It was 7am on Saturday morning and I was lined up outside a bank in downtown Leogane. The bank didn't open until 8.30 but I was only tenth in line. Most banks had fallen over in the earthquake so this one was very popular, especially on Saturdays. I had to get an advance on my credit card, because the only cash machine I knew of in Haiti was thirty kilometres away in Port au Prince.
It was already about 30 degrees and the line was steadily growing. I was the only white guy in the que, and an old man started talking to me in English about the orphanage he ran. Could HODR help refurbish it for him? He needed some running water and a coat of paint. He had fifty orphans to look after and it was hard to keep them clean without a water pump.
He was also a self appointed que disciplinarian. People kept showing up and trying to cut the line, and he would take them to task. He was only a little guy and didn't have much affect. Incidentally Haitian line cheats all look the same-their shoulders hunch a little and their faces set, staring at the ground, a humourless smile on their face-the look of a guilty Haitian who knows he (always a male) is being naughty but has decided it's worth it.
I got chatting to orphanage guy. He said that there was a problem in Leogane at the moment because there was no police force. That must mean there is a lot of crime in the camps then?
Actually no.
"You don't want to get arrested for anything around here my son. If you go to the police station they will let you back into the street straight away. The gaol got smashed in the quake."
"So what's the problem with getting arrested then?"
"Well it's simple. If the police can't punish you for doing a crime then we got to do it ourselves. If you get arrested then you did a crime, see? Then when you get let out the people will make sure you don't commit any more crimes again."
"So things don't get stolen around here?"
"No my son. A man stole a moto from a house one day a few weeks ago. When the police let him out, that night, he disappeared. They found him, dead, chopped to bits, burned, and dumped in a river! So nobody steals moto's in Leogane any more."
Good. I'd parked Matt Engeles' moto round the corner. He was a long termer on a break-he'd bought it for US$800 but was overseas on a holiday and said I could use it.
A couple of times I had to move my shoulder in front of guys who thought they could move in on me. There was nothing I could do about people who jumped in right at the front. My new friend the orphanage director tried his best though. He walked up and down the line yelling at people, jostling, and asking for order. He was like a cattle dog nipping and barking at the herd but having no real effect. He lamented to me that one of the problems here was that people didn't respect rules, this wouldn't happen in New York City. How could his country improve if nobody obeyed simple rules!
As the clock ticked down to 8.30 the line had grown to at least eighty people. There was more open pushing and shoving now, and two huge Haitian men had sauntered up to the front and were standing there, grinning with the look of the guilty and not moving. One guy in particular was a giant. I flipped him the bird and mouthed that he could get f%cked. He threw his head back and laughed as if it was the funniest thing in the world.
When 8.30 ticked over and the door to the bank opened the line disintegrated and everybody bolted for the entrance. It was like the starters gun had gone off at the City 2 Surf, everyone was trying to funnel into a single doorway, and it was violent. The big guy I had abused earlier turned out to be a security gaurd patting people down as they went in. His mate with a shotgun braced himself in the door, using his gun as a staff to hold people back.
People began tearing at my shoulders, dropping low and pushing through, pulling me back and thrusting, jostling themselves forward. There was no way I was getting into that bank unless I started shoving my way through the crowd. It was a rugby scrum, but with old men and frail women in the mix. A tall skinny guy in a white shirt pushed in front of me and I grabbed his shirt and dragged him backwards.
"You stretch it, you stretch it!" he cried
"Beg your pardon old chap, but one feels you jumped the fucking que!" I shouted, gesturing behind me with my thumb. I was getting angry.
Two of his friends turned on me, barricading my path and allowing him to push away through the crowd. At no point did they make eye contact.
I let it slide. I felt very conspicuous as the only blanc and didn't want to draw too much attention. It was every man for himself. This wasn't like any bank line I'd been in before. I was forced to drag old women and skinny men out of the way. To force your way through the crowd you had to move your shoulders in front of someone then lever them backwards while you moved into the gap. The women fought ferociously but got more elbows in the face than forward motion. They were just too small. Anybody in front of me got shoved aside until I was near the door way. I reached over head of the old lady in front of me and grabbed the frame of the cage door with my right hand-now nobody could move in from that side because I locked my arm in place. Then I reached over and did the same thing with my left hand, so I had a little clear space in front of me. The giant was panting with the effort of holding people back and patting them down as they came through the door. Once he had checked me he shoved me through...I was in.
The guy in the white shirt was standing in front of me. I prepared for a confrontation. "My brother! I am sorry, this is the way it is here, I meant you no harm!" He cried with a giant smile on his face. What the fuck!?
I had been taking things the wrong way. There were no fights or swinging fists, the shoving and mauling was just how people got into banks around here. When white-shirts friends had not looked at me even while they were barring my way, it was like they were acting against something in nature rather than a person. They kept it impersonal, which meant there was no violence.
I walked into the main reception area, sweating like a pig and breathing heavily. Feeling quite pleased with myself, just for getting inside. There were about thirty Haitians lined up waiting to be served. I'd only lost twenty places in line-not bad for my first time! They all turned to stare at me and I felt wary. What was going to happen next? As one they all broke out huge smiles and started clapping! I couldn't believe it! They were genuinely happy that I'd stuck it out the same as they had to get into their bank. It was incredible and bemused as I was, it is easily the most memorable banking experience I've ever had.
I left the bank with a wallet full of cash and rode back to base. Mimi was waiting for me there. A few days earlier I had announced that I was going away for the weekend, leaving Friday morning, taking Matts bike and going to Jacmel. Who wanted to come?
Mimi did, and she waiting for me when I rode back to base to pick up my backpack. We strapped our stuff to the luggage rack and took off. The sun was belting down out of a bright blue sky, not a cloud in sight. It was steaming hot and we rode in nothing but shoes, shorts and singlets. I had a hat on and sunnies, and it felt fantastic to ride out of Leogane and into the countryside knowing that we didn't have to work for three days, three days to kick back and reset our heads. It was freedom.
We stopped at the first service station and bought a few beers. Mimi held the drinks while I rode, and would pass the bottles of Prestige forward when I was thirsty, which was quite often.
Jacmel is on the South side of the Haiti, and to get there you need to traverse a little mountain range in the centre of the island. The road going over the top is well paved and smooth and the views are fantastic. From the side of mountains we had views of tropical rainforest and lush green pasture through the omnipresent haze, from smoke, sea spray and evaporation.
The trip across the top was a hairy adventure, and I'll leave that story for another entry.
SATURDAY, JULY 24, 2010 Auto tune pop music is sickening
Desperate Men. Sometimes things in your mind coalesce into clarity at really odd times. You can be trying to sleep in yet another hostel room, a memory will pop into your head, and suddenly what was really happening at that exact moment becomes crystal clear. The context, the colours and sounds, the diluting details wash away and a realisation of what was really happening hits you like a shot of rum on a hot day. Or maybe my brain is just ascribing meaning to something where meaning doesn’t exist. We’ll see.
There was a Haitian guy, I don’t remember his name, who used to hang out at Joe’s next to our base. He wasn’t one of the volunteers. He was friends with some of them and he tried to sell me pages of English words translated into Creole a few times, because I expressed an interest in learning some Creole when I first got to Haiti. The amount of time and effort to write a page of translations…it must have been an arduous task for a man who could barely write at all, let alone in English. I was tempted but laziness and a general tightness with cash prevented me from going through with it. But mainly, when I checked I discovered many of the translations were somewhat…flexible.
I should describe Joes since it was one of two main venues for relaxing we had in Leogane. There were a few smaller ones like Guttermans (situated in a gutter, later renamed Little Venice, I guess because of the picturesque canal running past it). We actually demolished and removed Gutterman’s house for him. There was also Toiletman, next to a toilet,, and more recently there was Left Bar, reached by turning left when you walked out of the base. It raised the bar for roadside bars (sorry) in Leogane, because he installed a tarp to sit under. He also initiated a price war, dropping his beers to 30 Ghoudes during the world cup soccer. Well, Joes is a basic place. It’s more or less an open square space, with the grey rendered walls of the HODR compound on one side, an L shaped veranda, with the fourth side open. There are square tables with plastic tablecloths and metal fold out chairs. At the corner of the L shape is a bar where can buy all sorts of drinks-Prestige beer, Barbancourt rum…and that’s it actually. Barbancourt rum sends you sideways. It sent me sideways literally. I could never walk straight on the stuff. Not ideal considering I lived on a rooftop with no fence. It‘s great stuff, brings out the obnoxious in you!
The veranda’s are lit with bright orange mood lights and there are murals painted on the wall. One thing Haitians do well is loud fucking speakers. The speakers in the bar are 5 foot tall and weigh about 90 kilo’s each and there are 6 of them. Huge woofers topped by giant horns. It’s not overkill, it’s overserialkill. These things are brutal. You don’t go to Joes to have a conversation because it is impossible, reggaeton or autotuned pop/rap music overwhelms everything.
As an aside, I can’t stand autotuned pop/rap/hip-hop music. If there is an aural equivalent to explosive mud guts, this is it. If auto-tuned music was a hamburger from McDonalds, the beef patty would have a pus pimple in it and there would a tangle of grey (or red!) pubes stuck to the pickle. Worse, they would have forgotten the cheese-I fucking hate it when that happens! I would definitely take that burger back, and as every respectable bulimic can tell you, at least you have the option of throwing up garbage food but you can’t unhear terrible music, ever.
It’s enough to make your ears bleed. Maybe it was the speakers and not the rum which sent everyone staggering all over the place. Let’s run with that. I’m sure there must be a law which restricts Haiti to only having 20 different songs in the entire country-although if it was a law it would be broken, so maybe it’s just a cultural thing-let’s only play twenty different songs this year! They would play reggae and rap all night every night, except for Wednesdays which was reggae night, and then they’d only play reggae. And every time they would finish on ‘No Woman No Cry’, the unofficial Haitian national anthem.
Thursdays was rap and hip hop night when the place filled up with gangsta’s and I felt daggy in my short footy shorts and y-fronts. Nobody saw the y-fronts of course but everyone can see a gangsta’s undies because his pants do up under his ass cheeks. Y-fronts wouldn’t cut it, especially the ones I wore because I bought them at Wal-Mart where the sizes are actually smaller than what they are in Australia, so they were a little snug shall we say. In fact they still are a little snug-I’m wearing a pair right now-it‘s more a squashed lunch than a cut lunch down there. Anyway that was all the music variations, except for Tuesdays now that I think about it, which is salsa night, when they play salsa tunes, and probably some reggae for good measure. Either way the repertoire of songs is very select. They definitely know what they like!
That all said I really enjoyed drinking at Joe’s, (probably in spite of the entertainment) and I really like Joe, they handsome chap who owns the bar. He is a top guy-very amiable and while I was suspended he let me sit on his veranda and gave me beers to drink in the sun for free, while I played the guitar and everybody else worked. He is Haitian and drove taxi’s in NYC for 25 years. He was in fact an award winning taxi driver, according to himself, which I find impressive in the extreme. He tapped into the fact the food at HODR base doesn’t quite qualify as gourmet and started making pizzas and selling them to all the hungry volunteers. Those pizzas were delicious, and made him a fortune. They were made in a bakery between the toolshed and the kitchen of the HODR base. I have great memories of that bar because of its unusual quirks and I miss it, and I most certainly miss the people I drank with there.
This Haitian guy was there every night. He was about six foot and athletic skinny, and had a brown fleck in the white of his left eye, like a blood speck that never filtered out. The whites were really more of a sallow yellow, and he spoke English to a reasonable degree. He would always ask me about the girls on base, especially brown Sarah, where is she what is she doing, so to get him to drop it I started telling him Sarah was my wife. The next day he started asking about someone else and I told him she was my wife too…and he nodded as if to say “I know something strange is going on here but I don’t know exactly what…”
Soon I was up to seven or eight wives. Since even the very concept of having seven wives was filling me with panic (and he was starting to regard every thing I said with suspicion) I told him I didn’t have a wife at all. He shook his in a disappointed, angry way. I had told him an untruth and more importantly diverted him from his infatuation with Sarah, who all the Haitian guys held in very high regard. Now he’d been daydreaming needlessly and unfaithfully about other girls for a couple of weeks.
These young men would hang around in the yard outside the bar, sitting on the fence watching the volunteers drink and be social inside. At first I found it a bit creepy, all these guys staring intently at us while we relaxed. Then it was strange and then I just ignored it all together. Some of them would venture inside to dance but the reason they sat and watched is because they couldn’t afford the 40 Goudes Joe charged for a beer. That’s about US80c. Over time, more Haitians came into the bar and partied with the volunteers. I think this was due to the local volunteer program which helped us integrate more with the Haitians.
When they did come inside to dance the result was spectacular. If it was rap or reggae they would form circles and have dance off’s. These Haitian guys can really break it down (I believe that‘s the term). The girls amongst the international volunteers also loved to dance so often the Haitian guys would round up all the women (come to think of it…it was usually the other way around!) and the dance floor would crank. There were two eleven year old Haitian boys. They could both dance as well as anyone I’ve ever seen-little Michael Jackson’s in training-and had no qualms about grabbing the young female volunteers and twisting, grinding, pelvic thrusting and doing various other lustful things that I almost certainly do not approve of...The girls, they absolutely loved it of course. I shudder to think what the reaction would be if I was dirty dancing with a ten year old girl, but anyway, they were talented little guru’s. They would have the most intent looks in their eyes as they sweat it up with the excited blancs, who’s shirts would cling to their bodies and hair would drip with perspiration, their skin shining in the lamplight. It’s easy to remember the grins on everybody’s face as they swirled in the humid night air.
It was great to watch, but never to participate in-I have a profound ego and as such there is no way I am engaging in any activity where a ten year old can completely disgrace me. Unless it‘s Xbox-then I don’t care. Plus I don’t like dancing of course.
The reason I described blood-fleck guy before is because I remembered his eyes when he spoke to me. Not the off-white colour of his eyeballs, but the earnestness in his face whenever he came to speak to me. He wanted to teach me Creole. He wanted to find out if I was staying long in Haiti, and if I liked his country. He wanted to know about the girls at HODR-did they know who he was? What he really, achingly wanted was for me, and the rest of the volunteers (especially the female ones I suppose), to see him as having some intrinsic value-to demonstrate that who he was and what his country has given him, made him into, was impressive or interesting to the international volunteers.
I was thinking of all of this the other day while lying in bed, over a month after I’ve left it all behind. I realised that maybe these young men were staring at us because they so keenly want, no, need the opportunity to be like us. Not to be like a privileged kid from Sydney’s leafy North Shore (like me) but to live in a society that allows them to at least contemplate their potential, or failing even that modest goal, to live in a country that lets them improve their lives, if that is what they want to do. They are desperate to be educated, to understand the concepts that we take for granted, to live the sophisticated existence that we enjoy in the West. We lead these lives without ever even thinking about how far our societies have come, and the prospects we’re afforded in them. Why do we have these opportunities which they don’t have? We can blasé about things they could never contemplate attaining.
