Yes, yes, today is the birthday. 27. Weehaw. It was actually a pretty big year, but most of it I don't feel like re-hashing (here or elsewhere, really), so let's just say I hope 27 is better than 26. B/C 26 was pretty much a stinker.
Positively, today is the first sunny day in weeks with temperatures well above freezing (46F/8C), so this seems like a more auspicious day for a birthday than last year's Waiting for the War theme....Also, I've had some professional and personal breakthroughs in recent weeks, so I guess you could say 26 ended better than it started.
Haiti was fantastic, I almost didn't get on the plane when it was time to leave. Of course, that is partly b/c I was put on stand-by when I got to the airport, which I was tempted to interpret as a sign from God that I should stay, but instead it meant that I got to fly first class to JFK, which was pretty sweet. Thanks to Stephane's amazing skills as a tour guide/chauffeur, I was able to see a lot of the country, especially north of Port-au-Prince. It's amazing how much that country has to offer, especially geographically and culturally. In Port-au-Prince you're an hour from pristine Caribbean beaches and 30 minutes from beautiful mountains and fresh air, and in the north is a town called Marchand Dessalines tucked between mountains and rice paddies. We went for a hike of sorts in the morning when we were there and there was an amazing mist rising off the paddies and swirling around the mountains, with the blue sky and bright bright sun above -- it was an astonishing vista of sparkling green, blue, and yellow so bright you had to close your eyes, softened with the diaphanous grey of the mist. It was almost appallingly beautiful, especially when compared to the poverty and neglect that permeates Haiti. It is nothing short of tragic that the country is in the state it is; so much potential and beauty just wasted, utterly. Do a quick comparison of the Dominican Republic, which takes up the other two-thirds of Hispaniola but is pretty much identical to Haiti in terms of natural resources, and you can see what *could* be in Haiti but just isn't. And might never be.
Some of the more amusing moments of my trip:
-- Getting off the plane in Port-au-Prince, I realized that living in the Netherlands may have caused permanent physiological damage. Those of you who have lived in Northern Europe know that by the middle of December, you're lucky to have five hours of good daylight, the effect of which is usually weakened by cloudy weather and the fact that the sun doesn't rise very high in the sky, just sort of skims across the horizon. So after living with that for the last couple of months, my body had apparently lost the ability to react to full sunlight -- I emerged from the plane and was nearly blinded when my pupils did not immediately contract -- I felt like a mole person!
-- It seems that a common form of campaigning in local elections is to simply spray paint the candidate's name and slogan on buildings (houses, businesses, whatever) or walls. A great example of this was someone named Bob Manuel whose slogan was 'Securite'. The irony of this made me laugh every time -- apparently Bob's definition of security does not include the protection of private property.
-- Most of the buildings in PAP are the sort of shabby, structurally unsound, poured concrete constructions you often see in less-developed countries, but there are a few really nice ones, including some of the old colonial buildings and a few new ones that were built either by foreigners or by Digicel, the big mobile phone company. There was one building that was maybe 10 or 15 stories tall, obviously modeled after office buildings in the US or Europe (albeit circa 1985) that I believe was attacked in last April's unrest. It is still standing, and there was an armed guard outside of it, which makes me think it must still have some things of value inside, but it has a lot of broken windows and looks generally like trash. Anyhow, spraypainted on the gate was the word 'Babel', which I found enormously clever and accurate.
-- One day we went up into the mountains to see Fort Jacques, one of the oldest forts in Haiti originally designed to allow the general in charge of PAP after the revolution to keep an eye on the whole port in case the French tried to attack that way. The view was astonishing, you could see so much of the region, including the whole of PAP, which is pretty impressive since it sort of sprawls in a disorderly fashion between the mountains and the sea. Our tour guide was pointing out places of interest in the city -- the airport, the US Embassy, and an area of town called Cite Soleil. If you do a quick Google search of Cite Soleil and UN, you will see that this area has a history of confrontation and violence, largely b/c it is a very poor area (even for PAP) with a large gang and organized crime presence that the UN responded to poorly and inconsistently. Anyhow, as we are standing on the top of lovely Fort Jacques, our tour guide is pointing everything out for us: 'To the left is the Cathedral, the US Embassy is next to that sort of empty area over there, the airport is straight ahead...Oh, and that area over there, the one with the big smoke cloud is Cite Soleil.' I'm sure they were just burning trash or something, but it seemed somehow fitting that it had the appearance of being on fire. :-/
-- Stephane, his cousin Leitzia, her husband Steve, and I all went to the nicest hotel in PAP (really, it's nice even by US standards), Hotel Montana, for some wine one night. Located on one of the mountains that surround PAP, the hotel has a beautiful view of the city, especially at night when the lights are on, which is not all the time since PAP has rolling blackouts throughout the night since they don't have the infrastructure to keep the power on all the time. (In fact, you could watch this happen from the terrace of the hotel, which was sort of fun. You also notice that there are some areas of town where the power rarely goes out -- one guess who lives in these areas...) Anyhow, we were enjoying some wine and fresh air on the terrace and looking at the city below, where there was one building that clearly put a lot of effort into decorating for Christmas. It was a big building, sort of modern from what I could tell, with lots of Christmas lights hanging from the roof to the ground, all lit up, and Leitzia insisted this was the Presidential Palace or Congress or one of those. Even I was a bit skeptical about this b/c this building did not look anything like those buildings and my rudimentary sense of direction in PAP told me that was not the right area. Stephane and Steve agreed that this building could not possibly be what she thought it was, but Leitzia was so sure that she bet Stephane $200 it was. Our waiter was then consulted for his opinion and he laughed and said, 'No, of course that's not the Palace!' So Leitzia was embarrassed and Stephane was gloating and THEN our waiter brought the entire wait staff over to look at the building and laugh as a group when they heard that she thought it was the Palace -- haha...I think Stephane is still waiting for his $200.
So, yes, it was an entertaining trip, I'm looking forward to going back in a couple of weeks for Carnival, the cultural event of the year in Haiti. Gary and Ron think I'm crazy for wanting to go to places like Haiti, but it felt a lot more comfortable for me than most of the places I've lived, more like home than many places that were called by that name.
