Outside the front gate of Christianville, you take an immediate right to go to Haiti Made, a local cafe, coffee and smoothie shop run by Americans.
An eighth of a mile down the rock strewn, bumpy, water puddled lane, that barely makes a foot path, is the landmark Old Well.
It is called old because it is a deep well drilled in the 1950’s when the Christianville Bible University occupied the hillside above the well. The University was taken out by one of Mother Nature’s hurricanes some years ago and all that is left of it is a concrete shell of a building at the top of the ridge, obscured by battered trees and beat down vegetation.
Often, at this well, there are vehicles, motorcycles pulled off the road while men and women fill yellow five gallon plastic jugs with water to take home for cooking, drinking, and bathing.
I splash water on my face, direct from the spigot, stopping my walk to Haiti Made for a moment.
A hurricane, taking out this Bible University on the hill, is ironic.
If the well had been taken out too, the tragedy would have been exponentially worse.
While having a God helps us survive, not having water is a death sentence.
A phone call has been made to get this work started.
This workman uses a ladder to climb up into the tree branches,and, with deft strikes, his machete becomes an ax and tree limbs come down with a crash.
This crew of four has spent half a day trimming trees and another half loading debris into the back of their old pickup to be hauled off. The hood of the truck is left open to cool the engine.
Contrary to popular myth, Haitians work hard when there is work to be done that someone will pay you to do.
My apartment, after this tree amputation, will be fifteen degrees hotter because there are no longer branches to shade me, but I won’t have to listen to mango’s hit the tin roof day and night, with a noisy crash.
In the famous words of some long forgotten philosopher, written on some bathroom wall, ” The longer you wait before doing something,the better the chances you will decide it doesn’t need to be done. ”
I wish I hadn’t said anything about the noisy falling mango’s on my roof to the East Indian scientists who live upstairs, who then called Elizabeth, who then called the Christianville Public Works Department.
Shade in Haiti is more important than quiet.
Sometimes, it is best to keep your complaint to yourself, hold your tongue, and let things be as they have been a long time before you arrived.
It is Sunday morning.
Sun squeezes through delicate spider webs by an old stump.
Water seeps through screw holes in the tin roof of the guest house.
Children sing songs at Ms. Sue’s.
When you have little, you are happy with what little you have.
The kid meter is shaped like a stop signal with green,yellow, and red lights.
When the green light is on there are bursts of positive energy. Kids seek like minded playmates and act out dramas the length of the dining room. They stay out of each others way and, like water, seek paths of least resistance. There are yells of pleasure, shouts, rising and falling voices harmonizing like a well tuned college choir.
With the yellow light there are the beginnings of malfunction. Small groups disintegrate, individuals grab for the same toy, sharing is a foreign concept. Someone is pushed down by someone bigger or someone is reprimanded by staff for doing a behavior out of bounds even by a child care workers loosest standards.
At the red light, there is loud and persistent crying, by one, several, or many.
At this breakfast, there are 42 children and staff being served, getting books ready for school, visiting, doing dishes, wiping down tables, sweeping the floor and finishing chores. It is not a well oiled machine, but there are good things happening that are reinforced each day over time.
This morning the light is solid green.
In the 1950’s, the world was in a Cold War.
Yet, there was hot atomic testing with Pacific atolls being blown into non-existence and school children crawling under their desks at a school bell. Russia and the United States were headbutting and angry rhetoric took the place of missiles. Scientists, and what they were working on, became a preoccupation for the public.
In the 1950’s, there was also a flurry of B movies about giant insects, crabs and birds turned into threats by nuclear radiation and/or chemical injections in secret government research stations, taking revenge on humans that created them, casting fear into hearts at local theaters and spawning fantastic comic books.
One such movie production was a 1955 epic, titled ” Tarantula . ”
The plot stars a giant angry spider escaping from an isolated desert laboratory and threatening the fictional town of Desert Rock, its hard luck population, the U.S., and, by extrapolation, the world.
This real tarantula, outside my guest house in Haiti, is not to be feared.
After discussion with the kids who watch the tarantula with me, he is allowed to live, to move back into the brush. His bite would hurt but his venom wouldn’t be fatal to any watching him this morning while tree trimmers work, stirring up undergrowth.
