More gorgeous mornings walking to work. And Karlen's little body about to slide off his chair during nap; which he actually did and it barely woke him up. Most of the time, if they fall off their chairs, they just sleep in the floor. Waking them up is a riot because they've only slept for about 45 minutes (which I think is preposterous) and you pick them up from their chairs and have to hold them up for a few seconds until you think they have regained muscle control only to watch them stumble towards the door and collapse into something and slump into the floor, immediately back to sleep.
Another crazy Saturday at the market. Although this time was much better; we got in and got out. And according to Genevieve, didn't get ripped off. I attempted to do the math this time and bargain but occasionally just gave up and threw some bill their way. You want to overcharge me and make me pay about .15 cents instead of .05 for these amazing avocados? Not going to be my biggest battle in Haiti. I bought tons of passion fruit to make fruit roll-ups/leather and it kind of worked out. All I had to do was gut a sac of passion fruit, blend it (seeds and all), sift out the seeds, boil it with sugar and bake on low temperature for about 10 hours (maybe more since our electric current likes to come and go). Papaya is my next trial.
Afterwards Jean Claude, one of the gardeners here who lives in Pont Leocan (the surrounding village) took us on a hike before dinner to the river "nearby" (at times I thought we were walking to Spain) and the rice paddies, coconut grove and mango trees; so....worth it in the end.
Of course we had fresh coconuts and were carried over the rice paddies. We decided we would sell it as a spa destination to make money for the town since the mud is an exfoliant and apparently what anyone in the States would pay bank for if they went to the spa; we just walked through it. And how much is coconut water in the US these days? Right. We figured $500 for the spa day, including being carried across the rice paddies. And $1,000 to come back to our air conditioned rooms at the school with 'local cuisine'. Pas mal. However, the clincher was when our tour guide (Jean Claude's uncle and machete-extraordinaire) took a bucket of water and washed Genevieve's feet from any access mud accumulated during her 'exfoliation', to which Genevieve described as, "I feel like Jesus!" Which, we determined would be the company slogan.
We walked back to school for dinner and from the photo it does look like what the Gates of Heaven could be like. Maybe Genevieve was onto something. Again, another incredible sky and day.
(Greeted by rain on Sunday and a cloudy, overcast, Nags Head-like day today. YES! As I've taught my class to say; with fist pump, of course).
"Bonsoir.
Mesi paske w'vini.
Mrele Emily.
Mwen se profese angle PSB.
Mwen kontan fe konesans avek nou.
Epi fe konesans ak ti moun ou yo.
Mwen pa gen pwoblem pou nou poze m'nempot kesyen nou vle, nempot kile, nempot kote."
"Good evening.
Thank you for coming.
My name is Emily.
I am the English teacher for PSB.
I'm happy to meet you.
And to have met your children.
Please feel comfortable asking me any questions throughout the year."
Scariest thing so far in Haiti? Introducing myself in Creole for the first meeting with the parents of our class. Needless to say, Venine spoke the rest of the time (ahem, 90 minutes) and I gave a brief blip about English progressions for the year. In which, I basically said we're really working on niceties (please, thank you, excuse me), coughing into our elbows, and not hitting or biting. I.e., work on this at home in your own way of disciplining your child. Hopefully that came across.
You know in the summer when it's blistering hot and humid outside (and I'm only speaking from experience in Virginia here) and you unlock your car to get inside and you can see the waves of heat escape and feel the torture that is about to ensue and you unwillingly lower yourself onto the hot front seat? The steering wheel is so hot you can't touch it and you either leave the door open to hopefully air out before the A/C gets cold or shut the door, roll down the windows and find a road on which you can drive as fast as you can to get some air, cool, warm, whatever, moving? Well, imagine for a hot second that you get in, shut the door, and cannot roll down the windows and there is NO A/C whatsoever and you have to sit there and conduct thorough, intelligent, involved business meetings and be completely present and alert and not freak out and get antsy that everything is sticking to you and you can feel the tickle of sweat rolling and rolling and rolling down your back and chest and under your knees and that anywhere fabric is touching is rubbing and driving you slowly, insane.
