Communication

So, additionally to being frustrated about language and communication issue, trying to see where I can help with the school, what the community needs and adjusting to everything here, there are some surprises.

Tuesday evening, sitting in the office in the city, waiting for a car to take us back to the village. One of the sponsors of the project arrives at the office and is planning to video an infomercial the next day. Being the most qualified to show people the real Haiti (or alternatively, being without any important plans for the next day – you choose whichever seems more reasonable) we volunteered to accompany the photographer and show him around. Got some rubble/tent shots (very easy. Don’t need to look hard when in PAP)

,   some photos of our teachers training

 and went back “home” to get some school construction and cute kids photos. We called in advance to say we’re coming so that people are not surprised. We have A LOT of communication related mismatches here, so we didn’t even attempt to make the call. The project manager from the office called a committee representative to let him know.



surprise!



Not all kids made it into the photo...

After the initial shock, we took the kids to a parade around the town which should be excellent for publicity even if not really related to building a school.

parade

Communication is more than just language. One of my highest priorities is to at least identify when we’re agreeing with people where each party in the conversation understands totally different things.

The School

So – our organization is building a school. The construction is going on in full speed, although the roof seems to be a few days away at any given point. Toilets are progressing. Electricity is not mandatory for the opening. There are quite a few kids registered and assigned to classes. Although we still get additional requests from people that missed the very last deadline. Teachers are in the second week of teacher training. School year officially opens in 10 days.

Rumors are that the Haitian government will not let us open in time because the schools that were destroyed in the earthquake are not operational yet and it will not be fair towards the kids that are supposed to go to them. Seems that instead of “leave no child behind” the motto here is “let not child progress”.

The School

Food update: The office is working with an international organization to try and get food for the kids in school. If we are approved and fulfill all their requirements we will get rice, beans and oil.

Daily Routine

Our apartment has two bedrooms (one for each) and a kitchen/dining/living room. I usually get up quite early in the morning (yep. Read again.) and have some quiet time before the day really starts. Sometimes we get a driver to take us to the city for meetings or just as a break. Other times we stay around and try to do stuff around the village (visit kids with problems, talk to people about not throwing trash in the streets, etc).

my room

We have a cook that is doing her best to cook healthy vegetarian food. She was surprised with the veggie part, but accepted this as part of the white person craziness. The real breakdown came when we asked her not to use margarine as the core ingredient of the food. We were rewarded by a week of rice and beans. At the end of the week when we finally had a translator with us we found out that when we said not to buy too much food because it gets spoiled (see electricity in the next paragraph) she understood that we dislike anything we gave as an example. For example fruit. Besides that we have another woman coming once a week to manually do laundry. It actually comes out clean if you know what you’re doing. Which she does.

Electricity – close followers of this blog may have noticed an occasional complaint about electricity. A recap:
- First few days: Generator. Very noisy at night. Keeps running out of fuel.
- Installed inverter + batteries. Bliss for a few days. Open Generator for a few hours. Then have a couple of days of electricity. This new setup disconnected the A/C, but we had fans and were happy.
- Inverter started causing issues. Generator stopped working.
- Hot.
- People came to connect us to the electricity. Disconnected both inverter and Generator. Said they will be back in the afternoon. Never saw them again.
- HOT. Dark. Candles. Going to sleep early.
- Reconnected Generator. Doesn’t work. Replaced it.
- Today: knock on wood: sitting at noon with the fan on battery power.

Committee

Working with the village committee continues to be an important part of our daily routine. They dropped by unannounced yesterday evening to discuss some things about the school uniforms and school plans.

Thought you might enjoy a picture of our front “porch” J

Road to Leogane

Last week we went on a trip to visit some Israelis that volunteer in Leogane. Leogane was hurt a lot from the earthquake but it is not as populated as PAP so I think that all in all the damage and human life loss is smaller. As preparation to the really despairing details of PAP, I’m attaching some photos of the road to Leogane.  

(pause. Water pump putting water inside house instead of on the roof. No electricity in our house today. Totally lost line of thought….8 hours later, continuing in an air-conditioned office, decided to practice story telling by photos).