I doubt these young Haitian males would articulate things like that. It’s probably not something they dwell on, perhaps in part because it would be a futile and frustrating line of thought. I could be completely wrong as well, who knows. I wonder what the other volunteers think.
As I lay in bed that night, Joe’s bar wafted through my consciousness, the people, nui’s and blancs dancing, drinking together, the ear puncturing music. It swirled through my mind amidst memories of the heat, the flies and mosquitoes, the ice cold beer and potent rum, the concrete wall of the HODR base and the murals of Haitian coastal panoramas. I was reminiscing about these things and the coloured lights along the veranda and the pitch black streets beyond Joe’s, when the truth revealed itself, coalescing out of the memories in my reverie. Blood-fleck’s eyes, his body language, his words, his persistence-his desire.
It seems obvious now-he was a desperate man. He was clinging to the hope and desire of a better life. The sort of existence that the international volunteers gave him a glimpse of when we celebrated finishing a days work in Joe‘s bar. A moment of insight and it was crystal clear, even though I never bothered thinking about it while I was there.
I don’t think it’s all of them or even most of them. There could be a dozen reasons guys like him behaved the way they did. That isn’t the whole story either. Most of the time he probably just wanted to be friendly. But I know what I saw in this guys eyes and in his actions and I know what was underlying his curiosity, a force just beneath the surface driving his behaviour. On reflection there were others like him.
Some people will read this and disagree completely. I think those that would show a lack of empathy. After all it is just blind luck that we were born to privilege and my Haitian mates were born to poverty.
Myself and the other volunteers became close to the Haitians we worked with because the only things we had to judge each other on was our work ethic, integrity and generosity. But this guy, he didn’t work with us and he didn’t know that. So he wondered about us and how we judged his countrymen.
Or maybe it’s just a conceit I have, a privileged rich kid from the West, thinking these people want to have the opportunities we do. That’s possible. But I doubt it. Who wouldn’t want to have the options we do? Perhaps only bead selling hippies from Guatemala would suggest it’s not good to at least have the options we do in the developed world. That makes them the human equivalent of autotune pop songs, inedible, like that burger with no cheese on it. Either way we should count ourselves lucky. I’ve seen, the HODR people have seen what the have-nots have. Mostly, it’s just hope and determination. It will be a long road for Haitians but we’ve seen who the Haitians really are. They can get there in the end.
SATURDAY, JULY 3, 2010 Last night in Haiti
“My God will help you. You came to my country and helped me. I cannot help you, but I pray that my God will.”
Reginal was the oldest of the local volunteers and told me this on my last night in Haiti. He was crying when he told me that.
It’s tough for the Haitian guys. People like me fly in and work to fix up their city, which really was ruined in the earthquake. We work side by side with the Haitians and become their friends. After work we eat with them and drink with them at the dodgy bar next to base. We get to know their families, their problems, hopes and aspirations. We talk about their personal lives and find out that some of them pass up paying jobs to work with HODR, because they hope by working with Westerners they can learn something from us. We give the older ones grief about how fat they are and the younger ones grief about how desperate and horny they are. (They are outstandingly desperate and horny). We have nicknames for each other. Mine was Lapoynet. This translates to “only God sees me” or something poignant like that. It’s not as cool as it sounds; what it actually means is “wanker”. As I drove around in the back of a tap tap kids, adults, everyone would wave and call out to me “Lapoynet! Lapoynet!” It was a real honour to be hailed in that fashion. The name probably stuck because Haitian guys pretend they never have romantic moments with themselves-because they are so virile they all have multiple girlfriends. Yea right. They thought it was hilarious that I freely admitted to enjoying some special time on the odd occasion. By odd I mean every night, of course. Helps me get to sleep. Tony would ask me every day before work, “Tim, last night lapoynet? One time, three time lapoynet?” Thanks Tony. I started calling him Chichiflex Tony, which is a way of referring to sex in Guatemala.
After we’ve gotten close enough to write each other off with bad sexual nicknames the time comes to leave. Living in Haiti, working 6 days a week 7.30-6pm drains you, mind, body and spirit. I stayed for ten weeks. You live on a surge of adrenalin for the first month, and most people who stay for about that long have amazing memories of the place and plan to come back. They update their face book profiles with Haiti and HODR references and plan reunions. It’s a fantastic experience where you make wonderful new friends and revel in the work being done, which is difficult but very satisfying. Some of them do come back and are confused and disappointed because it isn’t the same as when they were first here.
If you stay for ten weeks, or longer, Haiti, the work, the living conditions, the difficulty of continuously making new friends, then seeing them leave, it grinds you down. Teaching people new skills, seeing them become good at their jobs, then seeing that effort disappear when they do is tiring. Long termers get a bit cynical and withdrawn and newcomers wonder why they are so unfriendly. The food is wholly inadequate and in my last two weeks I could barely stomach it. A typical meal is chicken cooked in an nuclear powered deep fryer, of which you are allowed one piece. The intensity of the frying allowed you to eat the bones often as not so maximum nutrition was gleaned. I guess the oil was full of energy to fuel our days. On a bad day we were served fish head soup. Fish heads are fucked, and so are the fish tails which are part of the recipe. Whenever that meal was served, it was entirely possible to pick up one end of the fish and pull it’s entire spinal chord out of the bowl. Plenty of brown rice with beans thrown in, and one piece of tomato. Often there was a vegetable mash (an appetising brown slush. It looked solid enough to walk on, but was surprisingly viscous. It certainly helped keep our bowels loose) with fresh onions thrown in. As luck would have it there was always chilli sauce to ensure it you could moderate the taste as required. The first month I believed the old maxim “there’s no seasoning like hard work” but now I know that in fact the real seasoning of last resort is chilli sauce. Always in the last week before guys leave (for some reason this applies to men, not women) they lose up to 10 pounds. I did, because I just couldn’t eat the food any more. I had a few other issues as well, including dynamite food poisoning and a busted rib which didn’t help. The thing to remember is that HODR is a volunteer organisation and that when you start to loose drive it really is time to go-no point poisoning the atmosphere.
I remember on my last night at the HODR base, I had made my goodbye speech, and was next door at Joes saying goodbye to the Haitians. Reginal would barely look at me. I could sense something was wrong so we went for a walk.
We walked down the pitch black streets of Leogane. The streets there are just dirt, the main ones cobblestones. If you’re in thongs you need to watch out for the puddles left over from the afternoon rain, which glint a little in the moonlight. The mud bogs are harder to spot since they’re not as reflective and you need to be switched on or you’ll get first muddy, then septic feet. The streets are lined with open sewerage/drainage canals and vacant buildings. There is no electricity. When I first arrived the roads were covered in smashed concrete and tents. People lived on the road out the front of their houses, while dump trucks rumbled past, literally inches away.
Now as I walked down the road I could feel the space that we had helped to create. The roads don’t have rubble or tents on them anymore and people don’t have to sleep next to heavy traffic. Street vendors line the roads in increasing numbers. Commerce is returning. People are rebuilding their homes. Cars can pass each other without having to back up because Leogane has its streets back. It has its streets back because the people who used to live on the road, have their houses back. The rubble has been picked up and carted away. I did that, and the other volunteers from HODR did that. We made it happen and Leogane is better for us being there. It’s a satisfying feeling.
As we walked down the broad streets it was clear Reginal had something to say. He is a Haitian man in his early thirties. He has short hair, slightly longer on the top than the sides. He is pitch black and is round in the middle but mostly from muscle, not fat. He has a gold brace holding one of his teeth in. We sat on a half collapsed wall on the side of the road, up the street from Gutterman’s Bar. Some local kids skipped past laughing, rolling bicycle wheels with sticks, and the only light came from the moon, which shone through fleeting clouds.
“What’s the matter mate?”
Reginal sighed. “I am sad. I am sad because I am losing a friend tonight Tim.” He lowered his head and stared at the ground. I could see his eyes glistening. I didn’t know what to say.
“Will you come back to Haiti one day?”
I don’t know the answer to this question. Haiti is a long way from Australia and I am broke. I would love to come back in a few years and see Leogane rebuilt, but would rather see my Haitian mates with good jobs and families living in a flourishing, incorrupt society. I tell him this. He grimaces. He knows I’m saying I will probably never be back.
“We see you Tim. We are sad that you leave because we see how hard you work and we see what you do for us. We know that you are a good man, and that you have a good heart. You come to my country and help me. I want to thank you but I can never thank you because I am poor.” He frowned. “My God will help you. You came to my country and helped my people. I cannot help you, but I pray that my God will. My God will help you Tim,” and he swung his eyes up to stare into mine. I could hear the truth of what he said in his voice. I knew he would pray to his God for me. I still didn’t know what to say, so I put my arm around his shoulders and we just sat there for a while in the moonlight.
His words meant a lot to me. The truth is that I have worked extremely hard in Haiti. I basically worked myself to a stop. Not necessarily only for the Haitians, especially at the start, but because if I actually get around to doing something I push it to the limit. At any rate, the actual reasons don’t matter. The volunteers saw me work and respected it. I’ve never been in an environment where it was so basic-if you worked hard you won respect, as simple as that. So for that, I need to thank the people I have met through HODR, the local and international volunteers.
It’s hard for the Haitians because when people like me come, work ourselves to a standstill, lose motivation and then leave, they are the ones left to deal with the loss of their friends. For me it was an amazing ten weeks and I'll always cherish the memories I now have and the people I met, but I left because I was exhausted. The Haitians have to keep going, for weeks, months and years and even when the rubble is cleared and their town rebuilt the struggle for Haitians is really only just beginning. I don’t feel guilt at all, in fact I’m happy with the contribution I’ve made. I just have a deep respect for the long term battle these people have, just living in their own country. Ten weeks is enough for me, for now.
On my last day I was sitting around at Masayes with a few people from HODR. Ton, Sinead, Becky, Chris and a couple of others. For once the music wasn’t too loud and even though I was sure the twelve fingered guy behind the counter had served me the wrong type of macaroni (again) it was a pleasant place to be.
Ton had been there a while. He is a tall crazy eyed Dutchman with a masters in science, who likes wearing orange outfits and proves that beer is a food group in its own right. He was always a bit crazy, I’ve seen him licking a girls feet while she slept, but on my last day I think he lost the plot a bit. Not because of me, just because it was that time. Or maybe it was just that he was on the end of a 40 hour bender.
“Sinead, you are very beautiful.”
“Shutup Ton, you’re an idiot.”
He looked out from under his shaggy, filthy fringe with questioning puppy dog eyes. “All I want is an orgasm. Is that too much to ask?”
I started giggling. I knew he was being rude but this was pretty funny. I wondered how it would pan out. Besides, Sinead was pretty plucky, being an Irish lass and all. She raised one eyebrow in exasperation. “Ton, stop it.”
“Isn’t there anybody here who will give me an orgasm?” He swung his eyes over the group. They landed on me. I shook my head, grinning.
“Is that too much to ask, just a little orgasm?” His eyes swung past Sinead again and stopped.
“You come under table and suck my dick. Yes suck my dick until I make orgasm. Please?” He looked around the table for reassurance he was on the right track. I gave him the thumbs up. He closed his eyes for a moment and breathed in, reflecting deeply on something.
“Oh no, I can’t get it up, how can I have an orgasm now? I hate my stupid penis…No wait, what am I saying? I love it!”
He pulled his knob out and started to apologise to it. It was pretty hairy down there, the bloke obviously didn’t have an extensive hygiene routine. Still, I didn’t need to see his old fella to know that.
I truly believe that a mans flaccid penis, surrounded by a thick tangle of pubic hair is one of the ugliest sights you can ever feast your eyes on. It’s one of natures most epic failures. It’s not grand, or delicate or impressive in any way, and it’s certainly not aesthetically pleasing, but it is why I had to change beds when I admitted myself to hospital with food poisoning on my last Saturday. The old chap lying next to me had his trousers pulled down to his knees and a yellow catheter inserted into his dangler. A little mushroom lying limply on a grassy knoll. With a plastic hose jammed in the top. Not what I wanted to see after vomiting all night, and besides, that catheter was disturbingly thick and it made me uncomfortable to look at it. I found a spare cot in the operating theatre and had a pleasant afternoon listening to reggae courtesy of the theatre nurses, who were sharpening surgical tools. That hospital was by far the most comfortable place to be in Haiti-because it was air-conditioned. When I was lying next to catheter man the generator broke and the air con stopped. Within the 15 minutes the temperature had risen to 47C in the hospital, because it’s just a giant plastic tent, acting like a greenhouse. I could actually see sweat emerge from the pores on my forearm. Luckily it was only out for an hour. When the air con came back on, I was lying on the floor of the drug storage room. I actually fist pumped the air it was such a relief.
I tried to salvage Ton from himself. “Ton, you’re out of your line, what’s on your mind?”
He looked up sharply and pouted. Then he reached cross the table and knocked over an empty beer bottle.
“What? What’s the matter?” He knocked another one over and stole a chip of Sinead’s plate and threw it at the street dog lurking around the table. I couldn’t stop giggling, he was being a very naughty boy. At least his little champion was back in his Dutch Orange soccer shorts.
He passed out later that evening on a sack of concrete in the base, spooning someone in a platonic way. He slept there every night. A few nights before he had passed out on the concrete in the middle of the courtyard at 7pm, starfish on the ground. Maybe he was a little crazy but at least he worked hard. Ton, I hope you got your orgasm, mate.
That night I was sitting with my mates at the bar and trying to think of things to say to them but nothing was coming. I knew what the matter was. I wasn’t excited to be going, and I wasn’t sad to be leaving these wonderful people behind. I wasn’t looking forward to Miami and I didn’t spend the evening reminiscing about my last ten weeks. The problem was simple.
I was just tired.
I remember Shooby who I met on a demolition site out in the country. He showed up to the site with a guy called Ga and spoke good English. Turned out he had lived in Florida for 25 of his 27 years and been deported back to Haiti in 2008.
The two of them looked like they wanted to pitch in so I gave them some tools and let them go. They were good workers. There was another local guy there who didn’t speak any English at all. He was a bit older and was missing most of his front teeth. He picked up a sledgehammer and I pointed to a corner of the house that we needed blown out. He worked, in the 35C heat, without a break, for four hours. I couldn’t believe it. Haitians have a strange style of sledging, straight up and straight down instead of in a circle which is how I would do it, to make the most of momentum. He just hacked away at his corner until he’d reduced it to dust.
The next day Shooby, Ga and old mate showed up again. I didn’t really have enough tools for everyone and old mate was left standing around without much to do.
Ga is a pretty gangsta sort of guy, who happily trades practicality for fashion, if it means his boxers can reach halfway up his back and his pants do up under his ass cheeks. He spoke English to an extent. He pointed at old mate who was standing around eyeing of a sledgehammer and said:
“Nigger wants to work.”
“What?” You can’t say nigger. It’s politically incorrect and offensive to minority groups. I looked around guiltily for someone from the Sydney Uni arts faculty, or one of those bead selling hippies from Guatemala.
“Nigger wants to work, man.”