That is what teaching in this heat has been like for the past week.
Don't get me wrong, it is still incessantly beautiful and we constantly are marveling at huge spiders spinning their webs larger than any pizza you could ever find in New York. Or, the clouds that roll up over the mountains every afternoon and make us stare a bit longer at the colors and forms we've never experienced in our skies at home. Or the lizards we see skirting across our paths, the neediness and big eyes and smiles of the kids in our classes; how they drive us crazy but how we also want to squeeze them so hard their little heads pop off. Everything still takes our breath away, and yet, so does this heat.
It has been so hot I've been searching for a way to describe it to make sense of it to all of you who are pulling your winter sweaters out in preparation for early fall and chilly nights; those crisp fall mornings I love so much. And the only real relation I could find to this type of heat and the incredible lack of escape is the heated car in the summer scenario. I think it paints it pretty well.
The conversation turns into, "How are you doing?", "I'm fine, hot," "And you?", "Yes, it's hot today."
Apparently it will stay this hot until about the end of October.
Wicked.
Daily I dream of climbing the hill to my room, turning on the A/C, getting in a cold shower and spending the rest of the afternoon in the A/C not moving; it's what I've started to think about all day.
It isn't so bad until the second recess, when the kids start hanging from your waist and pulling at your every limb. Your already damp clothes start pulling and tugging at the seams and what respectful, teacherly image you hoped to portray as you walked to breakfast is quickly dismantled, disheveled. The reward is that everyone is hot and sticky, so in the end, it really doesn't matter. However, I must say that I've yet to see a Haitian really sweat. Some teachers come to work in pants or shirts and ties and I must admit that by 7 am the ink from those clothes would be penetrating my skin if I wore that to work. What a great feat of natural selection and evolution. If only...
Anyway, some pictures from the week: a potential wasp nest on my yoga mat, Esther helping me test out my paper doll chain during nap time (she never naps and is actually a very good tester, Esther), Jigens, who is and has been one of my favorites and his unfettered attention span while he masterly colors his clothed "boy" (working on girl/boy this week, going well so far, although some girls think they're boys and vice versa, my co-worker describes a girl as: long hair, bows, dresses, big breasts, and a butt that sticks out...don't think that would fly with my previous school director), Esther and Mardochee painting finished paper doll chains, my laundry and papaya trees in the background (where our cafeteria gets our morning papaya from), another glorious sunset and the huge spider we watched spin it's web last night; absolutely breathtaking.
Susan, you would be proud. Look at what you've started. Your mulching influence has made it all the way to Haiti!
I started the project with the kids this week. There is/was a huge pile of mulch which, as I was told, had been there since January. It butted up against the fence that enclosed the playground so as children would climb onto the pile they could easily lean over and topple over the fence to the road. My days at the ISC have established a keen playground paranoia. So, to avoid the days, weeks, months it would take to go through the levels of who decides and who actually executes, I started ripping bags of mulch open during recess. The kids, who have absolutely nothing to play with on the playground (except for one area of playground equiptment for 150 children at once), were all for it and soon we had the immediate area surrounding the pile appropriately covered in mulch (4", right Susan!). I noticed thereafter, that the mulch was in fact for underneath of the playground equiptment and slides to pad falling children. So, I started dragging bags over and the kids were quick to run alongside me and help me pick the bag up and take it to the slides. Where they began to stab the plastic with splintered pieces of mulch (whatever, their own ingenuity at work) to open the bags, spread them, throw the empty bags in the trash, and run to get another one. It was great! Free labor right here at Lycee Jean Baptiste!
So, I decided to finish the task this morning. I asked the gardeners to borrow a wheelbarrow and shovel and went to work after breakfast. At 9 am the sun was already baking and sweat began to run down my back just pushing the wheelbarrow to the playground; this would be interesting. I started to shovel and move the mulch and then the head chef, Marc Antony (indeed), appeared from nowhere, took the full and heavy wheelbarrow and started unloading it and then filling it with mulch again! Then came Patrice and then came Karin. Finally a gardener, Jean-Claude came and we were five. What I thought I would be coming back tomorrow morning to finish, was completed in 2 hours. And, I have to say, looks amazing. Then we got our fresh eggs from the gardeners from our local chickens.
