Back in the US

With my lovely friend Sara, near her home in Seattle. Our other beautiful college friend, Eva, snapped the shot.

So, I've been in the US for six weeks now. I've only lived in Haiti for eight months, but some newly-learned ways of thinking are dying hard (and some of the following were picked up in my travels in South America, so they've had more time to become ingrained).

I adjusted to the following after a couple of weeks:

• recognizing electricity will always be present, so I can wait until phones and computers have less charge before being sure to plug them in
• tossing toilet paper in the toilet (not in a wastebasket) when out and about

I still have to remind myself it's okay to drink the water from the tap. Frequently on my way to brush my teeth I think, "Ooh, I'd better get a water bottle to take with me."

Here are some items I packed that I completely do not need in the US:

• wet wipes for bathing "in case there's no running water at some point"
• washcloths (in the countries I've been in the past four years, their presence in other's houses is not a given)
• bandanna to keep dust off hair while travelling
• cloth to wipe sweat off of face
• toilet paper

Now, while packing I did know that I wouldn't need the last three items while in the US, but I thought they would be so critical for the two days (in three months) I would be in Haiti that I should carry them around the rest of the time. Yikes.

I'm still not used to the fact that we can alter the temperature at will in cars or houses. I use hot water from the tap every chance I get. And I get really covetous at grocery stores with the immense variety of produce and fiber-filled grain products. Mmm...off to eat some Mestemacher bread and an apple!

With Niki, another phenomenal woman from college, and her daughter.

The American Midwest

My Aunt Char, me, and my Mom in Minnesota.

My "tour of the American Midwest" is about to come to an end. I have been in Minnesota, Michigan, and now Ohio, visiting with churches, family, and friends. I have had a lot of opportunities to speak about the wonderful things happening in Haiti, as well as some time to just hang out.

People have been the focus of my stay. But since those of you reading this won't know most of the people I've been with, I'll list other delights:

• hot water!
• "cool" weather for running
• speedy internet available absolutely everywhere
• customer service
• food: Thai food, Punch pizza (St. Paul), home-made bread and pannekoeken (thanks, Libby!), lettuce, cheese, hummus, strawberries, blueberries, s'mores, superb coffee

My Mom moved out of my childhood home six months ago and is living very happily in a retirement community. I had the opportunity to speak to people there a few nights ago. A very appreciative audience!

On Monday I head to Seattle to meet my newest nephew!

A baby Canadian goose relaxing in Ohio.

Another great day

I have the best life.

This morning I traveled with two of my colleagues and two American missionaries to two nearby CHE communities, Goden and Macedouan. We had good visits in both of the communities. In Goden they shared a lot about their perinatal program. We also took a short walk to see a committee member's garden: plantain, carrots, taro. One highlight for me was the children -- in March they started a children's CHE program in Goden, one of the first in the country. The kids sang us a song, it was very cute! In both villages they mentioned the significant reduction in illness, particularly among the children. In addition to appreciating the physical and spiritual lessons, in Macedouan one of the women said that she really valued the lessons she'd learned about how to get along within her immediate and extended family, to really “live well.”

I really enjoyed spending the day with the missionaries. Their organization has been doing both church-planting and building transitional housing in one of the areas hardest-hit by the earthquake, but they are now wanting to transition away from relief work into development and are interested in using the CHE tools. It's also just fun to meet different missionaries and hear about what they do, even on a personal level: how do you exercise here? What do you do in your free time?

On our way back to town I was dropped off at the music school. I had told them I might arrive late or not at all today, but since it was to be our last rehearsal before our May Day concert I had hoped to make it. I was nearly an hour late, but they were still setting up. We rehearsed our three pieces for tomorrow's concert. It has really been fun to conduct this orchestra. The majority of them are very new at their instruments but have really great attitudes. And they are showing up more consistently to rehearsals now which really helps!

I stayed after the orchestra rehearsal to practice piano. I haven't played seriously for nearly two decades, and really don't play at all here. But I was told last night (!) that all of the teachers would be performing, so I needed to practice (I also teach piano at the school). While playing, I realized I'd become defensive in a conversation earlier that day. Of course, I really wish I would have noticed this at the time so that my reaction would have been entirely different, i.e.: helpful. (I will say that attempting to work through a process of reflexion, asking God for forgiveness, forgiving oneself, and determining next steps is probably not best done while one is still trying to practice the piano. If you try this you may realize that the issue is still unresolved and you'll have to pause later in the evening while writing a blog entry.)

