Haiti

Day 3 – We got up early to meet our new friends at breakfast. The woman from Maine, who said she was a doctor, Jan, and the Haitian woman, Lucia, and the two men, Ben and Jake, were all waiting for Lucia’s brother, Charles, to pick us up. Charles lives in Port au Prince, and came up to Cap Haitien to meet and help everybody. Charles is / was an auto mechanic, who lived and worked in Fort Lauderdale for 20+ years. He showed up in a pickup truck that had been modified for Haitian roads – basically adding huge bumpers that extend to the sides to prevent other vehicles from hitting the truck body. The truck also had a cooler, which we soon learned was Charles’ lifeblood. We stopped somewhere in Cap Haitien and bought a case of Prestige, the Haitian beer, and Coca Cola. Then we stopped and bought a block of ice – they sold ice on the streets in blocks, with sawdust on them to slow melting. Charles bungeed the block to his front bumper, and chipped off whatever he needed for the cooler. When we stopped, we gathered a crowd, we white people in the back of a pickup truck with a couple Haitians. It became clear how valuable it was to have Charles and Lucia (and their friend, Jonnot, a Haitian from their hometown) taking us around. Not only did they know their way around, but they spoke Kreyol and knew how to argue, which we learned isn’t necessarily an expression of anger in Haiti but another club to use from the verbal golf bag. Being able to argue could get us through traffic more quickly, get us service from a roadside vendor, get us past a slower vehicle.




We headed back out the road we had come in on, which was, again, like a scene out of Mad Max – a dirt road of varying widths, full of potholes, with no discernible traffic direction – cars coming with us, against us, in between us, across us – it was a live video game. I started out in the back and, after we dropped Jonnot off, got in front with Charles. Charles has that wonderful ability to laugh about everything while being totally serious at the same time. I asked him if they would ever pave the road we were on. He told me that it HAD been paved – it just hadn’t been maintained in so long that the pavement had crumbled back to dirt and holes. When we hit sections of smooth pavement, Charles would exclaim “I-95!” and speed up.



We arrived in front of a newly built schoolhouse, Lucia and Charles’ project. We were greeted by 20-30 young schoolchildren in uniforms. It was flag day in Haiti – while driving out of Cap Haitien we had witnessed much street art, in the form of people painting curbs in blue and red, and painting portraits on the street. There had also been tables, chairs and couches placed in the medians in the city, I guess for people to use as they gathered for the many flag day parades. We saw one starting on our way out of Cap Haitien, but we were to hear parades frequently during our stay. After our experiences with Dominican streets, where garbage seems to sprout naturally, the streets of Cap Hatien were amazingly clean, even more surprising when you noted the poverty lining the streets. We saw people out sweeping and washing the streets each morning.



The schoolchildren had on colors for flag day – blue pants, white shirts with some red somewhere – and they gathered around us, all of them saying “good morning,” which was a language treat they had prepared for us. We felt a little strange –Jan and Lucia and the other men had been to the school the day before, and they had made contact with the people in this community, and it felt as if we were horning in on their good deeds. They were very kind to us, and included us on all the events of the visit. After we greeted the children, they sang a song for us and we were given beverages – cokes for the children and beers for us. It was 10:00 AM.

Lucia and Charles gave us a tour of the school, which had been built on the land that used to house their childhood home. In back of the school cocoa, coffee beans, bananas, pineapples, and mango all grew.

After the visit we headed to Milot, a couple kilometers down the road. Milot was a surprise – a pretty hillside town, with paved streets – cobblestone – and a relatively good – not as rundown as what we had seen so far, pretty good in fact - housing stock. Lucia told us that a former mayor of Milot had made it a priority to have the streets paved and had made contact with the national government to get it taken care of. Milot also has historic significance – the early leaders of the newly independent Haiti had built a castle, San Souci, and a fortress, The Citadel, on the mountains above Milot.





After a stop for refills on our Coke and beer supplies, we headed off through Milot. We had to stop when we came to a large parade. Charles tried to take a side street, but was stopped by locals, who seemed to be trying to get him to pay to get through. He tried (I was watching and am making these assumptions based on my read of body language. As I said earlier, every conversation in Haiti seems to blossom into an argument – you can only guess at its actual intensity. Unless, of course, machetes are drawn.) to tell them that he was from Milot and, even though they seemed to agree, they still argued to prevent him / us from passing. Later on this trip Charles told us he would go to people and ask prices for us by himself, because if they saw a group of blans they would immediately want more. Maybe their vehemence was because of the white people in the truck. Charles became upset with the argument, turned the truck around, and said “Okay, we’ll watch the parade.” Which was fine with us. The parade consisted of several groups of school children, each group in different colors and uniforms. It felt like a typical small town parade– the spectators consisted of the villagers, and these small groups of children walked down the street, with one group making up a band.



