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