Weekend!

KatherineMW says:

Hi everyone!

I’m in Haiti. I’ll be doing homestays with local families more or less until the end of the year (3 weeks in Dezam, 3 weeks in Port-au-Prince, with some time in between). I’m currently one week into my Dezam homestay.

I’ve started moving past worries based on the popular news images of Haiti in my head and am getting into the rhythm of dealing with the good and bad of Haiti as it actually exists.

Good:
– Most of the buildings in Port-au-Prince are standing (the estimates I got were that 1-1.5 million people were made homeless by the earthquake, and all but around 300,000 of those have been housed). So there’s a long way to go, and that’s not the greatest progress considering that it’s been 4 years since the earthquake, but some progress has been made.
– I am NOT being constantly swarmed by mosquitoes.
– I haven’t been sick yet.
– MCC and I are kindred spirits on pretty much any development/international political issue you can name. Not to get into specifics, because MD isn’t for that, but the other international person here in Dezam, Pete, worked with Christian Peacemaker Teams in Haiti in the ’90s during the coup. I’ve met CPT workers in Hebron, Palestine and have great admiration for them. Also, MCC’s manual for how to design, run, and report on development projects is pretty much ideal, going from my International Affairs courses. I.e.: extremely high degree of involvement of the local community, consideration for whether the project will have negative effects and how to prevent/mitigate them, considering the project’s potential effects on power relations within communities; asking the locals what problems they have and working with them to design projects that address those problems, rather than coming in with pre-set ideas; relying heavily on local workers – of MCC’s 25 staff in Haiti, 18 are Haitian and two others (Pete [the Assistant Disaster Coordinator] and Kurt [the MCC country representative for Haiti – he and his wife are in charge of the MCC Haiti program]) are married to Haitians; continuous monitoring of project results, and modification of projects as necessary based on those results; end-of-project evaluations to look at what worked, what didn’t, and how this can inform future projects in Haiti and elsewhere. Once I start my real work (which probably won’t be until after I attend an MCC orientation in Akron at the start of February), reporting on and evaluating projects will probably be a large part of my work here. The reason they picked me rather than a Haitian is that they need someone who writes naturally and fluently in English and has some experience with the procedures for managing development projects.

Bad:
– The houses that have been rebuilt are no better than the previous ones, so if there’s another earthquake they’ll just collapse again.
– It is, as expected, ridiculously and constantly hot.
– There are loads of bugs – ants everywhere, mosquitoes sometimes, spiders in most buildings (including a tarantula in the MCC office kitchen one morning) and giant crickets.
– Inability to have a real conversation with anyone except Pete – I’m learning kreyol, but slowly, and am limited to fairly simple conversations in it – is rather draining.

To give a sense of Dezam: It has a single paved road, and a lot of extremely uneven dirt-and-rock roads, and some smaller dirt paths. Transportation is by a mix of motorcycles and mototaxis (riding on the back of a motorcycle, which I’m beginning to get used to), walking, horses, and pickups; MCC has a 4WD. The market, which is where most shopping is done, is very dirty, with almost its entire ground made up of plastic wrappers. It sells food (including bags of pasta, so I’ll be able to cook something when I’m living on my own), sandals, toiletries, etc. There’s a lot of trees in the village and all the surrounding area, which is apparently attributable to MCC – 30 years ago this area was mostly deforested, but MCC’s primary project in the area has been reforestation and according to both its staff and some locals it’s had substantial effects. (Most of the area on the drive up from Port-au-Prince to Dezam is heavily deforested – the town and its environs are a clear contrast.) There’s absolutely no shortage of food – fruit trees all over the place; fields of rice, sugar, sorghum, etc.; chickens, goats, and the occasionally pig or turkey wandering all through the street. There are schools (mostly run by local churches) and a health clinic (run by a local community organization), though they seem fairly basic. Deficiencies are more in the way of employment and housing and technology.

To give a sense of life, I’ll describe the place I’m living in. There’s about four people (with me, five) living there full-time, although it’s hard to tell because countless cousins are constantly dropping by. The house is made of concrete. Their bedroom is one room with a king-sized bed; there’s also the dining room (which also contains my bed) and a storage room. The kitchen is in an outbuilding, also concrete, and cooking is done over a charcoal fire. Clothes are washed by hand in a big tub, using rainwater and soap. Bathing is outdoors, in an area screened by woven leaves, using water from a bucket. The outhouse is another area screened by woven leaves, with a pit and a concrete seat. The family has a few chickens.

Meals are breakfast (baked cornmeal, spaghetti, or plantains), lunch (rice, either beans or a bean sauce, and a meat sauce; the main meal) and supper (usually the cold leftovers from lunch, although once Edelène – the mother of the family – made me a delicious plantain soup). There seems to be enough, although I worry that they’re feeding me more than they have themselves (it’s hard to tell because everyone eats at different times).

We made peanut butter the other day, by grinding peanuts with some sugar and spices in a little mill and then grinding the peanut butter a second time to make it smoother. I had some on a bun with dinner and it was very tasty.

The kids go to school. They wear uniforms to school and nice clothes to church, but their everyday clothes typically have holes. They do homework in the evenings by a kerosene lamp, because there’s no electricity (the MCC office has solar panels and a generator, but that’s unusual). Midjilene, who is in her late teens or twenties and who’s been my main guide, also goes to school, and is learning stuff at around grade 12 or first-year university level in physics, geology, biology, Haitian literature, and English; I don’t think much of the methods of her English teacher, who has set the class a list of 83 verbs to memorize (infinitive, past, and past participle), including a lot of ones that aren’t very commonly used and certainly aren’t necessary for a beginner to know. Some of the other cousins Midjiline’s age don’t go to school; those who don’t seem to have a lot of time on their hands. Work doesn’t appear to be abundant here.

(To just mildly touch on politics – one of the issues in Haiti is that free trade with the US has led to a reduction in a lot of farming, including rice-growing which used to be a major industry, because the subsidized US crops are cheaper than the Haitian ones. Then a bunch of former rice farmers moved to Port-au-Prince even though there wasn’t work there. Similarly, there’s no milk or cheese here because Haiti used to have a dairy industry, but powdered milk from the US was initially cheaper so it drove the dairy farmers out of business, and then powdered milk became just as expensive as real milk had been.)

Just wanted to give you all a sense of how things are going. I’m writing this from the MCC Dezam office, which has (very slow) internet.Report