Haiti Elections

The Haitians had elections on Sunday November 28. The campaign of 19 candidates was lively, but not as violent as expected. Haiti elections have always been violent, so people expected the worst. This is a positive thing to say about the UN presence here, and there are not a lot of positive things to say….

The people in Village La Renaissance didn’t go to vote. There is no polling station. No public transportation. Most of the people don’t have voting cards. And we’re located very close to the capital city. Assuming this gets worse on far-out places, the democracy in Haiti is not for everyone.

The village and the surrounding area were dead quiet on Sunday the 28^th. We went out for a few minutes to try and get gas and were the only car on ‘national route 1’.

On Election Day, most of the candidates called for cancellation of the election. The mess in the voting stations made sure that even the people that tried to vote couldn’t find out where to go and how to vote. Candidates claimed that voting cards where only provided to supporters of the current regime. And the people that had the chance to vote executed their right in more than one station. If indeed the mess was planned by the current president in order to get the elections cancelled and stay in office (as people claimed), this is the first sign he has shown of planning and thinking ahead in a very long time.

And it’s not over yet. Yesterday the election results were announced. There will be a second round between the ruling party and another candidate. Even before the results were announced there was a strange feeling in the street. People were hurrying, closing all the little business around and disappearing from sight. The smell of trouble coming. In the evening some stores and a bank were attacked. Rumors said some people were shot. Today there were a lot of demonstrations, burning of buildings and tires. The 3^rd candidate called for a press conference this evening. He spoke for 2 minutes encouraging people to continue exercising their right for fair elections. Not exactly the calming peace calling speech one would expect.

As for us – we got stuck in the city. At 4 in the afternoon it was already considered unsafe to go back to the village, and today everyone stayed home waiting for the demonstrations to stop. There were helicopters in the air and some far away bombing sounds (probably UN), but other than that we couldn’t hear anything of the mess outside. Without satellite TV, we were quite out of touch. The second round of the elections is expected in January and we’ll probably get a replay of the unhappiness whether the ruling corrupted party wins or loses.

A little perspective

We’ve been in Miami for the past 3 days. Going back to Haiti tomorrow. The official excuse was Art Basel (http://www.artbaselmiamibeach.com/). But – I’m not really that much into arts J

After 3 straight months in Haiti, I’m now in the US, and can’t stop comparing.

Some stuff is pretty obvious:

The US is cleaner. The streets, the air, the water, the food.

Everything is organized. A road is used for driving and people respect the rules. Sidewalks are hardly used, since everyone drives. The side of the road in Haiti is where most of the life goes on. You walk, shop, sell, argue and sometimes live there.

Most people are not spending 25 hours a day just surviving. They know where the next meal is coming from and the one after that. They don’t spend every waking moment just to be a little ahead of the rest. Their kids aren’t hungry. They don’t need to talk about hope and change all the time. Having hope is taken for granted.

When you step into the shower, water comes out. A lot of it. And it’s hot.

Other things, I didn’t realize how much I missed until I started enjoying here.

FREEDOM. I can go anywhere I want, whenever I want to. I don’t need a chauffeur, a local person to accompany me, to organize buying bread a day in advance. A car and a GPS. What joy. Yesterday we went to the Everglades National Park. The park is very nice, but the thing we enjoyed most was driving on an open road without boundaries for a few hours.

STRESS – people here don’t want anything from me. I don’t have any responsibility. I don’t need to worry about things slipping.  Nothing depends on me. Nothing is expected. I think this is what people call a vacation.

I’m so relaxed, I can’t help ruining it a bit by being a little worried about going back...

Going Out

After a couple of very quiet months we are finally starting to have a social life. The credit goes to Inbal for being a friendly open person.

Still – in the last 2 weeks of cholera, political unrest and upcoming elections our little bubble went to a few nice restaurants, been to 3 concerts (classical music, local bands and a semi-international band called magic systems) and even attended a pool side barbeque. The Haitian elite live a very good life that includes regular flights to Europe and the US, shopping and eating in places that would be considered expensive for anyone who is not Japanese. When we stay in the city over-night we sleep in the mansion of a family that started renting a few rooms after the earthquake. Attaching some photos of how the ‘other side’ lives.

Out city 'get-away'.
This is not the most fancy house we've been to in Port-au-Prince...

They have more trees than our entire village..

Olofson is an old hotel that is used also for live music concerts.