Sweet, I thought, I’ll let the African-Haitian work. I gave him my hammer and took a break. And work he did. I never got his name but he was one of the fittest men I’ve ever seen. He belted down half the roof on his own and saved us huge amounts of time on the job. Men like that helped restore, and then bolster my faith in the Haitian work ethic.
Shooby and Ga went on to become volunteers with HODR. One day Shooby pulled me aside at the bar and told me about his daughter. She needed to be baptised and he needed 1500 goudes to pay for the baptism. I was pretty cynical and thought it was a scam. At that point I was pretty sensitive about being a source of charity to poor Haitians because of guys like Dave Shakalaka and Jesse James, who are con artists and dickheads (don’t worry I told that to their faces) and apart from anything else I was running out of my own money. Anyway I gave him 500 goud towards the baptism. I justified it to myself by thinking I’d rather be a generous sucker than a cynical asshole, in case he turned out to be telling the truth, but really I just wished I’d told him to go away.
A few days later he pulled me aside again and gave me a hug. There were tears in his eyes and he told me that thanks to me (and another volunteer, a Texan guy called Aaron who forked out 1000 goud) his daughter had been baptised in the proper way. Later he showed me a photo of the ceremony.
It made me glad that I erred on the side of sucker. Shooby was one of the guys who cried when I left. He is intelligent and speaks good English. I think he will be one of the young Haitians to lead their town, and maybe their country, out of the mess they are in.
I helped lead a strike in my last week in Haiti which transformed the local volunteer program but will leave that for another time as this post is already weeks overdue.
FRIDAY, JULY 2, 2010 Getting over HODR blog
Well that was an interesting week or two. I’ve been in Haiti for nine weeks now and around week six I was sick to death of the place. 80-90% of the buildings have been squashed around here so there are no: bars, clubs, libraries, internet café’s, normal café’s, shops of any description. There are also no parks or public spaces because they are covered in makeshift tents which is where the Haitians live. There is nothing to do and nothing to do within 45 minutes of our base unless you get a moto or taptap.
Speaking of volunteers, which I wasn't, Sangita was a girl from the UK. She was badly blocked up, in fact she hadn't had a successful trip to the toilet for nine days. That is quite a backlog, and one nobody else could understand given the soupy consistency of the average turd at HODR base. I took her to the hospital one night because she was starting to feel ill and she explained her problem to the doctor. Doctors love to use any issue as a teaching experience and before long there were eight or nine medical types standing around discussing options to treat her. Pills, potions, a saline drip to moisten things up a bit. One of the them suggested a digital manipulation to dig it out. I giggled and waggled my middle finger at Sangita, who turned pale.
I felt these guys were missing the point.
"What she really needs is an enema." That stopped conversation for a moment, and one of the nurses eyes lit up-she was the enema specialist. Sangita shook her head in mild embarrassment, but really that was what she was hoping for.
I asked if I could get one as well, two for the price of one, but the offer wasn't on the table. Did she want me to hold her hand while they inserted the hose? No thanks Tim. So I left and Sangita got her enema, and later that night did her first turd for nine days. When she emerged from the bathroom later that night she got a round of applause. Awesome.
There are plenty of smashed buildings to demolish and clear. So for the first month when you’re on a high from being in such a different, interesting place you work till you drop everyday. The shitty food is delicious and you relish the freezing bucket showers you take before and after work. Then you become a team leader and you get a kick out of running groups of people to continue the job HODR is doing.
I found that running teams was really satisfying, for a while. I had to work out how to get and keep people motivated to work hard, and also enjoy themselves and make them feel like they were contributing. Most of the people who come down to Haiti can contribute well, but truthfully some don‘t add much value. Having said that I felt it was our job to at least make them feel useful by giving them some small task they could complete because they had made the effort to get down here and help out, an act by itself which is very meaningful.
There was always a huge variety of people to work with-old, young, fit, fat, smart, dumb, etc. I would say some people are motivated to work and that others aren’t but coming here in the first place is quite a filter, lazy people don’t usually make it to Haiti. To sum it up, I liked some people at HODR and disliked others but respected almost everybody there. However, if you run the team well most people work properly. It was always satisfying to turn a rubble pile into a liveable plot of land again as well.
I found it easier to run teams with lots of girls because rubbling is a fairly repetitive job. That might seem like a strange connection but I think its because girls concentrate better than guys in general. So if you give them a repetitive job (like pushing a wheelbarrow) they will actually do it, and not come up with a helpful suggestion, or a better, shorter, different, faster, more efficient way to get the task done.
Girls understand that while running a site can be a collaborative decision making process, in fact it usually isn’t. They also won’t stop what they are supposed to be doing and pick up a sledgehammer and pulverise the nearest object for no reason.
Guys like sledgehammers. I get it. You break shit with them, work up a sweat, then walk away and let someone do the boring job of cleaning up the mess.
Some guys liked wheelbarrows too. They could run all day with them. Not me. I found it boring, and thought my talents were better deployed destroying things rather than shifting them around.
I’ve lead a couple of good teams and had a great relationships with the people in them. Then they leave and you teach another group the same things, and get them operating really well…then they leave…and it happens a few times you get tired of going through the same processes with new people, because you know where it will end.
So by week six I had decided to start something different. I was still out in the field a lot but was spending more time in the office. By office I mean concrete enclosed space with four industrial sized fans circulating air. There is a tenuous internet connection and dress code consists of thongs, footy shorts and…that’s it. That’s what I wear anyway-despite the practical nature of this attire you are still in danger of sliding off the metal chairs from the sweat lubricating the seat.
Anyway some Harvard Business School students came to Haiti I guess so they could put the HODR project in the Life Experience section of their C.V. Some of them were quite useful. For example they had skillsets in organising committees/discussion groups to disseminate methodologies to ascertain measurable, deliverable and tangible outcomes in relation to proactive group-based post act of God/cataclysmic natural event debris relocation, or rubble removal as the rest of us call it. One of them wanted to get locals in touch with a microfinance organisation called Finca to dish out loans to the local small business owners. I followed up on this and had a grand plan to set up HODR as a central part of the economic recovery of the region, and wanted to collect names of people who would be suitable for these loans and get them in touch with the finance providers.
So I organised a seminar for the Finca rep to speak to our volunteers. This guys job in essence was to sell micro loans, so I should have known better than to invite him to speak, having been a shady financial products salesmen once myself. Anyway I heard “Finca” mentioned perhaps 20 times in the first 5 minutes, and then the guy really got animated.
He was wearing a typical friendly African dictator/evengelical preacher button up long sleeve shirt-brightly coloured with gold stitching and slogans on parts of the fabric. He had large gilted rings and a bulky gold watch hanging loosely on his wrist. He had small square glasses perched on the end of nose, meaning his head tilted back and he stared down his nose when addressing you. His shabby trousers were held up by a worn belt and gleaming black shoes poked out the bottom. He took a deep breath, smiled, and spread his arms wide, pausing…“In Leogane you have some serious problems my friends! It is Finca who is the answer to your economic problems! Finca will help you feed your child and satisfy your women! Finca wants nothing from you but your partnership in this great vision of Finca’s!”
Then he started levitating and with a halo around his head and visions of God crackling around him he begun to berate our guys, loudly, for their ignorance, scepticism, rude questions and general intransigence in the face of the overwhelming logic and unparalleled opportunity he was offering them.
It seemed that he just wanted to five Finca discount these guys' money and I knew it was a failure when the guys started sniggering and left to help bring out tools for the afternoon session (something I’ve never seen them help with before) but I decided to call it a learning experience.
I pushed it, writing up a plan to get anybody with money, be they public, private or NGO, to channel their funds through us-we have experience on the ground with Haitians and could them direct funds efficiently. I sent it to management where it was met strongly and decisively with apathy and disinterest.
That was pretty frustrating as I thought that apart form the economic effect on Leogane, it could have helped HODR raise funds from donors by giving us a long term, sustainable program we could point at when in fundraising mode.
So at the end of week seven I had had enough. Most of the people I initially made friends with had gone and been replaced by others who I wasn‘t interested in, or lacked the energy to get to know. In my mind the general feeling around HODR had changed as well. It used to be a place where everybody worked flat out but in an uplifting way, where small things were done for you for no thanks and you did small things for others even when you knew they would never know it was you. Inspirational people had met me when I first started, and now were gone.
In my mind it seemed like small acts of selfishness and stupidity are more the norm and the workforce has changed composition, so that instead of strong proactive people it feels more like a babysitting adventure holiday. I had obviously burnt out. I just had no interest in Haitians, for a variety of reasons. It is very difficult to help people when many of them only see the opportunities you present them as zero sum games. I knew there was every excuse in the world for these people, poverty, lack of education, disasters, exploitation. After a while I got to the point where I stopped caring about the sad stories and have started wishing people here could learn some accountability, and learn to help themselves.
I knew it was me, not the place because whilst lying in my tent one night I heard two newbies chatting about how positive the atmosphere was at HODR and how proactive people were-they sounded the same as I had two months earlier.
I was essentially, bored and jaded and sick of living in everyone else’s pocket. Many of the Haitian guys who work with us are excellent in ways I’ve outlined previously. Conversely, many of them are useless to the point of frustration and as a team leader I’d lost patience. For example, it would be at least 35C here everyday, with 80% humidity or higher. One of our local guys, called Job, showed up day after day wearing a beanie, long pants and a baggy collared shirt. I told him the beanie at least was a stupid idea but he continued to wear it as a fashion statement.
So one day when he sat down at work overheating I threw his beanie away and told him it was a shit idea, through a translator. I explained that because he wears inappropriate clothes and has to sit down the rest of us have to do his work for him and that tomorrow he needs to grow up, just a little and wear proper clothes to work.
I forgot these guys never had role models apart from retarded American rappers. It wasn't their fault, but they needed to learn.
The point is, stupid little things were getting to me and I’d lost some perspective on what was going on. I needed to do something different.
As a result I decided to go to Jacmel. Jacmel is on the southern side of the island of Hispaniola and is a beautiful old colonial town surrounded by tropical beaches.
The HODR volunteer program has about 110 international volunteers on the base at any one time. They are mostly Americans with some poms, too many Canadians and a few token Aussies for some balance and perspective.
In addition there are about 30 Haitian guys who show up and work with us every day. Mostly they are top guys as I’ve outlined before. Some of them are dickheads.
I got one guy removed from the program because he was a shifty swindler. He was slimy, lazy, and ingratiated himself with people and then asked them for money or things, like phones, shoes, whatever. The reality is that, politically incorrect as it may sound, most people, when they first arrive, have a rich white person/poor black person complex and feel they owe these guys something and oblige the con artists. They have a great racket going because there is such a turnover of volunteers.
I went through the process with Dave Shakalaka myself when I got suspended. He kept insisting on taking my money so he could pay for things, and I never seemed to get any change. Everything was always 20-30% more expensive around Dave but he never did anything such that you could finger him for it. This went on for a while as I had to rely on his help while I had no accommodation but I drew the line after this conversation:
“Hey man what you do today?” Dave leaned against the wall with his hands behind his back, grinning slimily. He looked slightly sheepish, like he knew he was about to ask something that would probably get a bad reaction.
“Don’t know, probably just hang around at Joe’s.”
“I need some money man.”
What the fuck? I was already 99% sure he’d been ripping me off but this was a new approach.
“Can I have 500 Goud?”
“What for?”
“I need to buy some new shoes man, look at these ones!” He gesture to his sandals which looked fine to me. They were the third set of footwear I’d seen him in…that day.
“Dave, I’m not buying you new shoes. I told you yesterday I don’t have much money.”
Dave shrugged and raised his eyebrows. He wanted to appear reasonable. I wondered what was coming next. “Yea man, but we friends remember? Your money is my money.” Wow! If nothing else I had to respect the guys front.
“What? That‘s ridiculous. My money is my money and I’m not buying you new shoes.”
Anyway after that I told him to his face he was dishonest and a thief, and pushed to get him kicked off the program. Other people came forward and said they’d had similar experiences and that was it for Dave. His other problem was that he didn’t work very hard on site. He would pick up a sledgehammer and blow a block to smithereens, shouting loudly and drawing attention to himself…if there were women present. Everything he did was demonstrative and calculated to draw the girls eyes. He would speak in Spanish because it sounds more emotive, even though nobody else on the team could speak Spanish. Except me. One day he was saying in his loudest most emotive Spanish: “We’re going to the beach to play with horses! We’re going to the beach to play with horses!” Sure Dave. When I explained to everyone what he was saying he looked at me a little embarrassed but mostly resentful. At any rate it worked, because a moronic, loud, stupid, fat girl from New York called Cassandra fell “in love” with Dave after being in Haiti for 10 days and was still sending money from the US months later when I left. When we kicked Dave of the program it deprived him of access to stupid rich people and naturally he was upset.
To the guys credit, he was a good con artist. He showed me a receipt for a money wire from the US, from Cassandra for a few hundred dollars. Good on him, and good on her, maybe they'll have have shifty, annoying babies together.
I learned a few things about con artists in Haiti. They rip you off but never leave direct evidence of having done so. Then when you confront them about it they act extremely hurt that you could think such a thing of them and try to convince you it was misunderstanding. They try to make you feel bad that you think ill of them, so that you back down and they can ingratiate them selves again. A popular trick in Haiti, for the guys who I had stern conversations with, was to tell me that only God judges them and if they are what I say they are then God will pass judgment to that effect at the gates of Heaven. Stern stuff.
Jesse James was a guy who lingered around the camp flexing his pecs at girls. He also kept asking for things, and newly arrived volunteers always opened their purse for him. He got told to go away as well, so there was lingering resentment about HODR from a couple of groups. I made a few enemies in Haiti to be honest, a quiet source of pride for me.
One day a letter was found on one of the bobcats. It outlined that the translator we used-Jacob-should not be getting paid, and that we should fire him. He needed to be replaced with a local from Leogane (Jacob was from a town called Gonaive).
If this didn’t happen bad things were going to happen to Jacob and his family.
Three days later management decided to roll back the local volunteer program. It was a Thursday afternoon and I had been down the road sinking a few beers and was feeling quite pleased with myself. At the HODR base there weren’t many options for release, but I found a good one. In fact, it involved alcohol, can you believe it. I didn’t drink very often but when I did everyone found out very quickly what was on my mind.
So when I got back to base that afternoon after a few settlers and saw my Haitian mates crying I wondered what was going on.. I stood up at the nightly meeting in front of 100 or so volunteers and in a calm and articulate manner voiced some objections to their decision.
That saga is another post in itself.
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 2, 2010 I'm a racist cat murderer!
I got called racist the other day by one of the Haitian guys on my site. In the morning we piled onto the ute, about 16 of us, with 4 barrows, 4 sledges and a few other tools, and pulled up next to the site which was adjacent to the UN compound here in Leogane, after a nervous tap tap ride. The drivers have been driving more recklessly lately, possibly because there are less tents and rubble on the road slowing them down. Either way with 16 people on the back we’ve been reaching some sphincter puckering lean angles and I had a word to Mackenson, our jacked mesh singlet wearing driver, to slow down please. I had another word to him when I discovered the railings on the back of his ute, that we all sit on, could be picked up and pulled of his car with one hand. They weren’t even screwed down! With the 13 or so international volunteers were three Haitian guys, as part of the local volunteer program.
