Dear God

Dear god, I'm trying hard to reach you

Dear god, I see your face in all I do
Sometimes it’s so hard to believe in
Good god I know you have your reasons

- Monsters of Folk

Several ancient spiritual traditions use prayer flags as a means of communicating with God, blessing others and blessing the earth. We have a lot on our hearts right now, so this week Ben and I made prayer flags out of scraps of fabric I had laying around.
For one set, we decorated each flag to symbolize specific prayers. The other set we left blank to represent our unvoiced prayers.

It was good for us to take the time to do this project - to give voice to the things that have been weighing on us and then to let them go...

Dear god I see you move the mountains

Dear god I see you moving trees
Sometimes it’s nothing to believe in
Sometimes it’s everything I see

- (MOF again)

Eating on the Wild Side

Since pests and heavy rains have been inundating our garden of late, we've been looking for a cheap (and fun) way to get the green goodness that we generally eat in the form of homegrown collards, swiss chard, mustard greens and kale. So on a hike in Kenscoff this morning, I picked some dandelions.

You're supposed to pick dandelion greens before the plants have flowered, but I didn't find any of those. To get the bitterness out of the leaves, I had to blanch them. Even so, they were good. My only regret is that I didn't pick more. The French make cream of dandelion soup, which we'll definitely have to try the next time we have a chance to go hiking-and-dandelion-picking.

A little PSA for ya: The next time you're mowing your lawn, try to think of the dandelion as more than just a weed. You can saute or steam dandelion greens the same way you would use any other green. It's way fun to gather your own food and dandelions a're full of vitamins and anti-oxidants (unless you use Roundup).

We had ours sauteed with turnips over wild rice:

Telling the same kind of story about Haiti

A supplemental funding bill for Haiti is stalling in the House of Representatives. Meanwhile, our governmental representatives are hearing great things about the situation in Haiti. In a Senate hearing at the end of May, the U.S. Ambassador to Haiti and USAID staff reported that because things here were always so bad, the situation is now more or less the same as it was before the earthquake.

Ben and I often struggle with how we represent Haiti on this blog. We want to tell "a different kind of story about Haiti" to counteract the negative narratives that people see and read in the mainstream news. Lately, though, we've been having a tough go of it. It's quite easy for us to disregard the stress that the earthquake has had on us and we start wondering why we're discouraged... Hmmm. Although I would like to tell you otherwise, the situation here is NOT more or less the same as it was before the earthquake.

Two weeks ago I visited a small camp on Rue Perchotte in an area in Delmas 75 called Puit Blain. MCC is aware of this camp because we have an employee that lives in the neighborhood, but the approximately 70 families living in this community have not received aid from anyone else. They have had to purchase the NGO tarps that they are living under on the black market. Large, sturdy tarps – the kind that NGOs have been distributing in preparation of the rainy season - sell for 1,500 gourdes, almost $40.00 US, apiece.

Maranatha Medna, a young single mother of a 3-year old son that lost her home and small business in the earthquake, says that she and several friends responded to a government call to register as victims. They went downtown and put their names on a list, assuming that someone would contact them with assistance, but no one ever did. “We had hope,” she says.

Marie-Carole Bellande is in her 60s. She lost her home in the earthquake – “kraze nèt (totally destroyed).” It took her ten years to build her home and although she is still running the small commerce she had before the earthquake, at this rate it will take her at least another ten years to build it again. It’s been four months since the earthquake and she has still not had the means to start clearing away the rubble. Marie-Carole has two teenage girls and with no place to live, she worries about not being able to protect them at night.

When asked about the cessation of direct food aid, she replies, “God created food before he created us. We need food to survive, but food is not everything. I can’t build a house with food. I need a place to sleep.” She adds that necessity prompted the food aid that they have received, but that Haitians would be more satisfied with having the means to buy food for themselves.

Other members of the Puit Blan community agree. They want jobs. Coeury Sonel, 37, is a mason but has been unable to find work since the earthquake. He hopes that when reconstruction officially begins he will have plenty of work, but in the meantime he, his wife and their five children (ages 12, 9, 6, 3 and 18 months) are living under scraps of corrugated tin and a tarp. He says that life wasn’t easy before the earthquake, but now his family is "not living.” “We are in the mud, exposed to the sun and the rain.” He says he doesn’t dare to hope that he’ll ever be able to rebuild his home.

