North Carolina in November

October in Photos

We're posting this from North Carolina. I know, our trip snuck up on us, too! I found myself calling friends and a few colleagues on our way to the airport Saturday to let them know that we would be out of the country for a few weeks. Oops.

October was such a busy month that we didn't get around to blogging about some really important stuff. Like the worrisome fact that grocery stores in Port-au-Prince had Christmas decorations out by mid-October. And the excitement of finding shallots sprouting in the compost pile.

Like friends getting hitched.

And like the peasant women's association celebration we attended during which I, in all my plaid-shirt and hiking-booted glory, was asked to give an impromptu speech.

Hide 'n Seek Kitty

Guede/Ghede/Gèdè/Gede

In Haiti, Gede (or any of its alternate spellings) welcomes us to November. November 1st, All Saints Day, and November 2nd, All Souls Day, are national holidays. The gede are the somewhat raunchy spirits that preside over death... and sex.

Here is a picture Ben took last year in the National Cemetery:

Also, check out these photos from Day of the Dead celebrations throughout Latin America. I think Port-au-Prince needs a zombie walk.

Natural Medecine

I was way out in the countryside a few days ago and I met this doktè fèy, leaf doctor. I bought a small bottle of her medicine after this amazing sales pitch: "It's cold medicine. It works great on children. It's also good for any type of pain you have. The ingredients are sugar cane liquor, honey, and all of the leaves that make good pain killers." I took a capful and it numbed me for the following few hours I spent bouncing down dirt roads. I just tasted it again to remember what it tastes like and it made me not want to type anymore...

"Spotlight on Ben Depp" at The Image, Deconstructed

"BEN: Try to be a human before being a photographer - if you have the chance to save somebody's life, do it. Walking away from a malnourished child on the edge of death or a cholera victim that needs transport stays with you."

An interview with Ben about taking this picture and on shooting cholera in Haiti is featured over on Ross Taylor's The Image Deconstructed today: http://blog.imagedeconstructed.com/2011/10/spotlight-on-ben-depp.html

I ♥ Haitian Art

(Detail shot from a Martial painting)

This is a tèt zetwal, the head (or face) of a star. Isn't that a lovely image?

Around Here

It is getting dark now at 5:30. Even at summer solstice it is only light until 6:30 or so. Still, an hour makes such a difference in our hectic lives.

No matter how hard we try to create space, things never seem to slow down.

Today, Ben is off to the North for three days. He's taking pictures of agricultural work supported by Groundswell International. Check them out. We are increasingly critical - on our worst days acrimonious, even - of the international humanitarian aid and development world, but there are still plenty of organizations out there that humble and re-inspire us. Groundswell is one.

The manuscript for the book that I have spent the last four months helping to edit, research and fact-check is due on October 30th. Let's just say I'm a wee bit stressed out.

Thankfully, Saturday and the annual Artisanat en Fête provided a nice break from my computer and a chance for me to acquire yet more Haitian art (eeps).

Now that the mayor of Pétion-ville is repressively cracking down on street vendors, some of my favorite market ladies - think pumpkins, piles of gleaming shallots and vine-ripened tomatoes, sour oranges and bunches of chard - have been pushed from their usual spaces to a spot approximately 500 feet from our front door. Are we spoiled or what? 

Meanwhile, Luna's new favorite napping spot is among the bright orange impatiens that I planted last week. She spends her days looking like she's posing for a cat calender. It's seriously too cute.

Now, it's back to fact-checking I go!

almost too beautiful to eat

almost. #thelightreallywasfunkyorangelikethat

"Looks like it's cholera!"

Kids in Desarmes, in the Artibonite valley, have made up a song that they sing to the tune of Shakira's "Waka Waka":

Diri ak sos pwa, // Rice with bean sauce,
mayi moulen ak pwa, // cornmeal with beans,
yon sache dlo, de ji dola // one bag of water, two ice pops,
landan legliz la. // in church.*
Ou fin manje, // You finish eating,
ou kouche, // you lay down,
gen diyare // have diarrhea,
ou leve. // you get up.
Vwazen mwen, sa w gen la? // My neighbor, what you do have?
Vwazen mwen, sa w gen la? // My neighbor, what you do have?
Vwazen mwen, sa w gen la-a-a? // My neighbor, what you do ha-a-ave?
Genlè se kolera! // Looks like it's cholera!

*It's unclear why they are eating the rice, cornmeal and ice pops in church.