We have more to fear from the things this big boy eats.
Scarier than tarantula’s is what science is doing, outside our purview, while promising everything is just fine.
Eggs come from a local source and are delivered when ordered.
There are 30 eggs to a flat and ten flats to this stack which makes three hundred eggs. It sounds like a multiplication word problem from one of the kid’s math workbooks stored in a plastic crate on the back porch.
It becomes more than a multiplication problem when the cook cracks a hundred eggs for this mornings breakfast alone.
Now, it becomes a logistics problem.
Multiply your own children times a factor of ten, fifteen, or twenty, and think which direction your household finances are going.
What complicates the story is these kids don’t have parents, have parents who have left them to be raised by strangers, or have been abandoned.
That turns this post quickly into a lesson in multiplication, logistics, and heartache.
The crack in this wall began after a contractor built a security grate of ironwork on top of the storage unit so thieves couldn’t slip in at night and help themselves to someone else’s food. The crack has dangerously expanded and weakened the wall, and, in extension, the entire storage room.
This morning Mich poses next to a Haitian broom that looks like it wouldn’t work but does nicely on concrete, tile, even on stones in the yard. The broom’s fibers are flexible and strong enough to push mango leaves and paper into a pile to be picked up and thrown into an old oil drum to be burned or hauled off later.
The broom’s bristles are held together by rope twisted around them and the long thin wood branch handle. The broom is light to carry and easy to shake out and leans against the wall like a ;professional loafer.
Mich smiles.
He is happy even if this crack looks like a lizard ready to swallow him up and smack its lips after it’s snack.
Lucky has had two litters.
Her first litter was given away and taken at night when no one was paying attention.
This second litter of seven is housed in a suitcase under the front porch of the guest house. Besides the banging of mango’s falling on the roof, Scott is serenaded by puppies at one in the morning every night. Their four part harmony is mediocre but they are great at crescendos.
Lucky, diligently, stays up all night barking at threats to her brood but sleeps all day on the tiled front porch floor, in the shade.
This morning, Ms. Sue’s girls are coaxing Lucky back to her puppies by laying down a string of dog treats. They lay one down and Lucky walks to sniff it, then gingerly eats it. They lay another bite, just a little further, and Lucky follows them. No smart dog is going to turn down a snack.
Back at her suitcase, she is reunited with her kids, each one named by Ms. Sue’s children.
Their names, as chosen by committee, are Lacy, Lucy, Larry, Lalo, Lily, Lewenski, Lemenski.
No one is sure where the last two names come from but they are on a handwritten note given to Ms. Sue. The note has a big heart drawn on it and all seven names are printed neatly in a little girl’s hand.
How anyone will put the right name with the right puppy is yet another miracle?
Roads, in the Haiti countryside, are mostly dirt,with holes filled with rain water, covered with a sprinkling of rocks.
After a strong rain,these roads, leading deep into the bush, become non- negotiable and new paths have to be made through the underbrush so folks can reach their plywood shacks with tin roofs, homes with sheets for curtains, and plain Jane outhouses.
This steer is stretched to the end of his rope and he drinks from his own muddy bowl in the road’s middle, guarding it like a dog guards his bone.
Placing distance between us, as I gingerly walk past, I look at distant mountains and hear goats tied to fences, complaining continually about their nooses in the pastoral setting.
This bovine is intimidating.
I don’t see him taking off with a stranger without a brawl.
It would take a special kind of thief to take the end of this rope and lead this guy home.
There are volunteers this week, from Indianapolis, who lend fifty hands.
On our work menu is covering up a newly installed septic tank, filling in a washed out area around the clothesline, spreading gravel in areas that get muddy and cause kids to track mud into the home, sanding and refinishing kid’s beds, making new friends.
Work goes quickly when spread among many, and, by the end of two days, much has been accomplished The septic tank is buried, the washout is gone, beds, with a fresh coat of stain and polyurethane, match up with their mattresses.
Most of us work our own pace and some of the kids help, curious, wanting to try their hand.
Volunteers come and go, but kids, and staff, are here long term.
Nobody here thinks they can do everything by themselves.
The desire to help is a common Christian directive, and helping others, I am told frequently, by church folks, is something “we don’t have to do, but we get to do.”
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