When I first got here I was pretty dismissive of Haitian male work ethic, of which I could see no evidence. Crazy blanques would toil away in the sun, including young girls, helping this society rebuild, while young Haitian males would sit around drinking rum in the shade appraising our efforts. Since then increasing numbers of these guys have signed on to work with HODR for no payment other than food and generally they are excellent workers. Initially they thought we were being paid and resented the fact we were stealing their jobs. Since then word has slowly filtered through the community that we work for free (many people still believe we‘re on wages however) and these guys have earned the respect and friendship of most of the long-termers on the base. Some of them are pretty cool cats, sledge hammering all day in dress shoes, collared shirts and wraparound sunnies without raising a sweat. Us blanques get around in smelly singlets and grotty shorts because we sweat so much, so I guess no matter where you are, black guys are just cooler than white guys. We communicate through body language which gets tiring after a while and it leads to some interesting misunderstandings, but it hasn’t stopped me from bonding with some of them very strongly.
We got to the site, where a large house had pancaked through it’s supports. It was next to the Sri Lankan UN troop compound and you could hear ‘revielle’ being tooted at various times during the day. Out the front of the house was a small grass field and a cow grazed lazily, attached to a rope staked into the ground. It wasn’t concerned by our presence. As an aside, Haiti would be a great place for all the animal rights activists to live, because I am yet to see a cooped up chicken, goat, dog, cat, cow or pig. They are free to roam around and eat garbage on the side of the road as they please, thus serving two purposes-rubbish removal and a source of free range organic food. Goats, which are all small and petite with little furry horns, clop around on dainty little trotters, trying to ignore the pigs who are sprawled in the mud they nimbly avoid. To be fair to the pigs, they don’t just slop around aimlessly in a mud bog. First they shit all over it, and then roll in it. At least they aren’t using Tupperware. Any animal that can so casually fall asleep in a pile of it’s own effluent inspires a weird kind of respect. Mud has become a permanent fixture now the rainy season has started. Anyway they all look so happy and tasty I’d like to encourage this type of farming in Australia. You can buy an entire pigs head in the market out the back of the base, or a trotter. Delicious, like icing sugar eh?
Back to my site. One of the local guys was moping around, being surly, and generally not contributing. Sledging a roof is very hard work and if one team member isn’t pulling their weight it’s bad for moral and it means the people he is trading in with end up working harder than everyone else. In Haiti you never know why someone may be upset due to the general living conditions here and of course personal tragedies from the earthquake, so after a few hours of putting up with it and a few gentle enquiries as to whether there was anything I could do to help I pulled him over and said:
Me: Peterson, what’s the matter mate?
Peterson: Fuck off
Me: Right…We’re all volunteers here so I can’t tell you what to do, it’s your choice to stay or go. We don’t pay you, you don’t have to be here. Do you want to work?
P: What you talking about, I’m fine.
Me: Peterson you have a choice. Work, or leave. You can’t be here if you don’t put in.
P: You’re fucking racist man
Me: What? What did you say?
I took a step closer to him and stared into his eyes.
P: I said you’re racist man
Me: Get the fuck off the site. Now.
Peterson looked at me in confusion.
Me: Piss off mate, and don’t come back. You‘re an idiot. I don’t even want to look at you.
I gestured toward the road with the sledge in my hand, then turned away and started hitting concrete.
I was filthy with the guy. He had a lot of hide making that sort of statement and I didn’t feel in the least like apologising for any real or imagined offence I’d caused.
To his credit, he stuck around, and from that point onwards he worked harder than everyone else on the site. He did a really good job and busted his guts all morning. At the end of the session he came up to me and shook my hand and looked me in the eyes and said “mon zami” which means “my friend” in Creole, so I suppose he was just testing the boundaries. A few days later he told me he is 18, and dreams of being a soldier.
I imagine Haitian men don’t have many authority figures, or heirachical organisations in their lives, so they need to learn the rules too. There are lots of complications in relations between locals and the foreigners here, especially when we work together. Some of these are; The interaction between wealthy whites and poor blacks and the historical connotations this has, educated Western women dealing with men from a male dominated society, between two sets of people who can barely communicate, between communities suffering in poverty and well funded, extravagant NGO’s cruising streets in air conditioned sparkling 4WD’s…
Speaking of well funded, Bill Clinton visited today. The UN first blockaded the street with forty or so 4WD’s and the a Sri Lankan commando regiment secured the area in front of our base. The US secret service guys (and gals) staunched around in the khakis and earpieces, and the coolest thing I saw today was a female secret service agent, probably all of 5 foot tall, walking around with a machine gun. The clip itself had a spare clip attached to it. In Haiti you see things which might not have occurred to you previously, and they appeal. For example, watching a girl swing a sledgehammer, sweating in the heat, is really cool. Watching a girl drive a piece of heavy machinery, like a Bobcat or Caterpillar track is hot. Girls with heavy weapons take the cake though and I wish Bill would come every day so we can enjoy the sight more often.
Anyway he pressed some flesh and to be honest I got a bit bored of waiting so I went back inside but everyone else got a handshake and a photo, at the expense of 2 hours in the Haitian sun. I’m starting to regret not waiting it out actually. Anyway if the big fella could swing some money our way that would be a fantastic outcome because I strongly believe that HODR is one of the NGO’s that are making tangible differences to Leogane.
I’ll admit my first impressions about Haitian (males) were generally wrong and that these people are hard working, motivated and have good intentions, towards us and their communities. Amongst the locals there is a lot of frustration with NGO’s in general because they have (relatively) lavish camps but are seen to be acting with their agendas in mind rather than the interests of the Haitian community. Many Haitians feel they are using their presence here to gather donor money, rather than get the communities back on their feet. The truth is, I’ve been so busy on the ground running sites that I don’t have a good handle on the organisational situation here, so on a macro scale it’s hard for me to comment on Haitian politics, but I know what I see in the streets day to day.
I’ve taken a step back in the last few days, setting up a meeting with a microfinance company called Finca. My role, if any, will be to act in a liaison type capacity between the locals and this company so they can start disbursing loans to the community. I’m looking forward to this as it forces me to think and is related to what I did at university and at work in the past. At any rate, it’s a little ironic that I used to sell loans at Macquarie Bank, and will soon be selling them here in Leogane, Haiti.
There was a guy from Chicago who arrived stayed for a week, called Thomas. He was on one of my sites for four days and helped me finish. In the short time I knew him he was a good guy. The site was frustrating because there was nowhere to dump the rubble, and three houses had fallen in a heap together so it was hard to work out where the boundaries were. I negotiated with a local school principal to let me dump concrete in his driveway if I promised to get a Bobcat in to clear some collapsed buildings in his schoolyard. Whoever had built the house had used no rebar in the construction of the building so the bricks were effectively using friction to hold together. When the earth started to move there was no lateral support at all and the chalky cinder blocks crumbled to dust, and the houses imploded.
There was a flock of local homeless kids, aged 3-10 or so who come and visited us every day. They would run our empty wheelbarrows back for us and we’d treat their cuts and infections with the first aid kit.
One morning they brought a cardboard box to the site, with a cat in it. The cat didn’t look happy with it’s current situation. It appeared healthy enough but was very lethargic, breathing fast and shallowly. We gave it some water but it didn’t respond. I ignored the cat and kept working, but it was still there, next to a pile of dirt when we got back form lunch. It hadn’t moved an inch and the kids were tormenting it. I later learned this was because the cat was cursed and the kids were throwing stones at it to rid the demons from it, in a type of voodoo exorcism. Ralph, an old bloke from Tennessee, helpfully suggested we put it out of its misery, then put his head down and shuffled off with his wheelbarrow. Thanks Ralph. On that site we also found a litre bottle of rum. Fantastic, something to toast a hard days work with tonight right? Wrong. According to voodoo religion the devil was in the bottle, because the bottle had survived whilst people living in the house hadn’t, so to smell the rum would be dire, and to drink it would be worse. The locals we had with us were extremely cagey about that bottle so I let them pour it out on the ground. We weren’t even allowed to touch it, the homeowner did the honours. Disappointing? Yes. But cultural sensitivity is always high on my agenda of course so we did the right thing.
Back to our cat. I looked at Thomas, who being from Chicago knows about as much as I do about putting animals down. He picked it up in a shovel and we walked it behind a tall wall into the grounds of the school, which was fortunately free of kids. It didn’t struggle when he picked it up. Our diagnosis was that the cat had insurmountable problems. Simon dumped the cat onto the ground.
“Do you reckon we just leave it here?” I said.
“I dunno man, it seems kind of callous just to let it die slowly don’t you think?” Thomas replied.
“Ah yea I guess so, do you reckon we kill it?”
“Err…yea it would be the right thing to do…” He trailed of frowning and looked at me doubtfully.
“Sweet, go ahead, I’ll get rid of the kids,” I gestured at the gaggle of kids who had followed us around the corner. Some of them had no pants on and their little peckers were dangling in the afternoon breeze. One of them had an eye patch taped to his leg, where I had cleaned an infected wound with alcohol solution from the first aid kit. Lacking a proper bandage I thought the eye patch was a good compromise and he was still wearing it twenty-four hours later, although it was filthy by now.
“Fuck that-you kill the cat and I’ll get rid of the kids,” he said dropping the shovel at my feet, and shooed the kids around the corner.
This shouldn’t be too hard I told myself. I wasn’t fooling anyone however, and grimaced as I picked up the shovel. I had no idea where to start such a distasteful activity. I figured if I used the sharp edge of the shovel to try to decapitate the little bugger I couldn’t go wrong, since it happens like that in movies so it must be true, and a cat is smaller than a person.
I aimed at the cats neck with the shovel, took a deep breath and drove the shovel into the cats neck with all my strength and weight behind it. The loamy ground beneath the cat gave way (fuck!) absorbing most of the impact, and the cat reared off the ground screaming in agony! The little bastard was glaring at me!
“Shit! What should I do?” I croaked at Thomas who was looking at me in horror.
“Hit it again! Hit it again! Hit it harder you pussy!” Dammit, I thought, again someone calls me a pussy.
Hit it again I did. I weigh about 200 pounds and the cat absorbed the whole impact, and still didn’t die! Instead it started screaming loudly in a very human fashion, and thrashing it’s forepaws about.
Christ, I thought This is not going to plan. Shovel no good. With that thought I threw away the shovel and looked around for something to crush cats skull with. Handily nearby were 4 cinder blocks concreted together with rebar running through them. I picked it up-it must have weighed 80 pounds-and drove the concrete into the cats head. It impacted…and bounced off to the side. This was farcical! The cat writhed around and looked me square in the eye, half it’s head blown away, it’s remaining hair on end, mouth wide open. I could see down its throat and its tongue was spasming uncontrollably. It knew I was trying to kill it.
The truth is the cat appeared to be under some duress. Still, as bad as the cat felt, I’m sure I felt worse-I’ve never killed anything bigger than a cockroach before and this wasn’t euthanasia, it was cold blooded murder! Jesus bloody Christ! I’m done, I thought and dropped the block on the cat a final time, so I didn’t have to look at it. I could see it’s fluffy legs poking out, twitching slightly.
“Fuck this! Bloody thing won’t die!“ I said to Thomas, whose face was aghast in horror, and we scurried away, feeling less than manly about the whole episode.
I checked a few minutes later and the cat was well and truly dead, so in the end I suppose we did the right thing. However I know now that shovels are useless for that sort of thing, and will certainly use a sledgehammer next time.
There’s a couple of volunteers from here in Leogane who have been with us from the start. Emmanuelle is tall and gangly with big hands and feet, a brilliant smile and a happy go lucky disposition. He is 17 years old. Tony just turned 20, and I think most girls would consider him very good looking, with perfect white teeth and lean build. He is more reserved than Emmanuelle, and speaks very little English. They’re both black as pitch and often sit outside Joes, the bar next door, in the large dark tent outside our base. “Tim!“ They’ll call out and I never know who they are because all I can see are a t-shirt and some teeth. These guys are fantastic. They live together in tents next to the piles of dirt that used to be their houses, and come to work for free everyday to help rebuild their community. These guys have latched onto me and become loyal friends, sometimes to the point of frustration.
We get one day off a week and with about 20 words of common language between us misunderstandings happen. On my one day off I usually hang around base, eat, sleep or get on the computer to email/catch up on things.
The other day Tony asked if I wanted to go to the beach on Sunday. Since I'd had a few beers I said yes, then forgot about it. He showed up at 10am the next morning and I thought, dammit, I’m tired, hungover and the last thing I want to do is faff around going to the beach with Tony, who is a nice guy but speaks 12 words of English, and I speak 6 words of Creole. Anyway we walked down a dirt road, across some pasture, past some cows, through a sugar cane plantation, past a mango tree forest and attempted a creek crossing. I was wearing thongs because I thought we’d be ten minutes, travelling by road. (We both got stuck in the mud and had to dig our shoes out, which sounds fun but given the state of the water, which joins to the town drainage system it was a stress test my immune system didn’t need).
Along the way we would point at things and teach each other the words in our languages-bef=cow, zeb=grass etc. Anyway it’s really pleasant, eerily quiet and still in the country side. Rustic and tranquil, while walking amongst the sugar cane, with a little imagination you can pretend you’re back in the 17th century, when Haiti (part of what was known as Hispaniola) was a Spanish colony, and a pirate haven.
We pressed through the dark cane forest towards sunlight and finally broke through onto the beach. I stopped and smiled inwardly to myself. Brilliant sun, gunmetal blue sky, white, pebbled sand, warm water, some wooden fishing boats wrecked on the shore. The boats looked like the skeleton of a giant sea creature washed up on the beach, great wooden ribs tilted over in the sand and driftwood scattered on the ground around them. There was a rickety wharf, poking out with tiny oared launches tied off to it, palm trees lining the shore, and a lone fisherman arranging his nets on the dock. It was special.
I was tired and worn out, physically drained from weeks of hard labouring in the sun and sleeping on cardboard. My feet were chafed, my forearms and elbows were sore, my back ached. I was emotionally tired, from living in a giant dorm, from the work, from the isolation from family and friends. I shuffled slowly into the water which lapped lazily at my feet, a powerful feeling of vindication washing through my body, and for the first time since I left Australia I thought to myself, To think I could be in an office right now, in a job I hate, but instead I’m here…in paradise. I was relaxed, content. This was being alive. It was a spontaneous thought and I’ll remember that feeling for a long time, and always be grateful to Tony for dragging me to the beach that Sunday.
