Merry Christmas, photos from Terrier Rouge

Students from a 5th grade class in their school garden


Collecting manure out at the IDDH farm


Tilou and Loudwidge, hanging out at our house, Tilou was chilly so Peter gave him a sheet and his sister thought it was hilarious!

Mangoes and Manure

Bonswa tout moun,

We think maybe winter is actually arriving in Haiti after all. It gets really windy here in the afternoon and that seems to bring cooler air in the evening, it is so wonderful! A few nights ago we sat up on the roof and for the first time we were actually chilly! Yes chilly in Haiti, we thought this day would never come. But chilly to us means about 75 degrees in the evening. We normally shower before bed to cool off, but that is now not as enjoyable, it is a bit more of a task working up the courage to dump the bucket of water over your head in the dark. The thing we are missing the most lately is fresh air. There seems to be an excess of trash burning lately. In preparation for the holidays people clean up their yards and homes and this results in a lot of fires. The thick nauseating smell of plastic burning seems to be nonstop since that is the only way to dispose of waste here.

We had a chance to explore two new villages this week, Paulette and Phaeton, out on the coast. One of the Canadian Nuns, Marieva, who has worked here for twenty years brought us. She has set up a great kindergarten / early ed. program in each town, and a health clinic too. As you drive out there it is like driving to the end of the earth. It is so dry the only thing that grows is a small thorny bush. The cows just roam around searching for something to eat, and a huge cloud of dust follows the truck. These are some of the poorest villages in this region. In Paulette pregnant women were coming to the clinic for food rations donated by the World Food Program. Meredith is hoping to start coming to this clinic every week. She is excited to learn from Sister Marieva because she is quite impressive and also happens to be a nurse.

One highlight from the week was eating a beautiful papaya. Mondays and Thursdays are market days in Terrier Rouge so people come from all around to buy and sell goods. Women walk down from the villages in the mountains with basins full of mangoes, charcoal and oranges, of course carrying them in typical Haitian fashion, on their heads. There are a lot of material goods, like shoes, clothes, household items, but there are also vegetables and fruits you can’t get at the market on a typical day. Meredith did some bargaining and purchased 12 grapefruits and 1 huge papaya for 50 gourdes, or about $1.25 USD.

IDDH has an experimental farm a couple miles outside of town. It’s next to a small man-made lake which we use for irrigation. Also situated next to this lake is an interesting new community called the Nativity Village. It’s made up of about thirty or forty small well built light blue concrete houses. The whole village was built out of nothing by a large charitable organization, and funded by a church in the U.S. The people who live there now were given the housing because they previously did not have any. The town looks like something out of a science fiction book, a lunar colony that’s even equipped with a solar street lamp. The charitable organization is trying to provide some kind of employment opportunities but right now there ain’t much.

Peter was visiting the farm Friday and was invited to go for a walk to gather mangoes with some boys from this village. The mango trees only grow in groves on land that is too far away for people to cultivate crops, but when it is too dry to grow anything else, mangoes still give fruit. So they walked 3 or 4 hours. The boys were pretty good at getting all the ripe fruit from each tree – sometimes by throwing sticks or sometimes climbing up a branch and shaking it hard. It was one of Pete’s favorite days in Haiti.

Today, Saturday, is the day the IDDH members work collectively on the research farm. We seeded carrots, set up irrigation, watered the tree nursery, and fixed the fence. Today we also started the process to make compost. There are a lot of cow pies around the farm and Nativity Village because the animals come to drink at the lake. We started paying village kids, today it started with the mango boys, to collect the manure around the area in sacks and pile it up in the compost site. A good start.

We are sending warm thoughts up North as we heard VT now has snow on the ground.

Love,

Peter and Meredith

ps- Happy Holidays to all !

Jacques, the president of cooperative Raboure, plowing with his oxen



Meredith watering the garden

Hello Everyone,

Things continue to go well here in T.R. We seem to really be getting in the swing of things. Meredith had a little bout of illness and a visit to the clinic, but we are happy to report we currently BOTH are feeling healthy and are very thankful for that. Peter continues to work on his garden and in the schools with the school garden program. He is currently working to set up a partnership between two schools here in T.R and a school in Cambridge VT. Meredith has been busy with clinic related activities as the founder of the clinic from the US was here this past week. She also had the opportunity to work with a midwife. The midwife did some healing work on a pregnant woman (this consisted of rubbing some oil on her belly, and tying pieces of cloth around it). Meredith was not really sure what was going on most of the time, but it was an interesting experience to be a part of. They also worked together supporting another woman through early labor, but she ended up having to go to the hospital to deliver because of a complicated previous delivery. It was nice though to get a little more hands on with the midwifery community. We thought it might be nice just to talk about life here a little since we do not have too many exciting updates to provide, we both just seem to be plugging along with our respective projects and enjoying our work here. We are continuously learning here, in everything we do.

