Christmas branch

Ben's leg has healed up just fine. Our spirits are taking a little longer to heal fully, but in ten days we board an American Airlines flight to spend Christmas with our families. It will be the first time in six years that I've eaten my mom's ritual caramel pecan sticky buns on Christmas morning. We're excited. When we come back, we move more permanently up to the farm. We're excited for that, too.

Meanwhile, this lovely branch has been pulled out of our storage room to evoke the season. I do love the tradition of the Christmas tree. I love that it stems from an ancient practice of honoring life and anticipating spring during the winter solstice (the longest night of the year), now combined with elements that symbolize my own faith tradition - the lights that represent the birth of Christ. The side of me that rebels against the "institution" of church loves putting up my tree knowing that the Puritans banned them. I love that I bought this particular "tree" on the side of Avenue Pan-American, that it's painted white instead of green and that it's fixed into a recycled milk can with concrete. I love that my ornaments are all local and handmade. And I love the way it looks at night when all of the other lights in the house are turned off.

Sick Days

We've spent the past days nursing the vile colds bequeathed upon us by last week's inclement weather. Over the weekend, we went through more than 2 lbs of sitwon, Creole key limes, Ben let me cheat at Scrabble, and even Luna was well cared-for.

Ginger Honey Mead

Mead is the ancient liquor of gods and men, the giver of knowledge and poetry, the healer of wounds, and the bestower of immortality. 
-- Robert Gayre, 1948 (from Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers: The Secrets of Ancient Fermentation)

the first ferment - started a week ago

strain

soak ginger to remove the peel

ginger and water in pressure cooker to speed things up

strain

add the honey and water

watch Luna watch

airlock it

wait for bubbles

Oh hey, 'tis the Season

We're gearing up for another Christmas in Haiti, but have hardly had the time to do the things that usually put us in the spirit. This is what our living space looks like right now, this minute. There's a pile of work right there that I should get back to.

(But at least it's being illuminated by a lovely tree branch).

I hope you, this week, are loving on family, meditating, worshiping, celebrating, singing, snuggling, eating Christmas cookies, and possibly partaking of the other kind of Christmas spirits. We'll be joining in the fun shortly.

[I feel like I should add a disclaimer saying that Ben is not here right now, this minute, and so it was I (Alexis) that took these grainy, weirdly-lit pictures. By the way, and since a few of you have asked: did you know that you can look at the end of each of our posts to see which one of us posted it? Here's another good guideline: pictures of our cat - me; pictures that you might see in a glossy magazine - Ben.]

Living

growing

praying

blooming

fermenting

 resisting

partaking

imbibing

sleeping

dancing

It's a jungle out there!

On Tuesday morning, Luna chased a snake out of the dense vine that grows over one wall of our lakou. It struck at her, she hissed, it slithered around, I'm pretty sure I yelled and am absolutely sure that Mirlonde screamed and jumped around in terror. And then, of course, I grabbed my camera and followed it out onto the street for a photo op:

Mirlonde refused to go back out into the yard. She said that her neighborhood is better than ours, safer, because it's all concrete and the houses are so close together that there is no space for trees or weeds where snakes can hide. I didn't tell her that Ben picked up the snake and set it loose in our neighbor's yard (empty because their house collapsed in the earthquake).

Everyone says that there are no poisonous snakes in Haiti, but in Cameroon venomous snakes abound and a fear of snakes has been embedded into my subconscious since childhood. I am continually grateful to live in a rare Port-au-Prince neighborhood that is shaded by trees, with vines thick enough to harbor snakes, but am definitely watching my step in the garden these days.

Now that we're back in Haiti

Ben's anti-social tendencies hit an all time high this morning when, after his computer crashed and we ran out of propane, he built a fire on our driveway to make coffee. To be fair, later we both braved rush-hour traffic on the motorcycle to get our propane tank refilled. We were 10th in line at the gas station and it only took 45 minutes.

We know have been so.bad at posting. We plead busyness and over-heatedness: the heat has been sweltering, resulting in multiple showers a day and restless nights.

We've both been working from home since I started my new job, which at the moment has me all tied up in research, interviews and editing for a very exciting project. Being at home all day is taking some getting used to and also has us using more electricity than previously. Sadly, our power inverter has not risen to the challenge.