A young boy ran down the beach towards us. He stripped nude and ran into the water, doing cartwheels and flips in the shallow current. He flashed a huge smile and bumped fists with us, and started doing handstands. His black skin glistened as he threw himself about while Tony and I floated, relaxing in the water. All the worries I had about whether I’d made the right choice to be here or not melted into the sea and drifted away. Life slowed down a little just then and for a while there was nothing but the restorative calmness of the present. We were one with the sun, the water and a small nude Haitian kid doing cartwheels in the waters of this tragic Caribbean paradise.
SATURDAY, MAY 22, 2010 Rubble Guts
On my second night in the hospital while on suspension, I woke up at about 3am with dodgy gut pains again. I hadn’t been eating base food (which while basic is reasonably clean and tasty) and instead was sampling Haitian gourmet off the street. You might get super deep fried chicken or deep fried eggs with msg on a roll if you’re lucky, but more likely some deep fried green banana scallops or other stuff that needs a good dose of chilli sauce to bring out the full flavour.
Anyway I woke up with grumbly guts and got out of my fold-out stretcher bed to search through the hospital for a toilet. The hospital is four semi-cylinders, joined with small tunnels at various points. It is a sterilish environment with a space frame covered in thick plastic tarpaulin sealing the atmosphere. There are tubes running along the roof on the inside with holes punched in them, where cold air-conditioned air pours out. There is a full suite of surgical apparatus but generally a shortage of supplies and a lot of improvisation occurs there, especially with surgery.
It looks like the International Space Station crash landed gently on Haitian soil, all white and glistening in the sun. I like it because it’s cold and there aren’t any flies inside. For a temporary structure it is very impressive. I have a feeling that like many things around here temporary will turn into semi-permanent.
The problem is it doesn’t seem to have a toilet, so when I woke up I was given a bowl to go outside and turd in. I summoned the first guy I saw who happened to be a Haitian orderly. I grimaced in exaggerated discomfort and made a downwards flushing motion next to me backside with my hands. “I need to do a shit.”
The orderly frowned at me for a minute then motioned to follow him. I sighed in relief and shuffled after him.
“Take this,” he said handing me a bowl with some paper in it. I peered at him in confusion. This wasn’t the toilet I was looking for.
“What do I do with this?”
He motioned me to follow him again and we walked through a maternity ward where a Haitian lady was lying propped up on her elbows with her legs spread wide. For some reason the way to the toilet was through the maternity ward. She was sweating and grimacing in pain. There were a couple of nurses buzzing around her. Jesus Christ, I thought and hurried on to the end of the cylinder. The orderly opened the door and motioned me outside, and we walked to a small pile of rubble that shone white in the moonlight. I had to pick my way over mud bogs as it had been raining.
“So do I shit here, and wash my hands in the bowl?”
Of course this was a stupid thing to say since there were taps in the hospital but I couldn’t contemplate turding in a Tupperware container. What would my mother say? He made a pooing motion with his hands, intimating that I should do my business in the bowl, and turned around and walked away. Ok no worries I thought, and dropped my pants, shuffled over the bowl, and squatted.
Squatting is not a comfortable way to drop your guts. I am used to sitting down and relaxing, letting the body take it’s time to do its thing. It’s a time to contemplate life, your day, and whatever the hell you’ve been eating to make yourself feel so damned horrible.
I had a knee reconstruction a few years ago and squatting is not a comfortable position for me at all so I applied gentle pressure to speed things up a but. Bloody hell I thought two minutes ago I was fast asleep in an air-conditioned room and now I’m squatting over a blue Tupperware bowl ankle deep in filth and my knee hurts. And a mosquito was drinking blood from my ass cheek.
Anyway I finished up, at a loss with what to do with my blue Tupperware bowl so I just left it there and walked back to the door in the maternity ward feeling a little unsatisfied with the whole experience. I walked past the woman who had been in labour moments before and she looked exhausted, wrung out and bedraggled. I felt I could relate to her. Her hair was slicked down the side of her face with sweat and she sagged limply in the bed, but she seemed to radiate a deep happiness and joy, as she nursed her newborn baby.
I thought about our respective achievements over the last 15 minutes and realised how profound things can happen in such a short space of time. I can only vaguely imagine the pain and discomfort she went through for that child, while I was perched on my rubble pile. The beatific smile on her face as she held her child is something I suppose I will never understand but it was wonderful to see.
Jokes aside, having never seen a newborn baby in that fashion before, I was struck with what an amazing place Haiti is. The human condition is exposed raw to the burning sun, and things are brought back to basic needs and emotions. There’s none of the cosmetic and make up of civilised society to cushion the impact of what occurs here. The food tastes better, the alcohol is stronger, you sleep deeper, small achievements mean more.
A related event happened a few weeks ago. A mother had a two month premature baby and left it outside the hospital. She didn’t want it.
Someone found it and sent it to the Miami University Hospital in Port au Prince because there is an incubator unit there. The child survived, and one of the nurses has decided to adopt it. At two months old the baby, called Emily-Anne, weighs 4.4 pounds, and instead of dying on the side of the road abandoned, in Haiti, she will now grow up an American citizen with all the privileges that society has to offer.
Enough about that sort of thing. I haven’t explained what really makes this place so interesting, which is the people, the Haitians and the volunteers, some of whom I believe I'll be friends with for a long long time despite knowing them for a month or less. So maybe I’ll do something about that in the next blog.
THURSDAY, MAY 20, 2010 Anzac Blog-bit late
I started writing this blog about 2 weeks ago but have been too lazy to finish so if the dates seem a bit out, they probably are. And it looks like I’ve lost my camera so no more photo’s from now on.
If you’re Australian or Kiwi skip the first two paragraphs because you should already know it, otherwise read on.
25th April, 1915, the Anzacs (Australia New Zealand Army Corps) along with other Allied soldiers, invaded Turkey, on the Gallipoli peninsula. Instead of sending us to the nice flat beach as planned the English sent the Anzacs to the cliff faced, machine gun topped beach where they got slaughtered. Over the ensuing campaign about 11,000 Anzacs died, and eventually they withdrew in defeat. Many times that number of Turks died.
For the newly federated nation of Australia, it was the first time we had acted as a sovereign country, as opposed to independent states. As a result Anzac came to mean two things, a celebration of the birth of the Australian identity, and the time that Australians and Kiwis stop to remember the men and women who died fighting for our way of life. These days Anzac day is a time of respect and remembrance for Australians and Kiwis, with dawn services the usual way to pay your respects, followed by a day of toasting our soldiers as often as possible. Only unAustralian people (like farking Englishmen) stay sober.
There weren’t any dawn services in Haiti so I slept in a bit. We had a trip to the beach planned that day and before we left I made an Australian flag out of some nurses scrubs, a red mesh singlet and sports tape. It looked lush. There are photos on face book if you’re interested.
We got a tap tap (a ute with room for about 19 people on the back) and went to Bellisimo, which is a resort fronting a small coral reef. I use the word resort expansively because it was really some half built halls and guest houses, which were then blown up by the earthquake. What they do have is electricity for the 6 foot tall speaker blocks and the beer fridges. In it’s own way this place is paradise and like the rest of Haiti a design of contrasts.
Speaking of contrasts, I think Haiti is best summed up by the view of sunset we get from the roof of the HODR base each night. In the foreground the unfinished columns and rebar of Belval Plaza point vertically, like emaciated fingers at the grapefruit sized sun. It swells as it floats to the horizon, which is pierced by tall coconut trees. The sky turns a molten gold colour and the clouds reflect purple, blue and amber light. The sun is beach ball sized as it drops behind the palm fronds which are silhouetted black now, and your eyes are drawn to a grand concrete building, cement rendered and three levels high. There are trees in the grounds of this majestic structure and wrought iron patterns the windows and doors. It is gated with a large dirt driveway, and spaces for many cars to park. The wall around it is partially collapsed. Scattered throughout it’s grounds are pieces of concrete, rebar and a burned out car. Kids run around playing games, squealing loudly and barefoot. The road running past the building is dusty, potholed and lined with rubble, burning garbage piles, timid dogs, crushed, derelict or burned out vehicles and men pulling wooden wagons loaded with bricks, lumber or bottles by hand, often barefoot. If the garbage pile isn’t on fire often a giant hog or some skinny goats while be snouting around in it. There are a few vendors, each seemingly specialising in one item, you can buy a hot dog (mystery meat on a stick with hot sauce) from one, but have to walk further down the road to get a Coke. So the contrast, if you haven’t worked it out yet, is human tenacity and squalor amid amazing natural beauty. You could look at it and draw the conclusion that in the end nature is still very much in charge. Maybe there’s something in that for all of us.
Well, back to our beach. The shore is sprinkled with rubble and a few damaged buildings, with a small plaza leading to a large wrought iron gate that arches across steps leading to the water. The gate sits in isolation-there are no walls to either side of it. If it sounds like a strange set up, it is.
A large group of us went and by the time we got there the rum had already loosened things up a bit. We all stepped gingerly into the bath temperature water, which was wading depth out to about 100 metres, since the bottom was mostly soft sand but also sharp bits of garbage and man-o-wars. There was a cruise liner and a clipper with triangular sails off the coast, and as always seems to be the case in Haiti, there were indistinct mountains in the distance. They are actually the mountains on the other side of the gulf which is the most recognisable feature of Haiti if you look at it on a map. Mostly we spent the day wrestling in the water with Haitian guys, taking photos, throwing the gridiron ball and generally clowning around. Well, I was wrestling so I‘m sure everyone else was.
Before things got out of hand I wanted to pay my respects to the Anzacs. I drank a few beers and a few bottles of rum (they’re small) until I was feeling sentimental and emotional. Then I found a pile of rubble a little way from the rest of the revellers and climbed to the summit. I held my makeshift flag out, and stared out to sea for a slow count of sixty and thought of the sacrifice all those young men and women have made for our country and way of life.
I love being overseas and in different countries, in fact I left because I was bored with everything back home. I love sampling different cultures and languages, eating local foods and meeting locals. I also like appraising local alcoholic beverages to check if they have the same wonderful effects as Australian ones. But one thing which is reinforced while overseas is that we are lucky to be from somewhere like Australia because in fact there are a lot of places out there which aren’t as good.
I think it’s OK to have a patriotic moment every now and then (maybe once or twice a year) and while I was having a private love in with myself about Australia I made sure I was alone because I didn’t want to ram it down anyone’s throat (anymore that I had already-I scored some Australia flag boxers from a girl who had been romancing some Aussie guy somewhere and she’d claimed his boxers as a souvenir, which she then donated to me for Anzac Day. So I was prancing around in aussie flag boxers and bandana). At any rate this all took about 5 minutes, because I didn’t want to miss out on the rounds being bought back at the bar.
On the way home down the freeway I was standing on the bumper bar of the ute, which had a wooden tray and tailgate. I was wearing boardies, thongs and my backpack, and as we pulled into the street the compound is on, the tailgate I was hanging onto broke off and I hit the ground, did a few commando rolls, and somehow landed on my feet without a single scratch. Legend. More evidence that if you have to fall off a balcony or the back of a car be blind drunk when you do it.
That night was the start of a suspension from base I copped for missing curfew. Myself and two others came home late one night and walked through the front door, and went to sleep. The next day we were given two hours to get off base-we were suspended.
I thought it was a little strange, we were only an hour and a half late and as I pointed out, if I’d known it was a serious rule I would have walked through the gaping hole in the back of the building (caused by the earthquake) as opposed to the front door. Anyway rules are rules as I keep discovering. The first two days of hiatus, I slept at the house of a family who’s land we had cleared of rubble, about 30m down the road from the base, so I thought was karma really.
Maybe I should explain how this situation came about. When I arrived at the HODR base in Leogane I was given a brief tour of the facilities.
One of the rules briefly touched on is a 10pm curfew. I always imagined this to be a bit flexible since the bar next door shut at 10pm and it always took people 15 minutes or so to filter back into the base.
Natalie, an attractive, bouncy girl who seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time enjoying male attention, was the base manager. She always looked clean and fresh with spotless clothes and immaculate hair which I always wondered about since it’s almost impossible to clean a pair of socks, let alone your whole body at HODR base. She reminded me a bit of some of the girls I worked with at Minx who are also very resourceful. On Saturday night she invited a few of us to a locals birthday party. She said we could stay the night at the party where we were, and thus not violate curfew. We left Masayes, which I’ll generously term the restaurant at the centre of Leogane (since there aren’t any others, anywhere) and drove to the party a few minutes away. Great burgers at Masayes, so if you ever make it to Leogane you should it hit it up, but they’re small so you’ll need to order two.
The venue was an outside courtyard surrounded by concrete warehouses leaning at strange angles with cracked walls and chunks of wreckage lying scattered on the ground. The area was lit solely by a large fire which had ten or twelve chickens frying over it-delicious-and some oversized speakers were booming onto the dance floor. A few guys were elbow deep in the speakers (while they were at full volume) trying to fix the tweeters that weren’t working. There were tables set up with bottles of J&B whiskey on them, and the beer was free too. Unbelievable! When the blanques (whites) walked in everyone swivelled their head to peer at us but they settled down quickly because Natalie knew the locals. She told me airily that she had two Haitian boyfriends and they were both there that night. Yea right, I thought and hit the DF with Bora from Turkey, Cayla and a bunch of Haitian guys. I am probably the fourth or fifth worst dancer in the world but I’ve never danced like that in my life; the Haitians would do moves that we’d then copy/mangle them and it was like running cross country carrying a goat on your back and a sack of cement on your head, it was intense! At one point we all took turns doing handstands and walking of the stage to crowd surf into the guys below, and I remember being spread out like a starfish with four guys holding me up by my hands and feet, whipping me like a sheet. I was even busting out the worm, launching off chairs to do it onto the concrete and I don’t need to be told I’m lucky I wasn’t bashed and thrown onto the street for pulling such a rude stunt! It was fantastic fun and the gross lack of quality was made up for with enthusiasm. Those guys were great value.
About 11pm Natalie took off, pissed as a Scotsman at an open bar and unable to stand up straight. I don’t know where she went but it looked as though our accommodation option had disappeared without a trace! By that stage we were all exhausted (we had worked all day as well) and decided that staying at an all night party where we didn’t know anyone or speak the language in one of the poorest countries in the world was not ideal so we walked home.
The streets of Leogane are pitch black because there is no electricity at all so we walked around trying to avoid the street dogs and piles of rubble and walked in the front door about 11.30.
The next day we all got a talking to and a four day suspension from base, effective at midday Sunday. I pointed out that I wasn’t wilfully breaking the rules-if that had been my intention I would have climbed over the walls, not walked in the front door! At any rate I was given two hours to find somewhere to stay in a city where 90% of the buildings have been destroyed. Fucking ridiculous! I can sleep on any surface but I don’t know what Cayla ended up doing, the nearest accommodation option was hours away on a tap tap (like a local taxi). On Sunday we all went to the beach anyway (it was Anzac day as explained above) so not a lot of planning was done I can tell you, but in the end kharma showed up and the people who’s house I had helped to demolish and cart away said I could stay with them (in the remains of their house). They generously gave me a double bed with clean sheets, so I was actually better off than at HODR base. I believe that generosity to be tempered a little by the fact that they aren’t actually confident enough to sleep in the house after the earthquake and do so in a tent in the back yard but…I don’t care. Last night I got checked into the hospital by a nurse volunteer and had the best nights sleep I’ve had yet, in a clean, air-conditioned environment free from mozzies, so thanks for that Christina! In general the generosity people have shown me since I got punted has been overwhelming and I will touch on that later.
