Haiti: Week One
First week in Haiti has passed. How did it go? I suppose as well as it could have. I don’t really know where to start.
It’s 18h30 and I’m sitting on the back patio at our house in Petionville. We live in massive villas up on the hill over Port-au-Prince. It seems bizarre that we live in these mansions. It’s the grandest house I’ve ever lived in. But they’re the only houses remaining after the quake, partially because only the wealthy built houses with any strength, and partially because Petionville stands on the bedrock and had less damage from the quake.
It’s never quiet in Haiti. As I write, there’s the rumble of the generator, the buzz of the cicadas, the noise of the TV of the people next door, the tapping keys on the computers of my housemates sitting around me, the clinking of dishes in the kitchen. On the streets, in the day, it’s far more of a cacophony. People talking loudly, honking horns (streets are only one way, so when you turn a blind corner, or pass, you honk against traffic), the rumble of endless rows of dirty white Land Rovers enclosing foreign aid workers and Haiti’s wealthy.
The food lines, long, long lines of women belly to back, holding hands so as to not fall over in the crush, are noisy too, but in a different way. The crowd whines as they shuffle toward an unseen destination, prodded by Brazilian peacekeepers in blue helmets toward what we all assume to be World Food Programme bags of white American rice.
Now is the best part of the day: the time after work, at home. I get up at 6h15, dress (which shirt out of four to pick today?) and eat breakfast of cooked rice with milk, a banana, and coffee. Must remember to always take my anti-malarial and multivitamin. Leave for the office in the Land Rover, with five other housemates, at 7 am. We pile in and greet Telemac with a rousing chorus of “salut, Telemac.” We belt in and lock the doors and clip on our office badges that list our blood type. The guard opens the gate and we roll out onto the long, sloping hills of Petionville. The roads are insane here. Huge potholes, ragged cracks from the earthquake, mountains of debris and trash. Our drivers somehow navigate through all this.
(Today I stupidly said the BBC could film somebody traveling in a vehicle and then I realized it would be far too bumpy to film anything at all!)
We go through the streets for about 10 minutes until we arrive at the bamboo shop in front of our compound. It doesn’t operate anymore but I imagine it was beautiful with stocks of bamboo outside. In the streets people are up and about and the bright Haitian sun shines beautifully. It’s not too strong yet, although my National Media Officer Peleg tells me it will be terrible in the summer. Women carry all manner of items on their heads. Men walk around with one earbud in an ear, talking away on their cell phones. Some people put together nice outfits and do their hair and others don’t care at all. My favorite part is when we pass the flower stalls that sell armloads of tall calla lilies and exotic birds of paradise and simple gerber daisies. In the rubble of this country there are the most beautiful flowers.
We pull up to the compound gate and pile out of the vehicle. An enterprising man has set up a shoe shining stand in front of our office where national staff pay him to polish their shoes. Many Haitian men at our office come to work in full dress pants and black leather dress shoes with points, like the Italians in Geneva.
We pile into the office, filing past the guards with a chorus of “Bonjou.” (Bonjour = bonjou and Bonsoir = bonsoi, more or less, in Creole.) We truck off to our separate department rooms. I plop down my sack and computer bag and plug in. I have to start up Lotus Notes for about 20 minutes before I can get my mail. The program is terrible and the Internet connectivity tempestuous (and I’m being kind). My Blackberry, however, works perfectly. That blinking red light indicating a new message rules my universe these days.
We work in crowded offices with a jumble of chairs and desks and cords and fans that sort of work and lights that mostly work (except when the massive generator goes out, which is several times per day). There’s one good toilet and washing my hands each time I use the bathroom is the most refreshing part of my day. There’s actual liquid soap in there and running water and the toilet flushes, which is the best bathroom of anywhere. My room here at the house has finally got running water (when the house staff decide to turn on the pump), but the toilet is still broken.
So I do email (mostly from my Blackberry because Lotus only manages to retrieve mail about three times per day), have meetings, and stroll around the compound on my Blackberry for the next 11 hours. It’s a well-known sight around the compound: advocacy and media staff walking in circles in the yard, talking into their Blackberries, saying over and over “I’m sorry, can you repeat that? The line is bad.” Seriously, people back home make their sentences too long!
Sometimes I go out in the field to sites where we operate: to preview a site for a journalist visit, or to take pictures for communications with our supporters. Driving anywhere in Haiti takes a long time. The roads are poor and traffic in Port-au-Prince is intense. Last week, on the curving mountain road to Jacmel in the south, we nearly ran off the mountain in a head-on standoff with a large Mack truck. The driver turned to me and said “t’as peur, Julie?” I stared at him blankly because I’d hardly noticed the near collision. I was too busy practicing my yogic breathing to stave off another round of throwing up on the twisting roads. (The driver also gave me a lime to smell, which helped. I suppose it’s the Haitian version of smelling salts!)
The worst thing I’ve done my whole time here is go to log base: the UN base at the foot of the hill that is Port-au-Prince. (This far and away worse than throwing up six times due to food poisoning.) Log base is swarming with foreign aid workers and diplomatic staff and soldiers, UN and American. And it’s about 100 degrees F there, at the least. It’s blinding white and a landscape of gravel and UN and US army tents and Land Cruisers and dust clouds from helicopters. Up on the hill in Petionville, you feel like you’re in the tropics. At log base, you feel like you’re in Iraq (or, what I imagine Iraq might be…). Within 30 minutes of arriving there last week, I walked past Bill Clinton and Sean Penn. Later, in a cluster meeting about camp management, I accidentally hit Sean Penn with my shoulder bag. He’s handsome, but not as good looking as the camp management cluster coordinator from the IOM, a guy called Giovanni.
The best parts so far about this life are:
- My colleague Peleg, who hasn’t even finished university. When the quake struck, he was doing his final internship. He’s hardworking and naïve and so willing to work hard to rebuild his country. This guy is the future of Haiti.
- The fresh grilled red fish I ate with Peleg and our driver when we visited Jacmel. It was sauced with spicy little red peppers and tangy, sweet onions and served with piping hot fried plaintain. The skin was crackly and the insides sweet.
- Our backyard pool and the beautiful flowers that grow abundantly around it.
- The refreshing feel of washing my hands when I use the loo (but I already said that, right?).
