Scenes from Haiti

When we travel to Haiti we stay at the Guest House in Pignon. I tell people we will be staying at an Oasis. We have running water that we can drink out of the tap. We have separate rooms (sometimes shared with 2 or 3 people) with our own flush toilet bathrooms. The cooks are the best and included in your stay are three delicious meals per day-you can actually gain weight when we come to Haiti! Wi-Fi and electricity is solar powered. 

Front of the Haiti Outreach Guest House

Solar panels on the roof of the Guest House. These power the Guest House and the Haiti Outreach headquarter building. On fully cloudy days we may run out of power and have to revert to a back up generator.

Fun photo of the Guest House with the solar  panels on the roof. The shadow of our plane is in the foreground.

Typical room with the beds not made up.

Separate baths in each room.

Dining room/ Living room for eating and socializing

Looking out of the Guest House to the Haiti Outreach headquarters

Leaving the guest house we deal with different kinds of experiences. For the women, finding a decent bathroom is often challenging!

I forgot to tell Janita to use the bathroom before we left the guest house.  You can see by the expression on her face what we found here!! 

Another latrine. looks very clean compared to some.

Scenes from around Haiti:

Looks very green from a good rainy season. Most of the trees are fruit trees that are not cut down for wood unless they stop producing fruit!

Sugar cane is a major cash crop in the rural countryside. I have learned there is a special way to cut the cane that is better than just chopping it with a machete. 

                        

This is a sugar cane operation. You can see in the foreground all the  discarded cane after the juice has been extracted. They let this old cane dry a bit and then burn it to power the generator and to cook down the juice to  a molasses consistency.

Here is the distillery. They have very specific measurements they need to test the alcohol in order to sell it to the large distilleries that will make it into Rum. This pure alcohol (Ever Clear) is kept under lock and key!

Saw these very old dug out "canoes" that are still being used for fishing.

Part of the reason the countryside is deforested. These are bags of charcoal that have been made from wood and are sold to be used for cooking.

In Pignon on the central plateau where we stay there are very few opportunities to shop. Market day is once a week. I tell people to pack like they are going to the Boundary Waters (wilderness for you non-Minnesotans). You need to take what you need since there are no stores to shop at. Here are some market and store scenes.

This very limited auto parts store is made out of an old freight container.

In Pignon, market day is Saturday. Everyone sets up shop and everyone plans their week around either selling and/or shopping at the market.

This little piggy did not want to go to market! And the racket he made!!

Canned goods

Macaroni, tomato paste, potatoes...

Grains and beans...sold by the cup

Are you hungy? You can buy fried food that's been cooked in the market.

Beets in the foreground.

Drug store products...soap, toothpaste, lotions, batteries, etc.

Need a pair of shoes?

This has to be hot sitting in the sun selling your products.

This small store has more processed foods. No store like this in Pignon. This larger store is in the town of Henche. This is open every day so you don't have to wait for market day!

It doesn't make sense to carry water from the well to wash clothes so everyone goes to the river:

Laundromat and social event. 

Often times the river has very brown water but somehow the clothes get clean and white!

Common afternoon scene are the kids walking home from school in their school uniforms.

I stayed at a farm close to the beach. I couldn't wait to head down to the beach for my morning walk.

This is what the beach looks like. A layer of garbage washed up...no desire to swim here!

We decided to go to the "beach" and go swimming in the ocean. We paid to get in and the "beach was cemented with steps into the ocean. Refreshing.

This seems to be the "life guard" was he rowed around the area where we were swimming.

There are beautiful scenes in Haiti too. This is a very beautiful waterfall near Henche, a larger town south of Pignon

No rainy season is complete without a tarantula sighting. They usually live in holes in the ground. When it rains they tend to come out to find a dry spot so they head for our building!

This is a small tarantula compared to most.

Kids are very creative. This toy car is made from a plastic milk type bottle. The wheels are made from the bottle tops.

From the air you can see the erosion from deforestation.

Sunsets and sunrise are often spectacular! My camera doesn't do it justice.

Thanks for reading my blog! I'm sure I'll be back to Haiti and I have a lot more I can share... about history, Port au Prince, etc.

But stay tuned.. at the end of February I'll be attending Mardi Gras in Trinidad with my good friends Susan and Saurel. Susan was raised in Trinidad and they have been attending Mardi Gras for years. I have never been to any Mardi Gras so I am looking forward to experiencing all the festivities with the pros!