Yesterday marked the one year anniversary of the introduction of cholera into Haiti. As of the beginning of October, 465,293 cases have been reported and 6,559 deaths. Ben - who has spent a fair bit of time photographing cholera in the countryside - thinks that in reality there have probably been four times that many deaths.

Although it was tapering off, cholera has spiked again with heavy rains that began in August. Doctors without Borders (MSF) reported that in Port au Prince in the last month, cases in their clinics have increased from less than 300 admissions a week to more than 850, while "resources for adequately preventing the disease remain rudimentary and at the mercy of the uncertainties of life in the country." Resources remain "rudimentary" in part because many NGOs withdrew from the cholera response shortly before the rainy season. [See this excellent August report from the Center for Economic Policy Research explaining why Haiti's cholera epidemic is the worst in the world despite the outrageous number of NGOs working here.]

Haitian and international human rights groups are calling on the United Nations to acknowledge that the epidemic was brought to Haiti by peacekeeping troops, a fact that has been corroborated by multiple experts and researchers, and asking that the UN pay restitution to Haiti. As one Haitian social activist put it, "The irony is not lost on us that a Chapter VII peacekeeping mission [which are often deployed in response to crimes against humanity], is refusing to acknowledge their complicity in the deaths of so many people. Cholera is a crime against humanity in Haiti."

In protest, some of the organizations that we collaborate with marched yesterday from Fort National to the National Cemetery. We met up with them at the cemetery, arriving just in time to join the protestors as they rushed into the graveyard with exuberant ra ra instruments, a spray-painted goat [a popular nickname for UN soldiers here is "volè kabrit," or goat thieves, after a soldier stole a goat a couple years back], and a miniature wooden casket to symbolize the peacekeeping mission.

The casket is painted with the words, "Down with MINUSTAH: goat thieves, fags." (Even among activists, homophobia is so strong in Haiti that is more of an insult to call soldiers "fags" than it is to call them rapists. This, of course, is in reference to the incident in Port Salut in September.)

After speeches, someone threw spray paint cans into the casket, poured kerosene in and lit it on fire. Amid much cheering, the casket exploded. And as the crowd disbursed I heard someone yell, "MINUSTAH is finished!"

On the contrary, the mission's mandate has just been extended for another year. It doesn't seem like the UN will be taking responsibility for Haiti's cholera epidemic anytime soon. [In fact, last week when Ben was in Mirebalais taking pictures outside of the UN base that was the point of origin, he was detained and, as he puts it, "diplomatically threatened" not to publish the pictures in any stories related to cholera].

Fun Times with EDH (Electricite d'Haiti)

• We haven't had electricity at home for four days. This morning I finally got around to wiring a generator straight to our water pump so we could have running water again. An hour later there was a guy climbing the power pole in front of our house to hook up a line. I told him we didn't have any power so he used his pliers to shake our power line, and our lights came on immediately.
• A week ago a woman was electrocuted a few houses down from ours in a yard where they do a lot of welding.
• If you plug in any Mac Book Pro at our house and touch it while barefoot you get shocked. I have to put my feet on a wooden table or lie on the couch if I want to use my computer without shoes on.
• Apparently only 200,000 people pay for electricity in Haiti. Meanwhile, power lines are a tangled mess of cut and spliced wires threading to people's homes.
• We are not part of the 200,000. Though we are officially connected to EDH (and get regular visits from the meter men), we've lived in this house for two years without paying a power bill. There was an outstanding bill of three years when we moved in to this house that the landlord needs to pay before we can pay for the rest (which we do intend to do). EDH is not organized enough to know whether or not we are paying.

Gifted

I'm starting to ask myself more and more why it's "better to give than to receive." In North American culture, giving is more comfortable. There's an awful lot of power inherent in being a giver. Receiving, on the other hand, can be humbling, sometimes even shaming.

And, well, aren't most foreigners, even those of us that want to believe otherwise, in Haiti out of some [often misguided] sense of altruism? Whether of money, time, resources, expertise, even solidarity... we're here to be givers and, without meaning to, we reinforce the power dynamics that have been created by our very presence here as givers.

Paradoxically, one of the things Haiti is teaching me over and over again is how to receive. Like with these beautiful tart seriz (barbados cherries) from the garden of an extremely resource-poor friend, seriz he went expressly to Léogâne to pick so that he could gift them to us... I swallowed my pride (and the feeling that I should be giving something to him instead) and used them to make delicious cherry juice.