It has rained hard every day this week, and for several days, it has rained all day long. When Maranatha shows me the inside of the makeshift shelter where she and her family are living, I can see the indentations in the dirt made by water running through when it rains. I ask her about privacy and she says that this is a problem. She and the other women in the camp have to seek out private spaces to bathe. Shady places where they can hang out during the day to escape the heat that gets trapped in their shelters are also limited.

No one in the immediate vicinity of the camp owns a water reservoir, so they buy and haul 5-gallon buckets of water for 5 gourdes apiece (about 12 cents). 5 gallons of drinking water costs almost $1.00.

Most Haitians put their life’s savings into building their homes and in Puit Blain, most of those homes are destroyed. None of the people I spoke to are formally employed. As is the case for most Haitians, they sell items in small quantities or do odd jobs, scraping by however they can.

Because many members of this community owned their own homes before the earthquake, they are not as vulnerable as many other displaced people in Port-Au-Prince. They are still living among their neighbors in a community structure that provides a higher level of safety and accountability. Nevertheless, the challenges that face them are overwhelming. With the world’s aid and attention slowly dwindling, it seems hard to imagine that the situation will improve anytime soon.

This may not be the kind of story that I like to tell, but it's still an important part of Haiti's story.

Sunset and rain in the Artibonite valley

Did you miss us?

We returned Saturday from an outstanding vacation in the Dominican Republic. It got off to a rocky start when we missed the UN flight to Santo Domingo on Monday morning and Ben, who is deathly allergic to bee stings, got stung by a bee. But not only were we able to reschedule for a Tuesday flight, we also ran into and got to spend the day with Matt, Esther, Gabriela and Niko.

On our vacation we explored Santo Domingo, then bussed 4 hours east to Punta Cana where we stayed one night in El Cortecito and one night with Caleb and Jody, who let us crash their 5-year anniversary vacation. As I walked and Ben hobbled around Santo Domingo (try the Colonial District - it's amazing!), we were shocked yet again at the difference between the two halves of this island. How is it that Santo Domingo has public trash cans, park benches, a subway, sidewalks, photography exhibits and theaters and yet everything there (food, hotel, transportation) is cheaper than in Port-Au-Prince? Punta Cana was basically one all-inclusive resort after another, but the beach was beautiful and the company was fantastic.

We were both pretty bummed when our vacation came to an end. It's been hard to come back to Haiti lately. While we were in Santo Domingo, Ben asked me jokingly, "What is it about being out of Haiti that reduces your crazy factor so much?" Maybe the better question is, what is it about being in Haiti that is making me so crazy these days?

Driving home we noticed that the city is awash with green, yellow, white and blue. There are painted bottles strung over the streets and flags and jerseys for sale everywhere. Port-Au-Prince has World Cup fever. For the most part, Haitians are Argentina fans (white and blue) or Brazil fans (green and yellow) and apparently die hard fanatiks can get quite rowdy, even violent during matches.

Yesterday we fought off our post-vacation blues with some serious gardening and kitten-cuddling. Two kittens down, two to go...

And this afternoon we are headed to Desarmes for a tree distribution. Meanwhile, Hurricane Alex is headed our way.

Ode to the Waks

Two years ago (take a month or so) we met Bryan and Sharon Thompsonowak at the American Airlines terminal in the Miami airport. We were all on our way to Haiti to work for MCC. Ben and I got to the departure gate first and made a game out of guessing which couple approaching the gate might be them.

A canceled flight, overnight in Miami and six intense weeks of orientation and language learning later, we were inseparable (except that they lived in Desarmes and we lived in Port-Au-Prince, which necessitated a fair bit of back-and-forth travel). They love to garden. We love to garden. They have ridden bicycles cross-country. We have ridden bicycles cross-country. They love to travel. We love to travel. The list goes on and on. We have never shared such a similar combination of values and interests with another couple before: travels, books, magazines, movies, music, theology, ideology, hobbies, food... Sometimes it was downright weird.

Now this post is going to degenerate into a blubbery cliched account of our friendship that will probably make me cry as I write it. We have traveled all over Haiti and through the Dominican Republic together. While Ben and Bryan built cargo bikes and went mountain biking together, Sharon and I shopped in the market (she likes to buy 2nd hand clothes and alter them and, what do you know, I also like to buy 2nd hand clothes and alter them - although she's a better seamstress than I) and did amazing cooking and craft projects together:

When Bryan and Sharon left Desarmes and moved to Port-Au-Prince after the earthquake, we lived together for awhile. When they moved into their own place, we still worked in the same office (more precisely, in the same 5x10 ft of office space), ate at least 4 dinners a week together and spent weekends hanging out. Incidentally, we discovered that you don't actually need more than 4 people for a dance party.

