"Poverty is like everything else. It gradually becomes endurable. It ends by taking shape and becoming fixed. You vegetate, that is to say you develop in some squalid way, sufficient for existence," Victor Hugo's Les Misérables.
Trash surrounds the street; smashed plastic soda bottles, shoes, remnants of cloth that were once clothes, tin cans.... mixed with leaves, rocks, rubble, dirt. Then, once a week the community of a neighborhood will make an even larger pile of trash in the middle of the road to be collected by the public service. I never saw a trash can but I did see a child open a lolly pop and just drop the paper on the ground, a learned behavior.
We crossed over a bridge and my heart broke: standing water with canoe type boats ready to navigate the dark brown canal of floating papers, bottles, and branches.
In our neighborhood, a good 20 minutes from the center city of Cap Haitien, the roads are all unpaved. Paths connect blocks of cinder block, open sheds called homes where children run between all the paths barefoot playing before bedtime. They are happy, fed, and content.
There is no running electricity though the city of 600,000. You have electricity when you decide to turn on your own personal generator. Our rented "guest house" had electricity and air condition but only from about 5:00 pm till when we left for school the next morning at 7:30. We would often get home from school, sit around for a few hours sweating, and then the noise...... of the generator. Yes! And here comes the air and internet.
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| The Guest House |
On Saturday June 27th, we visit an English academy, one of many that dot the streets of Cap Haitien. Students pay to attend this Saturday program to learn a skill that will prepare them for possibly a job in a county with an unemployment rate of 40%. We agreed to show up as a favor to just speak to the students, allow them to ask questions, and practice their English for about one hour with a native speaker. To get to the academy we had to snake down narrow allies of dilapidated French style architecture, flooded with market vendors selling shoes, beauty products, shampoo, clothes, fruits, vegetables, electric wiring... We entered an unmarked door and climbed to the second floor where the academy ran six different classroom of English. For the first 10 minutes we sat in the language lab with headphones hanging from the wall and no lights, no fans, windows open. At this point I was coming close to delirium. And then the noise.... the generator was turned on to begin class. Hello fans, blow on me now.
We also visited a typical Cap Haitien house of a friend. When I say typical home, I refer to a couple of cinder block walls, corrugated metal laid for a roof, curtains as doors, a corrugated metal building in the back as the toilet, and a pile of rocks with a curtain to mark off the shower. This typical house also had wiring and a TV, but without the sound of the generator going the house was dark for our tour.
There is also no running water in the city or country side. There are community wells (puits) where water is free. You always see a group of people waiting to hand pump their buckets full and take them back to cook, clean, or shower. Drinking water is bought. Street salesmen carrying baggies of water on their heads or selling bags from the back of a truck are seen throughout Cap Haitien. You see locals biting off the corner of their bag and then sucking from it at their leisure like a child with a applesauce squeeze pack.
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| Truck delivering the baggies of drinking water to be sold in town. |
Oh... and everyone is seen with a cellphone in hand texting!
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