This house is not related to the earthquake..

road side market


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traffic



getting water

Standard street (rather empty)

street side

a small, unorganized camp

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street/market





Beach

Throughout the week people kept telling us how lucky we are to go to the beach on the weekend. “The beach” is an area with some hotels and “beach houses” that the more fortunate Haitians keep as weekend getaways.


We’ve been here since yesterday and have yet to see anyone else in the water or the shore. An ocean for ourselves. Water is calm, warm and rather perfect. The area is amazing, with grass and trees and lots of shade (one of the amazing things about the rest of Haiti is the lack of shade in a place where it’s most needed). Even the fact that there is no running water (but we should have a shower back home) and that electricity is on-off doesn’t take away from the peace.

And… as I wrote the word peace, the friendly rooster made sure I didn’t forget to mention him. Apparently, the “rooster calling out in the morning” doesn’t apply in Haiti. They are noisy all day long.

House yard

An ocean to ourselves

Fully charged and ready for another week. I will try to send out these weekly posts when I get home.

Writing this blog

Note: there wasn't internet when I got home. A day later posting from the office.

Rosh Hashanah

We celebrated the Jewish new year in an Italian police camp in PAP. They are hosting a delegation of Israeli police man, so they hosted the dinner as well. We were planning to get there really early since it was our official day of “nothing is working, wonder what else will break” and we wanted to get out of the village. In the morning we discovered that our water was finished. The day before we met a Cuban guy involved in the construction of our neighborhood. We called his English speaking engineer that assured us that the Cuban will be dropping in the afternoon with the key to open the door for the pump which is supposed to provide water. (3 days (without running water in the house) later we got a truck that filled our tanks. The Cuban never showed up and stopped answering the phone). Then in the afternoon it started raining so hard that our living room was immediately flooded with water. The mud got the better of my clean pants. So, we weren’t really surprised that it took 3 hours to get there (see the traffic post). But the dinner itself was OK with a strange (but expected) assortment of Jews from the various organizations (Spain, Guatemala, US and most of the Israelis around) and the hosting Italian cops which were very hospitable.

Guatemala UN, Italian Police Chief, UN deputy Chief, Israeli embassador celebrating the new year.

Work

So – work is starting a little slowly. There are things that need to be done, but I don’t know yet how to get them done.


In the past week we had the following work related activities. However, my contribution was mainly presence. I’m still unable to run things on my own.

- School yard cleaning – a common activity between “our” people and the residents. Outcome was pretty good, especially after the tractor showed up :)

- Testing kids to check if they are registered to correct class. They are not.

- Trying to finish registration. Although registration has been going for 3 weeks, people still want to register kids to the school. Kindergarten is full and we had to start refusing registration.

- Some office meetings about grant applications.

School opens in 3 weeks and construction is still not done. Kids are not yet divided into classes, but most of the staff was hired. I assume things will start getting more hectic as the opening date comes closer.

Cleaning up the school yard

The school. Opening in 3 weeks. Missing roof / doors.

Village Welcome

The people in the village are going out of their way to make us welcome. Last Sunday we went to church (beautiful singing. Very enthusiastic preach screaming about stuff. A lot of praising the Lord and asking for assistance). Yesterday we were invited to a wedding. It wasn’t that different than our weddings. There was a ceremony in the city and then the guests drove into the village for a celebration (and where we joined them). There was a little music, some food and drinks and people generally sat around. The main difference was the setup which was more Haitian style. Attaching photos…

I'm really here...

Not enough chair to go round..

We get visits every evening from folks in the village. I think its part curiosity and part a welcoming thing. The women from the village pedagogic committee dropped by one day to take us on a tour of their part of the village. Another day, they stopped by to visit our house. Without a common language these visits are another challenge. Also, being a very private person, I need to get used to my house being a public place with people dropping by all the time. My partner in this adventure is currently the main communicator with people. I hope that I will warm up soon and learn how to keep a conversation going with only a few common words.

Street

I’ve been wondering if there are homeless Haitians. Of course there are many many people without a home. And a lot more without a reasonable one. But – unlike western homeless people, Haitians living in a tent / shack / by the road ARE the society and not outcasts.


