adventures in public transportation

This week has been a lot of fun. The kittens are getting bigger. They look less like rodents and more like cats now, which is exciting. And so we've been taking pictures. Of course.

Tea-kitty.

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. 

Sorry it's kind of dark, Haitian sun makes pictures very difficult.

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?

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!