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.
On customs forms, my destination is spelled – Christianville, Haiti.
Christianville is not a town, city or village but a walled, fenced, compound in the Haitian countryside that is a trade school, a co-ordinating point for churches from abroad doing missions in Haiti, a research lab on TB and infectious diseases, an operator of three private schools, K-12, and the location of Ms. Sue’s children’s home.
The ride to Christianville from Port Au Prince is a juggernaut with the nightmare being highway repair that forces four lanes into one single file lane with police spot checking paperwork of vehicles and driver’s passing through the gauntlet.
Along the main road leading out of town, darting in and out of cars, are walking vendors peddling bottled water, food, treats, toys, and anything else they might make a dime from. Along the rutted road are shacks,smoldering fires, garbage and gaunt faces of urban people surviving a country with eighty percent unemployment.
Through this juggernaut, Ms. Sue, Hannah and myself leave Port Au Prince, enter rolling countryside, green with fields, and, in the distance, mountains. The countryside, anywhere, is better than cities. Cities are squeezed, packed, crammed, noisy, crowded and stacked. The countryside is open, wide, green, quiet, expansive, shady.
My purpose is to make repairs at Ms. Sue’s kid’s home, but most repairs needed here go beyond my pay grade.
I can’t put broken families together. I can’t undo untimely deaths. I can’t make things equal.
Broken rain gutters, sagging gates, leaky plumbing, walls needing paint, moving dirt will be on my plate this week and earning my eighth travel ring will take some effort.
Each week, rooster fights happen.
Men of all ages bring their favorite fighting roosters to this stadium, pay a fee to enter, put their rooster and their reputation on the line.
These battles are to the death, and, to ensure that, roosters have a finger long barbed metal spike attached to one of their legs just before they are set on the ground in the stadium ring and their owner, and trainer, step back and leave the fight to fate.
This stadium is filled this Sunday afternoon and is a series of intense moments broken by stretches of boredom.
People stand on the seats, move as close to the cage as they can to see better, wave or nod at bet takers who are yelling at them, raising fingers, making eye contact, scratching their right ear. Vendors move through the crowd selling food, snacks, drinks and cigarettes.
I have been told there are a few birds who are favorites but it is really impossible to tell which rooster will be ready to fight when it is time.
The noise in the arena grows deafening as the two roosters start pecking at one another, jumping into the air with outstretched wings,striking out with their talons.
The fights last most of the afternoon and emotions are live wires, as feathers float, in the air, in the cage.
The best statistic to remember is that half of the roosters come out of the war alive.
Coconut trees make pretty pictures, but they make money too.
On Marinduque, coconut trees grow up the sides and over mountains, in valleys and in flat areas that have been cleared of brush to make orchards, rows of the trees standing like sailors at morning muster, in a line, Irish pennants clipped and shoes spit shined.
All the land on this island is owned and coconuts are harvested every two to three months, those that survive typhoons,rainy seasons, and wind storms.The coconuts are harvested by hand and families supplement their income by working in the groves when the time is right, bringing down coconuts for sale to local agents to ship to Manilla, and, from there, around the world.
Uncle Estoy works on the first step in the harvest process, using a long stick with a hooked curved blade on one end to cut the neck that attaches the coconut to its tree. The coconuts look like clusters of grapes from the ground but when they fall you need to stand back because they feel like a bag of rocks if they hit your head.
The rest of the team, once the coconuts fall to the ground, carry or toss them to a burning station where the skin is burned off.
These guys work most of the day, and, when they walk home, the colorful T shirts wrapped around their heads make them look like tired but happy pirates.
By the end of the day, they harvest over a hundred coconuts ready to go to Manilla. Everyone is tired, but all are safe, and it is a job well done.
You wouldn’t want to do this every day.
Then, it would really be work.
These guys and girls aren’t going hungry.
They are fed in the morning and in the afternoon with snacks in between meals to help them put on weight. They will eat as much as you give them and they always behave as if they are starving.
Alma washes out their cages several times a day and they get hosed down with well water to cool them down. Pigs are fair skinned and mosquitoes bite them awful so a little fire burns in front of their roofed, cinder block pens, the smoke chasing mosquito’s away.
When you come up to their cells the big ones stand up on their back feet,put their front feet on the top of the cinder block wall, stick their snouts towards you and oink. You have to be careful touching them because they can bite.
After pigs eat, they sleep for hours, and grow like babies, fed with dry food scientifically formulated for fast growth, lean meat, tasty meat.
When they get 90 kilos they will go to the market, but not to shop.
Not knowing your fate is a good thing.
If they knew they were going to become barbecue ribs, they would lose their appetites.
In days when Britain ruled the seas and ruled the world, colonies were properties on a global monopoly board.
The more real estate you had, the more money flowed into royal coffers.