As it became early evening, several of the other music teachers came to rehearse in twos and threes. The music school director asked me to accompany him tomorrow on a flute piece and we practiced that. There's only enough room in the music school now for either the orchestra or an audience, so we'll be playing tomorrow at a government building in the city's largest public square! What a place to make my conducting debut!

I came back to my lodgings for a small bite to eat – not too much, because I didn't want to spoil my appetite for the mangos that were waiting in my room. Three varieties are now readily available in this region, each one remarkable in its own way. Francique: large, juicy, fruity. Baptiste: smooth texture, perfume-y flavor. Trop Douce: delightfully sweet with a subtle flavor, ridiculously fibrous but oh! so worth it.

And now to wash up. It was warm today, and even a cold shower sounds awfully lovely when dust has stuck to your sweating skin all day. I need to take our visitors to the airport at 5:30 am, so I'd better quit typing. I love Sundays, though – I can just rest after church until the afternoon concert.

I have the best life.

Easter Sunday

Baptisms Easter Sunday

My first praise of the day: we had electricity at 4:45 am so I could make coffee in my room before leaving for an early-morning service with a group of missionaries. One highlight: a family of four sang a song in harmony with bluegrass-style guitar. We ended with a breakfast feast which included cinnamon rolls, mmm. I also got to connect with some people I've never really talked to before, nice.

Then my church -- the pastor read a message from the Monsignor, including how to place our hope and trust in God in a country that had the January 12 (2010) earthquake and then cholera, and in a world that just experienced the Japan earthquake and new civil wars. I also had time to reflect on the fact that whoever thought that choir robes should be adopted in a Caribbean nation was nuts.

As I write, my neighbor's church is baptizing people in the ocean near me with lots of celebratory music. A British acquaintance was standing next to me for awhile. In the pageantry of the baptisms he saw tools used to placate and cheaply entertain people. He also commented that it was ironic that in a symbol of cleansing, people are actually dipping into what amounts to a cess pool. It is icky -- it's always icky, and we see people swimming in it every day. But I thought: well, baptism is symbolic of being baptized into Christ's death and then being raised with him, maybe that's not so inappropriate.

The best part of the day? Greeting everyone for Easter, hearing stories of how they have celebrated. Where I live everyone still has to work today, but they all had stories of special things done at church last night or this morning that made them smile. We take time out to watch the baptisms, comment on the music, greet each other with kisses and "Happy Easter." We share brief comments on what it means that Jesus is risen.

And I sit here in the shade, enjoying the ocean breeze and the blue sky, looking at a hummingbird, a fully-laden mango tree, and two other flowering trees, trying to grasp what it really means that death is no more. That it has really been conquered. That the beautiful things that we see in the world are part of the future breaking in to the present, they are the presence of the kingdom that is here and not yet. In Friday's sermon the pastor spoke of the cross, and one of the things he said was that the cross has crushed the power of darkness (kwa a te kraze tout fòs fenwa). This is clearly a "here and not yet" in a land of cholera, malnourished kids, bursts of violence, denuded mountains. But that's what I see. Because this is also a land of flowers, of beauty, of dignity, and of laughter. Alleluia! He is risen!

Mangoes

This is a collection of fruit I had at one point last week. The brown one is custard apple, the spiky one is soursop, and the rest are delectable mangoes (ripe, despite their green-ness).

I love mangoes. The season just started last week and I have been eating about three per day. I might have even had four once. They are seriously incredibly amazingly good. My day started out with "custard apple," though, another yummy fruit. Memene, who washes my clothes, brought me some as a gift this morning.

Then my work day started, with a meeting with the logistics guy for IOM. We needed to change a request order we'd put in for cholera supplies due to space and availability issues. Then we received boxes and boxes of soap, buckets, jerry cans, and chlorine. For free. Again. This is just so fabulous! With the first shipment we received we were able to supply our oral rehydration posts (which provide oral rehydration salts to cholera patients in rural areas as they are on their way to treatment centers), then some of our community health workers and a couple of schools. Now it looks like we might be able to supply all of our volunteer workers and some committee members, plus two hospitals in the northeast -- they'll get oral rehydration salts and IV solution as well, and get it all transported for free by the World Food Program!

This is the cholera treatment center for the rural hospital in Bois de Laurence in the northeast. We stopped by there last week.