We're actually feeling quite clever tonight, since it finally occurred to us to stoke up the portable generator that F&J gave us when they left Haiti. THANK YOU. Since it probably hasn't been used in a year, it took a few starts (okay, 2 hours) and a trip back to the gas station, but now we are happily recharging our feeble batteries so that we can keep sitting in front of our computers. And a fan.

We are glad to be back. Really.

fennel tea

Fèt Drapo

It's Flag Day, y'all! Last year I celebrated with Bryan and Sharon by paying some beautiful pink birds a visit. On the way out to Trou Caiman we chanced across several parades (including a boyscout march. Scouts in Creole are "scoots," which is just so endearing).

Unfortunately, there's no day off or parades for me this year. While I intend to write a blogpost soon about our upcoming plans, in the meantime I'll just tell you that May 31st is my last day at MCC. Suffice it to say, I have a lot to do between now and then. Today, for example: I spent the first part of the morning giving a really fun workshop on Canadian intervention in Haiti and advocacy for a visiting MCC group. The second part of the morning was my last conference call with MCC's advocacy offices (I think I just shed a little tear - what an amazing group they've been to work with!) and at 3:00 I have another conference call with some other people to talk about something else. Meanwhile, I am trying to deal with the invasion of mosquitoes into our home. We always have skeeters, but lately they've been unbearable. The strategy:

1. Spray myself all over with Herbal Armor (it's one of the most effective DEET-free repellents we've found).
2. Drink a prestige to compensate for blood loss. It's a holiday, after all.
3. Find and empty all sources of standing water in our lakou. This will include cutting open some of the tires stacked outside for the planned expansion of our tire garden. Turns out, tires make great places for pesky mosquito larvae to grow...
4. Burn eucalyptus leaves, incense etc (Mosquitoes hate the smoke and smell. We like the smell).
5. Mix up a mosquito deterrent of thyme, lemongrass, lavender and eucalyptus oils and put it all over the house. (I use this book all the time and would highly recommend it if you're into natural remedies.)
6. Take my 3:00 call in bed, under the mosquito net.

We've been asked a lot about malaria. We don't take anti-malaria prophylaxis because we would rather take a course of chloroquine when we get sick than be on an antibiotics full-time, which kills all the friendly bacteria in our bodies. Malaria mosquitoes (fancy name, Anopheles) are really only out at night, so we just sleep under a net. However, the mosquitoes that give us dengue (which we've both had here and it totally sucks) are daytime fliers... thus the concerted effort to repel them.

Christmas at our House

Disclaimer: even though I am the one posting these pictures, all the Christmas cheer (except for the kahlua) at our house comes from my lovely creative wife...

Home-eopathic Recipe

Makes:
1 cure for a cold, rainy, pre-Christmas-in-Haiti-without-my-family Sunday

Needed:
1 Ben
1 Luna
Homemade biscuits
1 jar of Ben's mom's blackberry jam
Christmas lights
Nirvana playlist
Wool socks
Picasa album of old, old photos from Laura

Instructions:
1. Mix the Ben with the Luna

2. Make the biscuits while wearing the socks

3. Top biscuits with the blackberry jam

4. Add the music, lights and old photos:


Top: Ben, Mom Depp, Tim, Caleb; Bottom: Caleb, Martha, Ben
5. Cheer up.

One Pumpkin Goes a Long Way

I recently remembered that on January 5th, back when 2010 still seemed to be on a somewhat normal trajectory (what is normal, though, I wonder?), I wished all of our readers a year full of pumpkins.

Well, we got distracted there for a bit, but have since resumed our pumpkin eating ways. It's really quite amazing what you can make with a single pumpkin. For the purposes of this blog, we've documented the culinary life of this beauty:

Mug included for scale

In the States, we used to puree baked pumpkin in a food processor and freeze it. Since we have neither a food processor nor consistent refrigeration here (yep, we are this amazing in the kitchen WITHOUT much of a fridge), we skip the pureeing step and eat a lot of pumpkin in a very short amount of time.

With the holidays right around the corner, pumpkin + nutmeg/cinnamon/cloves/ginger is a festive tasting combination: in pancakes, cookies, bread pudding and scones:

The bread pudding was so good that it was almost finished before we thought to take a picture

The savory pumpkin dishes sound better than they tasted. Next time we'll be sticking to soup. You can't go wrong with pumpkin soup.

Pumpkin salad with lentils and feta

Pumpkin and black bean "tacos"

When we cut into it, about half of the pumpkin turned out to be rotten. I can't imagine how much pumpkin we'd still be eating if it hadn't been.