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.