Day 49

I worked on an illustration all day, and went to Lane and Benjamin’s school to play basketball tonight, with some of the locals I have seen and asked about basketball. It was like a game at the Cambridge, MA, USA YMCA, with a bunch of young, athletic guys who don’t know how to play basketball so well. I had fun, I was rusty and, unlike the soccer game which ended in a fight with Italians and Haitians threatening each other with rocks and bottles, this game ended in a fight with two Dominicans wrestling in the grass, after which one ran and got a rock and the other ran home and returned with a knife.

I made my second consecutive visit to a Haitian comedore / bar-restaurant in town that I’ve noticed has quite a crowd in the early afternoon. Yesterday I stopped by the shack-like structure to see what the crowd was for – it turns out they were all there to watch a soap opera-like show. Yesterday the show was something set in Haiti, which seemed to feature two lovers who were having trouble getting together because the woman’s father was a Redd Foxx-like character (how do you say “the Lucille Ball of Haiti?”) who kept on having these physical comedy fits trying to find them and break them up. The midday comedore crowd was eating this up, and I found the production values - a lot of handheld shots, low-budget sets and what seemed to be live traffic and outdoor scenes - pretty impressive. Today I went there hoping to see another episode, but they were playing a bad Spanish horror movie instead. I watched for a while, then took more notice of the very large pig that had been tied to the building across the street and started squealing loudly.