Yesterday, we took Bryan and Sharon back to the airport. It has come time for them to move on to other amazing things - Sharon is off to Vanderbilt Divinity School where she will be studying ethics and society as a precursor to her PhD. Bryan will be doing a one-year internship at the end of which he'll be a certified arboriculturalist. (See how cool they are?!). Saying goodbye to them yesterday was one of the hardest things we've done in a long time. They have been our community here, our family. And as predicted, I'm crying now...

Bryan, Sharon, here's to 2 years in Haiti full of adventures, difficulties, fun times (and boring and inbetween times) and to our many years of friendship to come. We are so glad that you're who showed up at the Miami airport on July 29th, 2008.

p.s. I fully expect to be made fun of for the corniness of this post, but at least I didn't break out into the lyrics of "Friends are friends forever."

at the airport, sad

La Réserve de la Forêt des Pins

Over the weekend we discovered a Haitian paradise. Ben and I are mountain people. We love love love the outdoors and love trees and cool air and mist and everything that comes along with mountain forests. Although we hike regularly in Kenscoff and from time to time make the trek to Seguin, we just haven't quite been getting our being-outdoors-in-the-mountains fix. Until now. A short three hours southeast from Port-Au-Prince is la Réserve de la Forêt des Pins (the Pine Forest reserve) - elevation almost 6,000 feet. The Ministry of the Environment maintains at least 13 wooden cabins (we saw 13, anyway) in the forest that date from the 1940's. Trees, trails, amazing flora, and barely anyone around... clearly heaven in Haiti.

Stop Forced Evictions of Haiti's Earthquake Victims

Make your voice heard by signing this petition.

Many residents of Port-Au-Prince that lost their homes in the earthquake are being systematically displaced by the government and private landowners from the spaces where they have set up temporary shelters.

At the end of April, Ben received a call that CNE (the construction company that the government and private landowners are using to evict displaced people from a number of spaces) bulldozers were preparing to raze temporary shelters in a camp called Camp Canaan. Ben and I went to check it out and found that the camp, which is on a hillside, was being leveled by the government so that they could relocate several thousand people living in another camp at high-risk for flooding.
The woman pictured above is Violene Gedeon, 49. She has six children. In mid-April, she lost everything that she managed to salvage in the earthquake except a pair of bedsheets when the Haitian National Police arrived at Camp Canaan with heavy machinery. They told camp residents to leave because their shelters were about to be demolished. According to Gedeon, they received no advance warning, no opportunity to dismantle their temporary homes and no information as to where they should move to. She has an injury which she says she received from falling on a nail as she tried to run from the bulldozers. When they moved to a spot several hundred feet away, they were forcibly displaced a second time as the new site also needed to be leveled. There are approximately 50 families at Camp Canaan in this situation, none of which, according to Gedeon, set up shelters a third time. They are sleeping with friends and in other family members' shelters.
This points to a grave disregard for the dignity and rights of IDPs (Internally Displaced Peoples), as well as a lack of coordination amongst the various sectors of the Haitian government and international community that are handling relocation. The parties that are responsible for making decision about the relocation of IDPs include the Coordinating Support Committee (CSC - formed following a request by the Government of Haiti for enhanced coordination measures, this committee is made up of representatives of the government of Haiti, senior UN staff and donors), the Department of Civil Protection (DPC), which is part of the Ministry of the Interior, and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. MINUSTAH's human rights section and the OCHA protection cluster have the responsibility to ensure that all actions that concern IDPs conform to international human rights standards.

By signing the petition at Change.org, you can send a letter to these folks, as well as to President Rene Preval, Bill Clinton and others that have the power to protect the rights of displaced Haitians.

How to Support Haiti's Sovereignty and Independence

Excerpts from Q & A by The Haitian Blogger @ blogspot.com

What [can] us non-Haitians who sincerely want to give [do] to add something positive to the situation?

Non-Haitians need to pressure the U.S. government to change their foreign policy towards Haiti. It's clear that the IMF, World Bank, IDB et al's structural readjustment programs haven't worked. It's clear that "free-trade," privatization and other neoliberal measures have devastated local industries and destroyed food production in Haiti.

While some priorities have changed (the top priority is rebuilding) and TPS [Temporary Protected Status] has been granted to Haitian immigrants (for now). The list of priorities from this report by Haitian Lawyer's Leadership Network (HLLN) remains relevant: What Haitian-Americans are asking of the next US president

Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.
--Martin Luther King, Jr.