Real estate, however, requires expensive maintenance and security. Britain lost the U.S., lost India,lost Africa, lost all but a few Caribbean islands who are still attached to the Queens petticoats.
These days, the third world exports raw materials and people to industrialized countries that need cheap, skilled labor. Kids in Mogpog leave for jobs overseas and send money back to support their families. They go as housemaids,nannies, construction workers,nurses, hospitality workers, cooks, engineers, computer programmers, soldiers.
This flyer recruits in Mogpog. For every exploitation story, there is a success story.
Since Colonial days disappeared we have a New Colonialism.
Now, countries send raw materials and people out of their country, but don’t get security or infrastructure in return. Foreigners line up at Western Union offices around the world to pick up their wired cash from family and friends.
The price of Independence is high.
Pigs are popular on Marinduque.
They are particularly popular for large family get together’s and celebrations. Like Ecuadorians and Mexicans, Philipino’s like pork and many households have a pig or two staked out in back yard mud holes. On this day, the man who makes his living cooking pigs over a fire, on a spit, comes to get one for a family wedding. After looking in Alma’s pens, he chooses the right sized pig for the celebration, then lifts it out of it’s cage.
The pig squeals and hollers but is no match for this big man.
The pig man grabs one pig foot and ties it with a piece of line, then grabs the other three feet and wraps all four together. Finished, he lifts the squirming squealing pig and carries it to his tricycle. Tomorrow, this pig will be lunch. After a life of indolence, this well fed boy only has a few hours to live and he hasn’t even had a fair trial.
Pigs get slaughtered.
The most important thing to remember is not to name them, and not to get attached. It is hard to love your pork chop when it used to be your pet.
Rice is a staple.
The rice plant grows about a foot high and then men with machetes separate the part of the plant with rice grains from the rest of it. The rice grains are shaken from the leaves, gathered, then laid out in the sun on mats to dry in the intense sun, turned with a rake to bake evenly.
When dry, the rice grains are loaded into bags and taken to a machine that separates the husk from the rice inside each grain.
Rice production is labor intensive and men standing in water bend over all day wearing broad hats and long sleeved shirts to bring it out of the fields.
Rice is served here three times a day with vegetables, chicken, fish, pork, and, occasionally- beef. What is not eaten is dished into food bowls for dogs and cats,and pigs.
Coconut trees are also a staple.
Coconut shells are burnt in little fires near houses so the smoke keeps mosquitoes under control. Coconut water is prized in European and American health food stores. Coconut is used to make culinary masterpieces and give texture and color to cosmetics. The leaves from coconut trees make roofs that keep heads dry and kids sleep in bunk beds made from the trunks of coconut trees.
Rice and coconuts leave their fingerprints on everyone here.
Today, the exchange rate is nineteen pesos to a dollar.
Along the Hotel Zone strip, ATM’s, when they are working, dispense pesos or dollars. If you need money, you walk, bike, or drive to a little pitched roof shack on the main road not far from the Hemingway Eco Cottages.
At the bottom of the front barred window in the shack is a little slot through which the girl behind the window pushes me a small cardboard box just big enough for my dollars. I push the box back through the slot to her and wait. Inside, she has a calculator, a money box, a chair, papers and a pen balanced on her right ear. She counts out pesos, puts them in the cardboard box along with a printed receipt on top of the money, and slides the box back out to me.
The U.S. dollar is strong today so the exchange rate is nineteen to one. The weakest currency is the Canadian dollar. The strongest currencies are the British pound and the Euro. In this money game, the more pesos I get for my dollars, the cheaper vacation I get.
When the girl in the booth sees me, I get a bright smile from her.
I always leave her a tip and she hasn’t made one mistake.
Is handling money all day and not getting to keep any the same as walking in the desert with a canteen and not being able to drink
Sales receipts are prosaic.
On most there are times and dates, food ordered and its price, balances due and how the bill was paid. There is a spot for taxes and gratuities. There can be series of numbers indicating stock numbers of merchandise, re-order times, discounts, adjustments, credits.
On this restaurant receipt, at the bottom, is the phrase, ” Keep Tulum weird. ”
This is weird for a number of reasons. Weird, according to the Oxford dictionary, should really be spelled wierd to follow the rule – i before e except after c. Wierd has been spelled wrong so many years that both spellings are acceptable.Weird is also pronounced – wird, so we have a screwy English language where how a word sounds is not how it is spelled.
“Have a good day” is often at the bottom of sales tickets
” We appreciate your business is sometimes at the bottom of sales receipts.
In Tulum,” Keep Tulum Weird ” is totally acceptable.
The creator of this receipt is probably a seventy year old hippie living an an airstream trailer in a fenced off lot on the beach bought in the fifties for several thousand dollars. He would sell but can’t move because his cat, Mister T, likes to nap on an old couch under the airstream awning, on top of a Pittsburg Pirates World Series Blanket.
For all its weirdness, Tulum is becoming very comfortable.
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