We have discovered here that the month of December means that everyone morning around 5:30am, before the sunrises, youth from the Baptist church hit the streets banging drums and playing various instruments, yelling and singing in preparation for Christmas. A little different than the Christmas carols we are used to at home. The first time I heard this parade I thought it was some sort of riot, and Peter thought it was a voodoo ceremony. But now I am used to the sound waking me up, right along with the church bells from our neighbors the Catholic Church. They ring every morning at 5:30, 5:45 and 6am – but surprisingly we haven’t made it to mass yet.

This morning (Sunday December 6^th) we headed to Raboure to water Peter’s garden. Peter has a bike here that a friend loaned him to fix up. We also put a little seat on the back. So once a week we’ll ride out to the garden together (a long dirt road up towards the mountains) Peter does all the work and Meredith gets to ride along. Everyone gets a real kick at us two ‘blans’ riding along on our bike. The ride out there is beautiful. There is a lot of agricultural land towards the mountains and we pass cows, horses, and donkeys along the road. Pickup trucks drive by every now and then with as many as twenty five people standing in the back, it is so weighed down the truck sags with the weight – just like the bike.

Even though it is December the sun gets real hot here after 8am, and today seemed hotter than usual. After watering we walked/biked back to town to make a delicious breakfast of French toast (thanks for the syrup Mom!) it is quite the luxury. There is an outdoor market here where we do some of our shopping – but we have yet to do a lot of heavy cooking. Normally we buy bread, eggs, peanut butter, and fruit. There are at least two bakeries in town that make a pretty good white bread. Meredith got a tour the other day – it’s pretty much like Klingers expect the bakers don’t have to wear shirt or shoes. They roll up little balls of dough and squeeze them onto a big pan. Each little piece costs 1 Goud, about 2.5 American pennies.

There are also some vendors that hang out on the main road selling snacks (horse meat is the local favorite) to people in the taptaps and trucks that pass. The main road connects Dajabon to Cap Haitien so it is very well traveled. We often just buy oranges or bread right here too. Later on this afternoon we washed out sheets, and then washed our feet in the rinse water with an old toothbrush. Not a bad way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

It is 8pm right now as we write this and 89 degrees in our bedroom. Luckily we have electricity in the evening to power a fan and one light. We are really looking forward to January when everyone says it cools off here. We’ll believe it when Meredith’s upper lip stops sweating constantly. Until then, N’ap boule nan Ayiti! We’re burning in Haiti It means we’re chillen – but nobody really chills here.

Lots of love,

Meredith and Peter

Picture success...finally

Members of IDDH and VT-Haiti project meet at the office in Terrier Rouge


The hike up to the Citadel


Home sweet home, this is the entrace to our house here

Peter and I on top on the Citadel

Happy Thanksgiving

We went from a slow quiet week of healing for Peter to a busy week filled with gardening, teaching, clinic work and yes cheese! This week seemed like everyday was full and active with lots going on. We are happy to report Peter is feeling 100% better and back to his normal self, lots of energy and eating two servings at lunch.

The first week here Peter was introduced to a cooperative Vegetable farm, Raboure. He has been visiting the farm every Tuesday, the day the cooperative works together on their collective land. Last week they offered him his own parcel to work while he’s here, giving him a fantastic opportunity to learn how to grow vegetables in Haiti, experiment with some new techniques and varieties, and they’ll sell any vegetables to benefit the cooperative. Raboure also has a large flock of laying hens and two large ponds for fish farming.

The real excitement of the week was our visit with the Vermont Haiti Project group. It was so wonderful to see some familiar faces and meet some new friends as well. We had a total of 11 visitors, 3 Haitians, 7 Vermonters and 1 Californian. They arrived Thursday evening in time for a good meal, and some showers after an 8 hour ride in the back of a truck from Port au Prince. Thank you for making the long journey, Peter and I really appreciated you coming all this way! Friday we visited three schools in T.R. that have school gardens, we met with the IDDH folks to talk about their organization and then headed to Milot (about 1 hour away) to check out S.O.I.L, another NGO that makes composting toilets. It was fascinating to see the compost they are creating. We are hoping to keep working with S.O.I.L and maybe do some research using humanure compost or urine on gardens here in T.R.

