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