Last week my colleague Solencia had two people in her family, both young, die. The causes were unknown, which is common. She had to leave early today to go to her cousin's funeral. We prayed for her and her family with her before she left.

Due to virus problems and varying solutions, my main computer was my netbook, then my laptop, then my netbook, then my laptop again. Lately my laptop has been acting up (I think it's old) and since I'd recently managed to back up everything I only copied a couple of recent documents and started using primarily the netbook. Well, today I realized one of the documents on my netbook wasn't the latest version. So I needed to access the laptop. But Linux won't run on the laptop with the SD card I have, and I found out today that a CD I'd burned won't run on it either. So I had to shut off my netbook to use the flash drive with which I'd been running Linux on it. And I got frustrated. Blah.

The report I'd been looking for was on our oral rehydration posts, I needed to add the latest data and send it to the health department. In March, the 39 posts that reported in saw 119 cases of cholera. (These are the numbers for the posts we have, many people thankfully can make it directly to cholera treatment centers, or stop by other posts.) Some sites had seen no cases, but cholera has increased recently in some areas, in part exacerbated by drought making it more difficult for people to incorporate hygiene techniques.

Here's a house we passed by last week in the northeast, an area that's really been suffering from the drought, with SODIS bottles on the roof. Yup, turns out one of our community health workers goes to this house, and they now use this free method to get clean drinking water!

I'm working on solidifying travel within the US for my three-month trip this summer. The connections from Minneapolis to Detroit are ridiculous, and it will take me just as long in terms of travel if I fly to Chicago instead, hang out with Mark and Julie, then take a train the next day to Detroit. Seriously?

Tomorrow's a holiday (Good Friday), so I won't see my colleague Evelyne again until Monday. She started a school in her village a few years ago and needed to send off the budget to some potential partners. I'd agreed to translate it into English for her. We finished just before 7 pm. Which is when I realized that I'd missed yet another Lenten service. Sigh.

Which means I'll just have to eat more mangoes and practice the cello (the music school where I conduct and teach piano lets me borrow a cello!).

Moolah

Have I mentioned anything about the money used in Haiti? The currency is called "gourd," and it used to be tied to the US dollar, at 5 gourdes per dollar. So, people started referring to 5 gourdes as "one dollar" or "one Haitian dollar." It's no longer tied to the dollar, it's now about 40 gourdes to the US dollar.

Why is this history important? People still call 5 gourdes a Haitian dollar (HT). And they speak in terms of Haitian dollars much more than in gourdes. This is a mathematical nightmare for me. I mean, 100 HT is fine, that's 500 gourdes, no problem. But in the market they'll say something is 65 HT -- that's not so easy to do quickly. And this week my colleague cashed a check and came back with "1875 dollars." I count 9375 gourdes and know it's all there (after taking out my calculator).

I usually talk in gourdes, because I haven't been able to understand how people easily go back and forth. This got me into trouble once when I asked a colleague to give me "400" of phone credit. A few minutes later I got a text that I'd received 1818.18. I was completely confused until I realized that she thought I'd wanted 400 HT, or 2000 gourdes, and then the phone company took its cut.

So, I've been wondering for awhile how everyone does it, talking in Haitian dollars. They have just told me "it's easy." But yesterday I finally got some insight! I watched my colleague Evelyne count some money. She held a 500 gourd bill and I saw her lips move "100," then a 250 gourd bill and I saw her murmur "50." At the end she knew the amount in Haitian dollars. So what she's doing is looking at a bill that has "500" stamped on it and thinking "100."

This actually gives me hope. I actually might be able to do this if I translate each bill in my head, not the total. Especially for receiving change. No, really, I think this could work.

Mangos

I'm reading the minutes of a meeting I missed last week: “Dans la perspective d’une recrudescence du nombre de cas avec l’arrivée de la saison des mangues, des spots de prévention sont en préparation au niveau du MSPP. Ces messages s’adressent particulièrement aux enfants qui sont les populations les plus à risques pendant cette saison des mangues.”

So I ask my colleagues, “Is 'saison des mangues' what I think it is? Mango season? And if so, why are we having to increase our cholera prevention messages for that, and why are children more at risk?

Turns out there are mango trees everywhere in the rural areas (heaven?). Lots of people, and most children, just pick up mangos whenever they're hungry and eat them without washing either the mangos or their hands. There are also too many mangoes to sell, and so they rot and flies accumulate. Apparently “everyone knows” that diarrheal diseases greatly increase in mango season.