Daily Minutae

Our weekdays have been replete with lotsa work and a steady stream of houseguests, not to mention gifts from Luna (on Friday alone: a snake, a mouse and a giant green lizard) which tend to necessitate a fair bit of chasing around the house.

Recently, Ben seems to be providing the entire city and its environs with composting worms. Today we went up to Kenscoff to deliver a batch of worms, pick wildflowers and visit J's fledgling strawberry farm. Who can't wait for December and strawberries (fertilized with compost à la Ben)? Me! Me!

Among other destinations, Ben's worms have also made their way to Cité Soleil -- to fertilize a Pax Christi urban gardening program. Oh, and remember the Kabrit? The Kabrit has also found a happy home in Cité Soleil:

(The banner above the bike reads "Another Haiti is Possible: look further")

Coming soon: Ben will be spending 2 weeks in southern France at a photography festival. And even sooner: We're hoping that we will dodge Tropical Storm Irene just like we did TS Emily. The National Hurricane Center advisory isn't looking too good for tomorrow. Boy, does hurricane season have us perpetually on edge around here.

Today we are also grieving the death of Ben's uncle Fred, who passed away yesterday. Fred Fay became quadriplegic in an accident at the age of 16 and was a leader in the Disability Rights Movement. A PBS documentary, A Life Worth Living, showcasing his life will air on October 27th. Fred's death has us thinking a lot about Martha today, too.

Riding out 2010

 

Merry Christmas from Ben, Lexi and Luna!

(Bryan Thompsonowak and I built this bike early this past spring)

Posts We Never Posted #1

Tour de l'Artibonite

A mere three days before the earthquake, the MCC ladies rode from Mirebalais to Desarmes on a variety of bicycles (most of which were provided by Ben from the fast-breeding brood in our storage room). For a 25-mile ride, it was totally epic. I can say this: the Artibonite Valley was definitely not prepared to be stormed by six blan women on mostly crappy bikes.

On January 12th, I started writing a blogpost about the ride, intending to upload the pictures after I got home. Before I got a chance, there was an earthquake.

Pancha is leaving Haiti next week, so now of all of the strong and amazing women that I rode to Desarmes with that day, only Margot is still here. Next year's Tour will either be very small (read: two) or will have to be composed of new friends and colleagues.

Cycling Around Port-au-Prince, Six Months After The Quake

Yesterday I put together a story for bikejuju.com click here to go to it.

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

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.

Scratch that

Today I went downtown with my friend Bryan to try and exchange the cargo bike we built. Our plan was to trade it for pretty much any decent, intact bike in order to build another cargo bike. We built it thinking that we had in fact just converted a nearly useless Walmart BMX bike into a fully functional cargo-carrying monster capable of hauling sacks of rice, coolers full of cold sodas to sell or delivering school children to school. Our idea was to build just a few before the idea spread quickly as people copied our simple design. Within a few years, the cities and countryside would lose the hovering cloud of exhaust because Haitians would be moving primarily on bicycles. NGOs would quickly pull out and take their diesel blowing SUVs with them because the quality of life in Haiti would be improving at such a rapid pace. Haitian government officials on bicycles would be thinking clearer and corruption and issues of bad governance would vanish. The cargo bikes would be an integral part of rebuilding Haiti's agricultural production as people would use them to collect organic matter for composting and to carry their harvests to the local market. The economy would be so boosted that nobody would take jobs in the clothing factories that are about to be built thanks to an extension of the HOPE Act. Everybody would scrap their Chinese motorcycles - the metal would go back to China and be used to build more bicycles. All the children in Haiti would be carried to their local clinics on cargo bikes for their vaccinations and regular checkups. The US would be so impressed by Haiti's bike scene that they would stop dumping food and promoting oppressive trade policies in Haiti and...

We arrived at the bicycle market area downtown where about 20 guys sell bicycles and parts. The bikes are mostly second hand Walmart bikes. Today an old Cannondale touring bike and a Specialized Stumpjumper full suspension brightened the market area.

