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