My friends Susan and Saurel when we were in Haiti together. I expect our time in Trinidad will be as fun as our time together in Haiti!

Haiti: Roads and Transportation

I have traveled all over Haiti in my 26 years of coming here. What looks like on a map an easy half hour trip could be 2 to 4 hours depending on the condition of the road. I've gotten stuck in the mud, crossed through rivers where I thought we'd never make it (and sometimes didn't!), gotten our truck pushed out of the mud, gotten carried (me personally) across the river, traveled to a location by standing on the back of a truck for hours, or taken a motorcycle taxi with 3 people on the motorcycle, traveled on fantastic paved roads...you name it I've done it!

Here are a few photos(not in any particular order) for you to get an idea of what the conditions are. 

Doesn't look like  much of a road but this is the beginning of preparing for a concrete highway to be built. Because of lack of ownership or accountability in the government, it is difficult to find out why the road hasn't been built even though the money has been allocated!

Crossing the river on a modern bridge. Before the bridge was built you would drive down into the ravine, drive across the river and back up.

This is the hill that goes down to the bridge in the previous photo. This is where the paved national highway 3 (Yes only 3 "highways" in Haiti and #3 is only ⅓ finished) will be built.

Paved part of National Highway #3. Cars speed along as people walk along the road.

Up until this year Pignon (the location of Haiti Outreach headquarters in Haiti and where we stay) there was no gas station. This is a small business is selling gas by the gallon. Probably put out of business this year with the new gas station.

At these small stands, they use a funnel to pour gas into the tank.

It is common for the roads to be shared with all kinds of animals.

One of the things I noticed when I first came here in the early 90's was the huge number of people walking along the roads-day and night.     

              

Rural road. You can see the widened  part of the road and  then the narrow.  Widening the road was a project taken on by one of our participants from the leadership course we sponsored. He enrolled his neighbors to help. This road connects two small towns.

Another view of the national highway. Notice how close the houses are to the road. To build the road they knocked down and sometimes chopped off the houses in the path of the road. They do get paid by the government for their land.

To get to one very rural town, the only way to get there was to drive up this dried riverbed. In the rainy season it becomes impassible.

Here we are trying to pass over a ditch in the road. The driver and some of the Haiti Outreach staff had some boards in the truck.  They put over the ditch and we were able pass.

Somehow we ended up off the road. Usually our drivers are very experienced and this doesn't happen.  I think we were trying to avoid the pothole you can see on the right of the photo.  I don't remember how we got out of this one but we gather quite a crowd and we probably paid a few Goudes(Haitian money) to have people help us.

                                                       

I stayed at a Guest House associated with a clinic and farm about a half hour southwest of Port au Prince. Nearby they were hand cutting sugar cane and this is how they were getting it to the mill to extract the sugar cane juice from the cane. The juice is used mostly to make rum.

A front view of this same cart. The road here is very common throughout Haiti

We knew this would be a problem so our staff gets out to take a look to see how we will make it through this one. You can count on roads to have these mud holes during the rainy season. We knew going out there would be problems with the road so three staff went along this day.

Normally we don't have shovels with us. We all pile out of the truck and watch and sometime push to free us up.

Typical road surface on roads that have been worked on(not the real rural roads). The larger stones keep the surface from washing out in the heavy rains. During the hurricane which didn't damage the majority of Haiti, it did cause torrential rain which destroys the roads as they get washed out.

It's not just little streams we need to cross. This and the next photo show a river we drive through every time we drive from Port au Prince, the capital, to Pignon, where our headquarters building is. There must have been rain in the mountains as the water is very muddy from erosion upstream. Everyone is waiting for the next person to cross to see if they can make it too.

People make a living carrying motorcycles, cargo and people across the river.  Some of our employees have to cross this "stream" coming to and from work every day. I know our driver waited quite a while, watching others with higher vehicles driving across, evaluating how to drive across before he made a plan. We made it without a problem this day.

Fixing a flat tire. Often times we carry two extra tires for fixing flats. There's no one to call like AAA or a tow truck!

An option we often take in getting from Port au Prince to Pignon is by these small planes. There are two missionary groups operating charter air service throughout the country. Notice the grass landing strip. The pilot will circle the airstrip at least once to make sure there are no obstructions on the field--like goats, cows or even vehicles-- before we land. These old planes are carefully maintained and piloted.