Saturday morning we delivered a treadle pump, brought here by VT-Haiti Project, from Seeds of Self Reliance (John Hayden), to IDDH (complicated, huh). The pump traveled from Vermont to Port au Prince in a shipping container filled by Vermonters who have too much stuff. We then headed back to Milot to see the Citadel. An old fortress built to guard Northern Haiti against ill-willed foreign powers after the revolution. We headed part way up the mountain in the truck and then walked the rest of the way. It was amazing to think about the actual process of building the citadel, a massive stone fort at the very top of a steep mountain. Every piece of the Citadel was carried up the mountain on foot, and our “guide” said around 20,000 people died in the process. On our way home we stopped by Raboure to see where Peter’s plot is and the different projects they have going at the cooperative.

The real fun started that night though when Peter and I got to have our first cheddar cheese in almost 2 months… pure heaven thank you Ali and Bob. Kimball, Donna and co. were nice enough to carry some provisions sent to us by our parents back home and it really was like being 8 years old on Christmas morning. We got cheese and chocolate. Yesterday for breakfast and dinner we had fresh grapefruit followed by Shelburne Farms Cheddar with bread and crackers. We really felt like we were on our honeymoon!

Thanksgiving is right around the corner and we are sad not to be with family but at the same time we are feeling more thankful here in Haiti than we ever have. Normally at my house we try to say one thing we are thankful for at the dinner table while we eat our turkey. This year I feel like I could write a whole essay about what I am thankful for. Right now I am thankful for my and Peter’s health, having healthy food to eat everyday, and the access and ability to drink clean water. I am thankful that I do not have to use a pit latrine for the rest of my life. Most of all I am thankful for Peter and my whole family. We have truly realized that these things are all we need to be happy, the rest are just luxuries, but we am still thankful for chocolate and cheese.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone, enjoy the stuffing for us, my favorite part, and the mashed potatoes too, and the pumpkin pie!

Love,

Meredith and Peter

p.s. A couple of you have asked us about an address here for us. The best way to send anything to us is to give it to Kathryn, who is coming to visit the end of December.

Tetris and Typhiod

If our first week in Terrier Rouge was about settling in and figuring out our basic needs (housing, food, water), our second week has been learning how to enjoy our free time... not counting the day Peter spent in the latrine with typhoid. As we took the end of this week easy for Peter to get better we have had lots of time to sit on the shady corner of our roof, play cards, cell phone tetris, read, and most of all talk. We are finding that living in Haiti is giving us the perfect vantage point to reflect on our lives in Vermont, and what we want them to be like when we return.

Meredith has had success at starting to work at one of the clinics in town. It is called Esperance et Vie (hope and life). There is one general medical doctor, an eye doctor, and a dentist. The support staff runs the lab and pharmacy. Meredith's primary role will be as a triage nurse, helping the medical assistant who is currently filling that role. She is also continuing to meet some of the many midwives in Terrier Rouge in hopes of starting to work with them soon.
We have been busy with some projects at home. We started a garden in the backyard, and set up a worm composting bin on the roof that we smuggled here from the DR.

Despite what challenges we face as newcomers and outsiders here, we can't but feel incredibly blessed for the lives we have been given. Although it sucks being sick, our ability to see a doctor, pay for medication, drink clean water, or eat well enough to get better does not hinge on whether or not the rains fall this month, or how many shoes our mother or aunt can sell in the Dominican Republic. And while we have enjoyed our forced time to relax and reflect, it is not burdened by thoughts of missing a day of work, or like many here, not being able to find work at all.

We hope you are all well at home. keep the comments coming, we love hearing from you all! Lots of love,

Meredith and Peter

ps Peter really is feeling well now so please dont worry! sorry we tried to get pictures up tonight without success, we will try again next week.

First Week in Haiti

We have been in Haiti now for a little over a week and everything is well! We are sorry for the lack of communication, internet is a real challenge here and we probably will only be checking it weekly, so bare with us!

We have settled into our new home, a great room that we are renting in a large unfinished house. The owner lives in a smaller house in the backyard, which is nice for us to always have someone around. The best part is the access to the roof, great views of the mountains and the stars at night.

This week has really been all about getting settled and getting to know our community and surroundings, this will be an ongoing process. We have been visiting lots of school gardens and community farms. Meredith has been starting to talk with midwives and community health workers, as well as make some clinic contacts, all of this takes time though.

Our second night here our friend wanted to show us around Terrrier Rouge so he pulled out a motorcyle and a bike, he told Peter to jump on the moto with him and for me to start pedaling. Peter was laughing the whole time at me, looking back as I pedal to keep up! But it was a beautiful little tour and it was a nice treat to see the full moon rise out in the bush of Haiti. Next post we will get some pictures up so you all can see what it is like here. Pretty dry and hot still, but we think the rains will soon be falling. Until yesterday this area had not gotten a good rain for months! The farmers are really waiting on the rain to start planting, water is everything here.

