pm. Noon. 9pm. Tomorrow. Never. So many questions! Is Preval trying to hold onto his power? Is Aristide coming? Why is Duvalier here? If Aristide comes, will everything derail? What if Preval says Celestin should be in the run-off and we’re back to square one and rioting? The total uncertainty is the most unnerving thing. Everyone knows that significant questions are being decided, but no one knows when or how things will be decided, so we are suspended in a sort of delicate limbo that could easily come crashing down into a messy, violent political confrontation. Up until yesterday, the political situation remained essentially the same as it was in mid-December, except with a mounting sense of pressure, because President Preval is constitutionally bound to name the candidates in the run-off election and set a date for those elections before Feb. 7^th. If he does not do so, he will have effectively declared that he does not intend to step down as president, and the UN and OAS will no longer recognize him as legitimate president and will begin taking aggressive steps to remove him. This would be really really bad and everyone’s hoping it doesn’t come to that. So most people are hoping that he will follow the OAS recommendations on the outcome of the first-round elections, name Manigat and Martelly the two competitors for the run-off, and acknowledge that his hand-picked successor Celestin is out of the race"

Last night the power was out in half the city, so the streets were eerily quiet. No one wanted to be caught out on the street if the “wrong” results were announced and there were riots again. Still no announcement by 10 o’clock, so I went to bed, but stayed up for a long time listening to the faint sound of a radio playing somewhere down the street, jolting awake every time I heard the candidate’s names. This morning the announcement finally came. Around 7:30 am I heard the whole neighborhood reacting to something and I jumped up to look out the window. People listening to the radio on the corner passed the news up the hill and through the neighborhood. “Manigat and Martelly. Goodbye Celestin.” There were a few cheers, but mostly it seemed everyone (including me) just breathed a huge sigh of relief.

The kids are happy though. None of the teachers came in today because they were worried they might get stranded here if riots started after the announcement, so school got cancelled. It’s only fair, we don’t get snow days here, so they get ‘election results’ days instead. 

And now even though it’s already February (how did that happen? Time is going by so much faster than it ever did while I was in school!), I’ll go back and tell stories from Christmas break.

As soon as exams were over and the kids had a lot more time on their hands, they asked to braid my hair. So a full day of braiding later, I had purple, blonde, and black extensions braided into my own hair to make braids that hung down to my waist.

 

At first my head felt really weird and I freaked out every time I looked in the mirror, but after a few days I got used to it and realized that it was really nice not to have to brush/arrange my hair a zillion times a day. One of our janitors told me that I was Haitian now because I had Haitian hair (literally translated, “a Haitian head”). It actually got me quite a lot of street cred, if I may be allowed to use that phrase. Basically, people stopped assuming that I was a tourist, and I got a lot less off-color comments from guys on the street.

When Nate (the new intern) came in at the beginning of January, I went with our driver to go pick him up at the airport. This was a little daunting because the airport is a bit crazy and I had no idea what Nate looked like. But I shouldn’t have really worried. He knew I would be there to meet him, and I was the only white woman waiting in the pick-up area. In a random and over-zealous enforcement of immigration policy, the passport officers refused to let him through customs because he didn’t know the address of the place he would be staying in Haiti. (I should point out that street addresses in Port-au-Prince are a rather vague concept…anywhere else in the country they’re pretty much nonexistent, so this is really an absurd requirement). Anyways, he managed to explain to them that I was outside and would (hopefully) know the address they wanted. So they made him leave his bags and papers in the office, and then let him out a side door into the parking lot to find me. He and I then went backwards through the baggage claim, customs desks, and passport control with nobody even giving us a second glance. After I erased “Cecelia” from where the officer had written it on the address line of the immigration form, I wrote our address and the gruff officer stamped away at forms and passport with much gusto and very little attention to where exactly he was stamping, and we left the office. At this point I realized that I was on the wrong side of immigration and customs with no ID whatsoever. Not to worry, I simply shouldered one of Nate’s duffel bags, explained to the customs guy in an offhand manner, in Creole, that “He’s been through here already, and I’m with him” and we both got waved through without a thought. Not a very comforting representation of government security or control, I’ll admit, but I prefer to think of the whole thing as me busting a friend out of the immigration office with my awesome braids, passable Creole, and confident attitude. :-p