The first day off, I went with Dave (a Haitian volunteer) to PaP to buy a bigger sledgehammer than the ones we had on base, which maxed out at 8 pounds. I asked for the biggest one they had, which, disappointingly, was 10 pounds*. I am almost positive Dave ripped me off and arranged a kickback with the guy at the hardware store, since he mysteriously knew the price of the hammer well before we got to the shop, which happened to take 3 hours to reach. A number of strange occurrences like that happened with Dave (e.g. catching him pocketing my change) and after he asked me for money one day I told him piss off and not come near me again. Then I pushed hard (successfully) to get him fired from the HODR program because I believe him to be a shifty, dishonest swindler, who tries to guilt trip people into forgiving his indescretions by blaming it all on a misunderstanding. Enough of that…
Funny thing about sledgehammers. If you don’t care about sledgehammers I wouldn’t read this paragraph…I never really thought about them before, in fact had never used one. Now I care how heavy it is, how long the handle is, if the handle is wood or plastic etc. The longer the handle, the more speed you can swing the head at, and the heavier the head, the greater the impact and damage you do to the concrete. You have to balance the size of the head and handle length with your strength and fitness because the effort needed to swing hammers goes up exponentially with the weight and arc length. But lighter hammers bounce of the concrete more which messes with your wrists and hands, so if you‘re reasonably strong you want a long heavy hammer to get through your work faster…hmmm getting a little carried away by the look of it. Anyway for the first few days I was here I couldn’t open a bottle of coke my hands were so painful from hitting concrete, but like everything else they adjusted. I am quite pleased with my new sledgehammer and can’t wait to throw it at something.
One day of my holiday I went for a walk. I travelled a few hundred meters down the road from HODR base and turned left at the tent city, made of makeshift USAid tarps and tents with wooden doorframes. “Made in China” was stamped in big red letters on the doors and women sat between the rows cooking, or cleaning small kids. This place is crawling with children younger than about 10 years old. Men of working age sat around playing card games or chatting.
Question: If there are 4 Haitian men at a drinks vendor on the side of the road, how many does it take to sell you a fruit juice?
Answer: None, one of them will yell out to get a (busy) woman to do it.
To be fair some Haitian men are back at their old jobs, working on the sugar cane or coconut plantations, or tilling fields, pulling wooden carts laden with goods or produce, by hand, down the rutted dirt roads of Leogane, or selling things like motor oil, beer, Coca-Cola and machetes on the side of the road. Some are getting on with repairing their houses or clearing out drainage pits for when the monsoon hits in a months time. This place operates at about subsistence level, with any gaps being filled by foreign aid.
Past the tent city I headed towards the beach, and gradually the buildings thinned out and the tents disappeared. After a few minutes I came across three ruined buildings, roofless with vines growing around their columns and walls. They formed three sides of a square, looking inward, about thirty metres to a side. Behind one side of the square was a sugar cane plantation, the cane stretching three or more metres into the sky. A few old men were amongst the cane hacking at it with machetes and some cows grazed in the pasture between the cane and the ruins, chewing chaff lazily in the midday heat. Beyond the second side of the ruins was a coconut tree plantation, the palm fronds etched against the hazy indistinct mountains in the distance, and the searing blue sky. The water evaporating from the palms and the midday heat made the air shimmer and faraway objects were only just opaque and waif-like, insubstantial. The sun was so bright that the sky turned a grey blue from the heat. There was no sound except the wind rustling through the cane, and the odd tap-tap-tapping of a man nailing his house back together behind the woods.
Between the mountains in the distance and the coconut trees in front of me was the sea. The shore was sparsely dotted with makeshift buildings and crowded with plants, and the coconuts grow right down to the shore. The heat, ruins, small farms and natural setting combine with the strange silence to make you feel like you’ve stepped back in time to a more basic, primitive place. It is very beautiful.
I’ve had a pretty good week. It was my birthday on Thursday, so got shouted a few beers which is always nice. Also started running teams at rubble sites. I spent three days finishing of a large site at a house owned by a guy called Boissoniare, and the same people kept signing up to my crew and it was satisfying to finish clearing the slab so the family can move off the street where there tent is and back onto their property. The girls and guys on the team were great and cleared what was a huge pile of concrete out of the way right on schedule.
To cap it off the Haitian volunteer contingent voted me as the volunteer of the week, That sounds like something you get from McDonalds (by no means a bad thing at all) but there’s over 120 volunteers floating around base now so at least some people like me around here. Since I know about 7 things in Creole (do this, come on, please, thank you, good work, wanker, I am having a wank tonight) I wonder if the vote was influenced by the number of beers I buy the Haitian guys after work rather than any indication of their goodwill towards me.
This place is a revolving sick bay. People inhale or eat most of the things that make them sick. Probably the same as back home really but there is always a pile of garbage on fire somewhere, adding ambience to the streetscape. Failing that, but usually as well as that, is the dust thrown up by truck tyres. Where there are trucks there are plumes of oily black diesel smoke-these trucks are always at least 20 years old. The clincher is a bit more complicated: Running by most streets are deep canals or drainage gutters, about a foot wide and up to three deep. This is where you shit, piss, spit, throw garbage and leftover food (if you don’t want to light it on fire) and put basically everything not worth keeping (which in Haiti is a small and very unappealing set of items).
Then, to keep dust down, you throw water from the canals onto the road, so that when it dries and the trucks roll past and throws up dust and vomit exhaust, you’re inhaling particles of sewerage as well as standard pollution.
* A small girl showed up to base yesterday with a 16 pound hammer so I feel a bit underdone now. If you would like to donate a 20 pound hammer head please let me know.
WEDNESDAY, MAY 5, 2010 I Am Scared of Earthquakes
Leogane is stinking hot, with squelching humidity and a blaring sun that sucks the life out of you. After sunrise you can’t sleep because it’s too uncomfortable to lie in the greenhouse your tent has become and as soon as you get up you start to wilt in the heat. Exposed skin starts to prickle and sweat pops out of every pore. If you put sun cream on it washes off after 5 minutes, even in the shade, because you’re too wet for it to soak in, and by lunch time you’re drenched down to your underpants, literally. If you are hungover your head feels stuffed full of cement mix and your whole body aches. Any hydration your body had was leached out of you while you slept. Your mattress is soaked and the tent reeks of dank sweat rancid man smell. This is derived from the alluring scent of male pheromones (err..) and sweat, soaked into a dirty singlet and left to ferment for 48 hours in a tent with no ventilation and an ambient temperature of 45C. At any rate you feel crusty because even though you’ve taken the fly off, exposing the tent to the night air, there is no wind at all and you’ve woken up every 20 minutes to slide around your mattress in an attempt to find a comfortable way to lie. The only way to sleep in this heat is on your back, spreadeagle, nude or maybe in briefs, because people can see right in since the fly is off. That doesn’t bother me but out of courtesy to others I wear undies most nights. I am down to three undies from five-one pair lost in transit somewhere and another due to an unfortunate case of follow through on a demolition job on my second day. Oops.
During the day dogs walk across the road and slump down on their haunches in the middle, to lazy to get to the other side. Haitians sit around under improvised awnings made of sticks and bed sheets, on the side of the road, or on the verandas of the few buildings still standing and play board games or do chores. Many of them look at the crazy white people slaving away in the middle of the day and shake their heads in wonder. They think we’re crazy, but I think they’re lazy, you be the judge. Some of them sit around drinking rum from small bottles. Some Haitian guys offered me a swig of theirs today while I was hammering away-Haitian rum is 43% alcohol and at 35C-it’s wasn’t delicious. Another guy from Texas did the same and was vomiting in the gutter a few minutes later-what a weapon. It’s not just the temperature that’s the real killer but the humidity, and the physical work that we spend our time doing. At lunch after four hours in the sun when I wring my socks out the sweat drips onto the ground like I’m squeezing a dishrag. My body sweat runs down my legs and into my socks. I’ve been told I’m a disgusting human being but I’m not so sure. Anyway, the heat is one of the striking features of this place, along with the dust, poverty and destruction all around (and rum).
Until today.
At 4.30pm the clouds rolled in, the wind picked up and the sun disappeared early. It hasn’t rained here for a month but it really opened up tonight. From the first drops, which created little dust clouds on the road until the end of the downpour when the stars popped out again was only about an hour, and it was still dry outside when the first lightning hit, right outside the compound. Then the sky collapsed, there was constant lightning and you couldn’t speak for the deafening crash of thunder. Within minutes the entire central courtyard of the base was flooded, about 3 inches deep in water. A few people used the storm as a chance to pair off and run to a tent for some romance, confidant they could be as noisy as they wanted and for once nobody would hear them Something about rain after a long dry spell makes people act weird and before long everyone was running around fully clothed in the deluge, soaked to the skin. I considered getting nude but some people here are pretty conservative and it’s best not to offend. Other people were using it to wash (without a bucket for once), others sliding around like kids, it was bizarre. Charlie fell over and cracked his head which dampened spirits a bit (couldn’t resist) and then the wind hit.
It was really pouring, a typical thunderstorm with thunder, lightning, the whole set up. I’d gone up top to close Simons tent (Simon is a foul mouthed Scotsman who is one of my best mates around here) and my own, but forgot to close mine so had to race up halfway through the storm to zip it up, discovering it had collapsed. Still waterproof though so I jumped inside, I was prepared to stay with the tent all night to save it and the contents. Apart from the flimsy poles which kept buckling, I had anchored it well so it stayed dry and intact. Once the storm passed I hung out the few things that had got wet and took the fly off and for the first time since I got here, I had to use my sleeping bag at night, because it actually got cool-it was great.
The storm was a nice prelude to other events that made me realise that life is full of choices. Tea or coffee, Playstation or Xbox, stay at boring job or go overseas etc.
In Leogane I get to choose between zipping my tent closed to keep the mozzies out, or leaving it open so I can get out when there are earthquakes. I don’t know what the point of getting out is since I’m still stuck on a roof 30 feet of the ground with no exit route whatsoever. At any rate the mozzie won’t kill me (unless he gives me malaria and even then…) or even bite me very often but he buzzes past my ear all the time so I keep the tent closed. I even slept through a small aftershock once and was only woken up by the screaming from the people in the bunks downstairs.
Tonight there was a tremor, and it was the first big aftershock I’ve really experienced since I got here. It was midnight and I was fast asleep and I woke up to my tent shaking and air mattress bouncing. There was rapid vibrant banging as the bunks downstairs frantically started swinging into each other and the whole earth was moving as if a giant jackhammer was pounding into it. It’s like the world is a pot of water on a stove and the surface is the lid which starts to suddenly jump around when the water hit’s boiling point. It usually takes me 4 hours to really wake up, but I knew I was in an earthquake about one millionth of a second after my eyes opened and to be honest it completely scared the living shit out of me! I was terrified, and I couldn’t open my fucking tent zipper. FUCK.
Holy shit, I thought, I’m going to die in a $32 Walmart tent in Haiti. Dying in a tent just seems to shite for words, something a fat, uncoordinated, asthmatic, androgynous 36 year old virgin would do, it doesn‘t appeal to me at all! Just as I was about to rip the zip off entirely it came undone and I burst out onto the roof. Usually it takes me 2 minutes to unfold from inside my tent. In reality I was stuck for about three seconds but when your brain is really in imminent-death mode it works much, much faster than normal and three seconds is really 30. I experienced that once before, flying through the air in the moment immediately after launching over the handlebars on my motorbike, but preceding the moment I hit the ground. Ah clarity and reasoning, why aren’t you always with me!?
Anyway it’s pretty interesting experiencing an earthquake for the first time. We were told this morning that it was only a 4.0 so apparently I am a coward and was scared for nothing, I’m glad I didn’t scream. I thought about it…just kidding. Some girls downstairs slept through the whole thing…but I found out later they were drunk, which is cheating really. The first tremor we had when I got here (which I slept through) was a 6.0, but I guess it depends where the epicentre is and if you’re awake for it.
My heart rate went from a standing start to completely off the chart by the time I’d removed myself from the tent. The night, which had been silent, erupted in noise as every dog, cat, cow, goat, duck, turkey and chicken panicked and started making their respective noises into the night and for once I didn’t resent them for it. It took a few minutes to relax enough to go back to sleep but it’s good to be able to say I’ve popped my earthquake cherry. I fully understand now why the locals live in tents on the road even if their house appears intact.
In all an eventful couple of days.
FRIDAY, APRIL 30, 2010 Haiti first impression
I’ve been in Haiti for about 2 weeks now. I don’t really know because time becomes meaningless in a place like this. I haven’t updated the blog because I’ve just been too busy or tired but due to circumstances unforeseen I now have some time to catch up on things. Joe, who owns the local bar, has been plying me with cold beer this afternoon and it has settled nicely into my brain, like a tonic for this teeming humidity. So I’ll write, hiding in the shade in front of a coconut tree, with a pleasant buzz inside my head an annoying one (the bloody flies) on the outside.
You can describe Haiti much like the ingredients of a cake. You need a layer of apocalyptic catastrophe, a good part of failed-state/controlled-chaos and a base of underlying poverty to form the main ingredients. Spread through it like chocolate chips are things like the generous, patient perseverance of the Haitian women, the wide eyed enthusiasm and endurance of Haitian children, and the general ambivalence, laziness and aversion to labour of Haitian males of working age. This is set amid a Caribbean paradise of distant hazy hills, palm and coconut trees, humid sun drenched days and tropical beaches lined with coral reefs, where you can buy bottles of rum and cold beer on Sunday after a week of demolishing fatally damaged houses, sweating in the equatorial sun.
Haiti is beyond anything the vast majority of us will have any ability to reference with our normal lives so you will need a vivid imagination for the next few paragraphs while I describe the place. If you lack a vivid imagination I suppose not understanding this blog is probably the least of your problems!
I flew in from Miami via San Juan, in a twin engine Vietnam era prop plane at about 250 knots. Flying over the country in this fashion affords you an amazing view of the jagged mountains splitting the island that forms Haiti on the West and Dominican Republic on the East. The view is so good because the plane can’t fly above 18,000 feet which is less than half as high as a jet airliner.
As you descend into Port au Prince you can see the formations of tents near the airport that foretell of the devastation on the ground. For those of you who have played Sim City, especially early versions of the game, it actually looks like a city after a disaster, when all the tiles are rubble, so in that respect the developers of that game deserve some real credit. The Haitian lady next to me looked like a busty US citizen with a white suit, fake nails and big permed hair, but tears were streaming down her face as we flew over the ruined capital of her country. Personally I was just fired up to be going somewhere a bit edgier than a suit job in a skyscraper.