Are our voices as important as our house plans?

Non-Haitian voices are best used when raised in support of Haitian voices and Haiti. Although corruption, injustice and other violations of human rights must be addressed and are top priorities, perspective, sensitivity and context would go a long way in assuring Haitians that there is good will and that Haiti's best interest is at heart behind calls for transparency, integrity and accountability.

[It does not] make sense to dispense democracy from behind the butt of a gun. Pointing guns at hungry, dispossessed and destitute people is criminal. Most Haitians don't support the UN military occupation. Abuses by MINUSTAH are growing. MINUSTAH should either put away the tanks and guns for tractors and construction equipment or they must all go home.

Or should we with particular skills that are necessary right now be apolitical?

POLITICS: Haitians have been struggling for autonomy and independence for 200 years. The main issue Haiti has faced vis-a-vis the international community has been a lack of respect for Haiti's sovereignty, Constitution, laws, government and people. There is a paternalistic nature inherent in the "aid" that Haiti receives.

SKILLS: The problem with most NGOs in Haiti is that they're not building permanent, long-lasting structures or institutions. The fact is, permanent structures would put many of them out of business and that's not the plan for most.

Questions for us: Are we building permanent infrastructures and institutions in Haiti? Ones that we would want to live in and be governed by?

The Ride Journal

If you like bicycles and art you'll love The Ride Journal. Issue 4, which is now for sale, has a few of my pictures and a story by Alexis from our ride across the US. It's 13.50 GBP which is expensive but it's also a beautiful thick magazine full of great stories. and bicycles.

Oh Port Au Prince

A woman cleans and does our laundry once or twice a week. I hate having somebody do my laundry and clean my house -- it feels weird and colonial. Although I also don't enjoy hand washing clothes myself. We hired her primarily because it's our responsibility as rich people here (or at least as people with access to more resources) to provide others with jobs.... Most Haitians also have household staff. Anyway, when she is here she talks to herself and sings Christian worship music. It's like a five-hour musical taking place at our house twice a week. She also mumbles about us not buying the proper kinds of soap and not replacing the broom or mop often enough. And since we don't sweep up the leaves that fall on our driveway every day, she thinks we are dirty people.

She just showed up for work much later than normal and told me in passing, "I couldn't find transportation because there was a bunch of shooting downtown." What? I ask if there is a protest taking place and she says yes, but with no mention as to who is protesting what. There are several protests a week here, but most people don't take notice of them unless they destroy lots of stuff or a number of people get killed. Three days ago, university students were protesting downtown near the palace which is next to a huge camp of displaced people. UN soldiers teargassed them and also managed to gas the camp. The camp residents had to ditch their tents and valuables to escape the teargas. Apparently a few children were injured and six people treated at the general hospital with rubber bullet wounds. Following the protest, UN soldiers stormed the university and beat up a few students that had been throwing rocks. The chief of mission publicly apologized on the radio for this incident, saying that the soldiers had not been authorized to enter the university. For a country without a military, militarism and military intervention is still such a challenge for Haiti. Alexis put together a set of talking points on this issue after the earthquake and although it needs to be updated a bit now, it demonstrates the complexity of military aid and the UN peacekeeping mission in Haiti, which most Haitians we know oppose vehemently.

Speaking of protests, this one actually looks productive.

Fancy Feet

I have gotten two pedicures in my life. The first was before my wedding at an all-natural, aromatherepeutic spa in Boone, North Carolina. The second was last Saturday.

It's taken me nearly two years to notice that pretty much every man, woman and child in Port-Au-Prince - except me, and of course Ben - has beautifully painted toenails. Men typically go with a clear coat or a nice subtle pastel shade. (I'm serious). For Haitian women, though, it's no holds barred - red, blue, purple, yellow, rainbows, flowers, stickers, even acrylics! This is why there is a beauty salon on every corner.

Saturday, Sharon and I paid a visit to the Peigne d'Or Studio de Beaute (Golden Comb Beauty Studio) that is conveniently located about 45-seconds from my front door. While we watched Haitian music videos on television, our feet were soaked in green apple scented dish soap and vigorously scrubbed with sandpaper. Then our toenails were trimmed, buffed, primed with a clear coat and painted a glorious, shiny red. All this for about $3.00.

The most amazing thing about this experience is how normal it felt. For about forty minutes we were just two other women at the salon. [Except for some slight awkwardness when we realized that our pedicurists thought we didn't speak Creole]. Also, my nails look great! I am now proudly wearing sandals and waiting for my polish to chip so that I can go back for more.