So in conclusion we are well and we are sorry this is so short we will try to write more soon!

We love and miss you all
love pete and meredith

ps HAPPY BIRTHDAY LUCY PAPPAS!! I was thinking of you on your special day!!

Last Day in the Batey

we wanted everyone to see we are alive and well, this is our latrine, aka bathroom, a little challenging at times, it reminds me how lucky we are to have indoor bathrooms and running water at home, and no cockroaches!

in our backyard in Batey Libertad, our last night before Haiti!

Are time here in the DR has come to an end, for now, and we are looking forward to heading to Haiti tomorrow. If anyone needs to get in touch with us here is our Haitian phone number 590 3481 3811

We are going to take a few days to get settled in and hopefully Meredith will start clinic work on Thursday. Peter will most likely start up gardening and his composting project this week as well. It takes time though to get projects started and to see what the different obstacles will be.

We are looking forward to a visit from Kimball and the Vermont Haiti Project group in November!! Once we are settled and find out where the internet is located we hopefully will be able to do a nice long post with details of our daily schedule and what not.

Today was a bit cooler,high 80s as opposed to high 90s, a real treat for us! We are thinking of everyone at home as it is probably getting darker and colder there! Happy halloween, eat some candy for us!

love, meredith and pierre

our home and neighbors in Batey Libertad, DR

Batay Libertad, Tuesday, 10/20

So we've finally settled down a bit. We arrived in Batay Libertad last Friday, just the two of us now, after a very nice relaxing day and night at the beach in Cabarette with John. Over the weekend we got settled into the house we are sharing with a fulbright scholar who is doing research here, and relaxing a bit so Peter can get over a head cold he got.
Yesterday Peter started working on a compost project in the Batay, kind of a dry run for the project we hope to do in Haiti. And Meredith has begun her domestic training, learning how to cook, clean, fetch water, shuck Congo beans - she is turning into quite the Haitian housewife. Thid provides a great opportunity to work on langauge since it is the only way to spend time with the women here, from who she wants to practice her Creole, because they are always working.

We have been cooking some, using the local ingredients, we eat about 2 avocados a day, plantains almost every night, and of course rice and beans for lunch. We eat a big midday meal with a family in the Batey, so we are not spending the whole day in the kitchen! There has been a short supply of water lately so we have been going to the river to get water for bathing and dishes. This morning the water was finally turned back on so Meredith fetched plenty of water at the local well site. Yesterday after a long hot day we went to another river to take a bath/rinse off with some friends we have met here in the Batey. It was a beautiful walk through the rice fields, and bannana plants line the road and walkway, quite the beautful picture.

There was a soccer match on Sunday, and Batey Liberetad had a huge win, there was drumming and quite the celebration to follow, it was neat to be apart of that. It has been interesting adjusting to the lifestyle and culture here, there is so much to learn every moment! It has felt good to be in one place for a while and get to know the local community.

Our plan is to spend another week and a half here, working on our language skills and cultural compitence, and then head for Haiti on November 1st. Keep posted, lots of love,sending warm air to VT!

First Week

Hello Everyone,
It has been an excellent and busy week here as Meredith and I are setting up are stay in the DR and Haiti with our invaluable friend and adviser John Hayden.
Its Monday afternoon and we are writing from Puerto Plata in Northern, D.R. We arrived last Wednesday into Santiago and the next morning took a bus to the border of Haiti, where we were picked up by our friends in Terrier Rouge (TR). On the way to TR we stopped at the Ministry of Agriculture for the NE zone in Haiti and was introduced to the director and other staff there. We then spent a lovely evening, night, and morning in TR, our future home. We toured the cooperative farm of IDDH (the organisation that Peter will be working with) and two clinics in town, with who we are currently trying to arrange for Meredith to work with (we need authorization from the ministry of health).
We then traveled to Cap Haitian in the NW to attempt to make contact with an NGO developing composting toilet technology, we couldn´t find them but, we did buy a phone so we should be able to talk to you all while in Haiti. The next day we traveled back to the D.R. and have spent one night each in Batay Libertad near Santiago, and Batay Siman near Puerto Plata. We will likely spend most of our next two or three weeks in Batay Libertad, but will visit Batay Siman at least once more. Stayed tuned for more news, and hopefully some commentary. Lots of Love to all of you, Miss you all lots,

Peter and Meredith

Welcome

We have finally set up our blog! This will be our way of updating friends and family of our goings on while in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. We'll hope to update it once a week. Feel free to post comments to us here as well. Currently we are scurrying around getting ready to leave on Oct 7. Stay tuned . . .