The plane circled in over the single runway airport and I noticed a river that had had it’s course changed by the earthquake, a brown stain on a green land, one branch dried and cracked, the other forming a swampy impasse as the water worked out the most efficient new route to the sea. It was full of garbage. I got closer view of a sight that was to become commonplace in the next couple of days: a smashed cinder block building, roofless with jagged, fallen walls, with a derelict old Mack dump truck parked out the front. In the space behind the building tents were set up accommodating the inhabitants of the ruins. There were United Nations semi-trailers and armoured personnel carriers parked in rows and four US Army Blackhawk helicopters spinning up as glided in.
We landed and I got through a thoroughly lacklustre examination by customs before walking into the sunlight to discover that Hands On Disaster Response had forgotten I was coming and didn’t send me a driver to Leogane, which is two hours away from the airport. I don’t speak a word of Creole and having come from Central America immediately assumed that all the men offering assistance at the exit to the airport where trying to rob me, or rip me off. If you’re a Latin male, I’m sure you understand what I mean…unless you’re in denial!
As an aside, if you are a drug dealer, peadophile, murderer or any type of criminal on a wanted list and don’t mind (massively) sacrificing your living standards for freedom from investigation I suggest you migrate to Haiti.
The earthquake that rocked the country in January crushed the soul of a society already staggering with corruption, poverty and a lack of infrastructure, rule of law, and hope. This is the first time I have volunteered for anything (other than surf life saving in Australia but that was mainly so I could row surf boats www.asrl.com.au look it up it‘s excellent). People I’ve spoken to who have been to Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq and a variety of other places say conditions in Haiti are worse. I got a taxi with a guy called Joa from PaP to Leogane (30kms and two hours away) and by the end of the drive we were in a state emotional flatline. Neither of us were upset as such but we had ran out of reactions to the destruction and squalor we saw around us. You end up staring out the window as your senses are overwhelmed by glare from the relentless burning sun, thick swirling grey dust, plumes of black exhaust smoke, the roar of truck and bus engines and their horns, mountains of rubble, mounds of garbage lining the streets, youths washing in filthy water pooled in the gutter, dogs, chickens, goats and humans climbing on and sifting through piles of wreckage, hawkers selling everything from fried green banana’s to genuine “Rey Bans” in chaotic traffic composed of rusting, bashed cars and trucks driving though dirt, gravel or cracked roads, traversing blocks of a city that has been utterly pulverised. If you have ever seen footage of the Allied bombing of German cities at the end of WWII you will understand the streetscape, but there are more people here.
It really hit me when I saw the national palace, a once majestic white building in a colonial style, the seat of Haitian parliament and the centre of national government, cracked and crumbling, the dome collapsed onto its supports and split in half. It made me think of how I would feel if something did that to Parliament House in Australia. I am not particularly patriotic but politicians and parliament house represents who we are and to see it turned to dust would be traumatic. The block that held the judicial district just isn’t there anymore and the fact that Haiti lost half of all its government employees including half it’s judges and parliament, means that a nation already struggling with problems beyond the comprehension of us in the West, has been decapitated as well as decimated.
I do not believe conditions could be any worse in this country unless they were actively shooting at each other or they were starving to death.
I don’t want anyone to think this is a bleeding heart sob story write up on Haiti. If you care you’ll do something about it, if not then hopefully you’ll at least find the story an interesting one. Personally I wasn’t entirely overwhelmed with concern about the plight of the Haitian people but also rather excited about the chance I had to experience something out of the ordinary, so I admit my motivations for coming here were somewhat selfish. It gets interesting for me because of the work I have been doing here and the people I have met.
Hands On Disaster Response is an organisation based in Boston. They were formed during the response to the tsunami in Indonesia. The basic role of the organisation is to remove destroyed or damaged houses and to facilitate the rebuilding of homes so that people can move into buildings again, from the tents they have been living in since the earthquake.
What this involves in practise is getting a sledgehammer and demolishing houses that are still standing but too dangerous to live in, especially with the risk of aftershocks. You reinforce the beams with wooden supports, then stand on the roof and blow it out, leaving the beams. Next you weaken or remove the walls which are usually for partition purposes only and not structural, then fault the remaining columns, and pull the house over with a hand winch, or “come along”. Once the house is in pieces on the ground another team comes in breaks it up further and carts the mess out into the street where teams of government employees pick up the rocks, by hand, and throw them into dump trucks. We work from 7.30am to 11.30, have lunch for two hours and work again from 1.30pm to 4.30 pm. This doesn’t sound so hard but in practise I don’t think I’ve worked so hard in my life.
Haitians are deeply traumatised by the earthquake because it killed between one quarter and half a million of them, out of a population of about 10m people. This means most of them live in tents next to buildings that look otherwise intact, so they don’t get crushed by any further tremors that occur.
Port au Prince is the most chaotic, dirty, polluted, loud, hot, oppressive environment I’ve been in and I’m glad the site of the HODR project is in Leogane. About 90% of the buildings here in Leogane are either wrecked or slated for demolition but the city only had 90,000 inhabitants and as such the problems seem a lot more manageable here.
I joined a rubble clearing team on my first half day, and got pulled of it in the afternoon to help on a demolition. The guy running it was a hairy American guy called Bear and he wouldn’t look or speak to me so I didn’t look or speak to anyone and just did as I was told. That meant standing on a roof in 110 degree (Fahrenheit) heat hitting the 8 inches of concrete I was standing on with an 8 pound sledgehammer, for 4 hours. That afternoon I drank 5 litres of water. The next day I went back with the demolition team and we swung away at the roof till it was down. By 8am the sun is searing and it’s impossible to keep a shirt on because even if you want the sun protection the sweat makes it chafe your skin. The sun, while hot, isn’t as harsh as it is in Australia so it’s easy to prevent burning if you use plenty of cream. Bear left today with his girlfriend, Katie, to go back to New York and in the intervening two weeks we became great mates. He led the demo team and always got houses down fast and safely.
The thing about coming to Haiti is that you can’t have any illusions about the amount of good you are doing. You certainly aren’t saving the country and a lot of people will resent the fact you are there just because they think you’re getting paid to do the work! So you tell yourself that possibly you are making life a tiny bit easier for a small number of people, for a little while. If you’re happy with that, you can get on with making friends with some fantastic, interesting young people, mostly between 24 and 34 years of age.
I didn’t say much at all the first week I was here because I got the impression I was getting sized up by people who wondered how long it would take until I cracked. I suppose you could say I look fit and strong, which meant they were waiting for me to fail because it really is fucking hot here and the work is debilitating. It’s not unusual for five or ten people to drop from dehydration and heat exhaustion in a day. At any rate it turns out I can work reasonably hard when I have to and became great friends with the people I was working on demolition with first.
By and large the people her are from the USA, a few Canadians, with one or two other Aussies, a Scot and maybe some other nationalities. By and large they have been some of the most interesting, hard working, hard partying, intelligent and committed people I’ve ever met. Sledging a roof in the hot sun for no payment other than a meal (of dubious quality) at knock off time is a test of character but the people on the team always put in 100%, and often more, hence the handy location of the hospital next to our base. I’ll admit that breaking concrete is a pretty satisfying way to spend your day, and I’d say that any guy who claims to be too sophisticated to enjoy something as mundane as swinging a sledgehammer, is probably just too weak and soft to actually do it properly!
The base itself is in a derelict concrete building, two levels high around a central, tennis court sized open area, with no roof. There are bunks on the ground floor undercover but I set my tent up on cinder blocks, on level two. The use of bricks is to prevent flooding when it rains, which, unusually, it hasn‘t done since I got here. People tie their tents to columns of concrete sticking up out of the roof with rebar spiking out the top (rebar is the metal wire that reinforces concrete). From a distance it looks like rows of small skyscrapers with their tops smashed off and their windows blown out, like the remnants of a bombing campaign over Sydney or New York. Cast your eyes further down and the tents make it look like a small colourful slum. The heat is stifling, there is never any wind, always an abundance of mosquitos, an increasing number of flies and you have to pour a bucket of water into the toilets to get them to flush. When you get cut, no matter how small, it gets red, angry and infected (like an Irish backpacker!) and takes weeks to heal. The food is monotonously predictable (rice, beans, onions, chicken and fish head soup if we’re unlucky) but apart from the fish head soup (which is just a rancid as it sounds) it always tastes delicious. There is no seasoning like hunger! You shower in a stall with a bucket of water and a scooper to ladle the water onto yourself with. The water is cold from the tank on the roof but you wouldn’t want a warm shower anyway.
When the sun rises at 6am the temperature in the tent ($32 from Walmart you beauty) rises about 10 Celsius straight away so you have no option but to get out of bed. I’ve been getting two beer hangovers, I suppose from not being properly hydrated and sweating so much at night. Another clue to this is the fact that I didn’t urinate for the first week I was here, I suppose because everything I drank just disappeared out of my sweat glands. Maybe I was lucky not to end up in hospital too! I actually sleep directly on the cinder bricks adjacent to my air mattress most nights, because they are a bit cooler than the soft bed. And I’ve been sleeping like a baby! Sleeping on concrete is mundane now and doesn’t phase me at all. I’m fortunate in that the mozzies here aren’t huge fans of mine-some of the girls do it really tough, and look like they’ve got chicken pox every morning form being bitten so much.. I reckon being hairy makes it harder for the bugs to get to your skin although I’m keeping that to myself in case the girls all stop shaving. Horrible concept.
Anyway breakfast is oats or a (flyblown, from a garbage bag) breadroll with peanut butter out of a 5 gallon tub. If you want milk you put milk powder on the oats and add (room temperature) water. It’s important to force something down or you’ll pass out before lunch. Breakfast is the worst meal of the day, the other two are generally very satisfying.
The base is an alcohol free zone so it’s fortunate that right next to it is Joe’s Bar. You can buy any beer you want as long as it’s a Prestige or a Guinness. Down the road is a chap who sells beer out of a large esky, next to a latrine pit that funnels into the drainage ditch on the side of the road. There really is nothing more satisfying than sinking an icy cold one at Guttermans, drenched in sweat, filthy with dirt and concrete dust and aching from head to toe, chatting to your mates about the day, sitting on a rock next to a pool of polluted, septic water. Marypec (Gutternmans real name) likes us because we demolished his house for him and carted the mess away. The bar is at a t-junction in the road and conversation is accompanied by the growl of motorcycles and trucks, exhaust fumes and dust. The free market came to our rescue when Marypec’s daughter started cooking what I will expansively call sausages on a second hand, plastic coated shower rack. I have no idea what is in those tubular sections of pale meat or what the carcinogenic effects of the plastic being cooked with the snags is, but she puts just the right amount of tomato and chilli sauce on them, and at 5pm in the sun, I don’t care (or want to know!) what they’re composed of! At night you can go to bed around 10pm but you can’t sleep till about midnight due to the heat. You always know the time though. At about 11pm the dogs start barking, within 20 minutes every time. What is really happening is a pack of six or ten males are stalking a female and once they’ve cornered her in a back alley or against a rubble pile, they fight amongst themselves to see who gets to spend some romantic time with her. Dogs get stuck together after they shag, and they don’t know what is going on and look really embarrassed until they can separate their asses from each other and run away. I got a great photo of two dogs sheepishly avoiding eye contact, standing back to back on a crowded road in PaP, but can’t upload it due to bandwidth problems. I suppose we're lucky the same thing doesn’t happen to humans as well. Anyway at 2.30 or so the stupid turkeys start cockadoodledooing. Or is it chickens that do that. Whatever animal it is that’s responsible, I will eat it one day. I have actually had dreams about sniping them through a night vision site form the roof of the HODR building.
I found out that a 330 pound American ex NFL lineman is better at sledging concrete than a skinny surfboat rower from Australia. “O” came with his mate Scott form Dallas Texas and the two are the most unlikely pair of mates I’ve seen. O is a massive, African American force of nature whose predatory looks bely his humility and intelligence. His mate Scott is a skinny white businessman who, as I was to go on to discover, is about the most generous person I’ve met. Anyway working with O made me realise that these 8 pound hammers just aren’t big enough so yesterday I went to PaP and got a 10 pounder.
SATURDAY, APRIL 17, 2010 San Pedro Part II
I've decided that I can't be bothered writing about San Pedro again as I think the vibe of the place was sufficiently communicated in the last blog.
I will say I met some fantastic people there, like Marie, Gersh, Cecilia and Erick Cortez, and that it was interesting going to a house party where I ran into the drug dealer who, with five of his buddies, had tried to rob me a few nights before with Gersh. Only Marie's calming influence prevented interesting things occuring in the back alleys of San Pedro. He was by himself at the party. Anyway it all turned out to be a big misunderstanding and in fact he was a charming chap-my fault probably. The next dealer you turn down after he's offered you coke on the street, who then says, "if you're scared, go to church you gringo pussy" is probably offering salvation as well as drugs. Either way don't take it too personally.
Not all dealers are so obnoxious. I was walking up the street to put my guitar away late one night and this harassed looking guy popped out of the darkness into the street light. He was really agitated and his eyes were spinning like reels on a poker machine. They were black but really bright, like there was a sheen of wetness on them. I've heard most conversations with dealers occur in English because they need it to communiate with their clients better. Anyway this guy was nice enough to offer me some time with his Japanese wife if I wanted to wait around for a bit while he went and scored some gear which I hadn't actually asked for. She seemed really nice apart from the sores and scabs all over her body, the missing teeth, slack sallow skin and weird cheesy smell, although that might have been him. He was 18, she was 28. Romance!
Gersh and I found two other Japanese in San Pedro. They were selling burgers from a cart on the side of the road. Japanese people are strange.
Another interesting aspect of San Pedro is the alcoholism. When you look through the superficial layers of San Pedros' touristic charms you can see some severe social problems. It doesn't take a lot of insight: I walked past a man, face down on the road, passed out drunk at about 9pm one night. The gradient was about 1 in 6 so it was very steep and he was sleeping head down the hill. The next day at midday he was still there, although someone had moved him to the gutter so the tuk tuks could pass. This was not uncommon. Many women walk around with bruises on their faces and arms.
I have engaged in a number of challenges to test or prove my manhood in the last few weeks.
They were:
-A burger eating contest
-A chilli eating contest
-An arm wrestle
I lost all three.
The first was at an all you can eat burger buffet in San Pedro, on Sunday near the lake. An ex US Navy Seal ran it and made an assortment of the most delicious sauces I've ever tasted. The burgers were half pound patties, and in fact there was a fat American guy telling everyone loudly how he was going to smash six of them. The existing record was 3.
This guy started getting on my nerves, and he was a cheat as he smoked a joint before and during the session to enhance his hunger. The first burger was delicious, with cheese, lettuce, tomato, onion and fantastic steak sauce. Between burger one and two was time for some psychological games-so I ordered a plate of chips. I think that rattled his team a bit. The second burger was also tasty but by the end I was starting to feel pretty stuffed, as I'd washed it all down with a litre of beer and loaded it with salad, whereas oldmate was just doing the patties. I believed this to be not in the spirit of the competition but as I hadn't actually told him we were oin battle I can't really compain. At this point I admitted the chips were an error of judgment.
