A Caribbean Adventure

Chris and I are currently enjoying a cool evening in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. We came here last Sunday with a group called Healing Hands for Haiti. We've being involved in various volunteer activities since we arrived...doing physical therapy with disabled orphans, helping run outreach medical clinics, teaching classes on basic sign language and deaf education at St. Vincent's School for the Deaf (Chris) and participating in a 3-day prep course for parents of children with hydrocephalus who will receive free neurosurgery (Rachel). It's been hot, dirty, and full of activity.

Haiti is one of those places that doesn't seem to make sense until you begin to unravel the culture a little bit (and even then, sometimes it doesn't make sense to my white American self). What looks like graffiti is really address markers; what could be trash is actually for sale, again. The street doubles as a storage space, a sidewalk, a dump, a marketplace, a toilet, and sometimes a soccer field. Burning charcoal, which at home makes you think of barbeque, is the almost sickening smell that wakes you up in the morning when everyone in the whole city cooks their carbon-soaked breakfast. We also have seen people cooking over burning tires. It illustrates the mix between poverty and resourcefulness that abounds here in the capital city.

Everything is built with cinderblock and concrete, which is good because the smoggy residue just blends in. But it's beautiful, too, especially when you get out of the city into the quieter rural regions. It's also nice that, because the tourism industry is so small, you aren't mobbed by merchants at every stop. But we do get lots of stares and little children pointing and screaming, "Blanc! Blanc!" at the top of their lungs.

There are lots of things you'll find in Haiti that you probably won't find anywhere else. Sequined voodoo veve's (flags with voodoo symbols), for one. I bought one that means "fertility". Then there are the "tap-taps," small pickup trucks converted into open taxis with vibrant and crazy colors. My favorite thing about them are the weird corrupted phrases they have painted on the sides in English. I saw one that said "Don't bit the hand that feeds you," and another read "My Lover, My Lady, and the Lord." It makes we wonder if either the artist or the driver knows what it means. But then there are so many things that are imported from elsewhere. For example, everyone wears second hand clothes from the US and other places; Haiti imports most of its food and consumer goods. The "original" paintings of rural scenes and women in colorful clothes with pots and baskets that are for sale in the street all look alike. And according to one girl in our group, they are exactly the same as those on the other side of the island in the Dominican Republic. Except that in the DR the skin of the people in the pictures is light brown instead of black, of course.

Tomorrow we're leaving at 5 a.m. for a 4 hour bus ride to Les Cayes, "the most beautiful place in Haiti". We'll see if it lives up to its name and is worth the back pain--the streets here are the worst I've ever seen, and there are absolutely no traffic rules or stoplights. One truck scraped past our bus, and we almost got stuck in a country road-turned-river on Saturday. It felt like we were on a Haitian safari, and even though I felt it in my lower back that night, it was a cool adventure.

And the best part of all, no malaria, dengue fever, or typhoid...yet. I didn't drink the Sacrament water either at church today, just in case. I know it's blessed, but it's still Haiti. I sang the hymns extra loud in French to make up for it. Does that count?