Cholera

A month ago a cholera epidemic started in Haiti. When it started we didn’t have water in the school at all. We distributed drinking water to the kids twice a day

but other than that we were highly unhygienic. So – we got water tanks into the school, got a truck to actually fill those with water and started practicing with the kids after toilets / before food proper procedures. We hang posters, and each teacher reminds the classes daily. It might sound trivial to us, but the plan is that the kids will teach their parents about hygiene..

The main source for the cholera is an infected river about an hour drive from here. A week ago I tagged alone to some folks from our organization that were bringing a big water tank to a cholera emergency center that was being built. Strangely enough the deadly river looks the same. The population looks the same. There was no real feeling of emergency.

But – expectedly, it has now spread to other parts of the country, thriving in a densely populated country without any infrastructure for taking care of water or sewage. Our little village sits on a huge underground water pool that pretty much provide the water to port-au-prince. If this water gets contaminated the ‘little’ epidemic that has still not reached its peek and has so far killed about a 1000 people will become a huge natural disaster. The current estimation is that cholera will now become a permanent resident in Haiti for at least a few years and possibly spread to near by countries.

Sandwich

I just gave 2 sandwiches to Ban, a kid that I really like because he was hungry. I told him to bring one to another kid that popped up recently and doesn’t have anyone at all. As far as we could tell someone took him into his tent, but except for that he has nothing. No family, no cloths, no possessions whatsoever. He started going to our school today, which means he will get to eat some rice each day. I hope and believe that Ban is good enough to bring the second sandwich instead of eating it or giving it to one of his 6 siblings. Sometimes Haiti makes me sad.

Hurricane Tomas

For the past week we’ve been getting Hurricane alerts and weather reports. Being from a place that doesn’t have tropical storms we took the alerts very seriously and were excited about our first real storm.

When the ministry of education declared that school will be closed for 2 days in honor of the storm, we realized that this was really happening and started preparations.

The day before the storm started out with cooler air, and some wind. It felt a little like a storm was coming… Not leaving anything to chance, we set out to prepare:

-         emptied our two tents and secured them

-         removed the tarps used for shade from our house and the school

-         chased the water guy to come especially to fill in our nearly empty tanks so they would not fly away

-         hid or put rocks in everything that looked like it could fly

-         finished the preparation by putting a sack of sand on our back door which is the usual place from which rain comes in

-         then we asked someone to get us groceries (house was rather empty) and waited…

The hurricane touched the southern and northern parts of Haiti and we got a drizzle with very little wind.

School closed... looks like a storm is coming

Inbal fooling around with the kids on Hurricane day.

No real storm...

It rained quite a bit in the night after but all in all a rather disappointing tropical storm experience. On the bright side – those who are not curious visitors here, and especially the 1.3 million people living in tents probably prefer this version of the storm to the real one…

At night it rained... our front porch.
Notice the LIGHT -
we were connected to the electic company a couple of days ago!

School the day after...

Vallee de Jacmel

November 1 and 2 are a holiday in Haiti. It’s the serious equivalent of Halloween in which the dead are respected and the spirits are feared. We learned about it quite late so we didn’t have any special plans until the school building contractor (and also a friend) invited us to join him and his friends for a couple of days in the mountains above Jacmel. The holiday turned out to be a nice and much needed vacation. Vallee de Jacmel is a green quiet mountain area with a lot of trees and a calm community.

The Valley

The Village

The shore city of Jacmel is a center for art workshops and exhibitions in Haiti…. And there is also a sandy beach.

Art

In the evening in Jacmel before sitting down at a very nice bar for a drink, we got to see a small part of the Gede holiday spirit. Basically it’s a holiday in which voodoo ceremonies are combined with street parades and “sexual” dancing. There are ceremonies at the cemeteries. Most people we talked to claimed that in most areas the holiday lost some of its meaning by becoming a dancing parade instead of the ‘real thing’ (what ever that was). That actually sounds familiar as it happens in Israel and the US too (US Memorial Day is only one very trivial example).

Gede: it's a little hard to see but these men have white paint
on their faces and are dancing in the street.

Nice Jacmel bar

Food

Last week we started distributing food at the school.

It took a few days to get organized and is still far from being my favorite part of the day despite loving the idea of giving food to kids that many times go hungry.