Anyway burger three was the biggest test of endurance, commitment and character of my 26 years. Gersh was there to remind me I was being "tapped out" by a chubby loudmouth American and took a photo of the tiny peice of pattie left that I sat on for half an hour, for posterity.
Long story short, oldmate knocked back four, and then won the Boccia contest, first prize a bottle of rum. Every dog has his day. Without doubt the gut probems I've had recently have shrunk my stomach and ruined any chance I had of victory.
On the bus up from Guatemala to Mexico I slept for about 30 hours straight as a result of a rather large night courtesy of Crane and Dario at the Restaurant of Rock (no hippies allowed). When I woke up a Mexican lady, who had two daughters, very generously offered to let me stay with her in Cancun. I'm not sure why as I had pants ripped to the knee, a bloody ripped singlet from an incident involving a 9 foot fence and a clothes line (it was dark), and I hadn't showered for 3 days.
We travelled up to Playa del Carmen for her nieces 20th birthday. I met the nieces 3 year old daughter, and her 40 cousins, uncles, aunts, nieces and nephews etc.
A short fat brown drunk man with no neck and gold teeth choaded up to me with a habanero chilli in his stumpy, delicious looking sausage fingers. He held it out, offering me some. I politely declined, those things are fucking hot. He garbled something in Spanish and the cohort of male relatives behind him laughed loudly. The mans eyes were wild and droplets of spittle flecked his chin. "Argh argh Aussie argh gringo argh argh pussy harghhh," he spat and ripped the chillie in half with his teeth and started munching casually, with his mouth wide open so we could all see it getting pulverised. It seems I get called a pussy by a lot of men in this part of the world. Anyway he held out the chillie again and the crowd of drunk brown men behind him started laughing at me.
Bastards. Since I was never going to be able to resist such sophisticated psychological manipulation, I took the chilli from Marcus and chewed it with casual disdain. As soon as I felt the acid start to work on my mouth and face I swallowed the thing, and started crying. My nose was running, mouth watering, and eyes streaming. Throughout the ordeal I was smiling conscientiously pretending I was glad to be the butt of such a funny joke.
15 minutes later when I could pretend to laugh again without crying I think I had won some respect and credibility. So much so that I was offered another chilli.
No thanks.
In Miami Gersh picked me up from the airport. His mate Nick is probably about 15kg lighter than me but has been wrestling since he was 9 years old. We got out of the car and started wrestling, to prove what good mates we were going to become I suppose. Within 15 seconds he wrestled me to the ground and was choking me to death with his buttocks.
Then we went upstairs and armwrestled. I am usually quite good on the left arm and won pretty easily. I felt things going the same way with my right arm, but couldn't get traction to finish him off. Then my shoulder dislocated and I lost by forfeit anyway.
That night we went to a reggae bar where I was mistaken for a redneck, perhaps due to my moustache and mullet. I don't like being profiled, especially since I'm a white male from an affluent society and am not used to it. You don't know discrimination until you've been mistaken for a redneck, in a reggae bar.
Anyway we solved the tache problem the next day, at a barber who gave me a full cut throat shave, tache trim and three beers for $10. Much more respectable now.
If you're ever in Fort Lauderdale near Miami go to Beach Liqour-it's the only bottle shop on the beach-and ask for Gersh. He'll show you a good time.
Well that was pretty much what I've been up to, before arriving in Haiti 4 days ago.
So updates on Haiti next.
THURSDAY, APRIL 8, 2010 San Pedro-Guatemala
It's been a while since the last entry and I've been having trouble with internet access and my USB card so I'm going to put this entry up without photo's and add them later.
Additionally I'm splitting San Pedro into two parts because it's a very interesting place. The second bit will arrive in a week or so.
I met a crazy Canadian actor in Mexico City who liked cheap tacos and Thai prostitutes. So at least I knew why he was in Mexico, but anyway he told me over a few beers that if I wanted to learn Spanish that I had to go to a school in San Pedro, a small town at Lago de Atitlan in Guatemala.
So I got a bus to San Cristobal in Mexico and then made the border crossing.
If you ever meet a Canadian actor who likes tacos and hookers you should do what he says because San Pedro is by far the best decision I´ve made this trip.
Some backgropund about Guatemala first though, which I have lifted straight from Wikipedia:
-Guatemala has the fourth highest rate of chronic malnutrition in the world and the highest in the Western Hemisphere.
-Approximately 75% of Guatemalans live below the poverty level, which is defined as an income that is not sufficient to purchase a basic basket of goods and basic services.
-Approximately 58% of the population have incomes below the extreme poverty line, which is defined as the amount needed to purchase a basic basket of food.
-Approximately 50% of Guatemalan children under the age of 5 now suffer from chronic undernutrition.
-In the nation's highlands, where many indigenous people live, 70% of children under age 5 are malnourished
If you want more information on that the link is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Guatemala
Mexico is great and I really like it but when you get to the border there is a slightly different vibe to Guatemala. It´s wilder, more basic and more raw. Fun time.
The first thing I did at the border was change some cash. The guy who approached me first had long oily black hair, black ray bans, a black waistcoat and alligator skin boots. He also had a whispy moustache, and a 9mm pistol in his belt, with an ivory handle engraved with a mosaic of the Virgin Mary and a clip that extended fully 6 inches past the grip, with a few spare in his belt as well. Of course he tried to rip me off and having no idea what the exchange rate between Mexican pesos and Guatemalan quetzales was, I faffed around for a bit but he was happy to bargain so in the end I think I got a reasonable price for my pesos.
The most common way to get to San Pedro is by boat from Panajachel. Pana is full of tourists and locals flogging the sort of junk that tourists purchase and while I´ve heard good things about it I got straight onto a boat for San Pedro. The captain of the ¨Dorcas¨ quoted me Q25 but I only had 14 on me so I told the guy I´d fix him up when we got to San Pedro from the cash machine.
A few minutes later he told us that they were waiting on two more gringos before we left and he was going to charge them Q35...please don´t tell them they were paying more! So I didn´t feel too bad when the cash machine at San Pedro was empty and I couldn´t pay him the rest of the fare!
Lago de Atitlan is probably one of the most beautiful places on earth. I´m not going to spend too much time writing about it because many people, with better writing skills than myself have already done so (e.g. Alduous Huxley). However it is worth a brief description for those who have never heard of it.
Lago de Atitlan is a large, mushroom shaped lake about 5km across, nestled between three dormant volcanoes in the highlands of Guatemala. The volcanoes themselves are covered in verdant green forests and are anchored majestically around the water. Their slopes plunge in a more or less linear fashion from the summits to the crystalline water of the lake. They are like monolithic sentinels, observing the mundane activities of the busy little humans existing on their slopes with temperant, timeless patience. Clouds attend to the peaks, obscuring the tops, even when the rest of the sky is a clear blue. When the moon rises from behind the peaks it is stained orange from the woodsmoke from the fires the locals still use for cooking, and its reflection shimmers off the lake with a wraith-like luminescence.
Situated at various points around the lake and nestled into the ravines between the mountains are small villages, many of which are only accessable by boat from the transit town of Panajachel.
I arrived at about 9pm and the town is a rabbit warren of cobblestone lanes, dirt alleyways and steep streets tracking straight up the mountainside. The main strip is barely wider than an armspan and tacks in and out of the bars, comedors (eateries), local shops, fruit and market vendors, and street dogs. Tuk tuks and men on ag bikes swerve through the human traffic, which wends back and forth through the buidings which are a prime example of what happens when there is no planning-no order at all. But, trust me, there is an abundance of atmosphere.
Walking through the main street of San Pedro for the first time at night is surreal. The bars loom closely in over the street in an almost life-like fashion, dimly lit from within as they are with strings of red, green and blue glowing bulbs strung from the trees. Bamboo fences line the street, obscuring, but not hiding the shadowy interiors of the establishments, which are decorated with colourful swirling artwork and thickets of vegetation. Music, from Guatemalan classics, Vietnam era rock and blues, soul, electronica and heavy metal wafts into the street, with the murmur of conversation, and the tang of tobacco, cooking, and marijuana. Occasionally through the bamboo poles you glimpse a worn face, matted hair wreathed in smoke, slumped over a meal and a bottle of beer. Old women sit on the side of the road selling chorizo tacos cooked on small portable barbecues, with dogs and children playing around the fires until the early morning, when drinkers stumble out of the bars searching for something to eat. You'll meet quite a few US Army veterans in this part of the world.
I was reminded of the sort of world that Alice might have found in Wonderland if it was R rated, an impression heightened when I passed the Mad Hatters, a bar with giant mushrooms decorating the exterior.
There are various types of tourists in locations like this. I call one group professional hippies because for them it's a lifestyle choice.
If you take away the rest of the tourists there is a smattering of Western men walking around who take their alternativeness pretty seriously. It seems they ignore the rest of us with an arrogant disdain, and tend not to socialise much at all. It´s comparable to the way you´d walk past a dog sleeping in the street. You´d look at it but not register anything other than the fact that it was there and to not walk on it. These chaps are all different heights and colours but they are always skinny with baggy clothes, slightly sunburnt faces and dull glassy eyes and that wizened look you get from squinting into the sun too much. You can often find one of these fellows standing, lonely and forlorne on a roof, facing the lake as the moon rises, a long silhouette caste by their emaciated bodies by the orange orb, playing a pan flute or other indigineous instrument. Without exception it sounds...fucking horrendous! It sounds like a doberman trying to make sexytime with a chihuaha. It definately isn't Enya.
These guys work in the local bars at night hopped up on gear and spend their days smoking grass and eating Valium which is $1 for 10, or something like that. The point is, they aren´t arrogantly ignoring me at all, they are too spaced out to notice my presence.
The women in this group have a bit more spark to them. Rather than dully ignoring me as I walk past they might emit a mildly scornful look, quickly supressed. They are confident in the fact that I will never embrace the local culture to the the extant they have, and am therefore a transient gringo selfishly raping the locals of their culture, as evidenced by the fact that I have not:
-Allowed my BMI to drop below 15
-Purchased and worn local, hand woven garments made from natural fibers
-Let my underarm hair grow to more than 3 inches (ok I have but that´s because I´m male, if I was female I would shave it every now and then for sure.)
-Thrown away, lost or burnt my bra, or canabalised it to mend my natural fiber pants
-Have not joined a co-operative to help local women make beaded jewellery from genuine local materials (like a rock for example) for the economic emancipation of local women.
Of course such efforts are genuinely praiseworthy, especially in a culture where womens rights probably aren´t they foremost issue but I´m not sure I understand the scorn for the tourists who spend their capitalist dollars on, oh, hand woven jewelery for example.
Or maybe they just don´t like me because I can´t help looking at their angry nips which poke through their bra-less hemp fibre tops, which probably aggravates them. It´s not attractive, but weird, like the mole on that guys face in Austin Powers.
Speaking of hippies, I met a guy at a restaurant who doesn´t like them much. The first night I went to this place he staggered over with a beer and a cigarette and told us that the fish was really good so we went in-I was with my two friends from the hostel, two girls from Sweden and Quebec who were travelling together.
Three nights later I was back at the restaurant, by myself (the food was really good). It was my last night in San Pedro. It was dark, with string lighting wending through the roof and there was some Black Sabbath or Motorhead playing through the speakers. Dario, from Gautemala City, was still drunk and decided to give me his point of view of hippies.
Me: So what do you think of hippies?
Dario: Fuck off hippies! Do you know what I do when I see a hippie come in here?
Me: What´s that?
Dario: I put on Slayer, and turn the volume right up. That scares all the hippies away!
Me: What about some Pantera?
Dario: You know what man, I wrote a song about hippies.
Me: Let´s hear it.
Dario: Ok man:
(at this point he leans back in his chair and dangles his cigarette in one hand and his beer can in the other. His eyes close and his mouth opens vacantly. He spreads his arms wide and the sweat patches under his arms dribble further down his singlet)
Ooh, ooh I´m a fuckin hippies
Let´s go and make some beads
Ooh and I hate to shower because I´m a dirty hippies
Let´s go and smoke some weeds
(Dario stops and leans forward intently, trying to focus and failing)
Dario: Hey man did you hear that, that rhymed!
Me: Yea it did actually, I really wasn´t expecting that!
Dario: It´s cos my brain isn´t useless from all those drugs man. I´m real man. You know those fuckin hippies pretend to want to help people but that isn´t real. You know something man? I´m not racist but I fucking hate hippies.
Me: Do you want some more rum and pineapple?
Dario: You know, I´m real man, I don´t want to help nobody like those damned hippies. I just want to listen to rock n roll and get drunk, that´s the truth you know? That´s fucking real!
Me: For sure mate you´re not alone in that one
Dario: And the worst hippies man...
(finally focussing on me intently)
...are Jewish hippies!
Anyway he had a mate called Byron who worked in the Guatemalan equivalent of CSI. This guy had two modes of communication. Silence, and a honking foghorn of a voice that couldn´t be modulated at all.
Byron locked me in his sights and honked at me about his job:
Byron: Hey Aussie, man I´ve seen some funny shit in my job man!
Me: What´s that?
Byron: You want to know what a .22 bullet hole looks like in a person?
Me: What´s it look like?
Byron holds up the pinkie of his right hand a waggles it in front of me.
Byron: And man guess what I can fit inside a man with a 7mm bullet hole in them, you know, from an AK-47?
He holds up the middle finger of his right hand and waggles it in my face
Me: That´s pretty loose
Byron: And man, guess what I can fit inside when you get shot by a Magnum?
This time, he puts both his thumbs together and waves them in front of me.
Byron: You don´t want to get shot by a magnum, man!
Bloody oath.
Byron himself would know as he had a huge scare on his arm from a shotgun wound he got while running away from some kidnappers.
I was actually in San Pedro to spend time at one of the Spanish schools they have there. I met a couple of girls at the hostel I was staying at who recommended the school they were at, the Mayan Spanish School. I signed on for two weeks, for four hours a day. A skinny little chap called Walter was my teacher. He seemed a bit nervous and was always saying things like, "Tim, that's perfect, well done, but..." Walter barely spoke any English so it's a good thing my Spanish wasn't all that bad to start with. One day he just didn't show up and I got another guy called Lorenzo.
Walter showed me where there was a free gym in the town. A really basic place run by a guy who happened to also work at the school. He was the bench press champion of Guatemala, called Erick Cortez. I started training there everyday. I had a great routine going. Get up and start classes, from 9-1pm, back to the hostel for a 3 hour siesta, then gym till about 7.30. After that a healthy feed and a bottle of El Compadre with the Cecilia, Marie (the girls form the hostel) and Gersh, a rasta from Miami. Cecilia was a cleaner at a hospital and Marie a psychologist at a mental institution, and Gersh worked at a bottle shop in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Well I'll write about the rest of San Pedro in the next one and throw in some photo's too. Not to mention the last two days in Miami which have been interesting.
Because tomorrow I fly to Haiti where I expect it'll be down to business.