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| Tea-kitty. |
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| I wish I could say this was not my idea. |
I have caught Nate carrying around a kitten in his shirt several times now, and the best part is that our janitor/doorman, Soufrant, is deathly afraid of kittens. Yes you read that right. He just dislikes cats, but kittens are to him, in the words of one of my college roommates, "little tiny furry terrors". So of course, we've been chasing him around the building with kittens all week. It's been great. Today I found out the girls have named them. The big one (pictured here) is Tom, the middle one is Jerry, and the littlest has been named Cecelia, for reasons unclear to me, but hey! I have a cat named after me, woohoo.
Another awesome part of last week was that I got to see Mike Ruth! I'll just say he's my non-biologically related uncle. He was in Haiti doing mapping work for World Vision and some other NGOs, and I got to meet up with him in Petionville on Sunday for lunch.
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| Sorry it's kind of dark, Haitian sun makes pictures very difficult. |
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| The incredible view from Mike's hotel. |
Getting up to Petionville was an adventure, and my first solo attempt at public transportation (before I've always had someone from the orphanage I could follow blindly). People who move to totally new places often talk about "integrating with the local culture". The meaning is that you have your own cultural way of doing things, and when you move to a new place you should be conscious of the way you do things, and make an effort to replace some of those ways with the local ways. This includes things like eating stuff you didn't realize was edible, learning to function by candle-light, showering from a bucket, not eating in public places, dressing very formally for church, etc. In this case, I decided it was time to integrate Port-au-Prince public transportation into my way of life here, instead of asking Dr. Bernard to arrange for a driver to take me all the way to Petionville on what should be his day off.
As you may know, during my semester abroad in Europe I used public transportation extensively for the first time, and found out that I was pretty good at figuring out how it worked in each new city, and really enjoyed the challenge. Unfortunately, this knowledge really doesn't translate to Haiti. I set out on Sunday morning armed with knowledge of point A and point B, but only a very vague idea of how I was going to get from one to the other. Luckily the rule that you can figure out any transportation system via trial and error (as long as you're willing to walk a lot when you make mistakes) is still true here. I found a tap-tap that brought me to the city centre, and then walked north until I found a fairly large street going the direction I wanted (up the hill), and waved down another passing tap-tap. When that one pulled over for gas, I hopped across the road to a motorcycle taxi stand and showed a driver the address of Mike's hotel. Then the fun part, flying up the mountain on the back of a motorcycle, (you may pretend I was wearing a helmet and protective gear, if that makes you feel better), weaving in and out of trucks and cars, and honking the horn excessively. After about 20 minutes of this, I realized the driver actually had no idea where he was going, and made him pull over and ask for directions. Aaaand back down the mountain we go. I decided to think of it as a scenic detour, and really the view from that road (Route de Kenscoff) is gorgeous. After a couple more stops for directions we finally got to the right place, the driver started to demand more money because it took more time and gas than he expected, then took one look at my face and thought better of it. Probably he remembered that I was - unlike your typical blan in Haiti -capable of telling him it was his own darn fault for lying about knowing the address.
I had a wonderful lunch with Mike, talking about life at the orphanage, his work for World Vision, and Haiti in general. I found myself ordering the biggest steak on the menu. Guess I'm craving protein? We're basically on the reverse Atkin's diet here. I probably enjoyed it more than I have enjoyed any other steak in my life, thank you Mike! When it was time to go, I looked at my map to find out the name of the street that led back down the hill, and then wandered around Petionville until I found it. This was the part where I got my first real sunburn in Haiti. On the one hand I'm proud of myself for not getting terribly burnt before this. On the other hand...ow, and my neck is now peeling. People were definitely confused about seeing a white girl walking. ("What is she doing? Where is her driver? She must be lost. White people don't ever walk anywhere!") But eventually I flagged a tap tap and squeezed in between a very old farmer carrying a rooster, and a young mom with her adorable baby. Down in the city we got dropped off in a part I didn't recognize, but I just picked a direction and it happened to be the right one and I saw landmarks I knew. I walked the 10 blocks or so to where I knew I could catch a tap tap home. At the end of the trip I decided to spring for a motorcycle taxi up our hill...I was tired, my feet hurt, and I didn't care about not being pathetic, I just wanted to be home and take my shoes off. In my defense, what I call a hill is technically a small mountain.
Interestingly the taxi ride up the hill, which lasted approximately 40 seconds, cost 15 gouds. That's approximately 40 cents. The tap tap ride from the city all the way to Petionville (a trip of at least 20 minutes)? Also 15 gouds. Somehow that is just not right. Economist friends, please tell me. Did I get super-ripped off, or could the rate difference really be that big?