It took us some time to find cooks that the village committee approves of. Then there was a long meeting about what they are entitled / not entitled to as part of the job and what is expected of them (yes: eat the food, wash the pots. No: give food to relatives, wash all the plates of the kids). The cooks requested and we agreed to collect extra money from the kids of the school so that we can improve and diverse the menu a bit. We ask the kids to bring the equivalent of 10 cents a day. From the entire school we are able to collect about 20 US dollars each day (about half of the kids bring money each day). This money is used to make a sauce or some cooked vegetables. We get about 1 spoon per kid. The entire process of collecting money, fighting with the cooks, making sure everything is done and distributing the food (while making sure the majority of it ends up at the school and not for the cooks) is quite time and energy consuming. Still – we are getting better at this and I hope it will be a routine soon. For now: some pictures from the first day of food distribution at the school.

Petite Section of Kindergarten

On the first day we tried giving the food outside.
Afterwards we started distributing inside the classes.

Video shoot - through photos

Last Saturday we went to shoot a video for Sila our friend/companion/translator.

Had fun.

Check out some behind the scenes photos. Will update when the video is ready.

Production meeting in the office in the morning

Sila and his gang. He used to be a semi-famous rapper.

The second location was a broken church.

10 months after the earthquake

Spare Time

Since I’ve been here I’ve read half a book (same one I started on the plane), saw one movie (as a social event) and watched one episode of a TV series.

Some things simply take longer here. My morning get-out-of-the-house routine seems to take longer. It now includes cleaning up my room (a bit) from the dust/spiders/mosquito corps of the previous night and includes applying all kinds of sun-screen lotions.

Any kind of meeting takes a very long time. An example meeting will usually include:

-         saying something

-         translator translates

-         person doesn’t understand

-         saying again

-         translator translates again

-         noticing a mistake in the translation (creole improving painfully slow)

-         person unhappy

-         trying to understand why person is not happy

-         getting more unhappy

-         …. 30 minutes

-         finding out where the misunderstanding was

-         moving on to the next subject

I spend a lot of time sitting around, watching kids play and trying to talk to them, answering questions.

our friend Bantigula and his aquarium

I spend some time staring at the wall because it’s the end of the day and we finally managed to get the village kids to go home.

me, updating my new blackberry. Soon to become a close friend

I spend some time updating this blog.

I go to sleep quite early, and wake up earlier than I did in Israel.

Still – time moves differently here. The concept of efficiency seems to be foreign to many of the daily operations.

     This weekend, for the first time since we got here we took 2 days off and out of the village. We came to our city hide-out on Friday evening (and celebrating the fun the city has to offer went to sleep at 9 PM J). Not going back until Sunday afternoon.

Other stuff....

Our little house has become an attraction for some of the village kids. Especially since Inbal does sports and arts with them, but also because we have cool gadgets such as computers and are basically the only interesting thing in the village. I like it at times, and find myself hiding in my room at other times….

Next week we need to find a way to distribute food to 300+ kids. Some of which are hungry, without causing too much disturbance to the school.

Our porch. We just finished building the bench we're sitting on.
The fence is also new. Now we can plant stuff.

kids fooling around

stretching

We have a School!

Check this out. Apparently when you take a building, put chairs and tables, hire teachers and enroll kids the end result is a school!

Sunday evening, one week ago. We had 3 rooms without a roof, but construction was going on full speed to finish before the morning. After a busy day of preparing classes and making sure everything is ready, we decided to return at 6 AM to organize our roofless class.

Then it rained.

Night before opening

At 6 AM, I was the first onsite. No roof. Quick re-grouping. Moving one class into the teachers ‘lounge’ (which at this point is an empty room the same size of a class), and stretching plastic tarps on one of the roofless classes so that at least there is shade.

Monday Morning

Plenty of time to finish up, shower and come refreshed at 8 AM when kids are supposed to arrive.

Didn’t factor in that on the first day of a new school, children and parents are excited and come early, there are dozens of people on the waiting list hoping to get their kids in, and that some kids come from far away so they come at various times.

7 AM, we’re still in the middle of ‘building the last class’, school is already full of excited orange kids.

We have full classes since the first day which in Haiti is some kind of a miracle, because rumors are that other schools start the first week with 20-25% of the pupils…

So there are still some glitches. We (the office) are not really sure which kid is going to what class as opposed to the class that they enrolled to. Need to get our lists straight. It took us the first day to find out what’s the best way to distribute water to 350 thirsty kids that are used to fight over water and food.

We are still trying to get the list of missing books from the teachers so that everyone can have all the books. But all-in-all, at 7:50 AM every morning, there’s a bell. Orange kids line up in lines in front of the flag, sing the national anthem and say a little prayer. Then go into classes in an orderly manner. Walking in the corridors – it sounds like a school.

We have a school!