After the parade we turned the corner of the parade route and drove 100 yards to the front gate of San Souci, a palace built in 1813 by one of Haiti’s founders. It was designed to be similar to Versailles, and it is grand, even in ruins. Charles told me about the church next to the palace, which is still maintained and used – it was built with the palace. As we got out of the truck to take a look, we were immediately set upon by the town’s entire artisan community – people selling hats, paintings, sculptures, food. The hat women in particular were very aggressive, putting a hat on everyone’s head and telling them how good they looked. It must have been a slower then normal tourist day – there were crafts lined up all around this entrance – and trust me, this was no Disneyland-looking entrance, merely the remains of the palace walls – and I couldn’t imagine how they would ever have the business that would require the stock we could see.



Charles, our patron saint and tour guide, was also good at spotting potential problems. He shouted “let’s get out of here!” when the vendors got too thick, and we all started to get back in the truck. Again, Charles got in an argument, this time with one of the hat women. This one was even more spirited than the earlier one, and when we got back in the truck Charles told me she had accused him of robbing her by not letting us stay long enough to buy more things.



We drove around the back of the palace, up a steep road, and it turned out to go to the back entrance of the palace. Interestingly enough, the craftspeople / vendors knew a shortcut, and were awaiting us there. Again, “entrance” is too official – we were parked in a field next to a crumbling stone wall, through which we could walk into the palace ruins. We headed in – there were a couple school groups there, picnicking and playing soccer – and walked through the remains of the castle, accompanied by the vendors, armed with their wares. The palace was spectacular if you imagined it whole – the broken walls and grown over gardens were quickly rejoining the natural landscape – but the setting was incredible – the palace was obviously placed for the defense abilities of the view, on a mountainside looking over the Haitian countryside, with its Seuss-like mountains and thousands of shades of green.
After telling the vendors thanks, but no thanks we got back in the truck and headed down. On the way Charles told me that the mortar in the castle is from blood – both animal and human, which is supposedly why the structure has stood for so long. (We later heard the same story from Valcene, our Haitian neighbor in Las Galeras, who told us this unprovoked. We can’t decide if it is possibly true or if it is Haitian legend.)

On the ride back to the school, I asked Charles about the Duvalier regime. He repeated something we’ve heard from a couple Haitian friends in Las Galeras – he said things were good under Duvalier, that the country was taken care of and bad people were dealt with. This is confusing to us, as we read of how the Duvaliers turned Haiti into a police state while raping its assets for themselves. We only imagine that in the country people were away from the Tonton Macouts and their streets were maintained, so all looked good to them. Also, Charles and Lucia’s family were landowners, and landowners were given privileges under Duvalier.



We headed back to the school for lunch and to see the clinic in action. Lucia and Jan had offered to take us back to the hotel while they ran the clinic, but we were very interested in seeing this part of their experience and this would be our best chance to see any of the Haitian community up close. When we arrived Jan told us we could help with the clinic. The “clinic” consists of all the medical supplies Jan could round up back in the US and bring down to Haiti, to try and give this community even the most basic healthcare that they normally wouldn’t receive. This includes rudimentary heart, eye and ear exams, and a check up of their skins for any sores or lesions. Jan ran everything and was the person to go to with any questions. The rest of us took turns looking for tired eyes, ear infections, worms, scabies, etc. The day before they told us a guy had come in who had let an infection on his ankle go too long, and gangrene had set in. They had treated it to the best of their abilities, but were worried that he might lose the foot.

While Jan was talking us through our roles, I tried to put on disposable medical gloves, which turned out to be my hardest task of the day. The combination of humidity and glove size made them stick on my fingers, and it was difficult to get them on in an operational way in less than 15 minutes.

As we started, Jan made sure each of us was hydrated – by giving the adults a beer. I wasn’t sure if this was AMA approved, but it was hot and the beer was light.



After this, we started looking at children from the school and community and, after them, adults who had stopped by. We had originally started with Amy checking heartbeats and me checking ears, and early on Jan found a couple kids with scabies, and steered me to treating them. This involved rubbing a cream (I won’t even try to give a medical analysis – it was a cream, that’s all) on the sores, and looking for more on the children’s bodies. It was trying – some of the kids would cry silently while I rubbed their lesions, and the language barrier made it more difficult. As a rule, the children were incredibly stoic, sitting there while we poked and prodded them, and not moving until told to, either by us or by an adult.

Lane may have found a calling as an emergency room assistant. She was in charge of getting supplies for people, and she was always there with a piece of equipment, some pills, creams, or the anti-bacterial soap we used after each patient.

After 3-4 hours of this, Charles once again stepped in and said we had to go – he was right, because at this point there was small line, but a line that remained constant. A person would show up when one left, etc. They had run the clinic the day before, and would be doing it more over the weekend (it was Friday), so there was no urgency at this point. We grabbed our unfinished beers and cokes and got in the truck.

Charles dropped us off at the hotel. He was driving back to the school, where he would spend the night. On the way, he told us, he would stop at a river to bath and swim.

We were pretty tired at the hotel. We showered and went to the pool for a while. We don’t normally like to eat at the same location every night, but we didn’t have enough energy and motivation to leave the hotel.