I had poached the front wheel off our cargo bike for another bike project but expected the bike vendors to immediately realize this bike's full potential. Five guys rushed us before I could even dismount from where I was half pinned, awkwardly trying to hold the cargo bike on the back of my friend's motorcycle (the cargo bike had hit two vehicles on our way downtown - one truck had bumped the bike and we hit the other one) and wanted to know if we needed the bike repaired or if we needed to buy a front wheel. I declined and declared our mission to exchange the bike for a complete BMX bike (this isn't asking much - it doesn't cover the materials or weekend we spent converting it). A few people were interested for a few minutes. One guy suggested we trade our cargo bike and some money to get a different bike. Another guy offered me 250 gourdes or $6.25 US. The same guy asked me for 300 gourdes or $7.50 US a few minutes later when I tried to buy a pair of old caliper brakes. After buying a pair of new crappy brakes made in China, we lingered around hoping somebody would approach us to make a trade. After a while I climbed on the back of my friend's motorcycle, lifted the one-wheeled-reject-cargo-bike onto my lap, somebody asked me to give them the bicycle as a gift, and we left.

We have money available to set up a bike project to convert bicycles into cargo bikes, but it doesn't make sense to set up one more development project to give junk away (as valuable as we might think that junk is) and further develop the free junk mentality. My next little bit of research may be to try and sell a tire garden for cheap and then I might scratch that project as well. I sure hope my waste-oil-heater-fruit-dryer idea sticks, though.

Bicycling Haiti

Everyone needs a way to unwind. Bryan and I put this video together after a couple recent mountain bike rides.

Sweet

The long-tail cargo bike Bryan and I built was featured on the Popular Mechanics website as one of "The 8 Most Ambitious Instructables of 2009"

Kabrit is a Success.

Yesterday Ben and I helped F & J move... with the cargobikes! See pictures here.

Frank shot this sweet video of Ben on his trip to fill up their propane bottles (prior to which Ben carried 70lb of satellite equipment to their new home):



Fun was had by all and when Ben and I were finally heading home, someone on the street said to us, "that little machine (ie. the Kabrit) has sure worked hard today!"

what you have all been waiting for

How to build a cargo truck bicycle - More DIY How To Projects

click here to see our other cargo bike

How to Build a Cargo Bike in Haiti

How to Build a Longtail Cargo Bike - More DIY How To Projects

Bryan and I recently finished this bike. We've showed it off (in other words, ridden it around) and a lot of people seem to really like it. The idea is to make a couple and hopefully people will replicate them to carry goods to and from the market or whatever else they need to carry (like a half a dozen kids to school).

I just bought a beat up BMX bike to build another type of cargo bike. It's going to be even sweeter.

Bike Maintenance, Haiti style

I pack car grease into the bearing race and one by one push the bearings into the grease until they disappear beneath the black mess. A bearing slips out of my fingers, bounces off my toe and is gone forever. I crawl around for fifteen minutes before giving up the search. My front wheel had 20 ball bearings in it. Now I’m one bearing short of a good wheel but it still spins decently.

Disassemble the bottom bracket and find lots of loose metal debris, rust, and no grease. The piece that holds the ball bearings in place has been mostly ground away because it’s probably been without grease for the last 30 years. I clean it, pack it with grease, reassemble it and it spins great.

I add a link to the chain, which allows me to loosen the rear wheel and slide it forward to move the chain onto a larger cog giving me an easier gear for climbing mountains. Now I have a two-speed! I had broken the rear derailleur mountain biking, which encouraged the bike’s transition into a single speed. Tonight my knees are grateful that it has re-evolved into a two-speed.

A couple weeks ago, my brother Matt gave me a mountain bike handle bar so I put that on to give me a more upright posture for more comfort and control. I pulled a set of brake levers out of my parent’s garage while we were in North Carolina. When I put them on I figured out I was missing a plastic washer so a friend and I made a washer out of the cap of a specimen bottle. We also rigged the brake cables because they aren’t the proper cables for these levers.

There was a L-shaped bracket on the stem for holding a reflector that I bent horizontally and now it works as a camera mount. The bolt that formerly held a reflector is the perfect size to screw into the bottom of my camera - a minor sort of miracle.

Gerry rigging reminds of a proverb that we often hear, degaje pa peche (“to get by is not a sin”). I’ve mostly heard this expression used in reference to someone sleeping around or stealing to survive. As I type this, Alexis is sleeping on the couch and I hope she doesn’t wake up to see the rat that is eating a pile of rat poison on the other side of the room. A larger rat runs out and attacks it, then they both run in opposite directions. Now the smaller rat is back. I hope my brakes stay together.

-posted by Ben from Lexi's account

Ben....