The streets of Haiti remind me a bit of a coral reef. It’s a living organism composed of a huge number of individuals all doing their own thing. The side of the street is dedicated to an unofficial market. It’s paved by people selling any product from a few sugar canes, to phone cards, cords, rope or whatever else the people passing by may or may not need. A lot of folks (and kids) go between the traffic to sell water bags or some food to the people stuck in traffic. Except for merchants, there is always a large number of people simply trying to get from one place to the other. And immediately beyond the merchants there are “houses” or tents that people live in. So it looks like the street doesn’t really end, but goes on deeper and deeper into the sides. The feeling is that everyone lives on the streets (and it’s probably true because the houses are small and dark and there’s not much to do there). We’ve been trying to get a picture that accurately shows what it’s like all week. Nothing yet comes close.

After dark the streets just keep on going. In the city, people depend on lights of passing cars. Outside the city they simply go about their business in complete darkness. So – when driving at night there’s the added challenge of not running into someone when you divert from the road to avoid hitting a hole.

(I was planning to add a photo here, but nothing captures the reality. Will keep trying).

Traffic

The traffic in Haiti is naturally also a local variation of what traffic should be like. At a first glance, it’s clear that nearly all of the cars are 4x4. There are very few “family” cars out there and nothing similar to my beloved Yaris. The roads that do exist (and at many places there is a path, but it’s not paved) are so full with holes that driving is a very good test to ones ability to estimate the exact size of the car and the depth of a hole (which I don’t understand how they do, since many times the holes are full with rain and it’s dark).


To make us feel at home there was “holiday traffic” on Rosh-Hashana Eve. It took us 3 hours for a 20 minute drive. We did encounter one policeman that was trying to untangle the mess. He did so by going to each car and telling it to squeeze a few more centimeters closer to the car before it.

Day 2: The village committee

4. Afternoon: status meeting with the village committee. The committee, a rather large group of people (10-15), is the liaison between Prodev and the village. The purpose is to help the village push forward the things that they want and answer concerns. The committee prepared a festive meeting in honor of our arrival. We arrived at an empty room with some benches. There was a table in the middle of the room with a table-cloth and some flowers on it with 3 chairs for the honored guests. After a few minutes of setting up a light (it was cloudy, so the room was dark) the meeting began with a prayer (amazingly well sung. The Abu-Gosh choir festival has a competitor in the committee of Les Oranges), then another prayer (spoken this time) wishing us all a good calm meeting with no disagreements and great results. One of the two secretary generals of the meeting welcomed us and wished us to learn from each other, work together for good education in Haiti, and share information about the Israeli and Haiti education systems. Each person in the committee introduced him/herself and then the meeting began. This was an amazingly pleasant surprise and made us feel very welcome.

In the meeting itself there was a discussion of hiring teachers and the hiring process (one of the benefits of being in the committee is the power to attempt to provide work for people you want), what the school will bring (official Haiti curriculum + sports, arts, science and music), etc.

To wrap things up we thanked God again for guiding us through a good meeting.

By now you’re probably wondering how my Creole/French improved so much in such a short time. Our interpreter was a 4th year medical student that is waiting for his medical school to reopen. It has been closed since the earthquake.

5. Dinner at a up-scale restaurant. Pizza/Pasta/Salad. Took us ~1.5 hours to get there due to a traffic jam. Apparently this is not really a traffic jam, but rather the expected traffic behavior in PAP at certain hours of the day.

End of day 2. To the concerned readers: I will not keep posting in this level of detail. Expect some kind of a routine to form soon. It’s hard to believe that I’ve only been here for two days.

The committee

Day 2 - first meetings

5 part day (Excellent. The only alarming part was that it was stated that this is “easing into it”. Not sure I’m ready to meet the full blown days yet).


1. Free morning. Found myself walking around the village at 7 AM after 2-3 hours of waiting for it to be late enough. Night watchman (we have a private security guard in a near by apartment) accompanied me in a walk to the school and then village (it was not a security measure. He was just being hospitable). I can’t wait to be part of the scenery instead of the village spectacle. Frankly, I can’t even imagine how that would be.

2. Stopping by to say hello at a children rehabilitation center that includes autistic, mentally retarded and some ‘normal’ kids and babies that were found uncared for after the earthquake and picked up by a health organization. Have mixed feelings about this place. But – clean, provides food and shelter which lot given the alternatives.