We treated everyone to a cold beer at 11 am and of course a heavy round of dominoes ensued (the losers had to hold branches in their mouths while playing). We peeled Patrice and the vainquer Karin away to head to the largest outdoor market in north Haiti. Genevieve knew the routine but I was completely unprepared for the mental sharpness of the vendors as I tried to bargain and convert in my head three times as well as the throng of people, being pushed and pulled in every direction and trying to find space to move into as wheelbarrows barreled past and mobile vendors hawked oranges and piment in the walkways. Blanc, blanc, blanc was all I heard. I was the only white person there, in the midst of thousands and thousands of people. There was nothing to do for the sweat, it was running down all of our faces. The 'outdoor market' is literally just tarps thrown up on posts, most of which you have to lift up as you stoop under to walk through the stalls. The produce repeats: tomatoes, thyme, piment, papaya, passion fruit, oranges, garlic, onions, shallots, parsley, okra (I wish I knew how to fry), star anise, cloves, salt, bags of rice and dried beans, odorous dried fish. Then, live chickens squawking in the heat on their bellies with their legs tied, completely docile. Passing men carrying slayed chickens by their feet, raw meat, raw chicken feet, crabs with their claws tied shut by long strands of grass, an open-air mill. It was like being on a race track and trying to make sense of the sidelines as you race by at 200 miles per hour. Pictures don't do it justice but I've posted a few just to show something. We didn't even visit the entire market. A whole other side has fruit and then other sides have other things. Once you go in, you don't know where you are, where you came from, or how to get out. It's amazing.
Needless to say, as we hopped on a tap tap (a small pick-up with metal racks on the sides to hold everyone in as they sit/stand wherever there is room) for the ride back to the school our top priority was an ice cold Coke. We stopped at Gregory's (who is our handy man at the school) store at the entrance of our school and got some tall, glass bottles of Coke to go. I stuffed the bananas and bread we bought into my face and urgently made it into the shower and a/c and to stillness. The Coke was amazing and I can't wait to cook my findings: beets, thyme, garlic and shallots. All for way under $5. Oh, also found a hand-made wooden mortar and pestle that Karin helped me bargain down from 20HT to 15HT which is about $1.87 (divide by 8 for USD) (multiply by 5 for Gourdes, so 75 Gourdes). Pas mal.
Yep. That just about describes it. It's a heavy, unbearable hot. What should I wear in the morning? It doesn't matter because by 7 or 8 am it will be sticking to you. And you'll get to wear it until about 3:30 pm as you race up the hill to strip and jump in the shower. No wonder people move so slowly here. The American attitude of, "I want it yesterday and hot," doesn't fly here. Which is probably why I like it so much, it forces me to slow down.
I started taking pictures of our class outside today for their name tags. Which I think is a huge bother, but, take it and roll, right? For some reason the other teacher was waking drooling and sleeping kids up from their nap to scribble circles in their art notebooks for their allotted 'arts and crafts' time. It can't be done any other time since that's what the schedule says. Baloney.
Rose Darline (the drama queen of the class, and one of the smallest), was ripped from her sleep. She wasn't thrilled, especially when I thought I could then drag her outside into the beating sun to take her picture; which the kids love having done. She was having none of it. She immediately said, I don't want it in the sun, "pas de soleil." So, we chose to do her photo shoot against the green walls of the school, which, I have to admit Rose, did great justice to your red dress; Bravo. The photos say it all and don't cease to crack me up.
There's also a stunning video of M Karlens snoring away in nap. At first we thought he was faking it since he had just been moved for disturbing others. And a video of our moto taxi back from the beach on Saturday which I could just get loaded onto You Tube.
Enjoy! And ENJOY those chilly fall evenings in Virginia! Oh, la, la!