I have a PC laptop that was murdered by a Spanish-speaking virus last month. MS-13 connections, maybe? I was running the free version of AVG anti-virus software, which clearly does not speak Spanish. I've spent the last two weeks trying to download Ubuntu and was finally able to download it yesterday afternoon at nice hotel. This was not a small feat considering that it's 699 megabytes and internet in Haiti is usually only crawling. It took me four hours and $16 in overpriced snacks. So I now have Ubuntu and it's really sweet. My advice: if you're still using Windows, you should (1) write a letter to Microsoft about their terrible operating system and (2) switch to Ubuntu. My only problem now is trying to get Adobe Lightroom to run on Ubuntu.

I'm slammed with work now. I'm spending these hot, humid rainy season weeks hiking through the mountains of the Central Plateau visiting CLM clients, collecting baseline information and writing individual profiles on each one for our donors. An average day has me out the door by 6:45 AM, crossing a river by canoe at 7:30, visiting program participants until 3:30 in the afternoon, trying to beat the rain back to Sodo (4:15ish) or Desarmes if Alexis is there (5:00ish). Then I shower, have dinner and try to stay awake long enough to get some writing in before I crash around 8:00. Breakfast: bread, jam and coffee. Lunch: not usually. Dinner: rice, beans, vegetable sauce and, if I'm lucky, a piece of chicken. On weekends which seem much too short, I'm back in Port hanging out with Alexis, trying to catch up sleep and get a little more work done.

The latest update on my bicycle is that it's still awesome. I may have hit some single-track in the Artibonite a little too hard, though. The area we went riding in was flooded and I sort of fell into a four-foot deep stream. Later, while riding/pushing my bike though mud I managed to break my chain and trash my rear derailier. I had to push my bike back to the MCC office where I converted into a single-speed. I've always wanted a single-speed, but have never had the will-power to remove gears from a bike (and thus create a more painful riding experience for myself). I like to think that in spite of the pain, my single speed makes riding simpler and more zen-like. To say the bike is rigid is an understatement- the rocky sections of trail I hit are brain-jarring, and my vision blurs when I clamp on the brakes and try to stay upright. I'm going to put a riser handlebar on it when I get chance, which should help a little.

My new bike

So I bought this hot bike for $35. It's a Trek from the 70's or 80's. Bryan and I went bike shopping in Saint Mark where there are a few vendors, each with ten or twenty bikes. To demonstrate the bikes' durability they bounce them off the ground in front of us. This bike wasn't for sale but when I walked over to look at it the owner appeared and started giving me a sales pitch.

After I bought it, I flipped the handlebars and chopped them off for a more upright stance. Bryan had a small handful of bar-tape that covers a few inches of handlebar. I chucked the front-derailleur because I won't ever go fast enough in Port to use the big chain ring, and my little brother brought me some new 1 1/4 tires, my Brooks seat and my BMX helmet. I haven't had time to ride much yet but it's going to be so awesome. I'm going to hit some single-track in the countryside tomorrow and hope the bike holds together.

Riding Uphill

I just left home for the second time on my Ukranian mountain bike (a hand-me-down from a USAID guy that Alexis met on Thanksgiving). I stopped at the end of my street and paid somebody 25 cents to pump up the tires. Then I dove into traffic and 95-degree-exhaust for my ride uphill. The great city we live in is literally built on one long hill, which makes for great riding half of the time. The first few pedal strokes went well but as the novelty of pedaling wore off, I grabbed onto the bed of a passing pickup truck. I had a nice conversation with the three construction workers sitting in the back of the truck as I held on for dear life. I've seen lots of cyclists holding onto trucks heading uphill here and they make it look so easy... As a teenager, I thought I was being stupid holding onto friends' cars going 45 MPH, but it turns out that that was just practice for being stupid later in life. The construction workers were thoroughly entertained. And who wouldn't be by a skinny white guy on a bicycle skitching on their truck? Pretty soon I had to let go to make a turn. On the next short hill, I nearly died. It's been so long since I exerted myself in the heat that I thought I was going to throw up. After a long break I made it up the hill, then coasted down Route Delmas to my office where I drank gallons of water and felt sick for an hour. My total trip distance was about 2.5 miles.

Tim, when you come visit please bring my helmet and the seat and handlebar off of my mountain bike. Thanks.

PS: I once rode my bicycle 4,000-miles. If you don't believe me, click here.