3. Attending a meeting at the Corails camp. This is a camp built outside (and not very close) to the city. There’s a weekly meeting open to any organization that has a stake in the camp. The general purpose is supposed to be coordination between the various organizations. In reality this was a 2 hour tent sauna with ~20 participants that was mainly dedicated to repeating the summary of the last meeting and some blame throwing at stuff that doesn’t work as expected. There’s a new and energetic camp manager (3rd in 3 months, the previous one lasted only a few weeks) that seemed as shocked as I was at the lack of visible purpose / progress.

Our small errand and reason for attending the meeting: try (and not for the first time) to get the “camp” to allocate an alternative place for a library that was operating until the “camp” decided that is was poorly positioned and asked that it be taken down. Progress made: we were promised that the issue will be discussed at a Monday meeting.

The main things that concern most of the camp organizations there are:

- Getting ready for the hurricane season (progress made: everyone showed concern and agreed that it was very important to address this as soon as possible).

- Security (lighting at nights, having a community watch patrol)

- Health (is water contributing to disease spread? Water official: NO)

- Getting water in the infirmary (!)

- Controlling camp residents vs. visitors that come for the free utilities

- Permanent buildings. Progress and concerns.

Home (?)

OK. So it doesn’t really feel like ‘home’ yet. And actually the fact that it might some time feel like home is both a bit scary and hard to comprehend.


We arrived to a beautiful sunset to find about 15 folks trying to get a generator working for us prior to our arrival (one of them a mechanic, the rest curious spectators).

the village

The house is a very very pleasant surprise. The folks here really went out of their way to make us welcome. Fully equipped, including coffee percolator, oven, beds, night-stand, iron(!), and some kitchen utensils that I don’t even have at home. Everything brand new and set up. Linen on beds. Soap in the toilets. Fan in every room and the unexpected highlight – an air conditioner!

We are currently the only residents of a neighborhood that was built a couple of years ago as a present from Cuba to make the Americans feel bad about not helping Haiti as much as Cuba. (more about why are there empty neighborhoods in a place with 1.3M people living in temporary tents when I understand it myself). It’s a couple of minutes walk from the main part of the village (which is present from the president of Venezuela).

our neighbourhood

Got introduced to a bunch of folks, unpacking. Shower. Sleep.

End of day one.

And it can’t all be perfect: Not sure if there’s a technical reason, or if this is just Haiti, but the generator is located right under my bedroom window. I keep the window closed to get the fumes out (but there’s another window, so ‘pa pwoblem’) and generally feel like I’m sitting inside a tractor engine. There are electricity poles in our abandoned neighborhood and we’re supposed to get hooked to the electricity system in a couple of weeks. This should make the generator a much needed backup instead of a necessity.

Arriving in Haiti

I don’t have internet access yet, but decided to write anyways and post when I do.


It’s Saturday 6 AM. Day 3 about to begin.

I found our arrival to Haiti very symbolic of the situation here (as much as a newbie can understand it).

Plane lands, deplaning in a normal modern way directly into the terminal. Terminal air-conditioning weak, but existent. Walking through the corridor towards a ‘welcome band’ playing live music (Recommended for every airport to make arrivers feel welcome). At the end of the corridor there’s an escalator that goes down towards a door where a bus is waiting to take us to the real terminal that holds immigration. The only problem is that the buses are slower than the flow of people so when the escalator ends it pushes you on top of the people before you that are waiting for the bus. There’s a person at the top of the escalator for crowd control, but he only stops people from getting on the escalator, when he sees folks running up the wrong way to avoid hitting the crowd.



More about the landing:

- The US army base at the airport with its helicopters is just enough to raise the association of ‘Good Morning Vietnam’ arrival scene without really being scary.

- Getting out of the terminal - it was quite hard to push away the folks that wanted to ‘help’ push the trolley.

- It’s hot. But not unbelievably so. Humidity is not a problem as long as I stay within 2 meters of a fan. Preferably 1 meter. Otherwise – will still need to adjust.

A city street. We still don't have a picture that really captures the feeling.

Friendly face at the airport, excellent lunch at ‘the office’ (avocado salad is all I need to be happy), meeting the entire team of workers (except for those that were busy preparing our home), basic grocery shopping at the supermarket, drive to the village. Arriving home.